At every level of society the rule books have been dumpsterized.  

What I see being played out instead, over the last decade or so, is not being guided by official rules of any kind. Not the rules of so-called High Finance, nor the Rule of Law, or even the rules of common sense.  If there are any rules at play in this total balls-up they bear closer resemblance to the backyard ballgame rules made up on-the-fly by Calvin & Hobbs.

And why even bother to discus things like regulatory reform economics or the rule of law when the very language we use to describe them has itself departed the realm of reality ?  The rules of rudimentary logic and the conventions of language have been ignored and twisted so completely and for so long that even  intelligent educated experts behave as though such rules of discourse and  reasoning ever existed.

It is remotely possible,  I suppose,  that the Elites' supreme insouciance toward logic, law and morality is simply greed, ignorance or advanced syphilitic degeneracy ... but I deeply and sincerely doubt it.

To me it looks like something far more sinister.   Some secret guilty fear … only not so insipid. More like abject palm sweating heart palpitating terror. The elites reek of desperation, as though engaged in a struggle so dire and despicable that they dare not speak openly of it, even between themselves. Maybe the real situation is that they understand full well that the long predicted resource wars of humankind's denouement have begun in earnest. Maybe they already accept, after so many centuries of false alarms, that the end actually IS near. The numbers sure stack up that way.

Just look at the totally obvious situations (those for which no crystal ball or supercomputers are required.)  Every vital system is either in terminal decline, or teetered on the brink thereof. Water, oil, soil, food, climate, population, you name it. Maybe our leaders are ignoring the din of warnings because they DO 'get' what is being screamed at them and are acting accordingly... by saving their own asses, and to HELL with the rules.

If roles were reversed, and you were the one with real power, would you announce Armageddon and possibly turn relatively civilized warfare into utterly internecine chaos? Or would you deem it wiser to fight dirty for the home team and stock up on things you reckon might come in handy for your tribe WTSHTF? Would your fellow tribal elites view that as criminal or heroic?

So although I believe our Leaders are exceedingly unwise and corrupt, I do not believe they are stupid or poorly informed. Nor do I think they share even the slightest wisp of any inclination to stop. They are just clever rats, pilfering the ship that they themselves scuttled,  and they view their fellow plunderers as the good guys.

Donald Trump runs for President! Fidel Castro calls for an emergency turn toward free markets and private property. China dumps Mao and becomes Capitalist Capital of the World. The Fed announces (and no one laughs) that they henceforth will bankroll America forever … by taking in their own laundry. And they all speak in the wormtongue of Finance.

There is a no-holds-barred power struggle among the Oligarchs of the world, to see who will own the serfs and the oil ( and thereby survive ) and who will not. This is not a drill. The only rules are those of feudal allegiance, which shift with the ever changing estimates of probable outcomes. Laws, treaties and all other rules of fair play ( including Financial rules ) serve only to distract the semi-literate, and are ignored, defied or rewritten on the fly. Pure pragmatism. Now would be a good time to brush up on your Machiavelli.

The vast majority of us are spectators to this blood frenzy... by birth, choice or temperament. Or, if you prefer, we are just one more “tranch” of stakes in the game. No one has to be a spectator. Feel free to wade in and get your hands bloody any time you like.

Personally I see see little benefit in that. Who wants to rule over ashes? I shall tend my garden, care for my loved ones, study & write enough to stay alert, listen to some Bob Dylan... and continue reading theautomaticearth until the lights go out. But please, I implore you, let us revert to English. It's okay to translate forked tongues (like Finance and such) ... but that doesn't mean we should speak them ourselves. 

This is little more than a single amusing mental image, rather than a full essay, but it still tare than a sentence or two to express it.

The basic idea is that by some genetic quirk a barnacle ( we'll call him Barney ) is born with a slightly more than the average IQ of most other barnacles, and a LOT more of the inclination to use that intelligence to figure out what the hell is going on around him. In fact, and in certain ways at least, this particular barnacle is, within that narrow range of philosophic endeavor, a genius among barnacles . In some ways perhaps he followsin the tradition of the the wisest of his species, and is certainly more given to thinking than the overwhelmingly greaternumberof his brethren.

Anyhow, he ponders mightily upon many things, not the least of theseponderingsbeing theobservationthat other barnacles don't. By which I mean they don't ponder very much, and when they do ponder it is almost always about how they might gain some advantage for themselves over one or more other little barnacles. When they do bother to think at all, one of the things they think is that Barney is more than a little odd for thinking so much. Quite a significant portion of his time and effort is thus spent coping with their incessant insistence that he be completely different than what he was born to be. In other words, be like them and do like them and stop wasting his time with all of that THINKING, for gawds sake.

In any case he has little choice in the matter, because no matter what else he attempts, and no matter how he strives to pass himself off as just another barnacle, he just can't stop thinking about stuff. Clickita clickita clickita (sounds of mental machinery working away day and night .)

