¿Cómo vive el ciudadano estadounidense común estos tiempos de caos global, delirio financiero y terrorismo mediático? Aquí y allá aparecen indicios de que no la está pasando bien. Un ejemplo es la nota que sigue, de Chris Martenson para su sitio web Peak Prosperity:
Título: Signs Of
Distress
Subtítulo: The
need to change is becoming more obvious than ever
Texto: The world
is edging closer to the final moments after which everything will be forever
changed. Grand delusions, perpetuated over decades, will finally hit the limits
of reality and collapse in on themselves.
We’re over-budget
and have eaten deeply into the principal balances of all of our main trust
accounts. We are ecologically overdrawn, financially insolvent, monetarily out
past the Twilight Zone, consuming fossil fuels (as in literally eating them),
and adding 80,000,000 net souls to the planet’s surface -- each year! --
without regard to the consequences.
Someday there
will be hell to pay financially, economically, and ecologically as there simply
isn’t any way to maintain these overdrafts forever. Reality does not
renegotiate. Its deal terms aren't compromisable.
For those who
have the neural plasticity to actually see what's happening around us, the
changes are already here, blatant and frightening. Younger folks, with their
fresher eyes and fewer ties to the past, can see them a lot easier than their
elders.
The prosperity
enjoyed by the past few generations -- especially the Baby Boomers -- was
stolen from future generations. All the while, they pretended as if their
borrowing-heavy standards of living were the result of sheer genius and
intelligence; like trust fund babies who mistake being born on third base for
hitting a triple.
Young people have
sussed this out; and are now pulling back from many of the principal occupations
of their forebears -- like marriage, babies and buying homes and cars. This
perplexes older folks, who are beginning to find themselves increasingly at
odds with the generations following after them.
Humans can be
very very smart, but the flip-side of our ingenuity is our capacity for
self-delusion. We’ve very consistently preferred to look past our faults. That
can work for a while, but eventually an incomplete view will lead to a complete
disaster. For example: depleting our topsoils today to grow more eventually
leads to a collapse of our food system tomorrow. Similarly, increasing societal
complexity ultimately drains the resources out of an empire, until it withers
and fails. Such is what we can learn from history. Each of these examples is
rooted in the self-delusion that today's actions don't have real consequences.
Monetary printing
experiments like those currently being run by the world’s central banks are the
ultimate form of self-delusion. Money is the most potent form of social
communication, underlying all contracts and agreements. Violate those and
literally everything falls apart, as we are seeing happen in real-time in
Venezuela right now.
Money printing
and its other historical debasement equivalents, serve to cover up (barely) critical
signals. Derelict ideas that should die a quick death, instead, persist.
Mis-priced money leads mal-investment (e.g., Italian junk debt selling with the
same yield as ten year US Treasury debt!!). Extremely unfair redistributions of
wealth from the bottom to the top result. Every. Single. Time. This time is no
different.
If you cannot see
this madness in the chart below, I strongly suggest you keep staring at it
until you can. It shows the exploding balance sheet of the central bank of 'the
floating retirement colony' known as Japan:
The Japanese
money printers have gone hog-wild over the past decade. And they've had
company. The other major central banks of the wold have been printing
$trillions and $trillions, too, over the same time period. What will the
repercussions be? The world is about to find out.
But it’s actually
far worse than that. For those who can bear to look, the signs of illness are
as startlingly obvious as gangrene on a necrotic limb. Species are going
extinct at an unprecedented rate. Glaciers are fast disappearing. Frogs and
insect populations are mysteriously collapsing. Massive destruction of the
landscape as we chase the last low-EROEI fuels remaining (tar sands, and shale
wells). Miles-deep mining efforts. Enormous human migrations away from
economically and ecologically ruined areas (see: the MENA region).
But the average
citizen remains largely blind and/or numb to these. Again, much of this has to
do with self-delusion that broken signals enable. People worry less as long as
the stock markets are showing higher values, which is precisely why we don’t
trust them anymore – they have become the most important signaling devices for
The Powers That Be. They are far too important to leave to the vagaries of
investors, and must be rescued/controlled/manipulated so that the “right”
outcomes can be achieved.
If we’re lucky
when these financial delusions finally break, we’ll hopefully avoid a global
war. That’s the usual route by which the politicians and bankers seek to avoid
having to be held accountable for the colossal mistakes they made in the past.
They drag everyone to in a manufactured confrontation, whooping up the populace
into a fever pitch by inventing hobgoblins -- exactly as has recently happened
in the US with the recent rash of Russia-phobia; a case study in how easily
public perception can be manipulated (as well as proof-positive that critical
thinking skills are no longer requirements for today's journalists).
