Brilliant. A great way to introduce the photo of Victoria Nuland btw.
"The modern world requires a number of things to continue functioning normally and without those, significant breakdown begins to occur."
Many of the items listed need to be underwritten by one premodern given to remain, and were for a while. That thing is loyalty in service to X (a people's, a Land, an ideology/empire, whatever) - this is now gone.
Weber identified that modern bureaucracy is crucially upheld by an ideal of voluntarism, amongst others. Voluntarism doesn't have to be opposed to loyalty and service, but when it is, it then it transmutes into arbitrary shirking of all Principle. That's when the rigidity of bureaucracy really kicks into high gear.
Local community must have these premodern givens too to cohere, IMHO. Fortunately they tend to increase when a community goes through hard times together.
Fantastic article. The only way out, as I see it, is a vast restructuring of global and local economies (for which there is no political will to do so) or the elusive post-scarcity that can only come with mining asteroids (prohibitively costly and we lost decades of progress when the USA felt that reaching the moon was enough).
This feels small fries compared to scope of the issues you laid out here, but have you read Weber's thoughts on bureaucracy?
The only way to feasibly mine asteroids is to bring them into low orbit and smack them into Nevada or something and mine the crater. There's no effective way to perform mineral-separation in microgravity. That part is always hand-waved away in science fiction for a reason.
Elon Musk is racing the clock trying to get to Mars. He may succeed, but odds are stacked pretty heavily against him. The Limits to Growth paper has this decade being the decade where industrial productivity begins a steep and sudden decline. Not because we've run out of resources, but because they're too expensive to get.
I was being a tad hyperbolic, but I had no idea that there were feasibility studies on asteroid mining.
I am pessimistic about the mission to Mars, but wouldn’t it be great to send a small mission to begin terraforming? Send them with the compendium of human knowledge and see what society develops out of it. Maybe worth exploring in fiction, because I doubt it will happen.
What is driving up the cost of acquiring resources?
If we can get sustained-civilization on mars, that would be absolutely amazing. We'd need to transport over an entire industrial-base however. That would be extraordinarily difficult and I doubt we have the political or economic will to do it at this time. My prediction is that the next civilization will shift to be far more focused on stability rather than growth (see my article on holistic civilization, hoping to publish another one soon in that series).
The primary cost drivers in acquiring resources has to do with industrial-base and ease-of-access. It's a lot easier to get oil when it's leaking out of the ground than when it's 300ft below bedrock on the sea floor. We've pulled most of the easily-accessible resources out of the ground already and we're needing to move into deep-sea-mining and similarly expensive adventures. The Energy-Return-On-Investment goes down every time you pull a barrel of oil out. Eventually it will cost 1 barrel of oil of energy to extract 1 barrel of oil. Production will likely stop before that due to other cost constraints.
Oil isn't really the problem. "Modern Civilization" will continue puttering along for another century... the issue is specific critical elements and minerals: high purity silicon, sand for concrete, neodymium and praseodymium, Zinc and Copper. We're mining all of those at higher rates than ever before in human history, but demand is outstripping supply. We're trying to build our industrial base as fast as we can because the monetary system is set for infinite-growth. We can't mine fast enough, and it's getting more and more costly to mine specific materials.
Eventually a critical element will just be too expensive on the market and so relevant production of related goods will shut down. Say neodymium is too expensive for a few years to realistically buy. Then high-quality electric motors become too expensive to buy and a number of circuit boards used in high-end electronics. With those too expensive, car manufacturing has to stop for a year or two because they can't get the critical mandated-by-law computational components for building vehicles.
It's pretty easy for things to spiral out of control quite quickly because of sudden price changes in just a few key materials or minerals. The global trade system is extremely vulnerable to resource-disruptions... and has too many weak points to count because of how hyper-specific all of these components are.
I expect that a cascade-failure like that will result in a forced radical reshuffling of the global economy in the next 20 years or so.
Speculators are running rampant and they can do high-speed trading based on specific crises that occur in various supply chains. Look at the grain contract valuations that came out of Ukraine for instance. You don't know which commodity will go next, and if one falls apart, it'll often generate surpluses in others. If transistor-doping materials go, then high-grade-silicon will drop in value as it'll suddenly be in surplus to capacity.
Best long-term bet is financial assets that are deflationary and function in an economy forced to switch from a growth-model to a contraction-model. So bitcoin and similar (stable) cryptocurrencies would be high on the list. Real-estate if you can afford it (though the value will contract if population contracts). Local production companies: 3D printers, Metal 3D printers, mechanics and machine shops would also be a pretty good bet. Farms maybe, but farming is so beholden to national currency policy and the money-printer that there's no way to know which way that'll go in the medium-term. Most of these are 10 year bets.
