Comments on: End of an era

By: David Williams

David Williams — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 19:03:06 +0000

I’d never heard anything by Galtung–very interesting stuff indeed.

another really good book btw is Niall Ferguson’s Colossus. Ferguson comes at all this from a neo-imperalist perspective, but it’s no less interesting for all that.

By: john k.

john k. — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 17:42:53 +0000

No, I can’t say that worldly comforts are necessarily a bad thing either, but I do believe that the manner by which we cling to them is a direct symptom/indicator of our general blissful ignorance with regards to our reality.

A few years back, Johann Galtung gave a speech which floored me. In short, he said that the marker for our decline will be the our stock market peaking. The reason for the decline will be the disparity between production and finance economy. So, when the dollar surges financially but the productive economy is sluggish, there is a backlash. He predicted our 2001 economic slump back in ’99 and again predicted the current failure back in 2004.

In the end, we are simply riders on the roller coaster. Our machine, to make an analogy, has reached critical velocity and is beginning to break up. There will be many social and political “casualties” as a result, but from the ashes there may rise a new general sensibility by which we emerge stronger and better educated, though there is another more likely alternative result which is far darker and more bleak.

Perhaps I’m being a fatalist with regards to our future, but the truth is, I’m world weary and feel like I’ve seen this over and over again. I get gut feelings and they typically are validated.

By: David Williams

David Williams — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 17:21:57 +0000

man, after I read that first sentence, I thought I was gonna get a lecture about how the sun never sets on the Pax Americana . . . thanks for going in a more sensible direction.

That said: I don’t think “worldly comforts” per se are the problem, but I do think that the confusion of wants with needs (as a friend put it the other day) is definitely related to all of this. But I still maintain that Paul Kennedy’s declaration of the decline of America was premature; several years after the cold war, America was (relatively speaking) more powerful than at any point in her history since 1945.

By: john k.

john k. — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 15:06:43 +0000

I cannot agree with what you’ve written any more. We’ve been on the decline for quite a while, our financial model has all but broken. The need for adaptability in a world which is passing us by is greater now than ever, but I have little hope that we can accomplish this as a country. We’re far too entrenched in the worldly comforts afforded to us by the now waning prosperity.

I’m afraid that we’ve driven our gas guzzling SUVs into the sunset of our nation, sipping the lattees of contentment and the McBurgers of obesity all the while. Perhaps the part of the population which prefers pinstriped button down dress shirts and perfectly hydrophobic hair will learn a new industry other than mortgage brokering or real estate sales, though I doubt it. Such “skills” are devoid of value in the long term. The type of person who is attracted to this lifestyle is typically incapable of adaptability, though this generality is not without exception.