I think we’ve gone about as far as we’re going to go with endless production, math trick accounting, and infinite growth.
We’ve tweaked the last process, tuned the last cog, and beaten the final dead horse a la Six Sigma.
Black Scholes can suck it.
Double entry accounting is the Language of the Mad.
Paul Krugman’s great-grandkids will stand outside the Museum of Walmart (full of carefully preserved plastic crap) and palm hand carved stone tablets of money supply curves.
It was a great run, but I think we can all safely admit that the new economy looks a whole lot like the “really, really old” economy where things like transparency, connectedness, and community are the real factors of production and things like extraction, degradation, and mechanization slowly wither and die. This is great news.
Our job is to build arks of sanity. Our job is to be artists and artisans who actually do give a shit and actually do care about value. We have the power of creation, sentience, and choice which we can use to either make a new world or piss this one away within a human lifetime.
Thanks for all the inspiring mail regarding your one thing. I received dozens of emails that convinced me that there is a whole world of infinite possibility in the really, really old economy.
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Our growth-based economy needs to end. It does nothing for us anymore except pave a path of destruction and self-delusion. It’s time to take what we have and make it better. More people, more sprawl, more plastic crap, and more narcotic-like acquisition and spending of worthless money is a game of death.
YEAH!! What HE said!
I hope the fellow in the picture is just using the horse to take the car to the blacksmith and use it as barter to convert the car to a tractor. Using a horse for power is like eating meat: usually wasted resources to feed it all year ’round for a few hours worth of heavy work.
There’s “old” economy and then there’s “wise” economy….Sometimes we paved the cow paths because the cows knew the way around the swamp, and sometimes we don’t because the swamp is easy to bridge.
Guys like Krugman can’t figure out the difference or make a choice. They just follow something: either the cows or the bulldozer, and don’t look ahead to see if the bulldozer is going to be under water in a few minutes.
You’re right-on when you write “our job is to be the artisits/artisans…”. As this economy sputters and dies, those of us who can be the most creative will survive and may actually thrive.
Okay, two comments today:
Kunstler is ‘on’ with this:
http://www.truthout.org/which-horizon60206
“The American Way of Life is not so charming, but its very sprawling character may prevent a political maniac from controlling enough of a base to hold all the states and regions together in a thrall of fascism — and there are all those firearms to think about. I maintain that the trend is down for centralized power here, in the direction of impotency and decreasing competence at anything. I don’t subscribe to the paranoid themes of Big Brother government domination, the surveillance state and related fantasies. It’ll be more Home Alone meets Risky Business — all dangerous places with no adult supervision.”
“there is a whole world of infinite possibility”
One of the things that comes out of a culture is how to do things. Our cultures are repositories of successful survival knowledge and tell us how to do everything from sexing and birthing, to harvesting and hunting, to scattering the ashes of the dead on the Oklahoma breezes.
At the same time however, cultures also draw boundaries around what can be done. Because we have our culture to tell us how to do a thing, we are limited in thinking of the infinite other ways to do said thing. Think of comparing the permaculture vid you posted some weeks ago to the mindset of a regular old farmer out in the midwest. He would never have thought of that, would have a hard time even agreeing it might work. Not because he is stupid, but rather because his farming knowledge is very extensive but defined and outlined by his culture.
Or like a kid growing up in a religious family deciding not to be religious. There’s “Mom’s way,” and “Not Mom’s way.” “Not mom’s way” might be becoming a modern Pagan, or perhaps being an atheist for that particular kid. But the reality of the almost infinite ways human cultures have tried to deal with questions of the infinite, of whatever god and religion are, will be opaque until the kid divests himself of belieiving in not just “Mom’s way” but also of “Not Mom’s way.”
So whatever the future holds, there are infinite possibilities to accomplish what needs to be done, as long as we can be self-critical enough to move beyond “the way we do it” and “not the way we do it” to the almost infinite ways it can be done.