I like the comment that the embrace of electric vehicles is a panicky one. I would extend that to the entire green economy- they seem to think that passing some laws will magically create a new age of pollution free prosperity. Now people don’t want EV’s and China can make them much cheaper, it’s all falling apart.
The same goes for importation of vast numbers of foreigners. Now the political talk in Canada is of doubling home building to accommodate the subcontinentals they imported in a crazy bet. And the talk is also of putting families in apartments, reviving post WWII building plans and prefab houses. The predictable result is a fertility crash.
"Breaking Together" is a great book on the subject of Elite Panic. The elites are in a state of panic because they really don't know how to handle the top-heavy economy in combination with a shrinking economy. They're all looking for a magic bullet that doesn't exist.
I haven’t heard of that book… based on quick googling, seems like a John Michael Greer type. To me, the problem with any book is that events so rapidly supersede it.
A pure panic in some sense would be better in that it might prompt some welcome changes in approach. But what we seem to get is dumb complacency leading to panicky lurches when reality intervenes. So many leaders get this panicky look when expected to improvise or react. Kamala is classic.
Lashing out is the next step. You can also find a lot of bug eyed Trudeau videos online.
Checking out reviews of Breaking Together, it seems like an attempt at friendly leftism or communitarianism that would inevitably end in authoritarianism, sort of like a Jacinda Ardern shouting Be Kind while she ruins your life.
I feel like this program would start with cajoling and end with a migrant family being assigned to live in my house.
It has gigantic gaping flaws. His view of materialist leftism basically has profound spiritual holes that are easily filled by a Christian conservatism but are left empty because he can't fathom that he might be wrong at the spiritual level. I reviewed the book recently on my substack: https://alwaysthehorizon.substack.com/p/book-review-breaking-together
If you can get past all the trite whining, it does paint an excellent picture of how the elite view these climate/resource issues. It helps substantially to understand that most of our elites are incompetents who retain power only by the perception of strength. They have no answers and are in a panic trying to keep their system chugging along despite the tremendous flaws in it.
Anything tied to DC whether people, funds or resources is tied to Disaster already, the Democratic Party is in dissolution, DC and all national and international arrangements and institutions which are tied to the Democratic Party are in dissolution. The Democratic Party is the government above state. It’s usually the government above Local or County. This is a choice made a century ago and no, the Republicans are not ready.
Manage all ties to DC as a disaster that will drag you down and sever ties. The regions states, counties and localities that sever ties to a dissolving central government in DC faster than the others will recover faster.
As America is very densely federated, we are naturally very resilient. There are 85,000 distinct governments in America 50 states for territories with its own national guard often air and ground National Guard 20,000 police departments at least emergency services and planetary powers are usually local. The population is well armed, and very skilled. We have rich lands of boundless resources guarded by matchless geography.
The chief danger is the dollar is of course tied to these national and international institutions centered in DC as DC goes. Our currency goes. The danger of this is this will break the food distribution system unless something that has real value as money replaces the dollar. Without actual valuable money, the food distribution system will break so therefore, after some months, the chief danger is famine. The dollar should be replaced with money a real value all things considered for sometime and from different angles and seeing other countries collapse, including ones collapsed by the United States government, Pat is probably the best basis for an interim currency. This is insurgency economics 101. You can get there or the gangsters and insurgents (same people) can get there first but with petroleum the food distribution system can run. Without petroleum the food distribution system breaks along with every other distribution system. The worst danger is Food running out, which makes the big killer famine in a few months.
Great article. The liberal world order sees itself as all-powerful and unstoppable, but it has two fatal weaknesses: its systems are overly complicated and it selects for ideological conformity instead of competence. What good are your systems of control if you have no competent people to maintain them?
By the way, I can't stand KaiserBauch. He's an insufferable doomer. I'm convinced he's part of some op meant to spread demoralization propaganda.
Brilliant. A great way to introduce the photo of Victoria Nuland btw.
"The modern world requires a number of things to continue functioning normally and without those, significant breakdown begins to occur."
Many of the items listed need to be underwritten by one premodern given to remain, and were for a while. That thing is loyalty in service to X (a people's, a Land, an ideology/empire, whatever) - this is now gone.
Weber identified that modern bureaucracy is crucially upheld by an ideal of voluntarism, amongst others. Voluntarism doesn't have to be opposed to loyalty and service, but when it is, it then it transmutes into arbitrary shirking of all Principle. That's when the rigidity of bureaucracy really kicks into high gear.
