While War, Wall Street or Weather by itself could each cause the world economy to collapse, they are not mutually exclusive. Empire is becoming increasingly expensive. Nations have caught on to the US’s strategies of debt slavery (through the IMF, World Bank, etc.) and overthrowing legitimately elected government to install friendly dictators. Russia and China, both of which the US had a hand in creating, are both competing for the world’s dwindling fossil fuel reserves. The US now spends upwards of one trillion dollars on the national security state. Client states are propped up with financial aid but the US financial system is also teetering on the brink. Mark Farber believes, “…that eventually we will have a systemic crisis and everything will collapse.” See: Fed Will Destroy The World. While the most prominent world economists argue over Keynesian economics versus austerity measures, the world is quickly running into finite natural resources and infinite “growth” economics is part of the problem.
From The Myth of Human Progess:
The human species, led by white Europeans and Euro-Americans, has been on a 500-year-long planetwide rampage of conquering, plundering, looting, exploiting and polluting the Earth—as well as killing the indigenous communities that stood in the way. But the game is up. The technical and scientific forces that created a life of unparalleled luxury—as well as unrivaled military and economic power—for the industrial elites are the forces that now doom us. The mania for ceaseless economic expansion and exploitation has become a curse, a death sentence. But even as our economic and environmental systems unravel, after the hottest year in the contiguous 48 states since record keeping began 107 years ago, we lack the emotional and intellectual creativity to shut down the engine of global capitalism. We have bound ourselves to a doomsday machine that grinds forward, as the draft report of the National Climate Assessment and Development Advisory Committee illustrates.
..
Wright, who in his dystopian novel “A Scientific Romance” paints a picture of a future world devastated by human stupidity, cites “entrenched political and economic interests” and a failure of the human imagination as the two biggest impediments to radical change. And all of us who use fossil fuels, who sustain ourselves through the formal economy, he says, are at fault.
..
“We all have the same, basic psychological hard wiring,” Wright said. “It makes us quite bad at long-range planning and leads us to cling to irrational delusions when faced with a serious threat. Look at the extreme right’s belief that if government got out of the way, the lost paradise of the 1950s would return. Look at the way we are letting oil and gas exploration rip when we know that expanding the carbon economy is suicidal for our children and grandchildren. The results can already be felt. When it gets to the point where large parts of the Earth experience crop failure at the same time then we will have mass starvation and a breakdown in order. That is what lies ahead if we do not deal with climate change.”
“If we fail in this great experiment, this experiment of apes becoming intelligent enough to take charge of their own destiny, nature will shrug and say it was fun for a while to let the apes run the laboratory, but in the end it was a bad idea,” Wright said.
Related posts: