From the poor to dirt rich
We all turn the same direction the earth twists.
….
Fuck spending my whole life in a job that I don’t like
To go buy shit that I don’t need.
It’s so easy to fall into the trap
I’m better than him, I got more crap.
Even if you’re not sure what you’re on this rock for,
You’re worth more than the money in your sock drawer
Seth Sentry. Simple Game
OK, got to get this off my chest or I won’t be able to focus on my Bullshit Job providing life support to the section of the auto business called the fleet industry.
The mountain of energy supporting our civilisation is beginning to erode away from the foundations.
It doesn’t feel that way to most people yet. Like a cliff-top building that still 95% rests on solid ground, everything feels OK on the inside. Unless you go out of the back and look down into the dirt and waves boiling hundreds of feet below where the garden used to be, the only signs of trouble are occasional creaks and groans in the structure.
The building managers refuse to acknowledge the erosion threat. They prefer fighting among themselves to enlarge their personal corners of the structure. Each new story and cantilevered outcrop of high tech wizardry adds weight and erodes the energy base faster … bringing the toppling point nearer from both ends.
If someone does get them to listen to the creaks for a moment – climate change, loss of diversity, the fact that we’re burning fossil energy seven times faster than we’re finding it – they’re dismissive. Technology and human ingenuity will solve the problem. By which they mean that technology will magically insulate the managers at the top from the bruises inflicted on the bottom 90% by the accelerating cliff-fall.
And if this planet ungratefully fails to survive being relentlessly exploited, the crowd in the penthouse are pretty sure that clever Mr Musk will wisk them off to safety in a luxury gated community on Mars (despite his evident inability, on Earth, even to stop a modest motor business devolving into a kind of auto jumble in a big tent).
We’ve normalised excess. Gross excess. And we fight and kill and torture and imprison indiscriminately for the right to be the primary managers and beneficiaries of that excess. The complexity of the system is growing exponentially, already beyond the comprehension of the technicians, let alone the general managers and the ‘economic advisers’ whose voodoo religion provides them with a fantasy framework for managing.
There is no solution to this short of the managers changing their tune. If the 90% on the ground floors of the structure refuse to hold it up through turbocharged consumption, they know most of them will be crushed by the elites’ goon squads on the middle floors. But if they carry on consuming, they’ll undercut the foundations even sooner and end up going over the edge with the whole structure.
But like I said, the managers aren’t listening. Life is shiny and bright up where they are. And for now they’re succeeding in keeping the 90% if not happy then at least quiet with daily salvoes of hope and fear from their media flunkeys.
Will it come unstuck? My guess is they’ll keep throwing money at pointless projects, and repression at people, right up to the bitter end unless a significant country or region goes tits up so spectacularly and un-spinnably that they’re forced to acknowledge the fact that this is the only planet we’ve got and the time’s come to start behaving like that fact matters.
QuadRanting 