Eve of 2013

We come toward the final hours of 2012, a year of vast changes for me personally (leaving a job that wasn't idea but was stable, moving to a new country, being immersed in a different culture, beginning to learn to speak a different language, and much more besides). Whether civilization moved forward is, of course, an entirely different matter. We could single out points of promising technological advance (3D printing comes to mind); but did civilization begin to move forward past its present amalgamation of Third and Fourth Stages, or is the West in a cul-de-sac that is destined to erode. As we said in the last post, despite Comte’s use of the word law for what he believed he’d observed in historical development, there is nothing inevitable in any advance forward. History is not “law governed” in that sense. It depends on what individuals do; it depends on thought leaders who emerge, if any, and what they are able to accomplish.

This past week has seen any number of predictions for 2013. These are hazardous, of course, if taken too seriously. None of us has a crystal ball. A few writers (e.g., here) have looked back on their predictions for 2012 and, to their credit, honestly noted their misses as well as the occasional direct hit. Anyone who predicted total economic collapse in 2012, however, missed it by a mile, obviously; such predictions reinforced my commitment to gradualism (the idea that if decline occurs, it will occur in slow stages, as was the case with the Roman Empire) as opposed to apocalypticism (the idea that we’ll see a relatively sudden and unstructured collapse, with cities in flames, riots in the streets, etc., etc.). My position: the latter is not impossible, of course; just not as likely as the former. The U.S.’s masses are, by and large, content as long as they have sports, reality television, hand-held gadgets, and the calming voices of mainstream media pseudo-pundits even when crises erupt.

So in that spirit, here are my predictions for 2013. Take them for what they are worth. I am not predicting revolution. My predictions are modest. I don’t consider them the product of genius. I consider them common horse sense.

(1) The standard of living in the U.S. has been dropping and will continue to drop. This both has had and will continue to have several causes. First, Ben Bernanke’s QE-to-infinity money creation machine will continue to undermine the value of the dollar; Congress will continue to approve whatever Helicopter Ben does. Only a small amount of the newly created money will enter the general economy, of course; most will go into the coffers of superelite-controlled banking leviathans. Otherwise we would already have seen waves of inflation beyond anything yet recorded. But prices of food, fuel, and other consumer goods in the U.S. have been rising steadily alongside QE’s 1 and 2, and will continue to rise. Taxes will also rise in 2013; this is a given.

(2) Real unemployment—that is, the actual figure (reported, to the best of my knowledge, only on ShadowStats.com)—will continue to rise, possibly surpassing 25%. This will be the case even if the “official” (U3) figure drops. The “official” figure, after all, counts a person as unemployed only if he is out of work and has sought work within the past four weeks. Otherwise he drops off the radar. I continue to be amazed that so many Americans are so hypnotized that they repeat the “official” figure mechanically and see the U.S. economy as improving, however slightly, when the “official” figure drops from 7.9% to 7.7%. Exacerbating both unemployment and underemployment (both part-timers who cannot find full-time work and those with college degrees who are working at jobs not requiring degrees, e.g., as bartenders, bouncers, etc., because those are the only jobs they could find) will be Obama-care as more of its provisions kick in starting in January. Were I making predictions past 2013 and further down the pike, I would say that eventually we will see shortages of doctors, as those who can do so will take early retirement to escape a system controlled by the federal government (operating through Medicare and Medicaid) and the insurance and pharmaceuticals industries. Young people smart enough to read the handwriting on the wall will not go into the medical professions.

(3) Assuming Obama and/or the liberals in Congress cannot get significant gun control legislation passed, I predict we will see at least one more massacre of the Aurora, Colo. and Newtown, Conn. level. It will be a false flag, as those very likely were—I call them false flags because of specifics regarding these cases (countless links to material online on my Facebook page) that do not add up, and in some cases do not make any rational sense however we look at them. (Look here and here.) A strong anti-gun contingent will emerge within the general population. Whether this contingent will effect actual gun control remains to be seen. I will not predict that it will, only that the stage will be set for a possible violent confrontation, because there are a lot of people scattered throughout the Southwest, in the Northwest, and elsewhere, who will refuse to give up their firearms. If pressed, some will organize and prepare to shoot back if that’s what it comes to. Decisions will have to be made on who will back down. I am not any too sure it will be private gun owners, who recognize that a disarmed citizenry is at the mercy of both its own criminal class and its own government (sometimes the two are difficult to distinguish!). Behind the scenes: there are powerful people who would like to see a totally disarmed U.S. citizenry. Their variation on my Fifth Stage is World Government, not World Liberty. They realize that World Government is impossible as long as a Constitution with a Second Amendment is in force, with people willing to use force to defend the ideals represented in those documents.