But if we’re
unlucky, war may destroy much of what we take for granted and hold dear. Living
standards will drop. The veil covering today's massive financial deception will
be yanked off, revealing the shriveled, cold promises of past decades as being
wholly incapable of meeting their obligation to fund millions of promised
retirements.
And if we’re
really unlucky, that war could involve some horrendous new weapons that could
cripple our nation's electrical grid (e.g., EMP, cyber attack). In which case,
all of our individual attention and effort in the northern hemisphere will
focus down to one simple task: surviving the first winter.
Signs Of Distress
In ways conscious
and subconscious, we're becoming aware of the signs of growing instability
around us. Like a flock of sheep catching the scent of an unseen predator,
right now we’re collectively becoming increasingly nervous and stressed.
People’s tempers are short with each other, criticisms fly easily, and stances
are becoming hardened to ludicrous levels.
Many don’t know
why they're unhappy. And because they're unable to identify the source, they
blame themselves. Instead of acting out, they act in.
Heavy drinking is
on the rise:
“More U.S. adults
are drinking, and more heavily
Aug 9, 2017. The
United States has a serious drinking problem. Since 2001, heavy drinking and
alcohol use disorder have risen dramatically, according to a new study that
surveyed tens of thousands of adults.The numbers reveal “a public health
crisis,”the authors say.
The increases
were especially large among those 65 years and older, minorities and women,
researchers report online August 9 in JAMA Psychiatry. Alcohol is a risk factor
for many potentially life-threatening injuries and health problems, including
cardiovascular diseases, type 2 diabetes and liver cirrhosis.
In 2012?2013, an
estimated 29.6 million American adults reported high-risk drinking, up from
20.2 million in 2001?2002.”
Alcohol is not
enough for some people. Their need to numb themselves to the bleak existence of
their lives leads them to opioids, both legal and illegal:
“Opioid Crisis:
The Awful Arithmetic of America’s Overdoses May Have Gotten Worse
"Aug 7, 2017. The
deadly drug overdose epidemic that has been ravaging the nation may be even
worse than we realize.
A new University
of Virginia study says the numbers of deaths due to heroin and opioid overdoses
have actually been severely underreported.
Dr. Christopher
Ruhm revisited thousands of death certificates from 2008 through 2014 and
concluded the mortality rates were 24 percent higher for opioids and 22 percent
higher for heroin than had been previously reported.
Ruhm’s awful
arithmetic emerged just days after the presidential opioid commission, led by
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, urged President Donald Trump to “declare a
national emergency” to deal with the crisis.
Nearly 35,000
people across America have died of heroin or opioid overdoses in 2015,
according to theNational Institute on Drug Abuse.”
Records are being
broken:
“Opioid deaths in
US break new record
Aug 8, 2017. The
first nine months of 2016 saw a sharp increase in opioid drug overdoses in the
US compared to the prior year, according to new data by the National Center for
Health Statistics (NCHS). The government is struggling to respond to the
crisis.
Deaths due to
drug overdose peaked in the third quarter of last year – 19.7 cases for every
100,000 people, compared to 16.7 in the same period the year before,according
to newly released numbers from the NCHS, which is part of the US Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).”
(https://www.rt.com/usa/399000-opioid-epidemic-record-increase-deaths-cdc)
That is a
startling rate of increase. 3/16.7 = 18% An 18% increase in one year is
profound. What’s going on? We won’t go into the really dark side of this story
which is that certain pharmaceutical companies make a ton of money off of
addicted people, and those same companies donate a lot of money to the US
political system. Suffice it to say that the worship of money and power is so
profound that some activities of late cannot really be distinguished from those
of a death cult.
For those who are
not into opioids other avenues towards relieving the pain exist,
“One in 6
Americans Take Antidepressants, Other Psychiatric Drugs
One in six
Americans take some kind of psychiatric drugs — mostly antidepressants,
researchers reported Monday.
They also found
that twice as many white people take those drugs as do African-Americans or
other minorities, and fewer than 5 percent of Asian-Americans do. And most
people who take them are taking them long-term, Thomas Moore of the Institute
for Safe Medication Practices in Alexandria, Virginia and colleagues found.
"Overall,
16.7 percent of 242 million U.S. adults reported filling one or more
prescriptions for psychiatric drugs in 2013,” they wrote in the Journal of the
American Medical Association’s JAMA Internal Medicine.”
