THE SECULAR FUNDAMENTALIST: Mission, Chapter Synopses, Introduction & executive summary

The reader will find the link immediately below gives access to my Writing.com site. The live link chapter headings at the end of this introduction can only be accessed through cutting and pasting that link up in the address bar....or going to chapters 1-35 to be found in the next blog entries.



https://www.writing.com/main/books/item_id/2064958-The-Secular-Fundamentalist

THE SECULAR FUNDAMENTALIST

The making of a Post-Modern Testament.

Christopher Nagle

For the indulgently rotund

Moral tales are like bathroom scales

Unforgiving, maladjusted and shunned.

Great journeys must be imagined first

and so trenchant in their intent

to slake the deepest kind of thirst,

they grasp imaginers by the throat

and tell them bluntly

only through travail and trial,

by purging fire

and hammer blows be smote

can their spirit be reforged

and history's child

be sired.

This ordeal can either temper

or destroy

according to its whim,

or perhaps the pilgrims’ strength within.

Courage can surmount faint hearts,

but how can faith presume

that having gambled all,

there is a way to save us in the end?

There are no roads upon the other side,

except the ones we make,

every step perhaps at stake

our lives,

every view through soldiers’ eyes.

And so we wile away our days

beside brooding familiarities

that will not speak to us for fear

that it is not the sun that brightens

all that we hold dear,

but the bonfire of our vanities;

that the deepening darkening shade it castes

is not shadow,

but decaying sanity.

We look for hopeful signs,

but at midnight,

the clock rings its hands and says

in anguished tones,

“Ladies and Gentlemen,

it’s time.”

CONTENTS


Faceplate Statement: (Picture of Martin Luther circa 1525)

Contents

Introduction and Executive Summary

PERSPECTIVE AND HISTORY

1. Modernism: Satan’s bargain

This uses a modernized and secularized version of Faust’s deal with the devil as a motif for what an entire society has done to itself.

2. Plunder: species war against the planet

A profoundly dominant species faces its apotheosis in the destruction of the life support system.

3. The Blind Eye: the accounts

Accounting is a much as anything else a propaganda and screening device that conceals damage, loss and later disaster, cannot distinguish between economic obesity bloating, cancerous over-replication and healthy output, distorts and mythologizes economic effort, prevents realistic planning for the future and will likely preside over a disgraceful rationalizing of economic and ecological collapse.

4. Modernity and Postmodernity: some further explanation

The mythologization of modernity into irrational collective thinking that bunkers down rather than rationally responding to profound challenges, feeds into a scenario of disruptive historical dislocation that will propel us into a quite different and devolved order, forcing us into an uncertain and difficult journey into the future.

5. A Personal Late Modern Experience

A short personal history and explanation of why I believe what I do.

6. Early Twentieth Century Perspectives: modernism triumphant.
This is the story of the accumulating threat of blithe optimism in the face of overwhelming historical success and chronic under-estimation of the possibility that it might turn.

7. Towards the Middle Twentieth Century: construction of the modern totalitarian template

While early versions of bluntly autocratic totalitarianism had ‘issues’, they did address the overwhelming pressures and traumas of industrialism, even if at a very high price. Ironing out those kinks has led to much more sophisticated and ‘democratic’ solutions.

THE MECHANISMS OF LATE MODERN TIMES

8. The New Totalitarians: the industrial drivers – hubris

The wages of corporate megalomania are a society that has been turned into an asylum, where fantasizing and rationality are no longer distinguishable.

9. Masters and Slaves: the rule of the Idearchs

The locus of slavery has moved from physical domination to the domination of thought and its entrenchment into the collective imagination, to the point that independent contractors will deprive themselves more and beat themselves harder and more often, than the slave drivers of old.
.
10. Restructuring: shifting the parameters of social control.

The development of a new kind of corporate totalitarianism that colonizes civil society through the root and branch commercialization of liberty, where the instruments of enforcement and subjugation are depoliticized into products and services, the building of public pressure around them, the protracted institutionalization of mass seduction and the editing out and/or domestication of dissonances.

11. Total War and Peacetime Mobilization: the template.

Commercial totalitarianism has been reconfigured out of the all out mass mobilization for total war production to ‘peacetime’ total production war, turning soldiers into 24/7 production warriors and shop troops, reconstructing socialization in favor of adolescence, conflating critical language into doublethink and building libertarianism into the language of orthodoxy and administration.

MODERN REGIME PSYCHOLOGY

12. The Dictatorship of the Toys: the hegemony of games

The engine room of production warfare is the conversion of objects into icons, relationships into games and reality into fantasies, desires and fulfilling them.

13. ‘The Edge’: the psychology of totalitarian mobilization

The extremism of production warfare forces everyone to the edges of their character and the possible in ways that energize and reward the enterprisingly nimble, over-tax the hard working, marginalize and strip the vulnerable and turn all human intercourse into a fall prone exercise in slippery cliff hanging and scrambling, that all too often ends in the valley of the shadow of marginalization.

14. The Western Existential Hinterland: once you saw it, now you don’t

The journey into the modern world of instrumentalized and specialized thinking has eroded the parts of us that religious life and institutions looked after, to the point the we are so stripped of an existential heartland that faith and reason no longer meaningfully correspond, such that reason degenerates in rationalization and faith becomes blind.

THE CRUMBLING EDIFICE

15. Hypatia’s Ghost: the decline of modernism

The secular critique of religion, as exemplified by the work of Richard Dawkins, not only underestimates the rise of religious fundamentalism, but entirely misses what is giving it its traction; serious flaws in the secular world itself that require a complete existential, social and economic rethink of the absolute basics; what the purposes of life and wealth are. Failure to do this has given old time religionists a free get-out-of-the-garbage-heap-of-history card, enabling them to re-stake their claim on the territory and preparing the way for a reformational shift, which only a determined secular counter-reformation will stop

16. Adaption Success and Failure: The early modernizing and late modern experiences

The challenges raised and responses to them during the transition into modernity are analogous to the challenges we face today, as the modern project begins to confront its own mortality, just as its predecessors did, when they had to decide what could be ported from their past into a new world order, and what had to be left behind.

CASE STUDIES IN EMERGENCE, TRANSITION AND DECAY

17. Romeo and Juliet Revisited: ‘childthink’

Shakespeare introduces us to a very ‘early model’ version of the autonomous child in the face of traditionalist expectations and political realities; traditionalists who are made to take the modern blame for the adverse outcomes arising from the children’s willful and inconsequential egoism and their adult collaborators’ irresponsible and indulgent behavior.

18. The entrenchment of Adolescence: the modern Romeo and Juliet

Our system of one to one familial social governance has been systematically unpicked and replaced by market forces and methodology to the point that parenting without a sales and marketing division is out of the question. We are not helpless before this, but not only is the challenge daunting, the road back is strewn with mines and obstacles that every parent must understand and negotiate.

19 Abusing Children In Detention

One of the ways that the social libertarian humanist ascendancy shifts blame from itself and its deregulatory agenda for collapsed governance and the social infrastructure for producing it, in favor of private market forces and individual egos, is to transfer it to low level social administrators who can no longer manage the chaos and accumulated inter-generational malfeasance that is coming into their care. Liberal media lead the charge to reinforce the status quo.

THE 4 UGLY SIBLINGS: sexism, homophobia, racism and religious fundamentalism

20 Sexuality, Feminism and the Coming Crunch

Women have been dudded by the sexual revolution that emerged in the 1960s. Instead of being delivered a feminist sexual politic, they got deregulation of the social system instead. And they were the ones who were deregulated into a sexual feast not of their making. They became the commodified main course game and the dessert on a table set for unreconstructed sexism and an informal patriarchy that no longer directly discloses itself as such.

21. The Sexual Revolution 1: the case of abortion on demand

The ease with which this practice was legitimized had very little to do with the extremely dubious anti-sexist arguments for it, and everything to do with the internal politics of production warfare and the reconstruction of sex and female ‘liberation’ as consumer constructs.

22. The Sexual Revolution 2: the case of the homosexual lobby

While women have been ‘had’ by the sexual revolution, homosexuals have been able to leverage and fudge the gender critique of feminism with the rise of ‘sexistentialist’ consumer ideology, which became the perfect matrix for homosexual claims to sexual equality and the right to invade an increasingly chaotic and defenseless reproductive commons.

23 Aboriginals: racism, imperialism and ‘sorryspeak’

A narrative about ‘time travel’, adaption and governance, and what happens to not just an indigenous population, but anyone who fails to manage major and difficult historical shifts. Those who support and excuse such failure to reinforce their own ideological position through a culture of aggressive condemnation and shoddy excuse making, not only further disable their ‘clients’, but set themselves up for the same fate, as their own world and worldview starts to unwind.

24 Racial History Rewritten

Every generation rewrites its history as if this time it is the final word. I keep saying this to libertarian humanist acquaintances of mine who cannot resist the temptation to pretend that their vision of the world, their modelling of reality and their values are timeless, universal and unaffected by the forces of history. I try to remind them of the uncomfortable likelihood that nothing is timeless and their turn to drop through the gallows of history will come soon enough, leaving it to others to put their ideological stamp on how the world is perceived, supposed to be and its memory constructed.

25 Drugs, Executions and Moral Fundamentalism

On 29th April 2015, two Australian drug runners were executed in Indonesia. The response of the Australian media and the public conversations that followed, indicated a profound ideological and cultural insularity and complacency by the dominant western libertarian secular ascendancy towards an equally formidable challenge by an increasingly militant and equally fundamentalist global movement that no longer accepts that ascendancy, or its legitimacy. The article tries to provide a secular gloss to the Muslim answer to its secular antagonists that never surfaced at the time, because the libertarian ascendancy does not tolerate/platform voices that do not embody its fundamental assumptions.

26. Shylock and His Bastard Children

As Islam (and to some extent almost all other religions) start to convulse into a Reformationary spasm of puritanical rage, at the bottom of this highly volatile and explosive cocktail we are just bound to find an absolutely fascinating and extraordinary little tribe; the Jews. If you do not believe in divine providence and end-of-the-world eschatology, explaining how the modern era has become hostage to the fate of this tiny ethnic group is a tough ask, but I do my best…..for to not understand it is to not understand the rise of fundamentalist religion.

VISIONS:

27. MacSocialization

The civil libertarian side of capitalism has reached its use-by date and the market now needs to take over the space left by a laissez-faire implosion of governance. Social reproduction is just another services product and can be delivered in exactly the same way, by applying the same totalitarian principles of production warfare and consciousness control as one might use to promote bottled water.

28. Denazification as a Model of Change

The process of denazification was a unique experiment in changing consciousness at a mass national level, by combining the consequences of failure with collective shame and rehabilitation, in ways that modeled new values and behavior. The 2008 GFC offered an opportunity to repeat it in the context of prospective economic catastrophe, to break some very unpleasant habits and rebuild productive and prudent financial behavior throughout society, from top to bottom.

29. Sistermentor

The deconstruction of manhood into permanent adolescence eventually caused such grievously dysfunctional reproductive outcomes, that parents who could afford it, or families that had exceptionally understanding distant female relatives/friends, started to build a sexual right-of-passage mentoring process for adolescent boys into the practical business of becoming considerate, thoughtful, stable and emotionally mature adults, who could engage their future female partners in ways that would secure them and their future family throughout an entire reproductive cycle.

30. Aspirants, Redemptories and Practical Salvation

Salvation is the business of constructing the attitudinal software, social practice and institutional setting to enable communities to high function collectively and bring out the best in the individuals who compose them, in ways that enrich future generations, no matter how trying and dangerous their material circumstances.

31. A Post Modern Death

Death becomes our summary and the legacy that it leaves behind is not merely a dead hand, but a living artifact that buries itself into our successors, just as much as if we were to individually live on as immortal spirits. It is to be embraced, where possible, as an exalted moment rather than one denied and unnecessarily put off out of fear or egoism, so that our successors can take over our space in the generational social matrix at the height of their powers, and that the dying person does not overly consume scarce medical resources through unnecessary elongation of the process.

32. The Softwell Man

No institutional structure, no matter how high its ideals, is immune from the ordinary effects of political struggle, mistakes or the ineluctable transition processes that all living organisms must endure. Movement founders are often not the same sort of people as those who build them into great institutions. And if they are compressed into the same time and space, conflict is likely and the apparatchiks usually win. As a founding father dies, we see the dynamic of that kind of defeat and how movements change gear.

33. Post-Modern Heroes: Michael and Giordanda

This is a visionary ‘history’ of a post-modern commune and a family within it, making their way in an extremely hazardous, violent and deprived world, where the rules of conduct and social engagement form an integral part of its armory and wealth capital. The strength and discipline of their commons and the solidarity that it produces is the key to their survival, and everything they do and the entire process of reproductive effort, is geared to that end.

34. Satan’s Bargain: the ‘FutureSafe Guarantee’ ®

Satcor CEO, B. L. Zeebub, offers the company’s human elite genetically and memory engineered immortality, as part of their remuneration packages, in return for collaborating in the final solution to the biology question; death.

CONCLUSION:

35. War, Peace and the Ongoing Struggle

We are in a society that is living wildly beyond its means and putting crushing pressure on everything it touches. We must now prepare ourselves for a most difficult journey into the future in which there are no rescue services except our own, face the prospect of a multi-millennial time line to struggle against extinction and build an opportunity to port something of a legacy that includes virtue as a civilizational goal for our descendants.



Introduction and Executive Summary

In 1517, an obscure academic monk called Martin Luther (See faceplate) did what seemed impossible. He unwittingly started a massive two hundred-year political-religious upheaval whose echoes can still be felt today.

The trigger for this maelstrom was his objection to the sale of ‘Indulgences’. These religious instruments enabled sinners to buy their way out of the consequences of their negative behavior in this life, in the next. The Church Establishment of his day profited immensely from this sales practice. However, he felt it defeated the quest for salvation. For him, this institutionalized attempt to buy off God meant that the redemptive value of all well intended Good Works and Worthy Behavior had been hopelessly compromised. Only blind faith in His mercy, grace and forgiveness gave any hope for the deeply faulted character that is inherent in every one of us.

In its day this message had enormous resonance.

Today, Indulgence has become embedded into the foundations of our economy and culture in ways that Luther could have hardly imagined. As much as it did in Luther’s time, self indulgence and the indulgence of others equally subverts and damages us. We no longer try to buy off God. Instead, we try it on ourselves, family and friends, and the wider community. We try to buy salvation through goods and services satisfactions, but the more we fail, the harder we try to make them give what they cannot deliver.

Self-deception, lies and false hopes however are only the beginning. Systematically giving in to every desire and whim gives rise to an economic system that ravishes everything it touches in its efforts to feed a bottomless pool of demand and entitlement. We no longer end up in an afterlife purgatory. We have a self-designing and dynamically evolving form of hell that colonizes us in the here and now. Its name is the Golden Gulag. It is so overwhelming it absorbs everything, including our best intentions and Good Works.

Salvation and redemption can therefore still only be achieved by blind faith that one can do what seems to be impossible, which is to somehow escape its power.

The Golden Gulag is a concentration camp for the prisoners of desire. Unlike its predecessors, the facilities are very comfortable and copiously supplied, but its processes are exactly the same. It is a feedlot that takes many multiples of the value extracted from the victims of the Nazi SS or Soviet NKVD. Its victims are destroyed by their labor and starved of existential nourishment until all that is left are ghosts. Despite the pretty facades of the buildings, the well kept roads and gardens, the orderly administration and quality entertainments, it is a charnel house. It feasts on the living world for its fuel, debouches an acrid odor of burning flesh and leaves behind mountains of the charred remains of our needs and wants.