And as he thinks, he thinks that things aren't going as well for barnacles as they should be. He sees doom looming on the near horizon, not only for himself, but for the place he calls home, and for all of his kindred monovalves. He tries to warn, but none listen. He tries to prepare, but preparation for extinctions seems pointless. Eventually he sees it ALL. The clarity of thisRevelationisEpiphanous,complete, and with it comes both peace, and a laugh that takes quite some time to subside.

The epiphany is simply this. He is, after all, just a barnacle, as firmly nestled and attached to the hull of a great vessel (which as fate would have it, happens to be the Titanic ) as all the rest, and although he might have done this or that differently during the brief period that is the life span of a barnacle, at least he had spent the time doing something interesting.

The reknowned theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking posted a question to the world recently on the Yahoo Answers website (http://answers.yahoo.com) asking how we might accomplish survival for the human race for another 100 years (an overly modest period of time, don't you think?).

Anyway, I found that attempting an answer was very thought provoking... which was probably the effect he intended. Anyway, what I posted in answer to the question is republished here:


If we define the "human race" as all of the people currently alive, or as future generations with DNA identical to our own) then our demise within the next hundred  years is so certain that it makes the question pretty pointless.

If, on the other hand, we loosen up and define the human race as a continually evolving species capable of producing ensuing generations (which will likely be just a teensy bit different than preceding generations,) then our chances improve dramatically.

The problem is that along with our remarkable intelligence and fantastic dexterity there is some additional baggage which apparently had high survival value in the bad old days, but doesn't seem to be serving us so well in the present day.

Paramount among these is our insatiable acquisitiveness, greed and duplicity. That these universal human characteristics got us to where we are now, is no guarantee whatsoever that such 'hard wired' survival strategies will get us to where we must be in order to survive that next few hundreds or thousands of years.

Whether we succeed or not is of no consequence to the natural world.

The natural world is as utterly uncaring as a rock. It presents no abstract tests of worthiness to survive. Survival is either achieved or it is not.

The ideas of worth and caring are abstract intellectual inventions of our (and probably some other) species as sometimes useful strategies in the compulsory quest to keep on keeping on. In other words, in our super-brainy species compassion and society (along with deception, aggression and greed) got us to the top of the heap, domination-wise, but they might not keep us there.

They might just as well be our undoing.

In the biological 'musical chairs' game these traits still enable us to muscle or trick our way onto a seat every time the music pauses, and a few thousand other species fail to make the cut and go extinct. The looming doom, of course, is that at some point there will not be enough surviving species to sustain the minimum prerequisites of interdependent life.

At that point, the child’s game of musical chairs becomes the child’s game of ring-around-the-rosey, wherein we all fall down and become ashes.

We will have "won" ourselves into extinction, the ultimate "lose" in evolutionary terms.

For it to turn out any other way would involve deliberately and more or less voluntarily losing certain resource competitions which we would otherwise easily "win" if not restrained in some manner. The natural world shall provide highly effective (albeit heartlessly brutal) restraints. Welcome to the jungle.

It's a tough one. We are biologically 'hard wired' to win survival contests, and to go on winning no matter how much we have already acquired.

For example, notwithstanding their enormous charitable contributions recently, can you even imagine Bill, Melinda or Warren voluntarily becoming poor, lowering the consumption level of their lifestyles or renouncing the values and behaviors they exercised in acquiring their fabulous wealth in the first place?

Right.

It would seem to me, therefore, that to impose or implement some sort of new idea or social reform that would assure us another hundred years (or so) the idea or reform would require a nearly universal compliance to certain new rules of behaviour quite contradictory to our past and present biologically and culturally ingrained habits.

There is as much chance of that as there is for the Republican Party advocating gay marriage, immediate withdrawal from Iraq, and a ban of SUV's from all Federal Highways.

More likely is the natural world simply doing what it does, and that means that the herd shall be thinned.

Our best chances for the herd not winding up thinned out of existence lie in the fact that 6 and half billion people represent a truly incredible amount of cultural and biological diversity.

For example, I personally knew a 72 year old man who in addition to being cheerful and kind could jog 15 miles a day, on a diet of fish, meat and animal fat, in temperatures hovering around 30 F degrees below zero. In his culture wealth was measured by number of friends, not number of dollars.

My father told me of Australian aboriginals who, during WW II, could enter or leave at will a carefully guarded air force base at night, in the middle of an apparently uninhabitable dessert, and be undiscoverably gone during the daytime. That they would risk being shot without challenge by trigger happy sentries just to say hello or have a look at the place, is proof of a culture with values quite different from ours.

So, is there some "How" that we can realistically implement which would better assure our species surviving the approaching involuntary downsizing?

Yes.

Ban further civilized encroachments into the usually inhospitable places where primitive humans still reside, and allow the reoccupation by genetically indiginous homo sapiens of such places where they once resided, and then use our high technology and rigid legal, financial and military institutions to protect them there.

Academia would have a good old time (and make lots of money) setting it up and studying the results. There might be some accidental compensation in the knowledge thus gained, but the real value would be in the fact that increased cultural and genetic diversity is some insurance against extinction of the species.