(4) Foreign wars will continue on scales small enough to remain manageable, as in Syria. We will see continued skirmishes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, and probably on the African continent with U.S. troops moving in down there now. All this continued ill-advised interventionism will cost money, of course, and will drive the U.S. national debt still higher. It will probably surpass $17 trillion by December 31, 2013. (Real indebtedness is, of course, much, much higher.) I am not going to predict a head-on confrontation with Iran, although an incident in the Strait of Hormuz that could precipitate such a confrontation is not impossible. I don’t think the global superelite wants such a confrontation; it’s simply too dangerous, given that Iran would likely have the backing of both Russia and China. The global superelite is not going to authorize any confrontation or event that could cause them to lose control over the situation, resulting in the sort of all-out war that could have them presiding over a radioactive wasteland!

(5) The Liberty Movement will still be around, but with Ron Paul’s retirement from Congress (his Farewell Address deserves to be listened to and read over and over again), it is ever in danger of being increasingly marginalized in 2013 if it does not develop some new strategies. The present ones have not been working. The libertarian wing within the GOP was ineffective against the brazen power-playing of the neocons—probably because they still believe that such decisions as who receives a presidential nomination are made rationally, in response to reasoned arguments, instead of based on lines of authority supported by habit and emotion. I wish I could predict that the Liberty Movement will learn to adopt a strategy not unlike that used successfully by the Fabians over 100 years ago: penetrate and permeate. I cannot. For starters, the Liberty Movement is fundamentally too honest for that, and in societies permeated by corruption, honesty works against you consistently. I do predict that some will take a cue from the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus who advised his followers to withdraw from politics as a condition of achieving a tranquil life. The number of Liberty supporters who are moving to Chile is definitely on the increase, little by little. I have met several, three of which have already moved here and an entire family considering making the move, in just this past month. One may bemoan the fact that Liberty minded people are abandoning the U.S. If more and more such people come here, that leaves fewer and fewer to fight the good fight back home. But these people are thinking of their families, and looking at a society that may not be perfect but is well behind the rest of the West on the curve, with the hope of beginning new and better lives—historically the reasons people have always emigrated to new lands. Many people, of course, cannot afford a relocation of that magnitude. Having realized long ago that government is not their friend at any level, they will withdraw into themselves and their enclave-like communities, dealing only with each other as much as possible and having as little to do with the larger society as possible.

Where does all this leave the idea of a Fifth Stage of Civilization? I obviously will not predict that the West will discover, all at once, any Fifth Stage in 2013. The Third and Fourth Stages will continue to prevail, as so many still locked into the relevant worldviews (materialism, for example) are yet unable to conceive of the possibilities of anything higher.

But in future writings both here and hopefully elsewhere we will continue to examine the possibility of moving forward (we cannot move back, at least not systematically): away from the scientistic materialism of Stage Three and the postmodernist skepticism of Stage Four to the perspective of what would be Stage Five, based on Global Liberty (not Global Government). What might this mean? Were such a society to come to fruition, it would be characterized by freedom for the individual who wants it, who is willing to work to achieve it, and who can assume the responsibilities, moral and economic, that go along with maintaining it. On a larger scale, such a society also recognizes the Creator of all of spatiotemporal physical reality as the real Power behind the scenes. Its people would urge peace instead of war, with problems solved through careful dissection, discussion, and ongoing cooperation instead of by force. Genuine community with any hope of lasting can only be based on such premises. The Fifth Stage of Civilization may involve both the highest and most advanced technology in some of its aspects, if 3D printing indeed catches on and begins to live up to its potential; and it should also involve the “low” technology of, e.g., industrial hemp farming (most recently defended here). Hemp, after all, is one of the most versatile crops ever cultivated, and can be used to make very durable clothing as well as fuel that is environment-friendly in the sense that it burns clean and should provide the sincerely environmentally conscious with all that they need.