Inside the Gulag, people enslave themselves and each other to intensely engineered passions, unbridled egoism and pathological levels of overproductivity and consumption. They are persuaded to abandon the domesticity and community sociability that not only existentially secures them and their intimates, but also constructs them as adult characters. Adolescence breaks out of its age niche to become a toxic mainstream force that paralyzes adult consciousness and critical thinking.

Within the Gulag, freedom, human rights and indulgence seamlessly merge to benignly disempower the inmates in ways repression never could, thus binding them all the more tightly to their voluntary destruction. Liberalism has been elevated into a powerful orthodoxy, but at the price of denuding it of the discipline that made it work as an independent social ideology. It has been reduced to a cruel parody of itself in return for its role in masking the more negative aspects of the Gulag’s operations. Its control of our social welfare, educational and legal establishments has become as corrupted as it is incompetent.

Humanist libertarchs hang around the civil gateways of indulgence capital, delegitimize what is left of a social commons, its discipline and the authority vested in it, and provide unconditional, excuse rich and all inclusive absolution for the lumpen proletariat, the sexual underworlders, the picaresque edge dwellers in the valley of the shadow of marginalisation and those still in denial about responsible moral agency. At least in the sixteenth century unreconstructed sinners had to pay up front to avoid damnation. Not anymore, with the special all-you-can-eat-don't-have-to-pay-til-next-year offers you just cannot refuse.

All that freebie get-out-of-jail-pass-go inclusivity is now absorbed and co-opted into a giant theatre of fantasies posing as wants, evolving into needs and apotheosing into rights, because the customer is always right, ready for the masters of business administration to orchestrate the real business of uncontrolled spending and inconsequential behavior on the never never....whether international banker or humbleton credit card hound.....indefinitely, as if the future will never come, because we can put it off.

This Gulag is not an autocracy. It is self-regulating. There are no guards or fences. The prisoners cannot bring themselves to leave. They have not been arrested or deported there. They have been driven in by proudly sponsored visions of paradise.

The Gulag is a revolutionary and totalitarian organism in all the worst and grossest senses of those words. No goal it ever sets itself is ever enough for long. No amount of force or institutionalized violence could possibly accomplish the extent of those goals. However, selling and marketing can. Thus even the most pathologically insane values and aspirations can be readily turned into middle-of-the-road, state of the art and reasonable. And while the organism assiduously purveys an image of concern for the value of life and property, like all its revolutionary predecessors, it too eats its children.

The culture of the Gulag is characterized by the language of ‘Doublethink’ (turning empowering ideas into their opposite), 'Fudgethink' (conceptual conflation, particularly of social and market/consumer liberty and rights/entitlement), ‘Hollowthink’ (vacuous slogans, aphorisms, clichés, euphemisms and dysphemisms) and ‘Childthink’ (disinhibited adolescent consciousness and egoism-without-boundaries), revolutionary enthusiasm, institutionalized veneration of icons, personality cults, privatized, massively budgeted and science driven propaganda ministries, ever intensifying productivity and compliance requirements, systematic white anteing of pre-Revolutionary values and institutions and an agenda of nothing less than the complete reconstruction of the individual and society for the maximizing of production and consumption outcomes.

The Gulag production system originated from the initially temporary expedients of total war. These have now been adopted and re-engineered by industrial ‘war machines’ for marketing assaults on civil shop troops. They have turned episodic war production into permanently institutionalized ‘production warfare’ by systematically overproducing and then ‘wasting’ goods and services onto market ‘battlefields’. At a profound level, it no longer makes any difference what sort of battlefield is being fought over or whether the munitions are poison gas or air freshener.

The damage inflicted by traditional warfare and modern productivity is gradually becoming indistinguishable. The costs of this damage, both tangible and intangible, are externalized out of the accounting system. Even the most merciless and rapacious looting of off balance sheet capital accounts are never disclosed. Thus this system now conceals vast accumulated ‘invisible’ losses that will eventually bankrupt a great part of our institutionally organized, existential, cultural and ecological capital bases.

Obesity and cancer are not just medical blights, but metaphors for our age. Damage to healthy tissue through excessive feeding and developmental bloating, over-replication, and aggressive metastasizing are pictured as fabulous success stories, even as they kill their hosts. The Gulag is death, not just for us, but the life force itself.


Post-Modernism is an art movement whose aesthetic fractures, deconstructs and dysfunctionalises images. Post-Modernity is a potential historical state of being and living that expresses this prescient art form with all the violence, dislocation and chaos that its definition would imply. The greatest question for the latter days of modern times is how we can limit and manage our exposure to the worst effects of such an age.

The defining strategy for managing the answer will be to recast modern technology and ideas to facilitate retreat into sane and defensible existential, cultural, community, corporately institutionalized and ecological boundaries; i.e., to industrially calm and ‘disarm’. Such a process would redefine what it means to be productive, wealthy and fully human. It would make a start down the long road to resuscitate our inner hinterlands, recapture our now thoroughly demolished sense of the sacred and redemptive and rejoin the worlds of faith and reason, so that once more they can make sense of each other.

As things presently stand, the only groups currently ready to deal with a post modern period are the militant religious fundamentalists of all persuasions, who have dispensed with reason in order to maintain existential and social capital, which they are increasingly inclined to sustain by blind faith and force. Seculars have barely begun to even contemplate the business of rebuilding this wealth, that has been systematically smashed to be bits by the requirements of a consumer society that needs only production drivers and consumer responders for its veteran third generation contract drones and shop troops.

And of all global religious movements, the Abrahamic one, whose power and persuasiveness derives from the greatest totalitarian idea ever created, monotheism, will very likely come to a civilizational flashpoint between its equally absolutist traditions, in the one place that is holy to them all, over which numerous wars have already been fought, and now held hostage to Zionist fundamentalism, in a historical irony too profound and terrible to plumb.

And the question has to be asked, how such a tiny ethnic group could possibly be at the centre of what maybe the last modern war, because if it comes, it will very likely be a nuclear one.

The timeline for the emergence of post-modern disorders and war has already started and the options for a moderately effective response degrade every day we delay in facing it. Totalitarian megalomania, revolutionary zeal and the awesome momentum of two hundred and thirty years of energy, capital and technology intensive development will likely thwart such a response. Unless we can pull off the impossible, we can look forward with some confidence to a very dark and traumatic period.

Seismic shifts in human history bring out the best and worst of our nature. There will be the inevitable violence that characterizes such periods, whereby criminal elements and new contending social forces will move in from the margins to the center stage and challenge the traditional state and confront each other. And there will also be those that arm their communities with the tools to not only overcome adversity, but redefine the human condition, the means by which it assembles itself and their ability to deliver sustainable, stable and empowering solutions to the age old conundrums of what makes human society and its social and existential software, worth living in.

