Geez, a couple more weeks of this turmoil and people might actually start listening to those who have been warning us all for years.
I'm going to list Dmitry Orlov's stages of collapse here, so that we have a handy checklist:
Stage 1: Financial collapse. Faith in "business as usual" is lost. The future is no longer assumed resemble the past in any way that allows risk to be assessed and financial assets to be guaranteed. Financial institutions become insolvent; savings are wiped out, and access to capital is lost.
Stage 2: Commercial collapse. Faith that "the market shall provide" is lost. Money is devalued and/or becomes scarce, commodities are hoarded, import and retail chains break down, and widespread shortages of survival necessities become the norm.
Stage 3: Political collapse. Faith that "the government will take care of you" is lost. As official attempts to mitigate widespread loss of access to commercial sources of survival necessities fail to make a difference, the political establishment loses legitimacy and relevance.
Stage 4: Social collapse. Faith that "your people will take care of you" is lost, as local social institutions, be they charities or other groups that rush in to fill the power vacuum run out of resources or fail through internal conflict.
Stage 5: Cultural collapse. Faith in the goodness of humanity is lost. People lose their capacity for "kindness, generosity, consideration, affection, honesty, hospitality, compassion, charity" (Turnbull, The Mountain People). Families disband and compete as individuals for scarce resources. The new motto becomes "May you die today so that I die tomorrow" (Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago). There may even be some cannibalism.
Stage 2: Commercial collapse. Faith that "the market shall provide" is lost. Money is devalued and/or becomes scarce, commodities are hoarded, import and retail chains break down, and widespread shortages of survival necessities become the norm.
Stage 3: Political collapse. Faith that "the government will take care of you" is lost. As official attempts to mitigate widespread loss of access to commercial sources of survival necessities fail to make a difference, the political establishment loses legitimacy and relevance.
Stage 4: Social collapse. Faith that "your people will take care of you" is lost, as local social institutions, be they charities or other groups that rush in to fill the power vacuum run out of resources or fail through internal conflict.
Stage 5: Cultural collapse. Faith in the goodness of humanity is lost. People lose their capacity for "kindness, generosity, consideration, affection, honesty, hospitality, compassion, charity" (Turnbull, The Mountain People). Families disband and compete as individuals for scarce resources. The new motto becomes "May you die today so that I die tomorrow" (Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago). There may even be some cannibalism.
come across, ways in which to arrest the process and reverse it at each stage; he also explains why the United States is unlikely to pursue any of these prudent courses of action, at least in the early stages. He predicts the rapid depreciation of the American dollar, hastening the appearance of Stage Two: Commercial Collapse--which, he says, we'll "get for Christmas" or shortly after. Indeed, we're already seeing gasoline shortages in the southern U.S.
I can hear many of my readers suggesting this guy's out to lunch and things aren't really that bad, are they?
Dmitry Orlov knows what he's talking about, because he lived through the Soviet collapse that got almost into stage four before wiser heads prevailed. He sees a lot of similarities between what befell the former Soviet Union and what's in progress in the United States of America. The key difference is that Soviet society was considerably more resilient than American society likely is--the Soviets didn't have reality television and so had to subsist on reality. I'm not suggesting we're on a steep slope to family breakdown and cannibalism, and neither is Orlov. Still, it is somewhat sobering to see Stage 1 and early Stage 2 unfolding all around us, wouldn't you say?
4 comments:
I love Orlov's work and so far, as you say, he's been proven right. Have you read his book yet Ken?
I haven't. Not in our local excuse for a library. I'm going to have to get it off Amazon, I think.
There's part of me that doesn't want the bailout. Let the systme collapse and maybe it will wake us up from this delusion we are in and truely chnage the system and the people who run it.
In a way I feel like rocketstar. This bailout is just delaying the inevitable.
Of course I really don't want to live through "the inevitable" so I hope that things will work out.
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