The Prosthetic Imagination | John Michael Greer

[Tace]

March 11, 2015 (Archdruid Report) -- Two news stories and an op-ed piece in the media in recent days provide a useful introduction to the theme of this week’s post.

The first news story followed the official announcement that the official unemployment rate here in the United States dropped to 5.5 percent last month. This was immediately hailed by pundits and politicians as proof that the recession we weren’t in is over at last, and the happy days that never went away are finally here again.

This jubilation makes perfect sense so long as you don’t happen to know that the official unemployment rate in the United States doesn’t actually depend on the number of people who are out of work. What it indicates is the percentage of U.S. residents who happen to be receiving unemployment benefits -- which, as I think most people know at this point, run out after a certain period. Right now there are a huge number of Americans who exhausted their unemployment benefits a long time ago, can’t find work, and would count as unemployed by any measure except the one used by the U.S. government these days. As far as officialdom is concerned, they are nonpersons in very nearly an Orwellian sense, their existence erased to preserve a politically expedient fiction of prosperity.

How many of these economic nonpersons are there in the United States today? That figure’s not easy to find amid the billowing statistical smokescreens. Still, it’s worth noting that 92,898,000 Americans of working age are not currently in the work force -- that is, more than 37 percent of the working age population. If you spend time around people who don’t belong to this nation’s privileged classes, you already know that a lot of those people would gladly take jobs if there were jobs to be had, but again, that’s not something that makes it through the murk.

We could spend quite a bit of time talking about the galaxy of ways in which economic statistics are finessed and/or fabricated these days, but the points already raised are enough for the present purpose. Let’s move on. The op-ed piece comes from erstwhile environmentalist Stewart Brand, whose long journey from editing CoEvolution Quarterly to channeling Bjorn Lomborg is as perfect a microcosm of the moral collapse of 20th century American environmentalism as you could hope to find. Brand’s latest piece claims that despite all evidence to the contrary -- and of course there’s quite a bit of that these days -- the environment is doing just fine: the economy has decoupled from resource use in recent decades, at least here in America, and so we can continue to wallow in high-tech consumer goodies without worrying about what we’re doing to the planet.

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http://worldnewstrust.com/the-prosthetic-imagination-john-michael-greer

[Jackpine Radical]

1. John Michael Greer is always worth reading.

I often check out his Archdruid Report site, and highly recommend the one novel of his that I read: Star's Reach, which is set in a future after the collapse of industrial civilization.

He's actually quite a prolific author who deals with a mix of green technology, futurism, etc. as well as with more-or-less "pagan" perspectives. I find him to be a solid and broad-gauge thinker. I also find his general worldview quite congenial with mine.

[gregcrawford]

2. You can find him at World News Trust...

... all the time, along with Mickey Z., James Howard Kunstler, and... me.