Chapter 1. Modernism: Satan's Bargain

Modernism:- Satan's bargain

PERSPECTIVE AND HISTORY Modernism: Satan’s bargain {A speech made by Bertram L. Zeebub, the founder, board chair and C.E.O. of SATCOR (incorporating Satan’s Dominions and Hellfire services ), to the corporate management team and invited representatives from major support services companies, at the celebratory dinner on the eve of the first annual general meeting, held in the year zero in the EYNBOTT era  (Every Year is a New Beginning for all our Tomorrows Today).  } “On behalf of the SATCOR board, may I most warmly welcome you all to this evening’s festivities.  May I also congratulate you for your participation and support in a project and vision that has not only inspired the usual institutionals, but millions of ordinary investors; inspired undoubtedly by the hottest ever profit stream, of the largest and fastest growing corporation on or beneath the planet… Unlike our traditional opposition, we have successfully made the transition from being an extremely ancient institution into a modern one, capable of aggressive expansion of its market share.  What started initially as a response to a crisis of overcrowding, incipient rebellion by inmates, low staff morale and a growing sense that we had lost relevance and market edge to human competition, became a fundamental review of our charter.  This forced us to completely rethink, restructure and reposition all aspects of our operations.  It was an unprecedented challenge and one that led us into a world of equally unprecedented opportunity. From the outset, we realized that the gap to be bridged was enormous.  It would not be overcome if we attempted less than a diabolical crash or crash through policy.  We took some very tough decisions, followed by even tougher changes, that made life hell for everybody…Even by our purgatorial standards, there were some particularly Gothic moments, as we closed down and wrote off the very inefficient and liability intensive plant, properties and populations we had inherited from time immemorial. As the consolidated accounts show, we are now reaping the rewards of modernization through: •    timely raising of capital for new infrastructure. •    investing in state of the art technology and research. •    adopting a positive thinking sales and marketing model of operations. •    altering workplace practices from labor intensive hands on with the damned, to capital       intensive facilitation with ‘clients’.  •    outsourcing the less pleasant aspects of our work to specialists. •    radically reducing the time scale of our commitment to our clients, down to lifetime only        contracts. We are no longer in the business of disciplining lost souls and outcasts.  We worked it out that by the time we had met the cost of tempting, perverting and finally damning an individual (and remember this could take a whole lifetime) it would take us almost an eternity to get our money back, let alone a profit. Our system of client repayment used to have something of a rough and authoritarian reputation. We now realize that positive self motivation is a much more powerful and cost effective tool. We have moved away from thinking in simplistic and old fashioned dualities such as Evil and Good, to a more open ended recognition of needs and their creative maximization.  We positively affirm you can never have too much, because too much is never enough.  Temptation and giving way to it is an economic imperative that empowers individuals to fully reach their potential..... usefulness.  Greed, avarice and waste are all positives if they create jobs, profits and further marketing opportunities. If there is an increasing interest in and concern about ‘Evil’, it is because in recent times there have been some unfortunate excesses; i.e., absurdly high expectations of human behavior in a brutally tough, ruthlessly competitive and rapidly changing world.  I put it to you that the very notion of evil is largely a misconstrual of the legitimate pursuit of corporate interests, to ensure the security of the bottom line, so that everybody’s needs can be met as presciently, quickly and as efficiently as possible. To serve our clients effectively under the new model, we must know them intimately; know their susceptibilities, desires, dreams and fantasies.  This has always been our forte and it is something we continue to build upon, using the latest psychological research and statistical analysis.  And of course, electronic information systems do make life so much easier.  One doesn’t have to be everywhere at once, when point of interface trackers can do so much of the work.... To convert susceptibility into delivered products and services at a reasonable cost per client, requires the ability to accurately stimulate well conditioned responses on all sides of the economic equation.  In the old days, our pitches were clumsily intuitive and expensively individual in character.  We did not have the intellectual tools or research facilities and budgets to work in any other way.  Modern scientific management, marketing and capitalization have changed all that and reduced the cost of reaching our client base by truly cosmic percentages… Interestingly, the fact that we no longer extract value beyond an individual’s lifetime, does not reduce our margins or compromise service standards.  On the contrary, how can one extract effective value when all our contract repayers are cooped up in an undercapitalized institutional monopoly plagued by eternal staff featherbedding and public service conditions?  Besides, humans have become amazingly adept at terrorizing, torturing and destroying themselves and each other in ways our staff had not even imagined, and best of all, at no cost to us.  They deserved the work. And just because eternal repayments by individuals have been stopped, doesn’t mean that their descendants can’t continue to bear the appropriate share of their forebears’ liabilities, accumulating at compound interest during the agreed payment free period, on our highly profitable inter-generational ‘ChildMinder’ rate… Naturally, we offer large rewards and product incentives to anyone setting up an inter-generational account.  In particular, military dictators, polluters and resource strippers, bank executives and armament manufacturers all automatically qualify for Gold Passes that include access to international peace, responsible governance, sustainable environment and social justice awards… Friends, the immediate benefits and the opportunities created by the restructure are manifold, but there is much, much more!  These benefits do not appear in the accounts and thus they profoundly conceal their character and the extent of value extractable from them. I can see that for some of our new team members, this is a bit of a mystery, which is understandable.  You were employed to build and expand our conventional wealth base and it was premature to disclose at the time of your recruitment the full extent of our corporate plan. As a result of your very much appreciated efforts in building up our business profile, we are now in a position to explain the full extent of our ambitions and the considerable benefits for you and your descendants that they contain. For SATCOR, corporate power and wealth give us a key into the dominant culture, so that we can extract the huge lode of undisclosed wealth lying inside. Searching for concealed value is a time honored investment strategy.  The wealth it can deliver depends on the blindness of the many and the insight, resourcefulness and daring of the few prepared to capitalize on it. The blindness of modern society is the very power and narrowness of focus that has made it so successful.  It is an article of virtual faith ( faith has become so passé)…..that only the obviously quantifiable and commodifiable are real or valid.  Concepts outside this narrowed definition of reality are treated as linguistic mistakes or obsolete archaisms.  The only wealth it recognizes must therefore be tradable, monetarily accountable and industrially or institutionally organized. This instrumentalism has given rise to such overwhelming scientific, technological, industrial and military power, that anything that falls outside its boundaries becomes redundant and gradually drops out of the cultural repertoire. Deny social and existential capital any quantifiable recognition and its accounts can be 'dropped out' of the books at will without disturbing social awareness that anything has been lost. Indeed, this ‘dropout’ factor was critical in bringing us down to earth…  As the spectrum of human awareness narrowed and the leverage of our traditional operating systems deteriorated, new, golden and earthbound opportunities opened up in front of us.  Outside the boundaries of orthodox judgment, psychological, familial and communal forms of wealth were being turned into the slums of the ideological inner city; neglected, undervalued and above all from our point of view, unguarded.. SATCOR and its predecessors have always wanted that Real Estate.  It maybe rundown and faded, but the architecture is divinely inspired, the location is the very heart of that city, and best of all, the native owners are a pushover. In the old days, mortals knew enough of what they were doing to drive a hard bargain with us, after protracted negotiations with some of our most senior retainers.  Today, people are so dazzled by the panoply of product and services, they will casually abandon their less tangible birthright.  They no longer have any idea what its loss might mean.  Now that we directly produce their hearts’ desire, we have the leverage to keep extracting till there is nothing left of them but the desire; as raw, inflamed and unquenchably burning as we can make it.... By way of example, consider the wealth locked up inside a human family.  Amongst other things, it is represented by the enormous investment of time, effort, sentiment and thought, required to construct and maintain strong and secure edifices of intimacy, and to pass on the skills of building them to the next generation. This rich vein of wealth cannot be fully or permanently removed by ideological dictum, state power or coercion.  Our more recent human competitors tried their best in this respect, but in the end, all failed.  But the narrowing of the definition of wealth to that which is currently monetarily measurable, makes it relatively simple to substitute social intimacy with preoccupation with goods and services. The relentless energy, variety, volume and velocity of transactions in the monetized economy, ensures that most family’s’ resources are consumed by its ever accelerating, and ever more aggressive demands. They vainly struggle to find ever more money, time and brain space, for ever more sophisticated, absorbing and affecting goods and services, which must be procured, used and dumped, in ever shorter cycles of boredom, wear and obsolescence. The payoff is a degree of compliance never before achieved by us with human populations.  To procure their goods and services fixes, masses of people will work like demons for what seems like an eternity, in hellish working conditions, for next to nothing, and increasingly be expected to do it using their own capital …And they will do this even if it costs them their marriage, their children's character development and even their own psychological, physical and moral well being.  All we have to do is quietly, inexpensively and invisibly extract the value generated…… The absoluteness and abjectness of this slavery is all the greater for being self administered. Intuitively they sense loss and underlying chaos, but their language of meaning prevents them from recognizing or articulating what has been removed.  They cannot resolve the paradox of having surrounded themselves with the glittering prizes of the marketplace, yet feeling somehow impoverished.  They cannot account for why so many previously marginal and bizarre behaviors are starting to invade the center. Above all, their sufferings and sense of displacement go unprotested as the private and apparently apolitical character of product flows make traditional refusal obsolete and mystified and medicalized resignation its natural replacement... As we empty the ideological inner city, so too with the life supporting terrestrial hinterlands.  In the modern world, these landscapes are only valued for their commodifiable output and the direct cost of its extraction.  As with people, the vitality, diversity and real value of this life force is not accounted for.  Thus it can be profitably looted and damaged by production systems without cost, other than the internal ones of extraction.  Even where serious episodic damage occurs, it still appears as though wealth is being created, as a result of clean up and restoration responses being added to the G.N.P. The only reality check is when the damage has become so chronic and destabilizing, it threatens the viability of industries and human populations.  As the life support platform starts to shrink, economies suddenly discover how much they need healthy eco-systems, by which time it is too late.  The repair bill turns out to be many times greater than the total asset value of the industrial system, even before the business-as-usual world has collapsed, let alone after it. By becoming direct producers of narrowly commodified wealth, we benefit doubly, through our profit line in the accounts and through the off balance sheet removal of the Life force, both human and natural.  We confidently expect that two to three more generations of your species should finish the job of extraction here on earth. You see we are predators.  We are citizens of the universe.  Not being of this world, we have no interest other than to consume what sustains us, until there is nothing left and then move on. The faster and more efficiently this feeding process is, the better we like it.  It is the nature of the beast...”