To be sure, however and finally, what Christians call sin will probably ever stand in our way, which only means that the struggle to create and maintain the good life, within even the highest civilization, is never complete and never to be taken for granted. The struggle never ends, in other words. My final prediction is that it will continue in 2013. I dare say this one is impossible to get wrong! The struggle for Liberty must continue! Moreover, it must be as global as the struggle to impose Authority has been. After all, all peoples deserve a chance at freedom, not just those of us fortunate enough to have been born in the U.S. In defense of these goals, and the ideals motivating them, the last thing we should ever do is give up!

Why a Fifth Stage of Civilization Might Not Happen in the West: Thoughts on the November 6 Election.

In just four days the election of November 6, 2012, has been analyzed and agonized over so much that it would be impossible to summarize it all. One thing is clear: always assuming no vote fraud in crucial states like Ohio, U.S. voters were willing to send Barack Obama, easily the worst president in U.S. history, back to the White House for four more years. This despite (1) his utter failure to contribute anything toward turning the U.S. economy around by encouraging a business-friendly or entrepreneur-friendly economic climate; on the contrary, under Obama’s watch unemployment rose to depression-era levels (see below), food and gas prices also soared, the percentage of people living below the official poverty line reached the worst levels since the Great Depression, and the national debt skyrocketed from $11 trillion to over $16 trillion with no end in sight. (2) Obama’s foreign policy has been based on a level of war, violence, and destruction that makes George W. Bush look like a man of peace by comparison, also with no end in sight as a confrontation with Iran now looks inevitable. (3) Obama’s continuing with the domestic police and surveillance state which began under Bush II and, very likely, will make whatever is left of Constitutionally-limited government, the rule of law, and privacy, things of the past within four years.

What we might add is that never before has an election season highlighted the immense gulf between fact and fantasy among American voters. The fantasy is that the differences between Obama and Mitt Romney were more than cosmetic. The fantasy is reflected in the hostility between Obama’s supporters and Romney’s which reached levels I have not seen in my lifetime (and I am old enough to have been following political campaigns as far back as the Nixon era).

The fact is that the Obama and Romney agendas were in agreement on all these essentials:

Both, as just said, have pro-war, interventionist foreign policies.

Both favor expansionist government and the regulatory state.

Both favor unrestricted immigration.

Both favor the continued outsourcing of jobs as a consequence of corporatist “free trade”; combine this with their support for expansionist government and both support, by implication, the main economic forces destroying the capacity of the U.S. to sustain a middle class: the fact that other things being equal, corporations always move operations to where labor is cheapest and regulations, laxest.

Both Obama and Romney service the superelite international banking cartel based in the City of London.

Both support the Federal Reserve System, the superelite’s primary instrument of economic control in the U.S.

Both therefore support an economy based on a fractional, inflationary monetary system which devalues the currency, wiping out incentives to save, and on steadily accumulating debt.

Both have supported and will continue to support bailouts for leviathan corporations (especially banks).

Both support a corporatism in food and pharmaceuticals, and factory farming, over the natural health movement against which the corporations would like to use federal authorities to suppress in all forms, be they dietary supplements, family farms, or just the producers of raw milk.

Both favor the brand of health care socialism that goes by the name Obamacare, which is not about health care but how health care is paid for. Obamacare does not contain one word about, e.g., primary prevention. What it does ensure is that health care will get more expensive, less efficient, and increasingly scarce as doctors leave the profession rather than comply with cumbersome regulations.

Both support continuing the irrational, destructive war on drugs which has resulted in the U.S. having the largest per capita prison population of any advanced nation in the world.

Both support continuing the centralization of “public education” through the U.S. Department of Education.

Both support the current tax structure.

Both favor police-state measures such as the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) which allows for the potential indefinite incarceration of U.S. citizens without specific charges, due process, or legal counsel.

