Friday
The harsh cut of reality is emerging on all fronts, though by no means is it obvious across the spectrum of existence – yet.
Some areas where it is about to penetrate the placid, flaccid consciousness of the post-WW2 era, are the two major areas of economics (including money) and energy.
In economics, the old adage that there is no such thing as a free lunch is about to be demonstrated most visibly (but not only) in the area of crypto-currencies. Crypto-currencies involves not wealth creation, but wealth transfer. The faster and richer fleece the slower and poorer. The ‘value’ of Cryptos is derived from fiat currencies. When the fiat currencies fail, so will Cryptos and those left holding the electronic hot potatoes will lose everything – which was never anything except make-believe. In the real world of real production and real value, cryptos will be exposed as a fantasy. Cryptos are far from being the only example of economic and monetary ignorance, but they are probably the most egregious. They were tailor-made for the era of ultra-gullibility that is now drawing to its inevitable conclusion. At least with the Dutch Tulip Bubble, you got a flower bulb.
Pretend money was appropriate for pretend times. Reality, which has been kept at bay for so many decades, is returning with a vengeance.
The pain attendant to the vast amounts of household debt sloshing around the world is about to be felt. How does one service a mortgage when one’s job has disappeared, when currencies have collapsed and one possesses no money (Gold/silver)? The destruction of the supply chains by governments with their ‘lockdowns’ does not just mean the inconvenience of temporary toilet paper shortages; it means that many goods that are a common part of the average household’s weekly shopping will never be seen again in a lifetime.
The cost of energy in the most common forms of petrol, electricity and gas will do a moonshot in 2022. Cars will sit idle and dwellings will be unheated and uncooled. Some areas, in Australia, the U.S. and Canada for example, will become uninhabitable without energy to heat and/or cool. The cost of alternative fuels, like cut firewood, will rise with increased demand and also with the rise in the price of fuel for chainsaws. That will be balanced to some degree by the desperate competition of people for work, any work, in order to put food on the family table.
Meanwhile, the cost of energy will impact a/ the growing of food (fertilizers are a by-product of the oil industry), and b/ the transportation of food. Food prices will go through the roof.
The world is emerging from a deep, multi-generational slumber. This real awakening means that the Woke are going to be sliced and diced by the harsh cut of reality. They will find themselves in an unknown world; a world where there are only hims and hers and where girly men don’t get to become preening military leaders, where people don’t begin to tremble because the weather changes, where people eat whatever they can get their grubby hands on, where there is no welfare (or government jobs – but I repeat myself) and where they have to produce goods that are needed and wanted and affordable if they wish to survive.
Everything that has been made so easy for the current generations by the struggles of previous, tougher and smarter, generations is going to have to be rebuilt.
I do not believe that the current generations have the fortitude or intelligence to recreate anything with the same level of merit of that which they have so cavalierly and ignorantly discarded.
I do so hope that I am wrong, but more than twenty years of watching this unfold in the more or less predicted manner assures me that I am not. The West faces a grim future and it is no longer far off and theoretical.
Get Woke to that.