Chapter 2: Plunder - Species War Against The Planet

Chapter 2: Plunder - Species War Against The Planet


The most fundamental axiom of the industrial system is the belief that there is an unconditional right to use and exhaust every resource that inventiveness can devise.  Massive capital stock, fast track technology, enterprise gigantism and global integration means the entire planet is being converted into one giant mining, processing and dumping facility for the sole benefit of humans; particularly the wealthiest ones. Large scale species loss and environmental degradation is not just a regrettable side effect, but the principal effect of an underlying philosophy of domination more absolute than the divine right of kings.  This ideology is so all pervasive, even attempts to defend eco-systems from demolition have to be couched in terms of potential alternative human ‘resource’ values.

Ecosystems have no life or needs independent of us.  Ecological ruin is considered an acceptable price of ‘progress’ because ecosystems are not deemed to have a finite or capital value.  They are therefore unlimited and costless expendables whose operations are external to the economic system. This absolutist philosophy is reinforced by increasing distances between decision making and the site of damage caused by the decision-maker.  A forest in Papua-New Guinea is destroyed from a Kuala Lumpur office whose staff will see much less of the carnage they have caused than World War II bomber crews flying at ten thousand meters over Tokyo.  Living in cities causes their populations to lose contact with natural processes.  Many of their children have no idea what produces milk, let alone understand the terrible ecological strain of maintaining the super productivity that makes it so cheap.

Above all, urban populations have such a long history of seeing purchasing inventories exploding year after year, it is an overwhelming expectation that the consumption boundaries must always keep expanding. There is no such thing as an ‘ecological ration’ or a realistic built in economic cost for ecological ‘services’ that would have the same effect.

The twentieth century spawned the term Total War.  Just as it had produced political totalitarianism, the war variant meant extremism to the maximum extent possible.  Its logical end point was war of total annihilation, as expressed in the nuclear bombing of Japanese cities and the threat of it to all major ones during the Cold War.  The mobilization of entire populations for war meant that entire populations would inevitably become the target.  The mobilization of the resources of the planet for production wars means total annihilation for any species unlucky enough to be exposed to the ever expanding blast zones caused by the energy and materials inputs, product and service outputs, and wastes of ever more massive industrial operations.  We have been spared (so far) the unthinkable outcome of all out nuclear war, but ordinary civil peacetime industrial operations will likely have similarly lamentable consequences if they are not severely curtailed soon.

The expansion of the industrial system is so fast and its activism so intense, it blurs the distinction between the deliberately destructive impact of total warfare and the deliberately predatory and/or ‘collaterally’ inflicted damage of all out production ‘warfare’ in ‘peacetime’. The attack is no longer periodic or spasmodic, regional or continental.  All the land, atmosphere and seas of our globe are under siege.

The result is simultaneous broad spectrum multiple species genocide on a scale unprecedented since paleontological times.  Ecocide is just another qualitative and quantitative leap from the Nazi and Soviet slave and death camps, and the Cold War threat of mutually assured nuclear annihilation.  Ecocide promises a painful hemorrhaging of the life force by millions of daily cuts at its fabric everywhere, until it starts to collapse.

With the emergence of the ‘tiger’ economies of Asia and particularly the economic awakening of the two population giants, China and India, all previous production war efforts are being dwarfed. At the turn of the twenty-first century, half the world’s construction cranes were concentrated on around 22,000 sites, in one Chinese city alone, Shanghai; part of the industrial chain reaction that was already starting to devastate the industrial regions of that country and those either downstream or wind of them.  The rapid increase in their participation in the industrial system can only serve to amplify the existing overwhelming stresses on environments everywhere.

The Chinese authorities are planning for a quadrupling of their economy within twenty years. If they decide to have a car ownership rate comparable with the Germans, it will mean an extra six to seven hundred million cars on their roads. India is not that far behind.  They already have a middle class of more than one hundred million people.

Long before these developing economies gain production/consumption patterns comparable with The West, it will be all too brutally clear that whether it be limitations on ecological systems, primary resources, energy use or the disposal of wastes, such ambitions are out of the question, unless of course war is used to eliminate the competition.

I recently saw two pictures: one recent, of a clear felled forest, and the other, of the battlefield after the battle of the Somme in 1916.  The only difference I could see was in the picture quality.

In 2012, The World Wildlife Fund, The Zoological Society of London, The Global Footprint Network and the European Space Agency published their biennial publication, ‘The Living Planet Report’.  It documents the baleful story of over consumption of biological resources and the relentless decline of biota; 30% since 1970.  We are currently trying to live off the resources of 1.5 planets and, unless something is done to slow down the process of over-exploitation of biological resources, that at current rates will blow out to three planets by 2050.

Chapter 3: The Blind Eye - The Accounts

Chapter 3: The Blind Eye - The Accounts


Most of the damage and loss caused by overproduction and consumption will not be measured in corporate or national accounts until restitution and repair become unavoidable.  This is when the invoice for over two centuries of ‘development’ (unrestricted production warfare) will have to be stumped up; by then very probably, a crushing demand.

When I was at school in year eleven, back in the middle 1960s, my economics class was told that domestic labor was not an ‘economic’ activity because there was no monetary exchange to quantify and validate it as an industrial wealth producing activity.  It had no relationship to the mobilization of industrial capital, so it was not visible in the national accounts.  

Even then, I wondered why value adding labor in the building and maintenance of social reproduction services wasn’t an ‘industry sector’.  And it occurred to me how easy it would be to raid and asset strip such a labor resource for industrial purposes, and pretend that it was a costless acquisition from a ‘non-existent’ labor market that was producing ‘nothing’.

Similarly, we were told that things like forests had no value other than as an extractable resource whose value would be only the direct costs of extraction and the infrastructure to get it to market as timber product.  The ecological services that forests performed had no ‘economic’ value, so this resource was also ‘free’

Something seemed to be missing in all this, but at the time, I and my classmates were told to take it on faith that this was right and we shouldn’t question it, because better minds than ours had decided that this was so.  There was always a suspicion that there was some malarkey in there somewhere, but it took decades to figure out what it was. 

The industrial system is served by an accounting ideology in which only the variables that serve the industrial system’s narrowest and most myopic interests are counted.  Thus obsolescence driven production, deliberate waste making and frivolous ‘value adding’ are weighted higher than the basic necessities of life and the infrastructures that underpin them, which are dangerously under/non valued, for the frivolous waste making ‘value adding’ top feeders control the market structures, and the accounts.