Both will expand Homeland Security and the activities of the Transportation Security Administration. The latter has already expanded its reach beyond airports into bus terminals, subway stations, and tractor-trailer weigh stations. One may expect the TSA to begin random checkpoints on interstate highways and major thoroughfares in the wee hours of the morning when it can be done without creating traffic backups.

Both support the growing cold war on Internet freedom.

Both support, at least by implication, the growing tendencies to demonize the various freedom communities (libertarian, Patriot, Constitutionalist, prepper, homeschooler, etc.) by labeling them potential “domestic terror” threats.

Both would probably support using military might to suppress a vibrant freedom movement, or possibly a secession movement in one or more States, that had reached a critical mass: with the NDAA and similar items of legislation some dating to the Bush years, and through any number of executive orders Obama has signed over the past four years, all the machinery is in place for such, with the permanent incarceration of its leadership, and it would be entirely legal.

In light of all these levels of fundamental agreement all of which were off the table during the contrived and orchestrated “debates,” a rational person would have to wonder what all the fighting between the two camps was over.

I fear rationality has very little to do with life in the U.S. today—or in Western civilization generally.

Where does all this fit in with our previous posts, in which we have discussed how Stage Three thinking (in Comte’s words, “scientific and positive”) eventually gave way to what I call Stage Four (“postmodern and negative”), and whether doors will eventually open to a Stage Five? This last, of course, is the primary subject of this blog.

Stage Three thinking had/has the advantage that its participants / adherents believed they had acquired genuine, objective, value-neutral truth about the universe and about ourselves. They believed the methods of the physical and natural sciences—also the social sciences—were the key, whatever their disagreements over specifics. Stage Three thinking, whatever our criticisms of it, has an impressive resume. The combination of respect for science as free inquiry, the unleashing of technological creativity of all kinds, and the furthering of commercial activities to improve the standard of living of all who participate (and many who don’t), built the greatest civilization the world had ever seen in what—in epochal terms—was a relatively short period of time (a few hundred years).

Niall Ferguson, in his latest book Civilization: The West and the Rest (2011), outlines the “killer apps” that built Western civilization: competition, science, the rule of law, modern medicine, consumerism, and a work ethic. While certain of these contain backward glances into Stage Two thinking (especially the rule of law), Stage Three civilization allowed them to bear full fruit as a seamless unity for the first time.

It is easy for those of us born in the twentieth century to draw benefits from Stage Three accomplishments without appreciating the amount of work that went into them. Somewhere here is the source of the entitlement mentality that characterizes the typical Obama supporter. The fact that Obama was reelected would indicate that entitlement addicts now outnumber those with a work ethic. When work no longer pays, people will gradually cease to work as it brings them no advantages. Civilization will, at that point, cease to enjoy further advances and begin to decline. If I may give Ayn Rand a quick nod, Atlas will begin to shrug. Some will say that decline has already begun. I do not believe the West is at that point just yet, if only because new technologies continue to appear in, e.g., electronics and high technology generally, the products of genuine enthusiasts for whom the work is an end in itself, not something they do just for the money.

So when we draw upon disquieting essays such as Bertrand Russell’s “A Free Man’s Worship” or Walter T. Stace’s “Man Against Darkness” or the literature of existentialism or the products of “modern art” to highlight those areas where Stage Three falls short via its gradual creation of a moral vacuum within civilization, we do not do so lightly, without a clear acknowledgement of its accomplishments and of the need to preserve what was best in them.

Stage Four, in this case, came about because of these weaknesses. While Ferguson sees the West as having fallen into a period of self-doubt, the problem of the moral vacuum of, e.g., utilitarianism was quite genuine. Some may be sacrificed involuntarily and even unknowingly supposedly to benefit others (e.g., the Tuskegee Experiment). Unnecessary wars, of course, sacrifice entire peoples and cultures to benefit the expansionist empire. We kept careful count of the number of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq. I don't know if anyone accurately counted the number of dead Iraqis. Were they less than human? Stage Three clearly went overboard in its optimism about human nature and its meliorism. Technology makes us more efficient and more comfortable, but it does not make us better people. Two World Wars plus the Cold War—plus the past 20 years during which we’ve seen the seeds of empire sprout full bloom in the West—should have cured us of that. These are observations, by the way, which philosophers are uniquely qualified to make. Why is the philosophical community (with very rare exceptions) not making them?

