Great new essay from Dangerous Minds pal Charles Hugh Smith on his Of Two Minds blog:
Knowing what lies ahead is a great emotional burden.
The knowledge that the present is unsustainable is, for many of us, a great emotional burden. It troubles our sleep, our minds, and our basic emotional well-being. Knowledge, like memory, cannot be erased at will, and thus it runs in the background of our lives, unseen by others but deeply troubling to the knower.
I am not alone in feeling this weight; correspondents and readers write me that they feel it, too.
Yet it is not just the knowledge that all this is based on cheap, abundant oil and a rapidly imploding financial system based on fraud and lies that burdens us; it is the mirror image of reality pressed upon us by the status quo: the Mainstream Media, the corrupt Savior State beholden to Power Elites and crony-capitalist, predatory monopoly-capital cartels and Global Corporate America (which conveniently enough owns the mainstream media).
One of the most chilling stories to emerge from China’s Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s and early 60s—in which peasants were instructed to “make steel” by melting down their metal farming and cooking tools, leaving them to starve in countless millions—involves the artifices presented to Mao to cover up the grotesque consequences of his policies.
Communist party officials fearful of Mao’s ire and losing their own perquisites arranged to have a specific route through the countryside planted thickly with rice. Five meters deep on each side of this road, rice was planted so closely that it appeared to be the very acme of abundance; the road was seemingly a thin ribbon of pavement cut through endless green abundance.
It was all artifice and lies. While the officials pointed out the phony bounty to Mao, tens of millions of peasants were starving to death. Behind the five meters of contrived abundance lay a barren landscape.
The American media and Savior State are busy planting their own five meters of apparent abundance and “growth” along every highway in the land. The vast majority of people—even people who should know better but who prefer not to know, and thus they studioudsly avoid peeking through the curtain of sham prosperity—accept that GDP growth means something positive is happening in their own lives, even as the visible evidence points to a mirror-image of this “growth” propaganda.
We know that all the contrivances of “modern life” are ultimately the result of one single condition: cheap, abundant oil. Everything—the plays on Broadway, the film industry, the iPods made in China for cheap, the endless Mcmansions in gated exurbs, the grain-fattened, fat-marbled beef, the “cheap” fast-food meals, the Savior State and its Global Empire—is all based on cheap, abundant oil. There is no substitute in the near term.
Every “solution” fails to hold up beyond the most cursory examination. Natural gas? Well, yes, but then all those “fracc’ed” wells the industry extols as the “solution” have a nasty habit of depleting rather quickly. There are an an estimated 254.4 million vehicles in the U.S.; would you care to guess the cost of converting them to natural gas?
Will “entrepreneurship” re-make the distribution system to enable fueling those tens of millions of vehicles with natural gas? At what cost, and to whom?
How about that “new discovery” of a 1 billion-barrel oil field in deep water? Does the MSM or Savior State propaganda ministry mention that 1 billion barrels is less than two months of U.S. consumption, or that it may take 5 years to extract the first drop, or that the costs of such deepwater drilling are so prohibitive that oil extracted will not be cheap?
How about that “endless” shale oil? How many MSM stories note that production tops out at 2 million barrels a day, a mere 10% of U.S. consumption—and the Canadians and Chinese have claims on much of that production?
Even a cursory read of this site, or others which peek through the thick green screen of State/corporate propaganda, reveals the multiple frauds at the very heart of American finance, governance, real estate and the stock market.
Yet most people don’t want to know. They adamantly accept the mirror-image of reality presented by the media and State: that the economy is “growing” and fundamentally sound, even though the reality is the opposite; that “reform” will fix the core problems, even though the reforms are simulacra designed to give the appearance of reform; and that sickcare “reform” will lower costs even as the sickcare cartels increase their take of the economy every year.
This heavily promoted and contrived mirror-image disconnect between what we are told is true and what is actually true threatens us with a very draining madness. Some readers donate money to this site because they say that it provides some sort of landing in a sea of lies, propaganda, misinformation and misprepresentation—that in reading it they know they are not alone and that they are not crazy.
The unease and insecurity is very real. None of us know the future; we only know that the present is vastly unsustainable, and that if we as a nation and species rely on simulacra, artifice, lies, fraud and propaganda instead of reality, then the status quo will end very badly. Any sane person who knows this finds it worrisome.
Read more of The Burden of Knowing (Of Two Minds)