In the food sector, much so called ‘added value’ is in part crude expropriation of those who have to be upstream price takers (especially those farmers working directly under contract to a large food processor or supermarket chains) which forces them to over-exploit their land, over chemicalize their crops and soils, and over concentrate on monocropping, despite knowing that lack of species diversity is in inverse proportion to ecological stability and vulnerability to pest attack and climate adversity.

I recall reading an account in the 1911 South Australian Year Book of complaints against Chinese horticulturalists because they were not spraying their crops and insect pests were coming off their properties, causing problems for their European neighbors.  Interestingly, the year book noted that the Chinese grown vegetable and fruit product was universally regarded as first class, but nonetheless, their growing methods were regarded as being out of step with ‘standard practice’.  

It didn’t cross anyone’s mind that perhaps the Chinese were just better farmers who didn’t need to be propped up with chemical poisons that would inevitably get into the product, into the soil and eventually move into waterways.  And no one was measuring these variables then, or at any time since, not just as a matter of scientific interest and curiosity, but as a cost in the system.

Downstream and into the processing, packaging and distribution chain, a grossly over-hyped and bloated sector of over distributed, over-processed, over fatty, sugared, salted, chemicalized, and flavored product, is over-feeding mass populations with an inappropriate and poorly constructed diet pattern.  It is marketed to override rational consumer understanding of nutritional balance and portioning.  It is a very poor substitute for the economically invisible, fresh, home processed and domestically controlled food production and diet planning system it has all but destroyed.

At both ends of the supply system, unsustainable practices prompted by market forces are long term undermining the security of the food supply system and fattening human populations into a pattern of obesity that will eventually overwhelm the health industry by slowly destroying their health, immiserating their later years and shortening their lives.  And all this is justified because it produces economic ‘profit’ readings, even though it threatens our ecological future and undermines public health.  Where is the genuine profit in that?

According to the Victorian Farmers’ Federation submission to the 2008 ACCC Inquiry into the competitiveness of retail prices for standard groceries, the farm gate price represented a mere twenty cents in the grocery checkout dollar, and that share is decreasing, while their input costs keep rising.

The average age of farmers goes relentlessly up because young people considering going into the industry, who are not inheriting a viably substantial family farm, can see that the capital cost of entry and climatic and market risk are high, but their return on that capital and the wages for often hard, long and uncomfortable hours worked, are low.

Yet it is the farmers who are the critical cogs in the wheel, but that isn’t reflected in the accounts. 

Those farming sectors that are sufficiently large and capitalized, like the Cotton industry in the Upper Darling basin, can make a profit by utilizing their vast size to get capital intensive economies of scale, and using their economic and political clout to procure ecosystem damaging amounts of absurdly cheap water supply, the runoff from which sends heavy loads of fertilizer, pesticide and herbicide downstream with the now heavily reduced downstream flows.  And this is particularly damaging during periods of drought/flood, which are going to get worse with global warming.

The whole Murray-Darling water system is heavily overcommitted to irrigators, leaving grossly inadequate flows for the natural environment and thus making it vulnerable to rising water table salination in the south as a result of over-irrigating/deforestation, dropping ground water levels in the north from overuse, nutrient intensive algal blooms hundreds of kilometers long, wetland die off, where much of the environmental ‘servicing’ occurs, ecosystem destabilizing crashes in wild species diversity and numbers, and dramatic reduction of river mouth water flows with equally dramatic increases in years of no flow at all, that tidal salinates and acidifies up river through the Coorong/lower lakes. 

Farmers who try to treat their soil and the complex life forms in it with respect, and apply environmentally friendly strategies do get healthy and diverse ecosystems underpinning the security of our food supplies, are constantly marginalized and capital starved by completely unrealistic overall primary product pricing. 

The organic/Land Care farmers are the ones adding the real value both in terms of minimally chemicalized raw material quality and the sustainability of their practices.  And while they can claim some (often very variable) premium for their product, they also have significant up front restructure costs.  While their chemical input costs are lower, their need for more species diversity, higher labor intensitivity, additional equipment use for large scale composting and on the whole (though not always necessarily) smaller scale land use, means they tend to lose many of the economies of scale and convenience enjoyed by their natural resource mining competitors. The accounts do not report the limitations of ‘economies of scale’, as in for instance the negative ‘side’ effects of soil compaction caused by repeated and protracted applications of scale ‘efficient’ heavy machinery, or large beast intensive pasture use.

The bottom line for any prospect of a sustainable agriculture is that it is forced to compete against the cheaper unsustainable one.  This keeps it at the margins of mainstream food production and consumption.  The average punter just isn’t going to spend extra money to buy benefits that aren’t right-in-your-face obvious until they know they have to.  There are no market or regulatory signals around to make them think that so why would they change?  And unfortunately, public consciousness raising through education tends to mainly convert the already educated.

Only through price penalization of poor agricultural practice, regulatory mandating of sustainability standards of soil micro and macro-organism densities, humus levels and  moisture retention capacity, and ensuring farm gate profit returns overtake those of food processing/retailing, will food supplies twenty to thirty years down track be secured.  And that cannot possibly happen if the accounts only paint the unsustainable picture.

Farmers don’t want to degrade their land.  A lot of them can see the damage current farming practices do, but most of them will not be willing, or can’t afford to make the necessary changes until they can see rewards that justify their effort and commitment of additional capital.  A few people will work and sacrifice for moral or lifestyle commitment.  Most people have to work for the money.  And that is before we have even begun to talk about realistic budgeting for not just making good the damage already done, but strengthening local environments against coming climate change adversities.

My mother-in-law was born after World War 1 and grew up in a small Greek village.  As a result of disruption to the food supply caused by the world war in 1941-2, there was a terrible famine in the towns and especially in Athens.  On the whole she and the people of her village were OK because they had hidden stores and could quickly grow for their own needs or forage for wild game and plants.

She remembers wealthy people from Athens coming into their village and trading valuable furs, jewelry and fine antiques for loaves of bread and olives.  Their middle class lifestyle assets had become almost worthless.

In effect the farm gate downstream market infrastructure is misappropriating the resources that could secure modern farming indefinitely and then blowing them on what will eventually become phantom accumulated profits which have been derived from cheap but unsustainable suppliers. And while the urban Greeks of the early 1940s could take some comfort that their food shortages were a temporary wartime aberration, first world urban populations in say the 2020s or 30s may not be so lucky.

This apparently enormously profitable rural industry is living in a fool’s paradise because it actually believes its own accounting propaganda.  Were it getting accurate data, it would be scaling back its operations (much in the same way that the fishing industry is now having to do as its feed stocks start to collapse) and allowing farm gate prices to rise to ensure security of long term supply for itself and everyone else.  High prices for farm gate product will turn the food back into a high value and rationed product and the processing industry back into a luxury end market product for the occasional indulgent treat when one can afford it; healthy for consumers, healthy for the environment and long term viable for the food processing industry itself.

Ecologically stabilizing and regenerative features in the environment are not assigned any economic value, so their loss does not register, except much later through false positive indicators that come with the industrial responses to adverse environmental events, such as insurance and reconstruction activity.
  
These activities are counted as part of the GNP, which would only be alright if they were offset against not just the direct damage write offs, but the real accumulated ecological asset losses that gave rise to the adverse events in the first place.  But they aren’t and won’t be.  So there is no built in provisioning for that, and when the inevitable happens, we’ll all be about as prepared as Britain was in 1939, for the massive German military buildup that had been going on under its nose for years.

Thus without so much as a canary chirp to warn us, huge accumulated damage could have been done in the off accounts areas that would cripple and possibly bankrupt the whole economy.