(http://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/one-6-americans-take-antidepressants-other-psychiatric-drugs-n695141)
If one in six
Americans is being medicated for depression and/or anxiety, and another
significant chunk are checking out via opioid numbing, perhaps we need to
consider an alternative explanation for these facts: There’s something wrong
with the world these people are inhabiting -- not with the people themselves.
Charles
Eisenstein really caught my mind’s attention with a piece he wrote long ago
entitled The Mutiny of the Soul. In it he argues that perhaps those most in
need of medicinal help are actually those who are most attuned to the actual
state of the world. He explains the rise in depression and anxiety like this:
“The answer is
staring us in the face. When our soul-body is saying No to life, through
fatigue or depression, the first thing to ask is, "Is life as I am living
it the right life for me right now?" When the soul-body is saying No to
participation in the world, the first thing to ask is, "Does the world as
it is presented me merit my full participation?"
What if there is
something so fundamentally wrong with the world, the lives, and the way of
being offered us, that withdrawal is the only sane response?
I have met
countless people of great compassion and sensitivity, people who would describe
themselves as "conscious" or "spiritual", who have battled
with CFS, depression, thyroid deficiency, and so on. These are people who have
come to a transition point in their lives where they become physically
incapable of living the old life in the old world.
That is because,
in fact, the world presented to us as normal and acceptable is anything but. It
is a monstrosity. Ours is a planet in pain. If you need me to convince you of
that, if you are unaware of the destruction of forests, oceans, wetlands,
cultures, soil, health, beauty, dignity, and spirit that underlies the System
we live in, then I have nothing to say to you. I only am speaking to you if you
do believe that there is something deeply wrong with the way we are living on
this planet.
So if you suffer
from anxiety, maybe you don't have a "disorder" at all — maybe the
house is on fire. Anxiety is simply the emotion corresponding to
"Something is dangerously wrong and I don't know what it is." That is
only a disorder if there is in fact nothing dangerously wrong. "Nothing is
wrong, just you" is the message that any therapy gives when it tries to
fix you.
I disagree with
that message. The problem is not with you. You have very good reason to be
anxious. Anxiety keeps part of your attention away from your tasks of polishing
the silverware as the house burns down, of playing the violin as the Titanic
sinks.
Unfortunately,
the wrongness you are tapping into might be beyond the cognizance of the
psychiatrists who treat you, who then conclude that the problem must be your
brain.”
(https://charleseisenstein.net/essays/mutiny/)
Does that all
ring a bell of truth for you as it does for me?
Perhaps the
sanest response to being in a world that does not merit your full participation
is to check out. Drinking, drugs, video games and Netflix binges (while not
advised or endorsed) are much more understandable when viewed through this
lens.
(Full disclosure,
these past few years have not been easy on me, either. I prefer action and
constructive motion, so the past few years have been like one of those dreams
where you're desperate to move but your body remains frozen in place. I’ve
wanted things to finally come to a head so we can at least begin the process of
acknowledging our predicaments and facing them head on. Beneath it all is my
dread at the prospect that all these years of delaying and denying will amount
to a larger and more painful correction when it comes.)
It really begs
the question: What if there’s nothing wrong with the people who are anxious or
depressed, but the exact opposite is true; those who are cheerful and chipper
are missing the plot?
If you were an
astronaut and your one-and-only spaceship was leaking oxygen into the infinite
void of Space, would you medicate those expressing concern while rewarding
those with positive attitudes and power drills who continue to punch more holes
in the hull? Of course not. Why should we think any differently in the case of
spaceship Earth?
The truth is that
the lifestyle we're living today is vastly distant from the one humans evolved
to value. Sebastian Junger explained to us in a podcast that returning veterans
commit suicide at the rate of 22 per day largely because they experience such
'emptiness' upon reintegrating into civilian life. Unit cohesion in the
military was so much more fulfilling and enriching that the prospect of a
permanent return to what we call “US culture” leads many of them to conclude
that suicide is the better option. If there's a more damning indictment of the
current culture in the US, I don’t know of it.
The data is
clear: in the US, people are as unhappy, overmedicated and overweight than ever
before.
Our society's
current plan is just not working. So why not square up to that reality, take
charge and fix things while we still can? Why would we agree to persist in this
dangerously broken state of affairs?
We, each of us
and all of us, have the power to pursue a different path. A better path. We can
and we should change everything that needs changing. We must rebel against this
state of affairs, and withdraw our consent from a toxic system rather than let
that system break us down.
The time for a
quiet revolution has arrived. One that begins with, and within, you.
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