Be that as it may, Stage Four loses all confidence in the quest for truth—scientific as well as moral. Truth becomes a cultural artifact, invariably historicized and relativized in a manner not dissimilar to what happened to religion in the hands of Stage Three thinkers. Arguing in defense of putatively important truths is blurred with the category of imposition based on authority—an idea developed in great detail within postmodernist philosophy and cultural studies. (Back in the 1990s I had a running debate with a professor emeritus at a major university for whom this distinction seemed literally unintelligible. His way of putting the matter: “Truth is determined by authority.” I would ask in response: “Is your statement true, given that you aren’t in a position of authority?” I saw no indication that he understood the question or its significance.)

Not just is confidence lost in the quest for intellectual truth, but respect for truths essential to any sort of sound public policy is lost. Truth in a variety of public arenas ceases to be important. When truth ceases to be important, the masses believe fantasies. Indeed, almost automatically they come to live in a fantasy world which politicians and mainstream media shills merely have to reinforce to accomplish their goals which, in this environment, will involve furthering a more controlled society. The fantasy, in the case of Romney, was that he represented a viable alternative to, and fundamental change of direction from, the past four years of the Obama presidency. Orchestrated “debates” didn’t need to do much to reinforce the fantasy, as so many were already willing to believe it. Other fantasies include an “employment rate” that does not count as unemployed anyone who stopped looking for work a month ago (the “U3” rate), thus radically understating the true extent of unemployment in the U.S. which has been at near-depression levels; and an “inflation rate” that fails to include food and fuel costs (“core inflation,” a bogus statistic created during the Nixon era with then-Fed chair Arthur Burns). For antidotes to these fantasies of officialdom, go here.

What I am leading up to in this discussion is just the following: by talking about a Stage Five I am not talking about something that is, in some sense, inevitable (even if various aspects of a possible Stage Five mindset possibly exist in incipient forms in, e.g., systems theory and presuppositionalist theology). There are no “laws of history” in that sense. Comte’s phrase Law of the Three Stages is actually something of a misnomer. There is no inevitability that a given stage will lead to its successor, as Marx believed capitalism would create the conditions for socialism. Most cultures, after all, never achieve a Stage Two level, developing distinct philosophies apart from their theologies. Only in the West did Stage Three develop and come to fruition—although other civilizations have now “downloaded the killer apps” at least in part. China is probably the best example. Other nations showing promise: India, Russia, Brazil, and of course, Chile.

There is no guarantee that the West (by which I tend to mean the Anglo-European world) will survive the skepticism, self-doubt, and public flight into fantasy that characterize a Stage Four culture. Stage Four might well be the furthest the West gets. This blog is an attempt to define the problems and obstacles ahead. We human beings are problem solvers, and as problems go, this is the Big One—the hugest problem facing the West. Breaking through skepticism, self-doubt, and the tendency toward fantasy and escapism is one of the biggest challenges of those of us seeking to go beyond Stage Four and bring about the nurturing and eventual flourishing of Stage Five—at which we finally achieve wisdom born of age and bitter experience, including acknowledging our limitations as finite beings. This might soon become a still larger challenge, since the reality of unsustainable fiscal policy will make itself felt sooner or later—and the longer it takes, the rougher will be the landing on the shores of economic reality! Many writers (e.g., Michael Snyder, author of this blog) support the apocalyptic view that a crash of unprecedented proportions is just around the corner and could occur as soon as next year! I've avoided such pronouncements, since it seems clear that the global elite doesn't want this to happen; they could easily lose control. Could it be that such an event is necessary, however, and that afterwards it will be possible to build up a better civilization assuming that what was best in the West can be preserved? Doing so obviously will be several magnitudes more difficult than just reexamining our first premises now would have been. Most people will doubtless be too busy just trying to survive! The Ron Paul movement was attempting just this sort of reevaluation, especially where economics was concerned. The GOP elites responded with resolute hostility and brazen dishonesty. The entire country might soon be paying the price.

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