The mechanisms of production have become so powerful they have removed the traditional constraints of scarcity and the requirement for use longevity.  It no longer matters whether goods represent value on any rational hierarchy of needs or whether they are designed to self-destruct either on a battlefield or in someone’s home.  The accounting system thus makes no distinction between economic junk and essentials. Plundering and wasting resources don’t register as a macro economic negative.  On the contrary!

Capitalization and maintenance of familial reproductive and existential infrastructure are ignored, so that its accounts can be neglected, pushed aside, ransacked or taken over without apparent cost.  This asset stripping and colonization turns its product stream into dysfunctional life ruining cultural rubbish.  If economic growth means anything it has to improve the full gamut of wealth types.  If it doesn’t, it isn’t real growth so much as a pseudo-industrial caricature and rip-off.
  
Clearly an accounting system that only measures what markets require to facilitate their operations is as much propaganda and smokescreen as a measuring and analytical tool.

Realistic accounting for all the variables that contribute to the total social effort and our broadly understood capital asset base would very likely show that industrial societies have been going ever deeper into the red for a very long time.  In effect they have been fraudulently converting off balance sheet existential, social and ecological assets to conceal their real losses.  Thus the faster and longer the system grows, the more dramatically and catastrophically it eventually goes bankrupt.

It has been estimated by a joint working party of the Conservation Foundation and the National Farmers Federation that to restore the Murray-Darling River systems at least partially will cost around AU$60 billion dollars over a ten year period.  If this economic region had to pay that, it would be bankrupted, and that would be if there were no delays.  Timely external support from other economic regions might enable a restoration to proceed, but that assumes that all these other areas don’t have ecological defense, repair and restoration inventories of their own, that won’t become equally pressing during the ten year period.  Assumptions about external support that exist in the absence of an overall continental, coastal and related oceanic ecological audit and strategy plan are therefore likely to be fanciful. The potential for multiple and contemporaneous adversities as a result of long term across the board ecological damage has to be factored in.  The trouble is, the accountancy system isn’t factoring anything of the sort.

The choices maybe about whether we try to save the Murray Darling or prevent much of Australia’s coastal real estate from being ever more regularly flooded by rising sea levels, and wind damaged by ever more intensive cyclonic storms, that seem to travel further south every decade.  We may well not be able to do both.

Worse still, all the river systems across the world that have been similarly over-exploited for over a hundred and fifty years, to irrigate otherwise marginal agricultural land, are in a similarly parlous condition.  They will thus have a propensity to either collapse in tandem or seriatim, with spectacular international effect.  The survivors of the resultant demographic crash will be scratching their heads and wondering how it happened, even as they continue to inflict unprecedented accelerating production war damage on still intact ecological systems to try and make up the losses.

Whole industries can wax fat producing almost worthless product, while contributing heavily to a poisonous legacy and debt burden for generations to come.  The industrial toy money that the customers paid for their soft drinks and hamburgers only provided for the internal costs of production, which is only a fraction of the environmental and social costs.  Had there been a real user pays system, those industries would never have been considered viable on anything like their present scale and their functions would have remained largely within domestic communities.  Further, the upstream primary and secondary industries that have supplied the raw materials, machinery, transport, communications and urban infrastructure for these burgeoning pseudo-industries would now be a small fraction of their existing size if they had.

Waxing fat is a good analogy to use for pseudo-industries because although they add volume to the overall economic body, this is not normal healthy growth, but a form of industrial bloating that is analogous to obesity in humans.  Obesity puts an increasingly massive strain on the entire infrastructure of the body and eventually destroys it.
  
To accountants and economists, enormously overweight cities, sclerotic transport networks, bulgingly over-sized housing, energy and resource guzzling industries and lifestyles are a sign of security and prosperity.  To me they are a sign of a debilitating and ultimately disastrous economic health failure.  An auditing system that cannot distinguish between healthy growth and surplus bloating is fundamentally flawed.  No Doctor, no matter how incompetent, would tell an obese person that they were in good shape.  But that is what the accountants routinely do. The metaphor of uncontrolled growth through fat storage is positively benign in comparison with the other great blight of first world affluence; cancer.  Modern economics is as blind to cancerous development as it is to obesity or the intimate links between them.  Thus it doesn’t so much account as provide an apologia for invasive industrial growth that parasites, pushes aside and finally destroys its host.

Inside the tumor, right to the end, the accounting system paints a picture of a burgeoning success; of overcoming all barriers to growth and the spread to new sites.  It is a success story full of heroic little cancer cells who struggle ceaselessly to not only co-opt, but outwork, outsmart and eventually outmaneuver the opposition.  It is a world where there are no second prizes for losers! Sure, there is some damage happening outside the tumor, but shit happens.  If that other tissue became cancerous too, it wouldn’t have any problems.  We can give it aid and teach it how it’s done.  The profit/loss and balance sheets for our system tell an unequivocal story that will convince even the most skeptical immune cell.  “Eat your hearts out guys.  If you don’t, we will.”

The ideology of the cancer cell creates an aura of glossy optimism when in fact there ought to be panic.  By limiting the accounting system’s field of vision, adverse realities can be reconfigured in much the same way as they were even in the last days of the Third Reich.  Self-delusional latter-day rhetoric is as much the preserve of economists and accountants, as Nazi demagogues.

When the barbarians (whatever their configuration might be) break into the empire of capital, this fabulous wall of mathematized accounting rhetoric will promptly collapse.  Then the almost complete lack of preparation by the imperial cities to defend themselves from invasion (whatever form that takes) will finally reveal itself, but far too late for anyone to do anything to stop it.

Environmental, economic and cultural fortification and reconstruction is a vast long term investment that would take at least a generation to engineer and only if doing it at a breakneck Japanese style modernization speed that taxed populations to the hilt.  And even then, once built, things like anti-desertification tree belts and cultural reconstruction take thirty to fifty years to get up to full strength, by which time the advance of the deserts, fire and extremely aggressive and feral human behavior may have overwhelmed them anyway.  This is the fate, for the most part, of last minute acts of desperation.

And finally there is deeper blindness in the accounting system.  From an accounts perspective, there is absolutely no difference between a concentration camp, a feedlot or a forest clear fell. None waste anything of the value that can be extracted from their respective livestock.  All these enterprises reward anyone who can think of a smarter way of extracting additional value for a lower cost and keep doing it.  It doesn’t matter if ever-more-powerful growth hormones start causing heart attacks in very young chickens, as long as there are enough faster growing full term survivors to offset the additional losses.  Nor does it matter if the drugs and hormones being pumped into the supply livestock get into the top feeding livestock, i.e.; us, as long as it is kept at deniably sub-traceable levels.

When the capacity to keep extracting additional value is raised to the level of sole raison d’etre for doing anything, the account system becomes blind to all else.  Concentration camps were only shocking because the livestock was human and nothing else. All the SS did was apply ordinary industrial efficiency and accountancy principles to labor extraction, slaughter and processing.  What was shocking was that the camps seemed so ‘normal’.  What was shocking was that the guards went home to their loved ones at night like ordinary abattoir workers after a tough day at the plant.  As that notable butcher Adolf Eichmann once said, “to lose a pet chicken is a tragedy; to kill millions a year is just a statistic.”

When constantly increasing productivity requirements are imposed across the economic board, in some measure we all eventually turn into beakless, featherless, neurotic, self-harming, drug dependant, close caged ‘chickens’ who teeter on the edge of their biological capacity, at ever higher risk to themselves, each other and the broader environment.  And when it comes to an accounting for the shambles this is already causing, and the accountants say to us that they were only obeying orders, we will send them back to Nuremberg for trial!

And when the going gets really tough, as the props that hold up society and its food production base continue to be kicked away, the accountants are going to have to work out which populations have the best survival prospects and which don’t.  They will run the survival models, crunch the numbers, identify the non performers, create strategic scenarios for cutting them adrift and package rationalizations for what would once have been the absolutely unthinkable.  Naturally, it wouldn’t occur to them to do the obvious and retreat before such ‘rationalizations’ became necessary, or at least retreat before entire populations had to be, ‘let go’. 

