Forecast 2015 — Life in the Breakdown Lane | James Howard Kunstler

[Tace]

Last edited Wed Jan 7, 2015, 02:35 AM - Edit history (1)

James Howard Kunstler

James Howard Kunstler -- World News Trust

Jan. 4, 2015

"Don’t look back — something might be gaining on you,” Satchel Paige famously warned.

For connoisseurs of civilizational collapse, 2014 was merely annoying, a continued pile-up of over-investments in complexity with mounting diminishing returns, metastasizing fragility, and no satisfying resolution. So we enter 2015 with greater tensions than ever before and therefore the likelihood that the inevitable breakdown will release more destructive energy and be that much harder to recover from.

I don’t know how anyone can trust the statistical bullshit emanating from our government reporting agencies, or the legacy news organizations that report them. Yet the meme has remained firmly fixed in the popular imagination: the U.S. economy has recovered! GDP grows 5 percent in Q3! Manufacturing renaissance! Energy independence! Cleanest shirt in the laundry basket! Best-looking house in a bad neighborhood…!

¡No hay problema!

This is simply the power of wishful thinking on display. No one — with the exception of a few “doomer” cranks — wants to believe that industrial civilization is in trouble deep. The staggering credulity this represents would be a fascinating case study in itself if there were not so many other things that demand our attention right now. Let’s just write this phenomenon off as the diminishing returns of career log-rolling in politics, finance, media, and academia. All the professional “thought-leaders” pitch in to support the “hologram” of eternal progress that issues their paychecks and bonuses. This culture of pervasive racketeering that we’ve engineered has made us obtuse. The particular brand of stupidity on display also points to another signal vanity of our time: the conviction that if you measure things enough, you can control them.

I’m of the view that the measurers only pretend to measure and can only pretend to control things, especially in the most fragile of the systems that we depend on for running all the other systems of techno-industrial economic life: finance. The pretense has endured a lot longer than many of us had expected. The legerdemain employed by banking officials and their handmaidens was greatly augmented by the sheer wish that fragility (i.e. risk) had been successfully and permanently banished from the universe. That “magic” at least sustained a universal faith in currencies until the middle of last year when so many monies went south — except the dollar, levitating on blowback of the deflationary wind flattening everything else.

All this unreality in money and markets should be expected in the conditions just preceding systemic collapse of an entire trans-national industrial civilization, just as one should expect societies to construct their most grandiose monuments to themselves shortly before collapse. The Mayans R us. One year, they were cavorting bloodthirstily atop their garish painted pyramids and a generation later the jungle was stealing back over the temple steps and the population was a tenth of its former size. The same thing is going to happen to us, except there will be a hell of a lot more worthless, toxic debris left on the landscape.

Of course, even that is a more long-term projection than the exercise at hand calls for, viz., the forecast for measly little 2015. So without further throat-clearing, permit me to break it down for you:

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http://worldnewstrust.com/forecast-2015-life-in-the-breakdown-lane-james-howard-kunstler

[NBachers]

1. I can't adequately describe the impact of what I've just read . . .

This is the only thread I've ever bookmarked.

[Tace]

4. NBachers: Suggest Taking It With A Grain Of Salt...

Kunstler at his best -- as in this year-ender -- can be a great read. Yet, he specializes in colorful, well-written hyperbole. He's been doing this stuff since the lead-up to Y2K, where he made a name for himself in the popular apocalyptic genre. He's one of the leading popular peak oil writers since then. He's generally not wrong, but he doesn't have a great batting average in his specific year-end predictions for the coming year. --Tace

[NBachers]

6. Grain of Salt taken- Thanks!

[brett_jv]

2. Excellent read, always enjoy JHK ...

More for his word-smithing (which is as sharp as ever here) than anything related to the accuracy of his predictions, but ... there's much to be said for an entertaining turn of phrase.

To be quite frank, his 2015 prognosis reads quite like those of his from 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, and 2014. His relentlessly bearish and apocalyptic prognostications, and his 'post-political' ramblings (you absolutely cannot pigeon-hole the man into D or R, that's for damn sure ... refreshing in and of itself in today's media climate) can be fairly well counted-on to represent an 'absolute worst case scenario' ... you know, unless you're into like 'Left Behind' and things of that ilk.

If for no other reason it's great to read his yearly prognoses because they're absolutely certain to make what ACTUALLY HAPPENS in the near future (no matter how bad it seems at the time) ... seem like a rather great relief in contrast.

IOW, there may not be a great deal of actual 'accuracy' involved here (in terms of the urgency with which the problems he describes will become reality), but you have to appreciate how utterly convinced the man is that he is a truth oracle ... he puts his version of reality across in way that can be matched by very few others. EVENTUALLY I'm sure that nearly everything he says will 'become real' ... but there's no way to tell WHEN. Reading it all as though it's going to happen IMMINENTLY ... makes for a gripping yarn.

[Tace]

5. brett_jv: It's Well-Written Satire

At his best, it's really fun to read. --Tace : )

[bemildred]

3. Love that first sentence:

"For connoisseurs of civilizational collapse, 2014 was merely annoying, a continued pile-up of over-investments in complexity with mounting diminishing returns, metastasizing fragility, and no satisfying revolution."

[Tace]

7. bemildred: I Wish I Could Turn A Phrase As Well

Kunstler can rip it up. : )

[KoKo]

8. Recommend....

I've been reading him for years.

His observations of our current global situation are, sadly, spot on in so many instances, imho. But then one would have to have been observing U.S., Global events and Markets as long as he has to understand where he's coming from.