Chapter 4: Modernity and Post-Modernity - Some Further Explanation

Chapter 4: Modernity and Post-Modernity - Some Further Explanation Despite the emerging cracks in its foundations, modernity is a fact from whose corrosive impact there is no cure, from whose gravitational pull, there is no rational escape and from whose templates there are but the smallest of concessions to strangers.  For the most ancient of pre-modern peoples, its advent was like being hit by a bolt of lightning; when eons of history bridged and arced in but a moment of such violence, that even the hand of friendship would melt that of the other.  Even for those who were standing on the very cusp of modernity, the transition into it was fraught with risk, violence and trauma, with awful punishment for hesitation (China) and terrible moral and institutional disfigurement as the reward for success (Japanese imperialism). Modernity has been a vision so vast and powerful it has captured our sense of the possible and the imaginable.  It has immunized its subjects against almost anything beyond its pale. Modernity has been our dreaming.  Modernity has informed us what is Real and Rational, and what is not. Its power is such that even when its end comes, very likely most of the dreamers will not see it until it is an accomplished and irrevocable fact. And elites are no more immune to this than plebeian humbletons.  When confronted by climatologists who inform them that hydrocarbon burning is causing global climates to change in ways that will soon become not merely increasingly more violent and environmentally damaging, but irreversible, they go into profound denial, en masse. They reassure themselves that markets have always been infallibly self correcting and able to meet any challenge, no matter how daunting, because, more or less, for the last 250 whole years they have.  And because they always have, they always will.  As German Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels waxed so eloquently in the last few months of the Second World War, a fix was just round the corner, because the extant track record of glorious victories was bound to presage so many more to come…. The reality of the strategic advance of allied armies was masked by constant reports of heroic and magnificent tactical victories, and the re-assurance that the Reich still had enormous ‘secret’ reserves to throw back its enemies and win the war.  And people wanted to believe it so much that they did, in large numbers, and continued to do so until the roof crashed in. In the same spirit of the Jewish banker and communist conspiracy to undermine the Reich, the public relations successors to Goebbels’ Reich Ministry are sent into overdrive to hose down scientific ‘alarmism’, ‘hoaxes’, ‘scams’, ‘peer pal groupthink’ and ‘post-normal science’. Ideological warriors are mobilized across the entire spectrum of public information to create the impression that the whole climate business is a left wing conspiracy to disindustrialize modern societies. This ideological paralysis in the face of crisis is but a rerun of that which confronted pre modern societies when they had to deal with the corrosive might of modern industrial society.  The environmental crisis is every bit as much a threat to the modern project as the modern project was to the pre-modern ones. Modernity is the ubiquitous term not merely for what is most recent in our own time, but as a descriptor of the developmental dynamic of industrial society from its beginnings onwards. Societies that are not modern are by definition ‘primitive’, ‘backward’ and incapable of informing our Reality; our technological and scientific rationales; our lifestyles. They are defined by their deficit of modern features, as ‘pre-modern’. Modern History is seen as an inevitable one way linear ‘progress’ that extrapolates into an indefinite future of ever more powerful, inventive, bigger and sophisticated webs of industrial development, the knowledge base that underpins it, and The Enlightenment utilitarian ideology that garnishes it. Even to the uninitiated, Post Modernity can make sense in a historical context if it is assumed that no entity or mechanism, including modern industrial capital, has an indefinite life span or does not have within it the seeds of its own destruction.  However, Post Modernity does not yet exist in the popular mind as a recognizable historical trend, at least in the developed world, except perhaps as a noisy and unarticulated discomfort in the collective cultural background and in the messianic and eschatological rantings of religious fundamentalists. Even in The Great Western Megatropolis, while the urban infrastructure seems in overall good shape, much of the psychological operating platform of affluent individuals and their communities is now as under-constructed, distorted and corrupted as many of the teeming cities of the third world.  Thus pathological and bizarre behavior in the West becomes an analogue of broken down state apparatus and the violence, poverty and filth of shantytowns.  A young, spoilt and protected San Franciscan can become a casual hit man and torturer with the same ease as a conscripted Hutu child soldier who has been systematically abused into violence by men lost to all moral understanding.  The American boy’s famished soul ingests crack with the same alacrity as his starving Zimbabwean counterpart eats grass and leaves.  The US is in its own way, in just as much of a mess as The Democratic Republic of Congo.  Only the sites of infrastructural damage and deprivation are different. Behind this is the ‘background’ of the fastest living species collapse in sixty-five million years. As the top feeders in the ecological chain, we sit astride a colossus whose very foundations are disintegrating directly as a result of both our intentional and unintentional attacks on it.  We are beginning to feel the first stirrings of later disaster, but they are as yet insufficient to inspire the kind of fear that might induce an emergency salvage response; one that might save us from going down with it. The term postmodern is used in this work to share a sense, an instinct if you like, that we are moving towards an increasingly turbulent and destabilized transitional period that may well turn out to be both dangerous and unmanageable.  It is informed by a belief that the modern world is advancing well beyond not merely sustainable boundaries, but the boundaries of sanity and psychopathology itself.  It is about that epiphanous moment when one realizes that despite winning most of the battles to date, unless something altogether unexpected happens, or a drastic change in course occurs, we are likely to lose the overproduction ‘war’ catastrophically, disgracefully and quite soon. It is about a coming uncertain time of competing visions for a future too open ended and perilous for anyone to claim as their own; even the currently overwhelmingly powerful Empire of Capital. Just as in the latter days of the Western Roman Empire, as it started to collapse, we may not only have to endure the rigors of internal dissolution and external threat, but face the need to completely rethink and re-invent ourselves and our surrounding communities. Post-Modernity is not just about strategically retreating from ground we cannot possibly hold for very long.  It is not just about cutting a slightly less aggressive deal with nature and us.  It is an attempt to start redefining the landscape of economics, society and moral consciousness.  It is about what our ambitions, priorities and values should be and how we should recognize and measure wealth.  It is about the architecture, building and maintenance of the city of the imagination; i.e., the psychological and social construction of the self. Post Modern thinking warns the subjects of latter day capital that they are living in a society that is more threatening to them than any previous regime; one that is more totalitarian, revolutionary and destructive in its operations than anything that has yet been faced, whether fascist or communist; one that compared with its cruder antecedents, has been very sophisticated at both camouflaging from the mass consciousness the depth, extent, strength and character of its control, and its capacity to inflict cultural and ecological damage; one that in some measure has made lifelong collaborators out of almost all of us. There is yet to be found a towering character of the caliber of an Alexander Solzhenitsyn to morally expose and help decommission this monster.  And yet, we inadequate children of a different future must do our best to seek an elusive and unlikely salvation as best we can. Post-Moderns are never going to win popularity prizes for the dour bleakness of their views.  But then, even from Biblical times on, individuals who warned of the possible consequences of the follies of their contemporaries were almost never popular, often reviled and even killed for their trouble.  Further, The Long March from Modernity is not likely to be easy and will probably be made by people who know they haven’t got any other choice. There is no easy vision of the future to comfort them; only the possibility that with great collective effort and good luck, they and their descendants might make it through the transitional period to the next epoch of human history, whatever that is. Their ideological journey starts its life as being therefore humble, small scale, tentative, pragmatic and conservative. Revolution is the folly of the status quo. For them, expecting to have all their fantasies and dreams come true is the seed of all the totalitarianisms and psycho-pathologies they are trying to escape.  Post-Moderns cannot sustain such promethean ambition and hope it will run its course without covering them in blood and the values of the Old Order. Hard work, discipline, steady and secure character, solid values and  a readiness to make sacrifices for others will be the mark of those who most successfully manage the undoubtedly extremely trying circumstances of the coming of the end of modern times.