Local community must have these premodern givens too to cohere, IMHO. Fortunately they tend to increase when a community goes through hard times together.
Fantastic article. The only way out, as I see it, is a vast restructuring of global and local economies (for which there is no political will to do so) or the elusive post-scarcity that can only come with mining asteroids (prohibitively costly and we lost decades of progress when the USA felt that reaching the moon was enough).
This feels small fries compared to scope of the issues you laid out here, but have you read Weber's thoughts on bureaucracy?
The only way to feasibly mine asteroids is to bring them into low orbit and smack them into Nevada or something and mine the crater. There's no effective way to perform mineral-separation in microgravity. That part is always hand-waved away in science fiction for a reason.
Elon Musk is racing the clock trying to get to Mars. He may succeed, but odds are stacked pretty heavily against him. The Limits to Growth paper has this decade being the decade where industrial productivity begins a steep and sudden decline. Not because we've run out of resources, but because they're too expensive to get.
Interesting.
I was being a tad hyperbolic, but I had no idea that there were feasibility studies on asteroid mining.
I am pessimistic about the mission to Mars, but wouldn’t it be great to send a small mission to begin terraforming? Send them with the compendium of human knowledge and see what society develops out of it. Maybe worth exploring in fiction, because I doubt it will happen.
What is driving up the cost of acquiring resources?
If we can get sustained-civilization on mars, that would be absolutely amazing. We'd need to transport over an entire industrial-base however. That would be extraordinarily difficult and I doubt we have the political or economic will to do it at this time. My prediction is that the next civilization will shift to be far more focused on stability rather than growth (see my article on holistic civilization, hoping to publish another one soon in that series).
The primary cost drivers in acquiring resources has to do with industrial-base and ease-of-access. It's a lot easier to get oil when it's leaking out of the ground than when it's 300ft below bedrock on the sea floor. We've pulled most of the easily-accessible resources out of the ground already and we're needing to move into deep-sea-mining and similarly expensive adventures. The Energy-Return-On-Investment goes down every time you pull a barrel of oil out. Eventually it will cost 1 barrel of oil of energy to extract 1 barrel of oil. Production will likely stop before that due to other cost constraints.
Oil isn't really the problem. "Modern Civilization" will continue puttering along for another century... the issue is specific critical elements and minerals: high purity silicon, sand for concrete, neodymium and praseodymium, Zinc and Copper. We're mining all of those at higher rates than ever before in human history, but demand is outstripping supply. We're trying to build our industrial base as fast as we can because the monetary system is set for infinite-growth. We can't mine fast enough, and it's getting more and more costly to mine specific materials.
Eventually a critical element will just be too expensive on the market and so relevant production of related goods will shut down. Say neodymium is too expensive for a few years to realistically buy. Then high-quality electric motors become too expensive to buy and a number of circuit boards used in high-end electronics. With those too expensive, car manufacturing has to stop for a year or two because they can't get the critical mandated-by-law computational components for building vehicles.
It's pretty easy for things to spiral out of control quite quickly because of sudden price changes in just a few key materials or minerals. The global trade system is extremely vulnerable to resource-disruptions... and has too many weak points to count because of how hyper-specific all of these components are.
I expect that a cascade-failure like that will result in a forced radical reshuffling of the global economy in the next 20 years or so.
What type of commodities would you invest in with this knowledge? :)
My bets on lithium and nickel didn't pay off.
Speculators are running rampant and they can do high-speed trading based on specific crises that occur in various supply chains. Look at the grain contract valuations that came out of Ukraine for instance. You don't know which commodity will go next, and if one falls apart, it'll often generate surpluses in others. If transistor-doping materials go, then high-grade-silicon will drop in value as it'll suddenly be in surplus to capacity.
Best long-term bet is financial assets that are deflationary and function in an economy forced to switch from a growth-model to a contraction-model. So bitcoin and similar (stable) cryptocurrencies would be high on the list. Real-estate if you can afford it (though the value will contract if population contracts). Local production companies: 3D printers, Metal 3D printers, mechanics and machine shops would also be a pretty good bet. Farms maybe, but farming is so beholden to national currency policy and the money-printer that there's no way to know which way that'll go in the medium-term. Most of these are 10 year bets.
Yep, pretty bleak. At least I made some returns on Palantir. I guess I'll stick to memecoin gambling, and hedge it with some BTC.
I like the comment that the embrace of electric vehicles is a panicky one. I would extend that to the entire green economy- they seem to think that passing some laws will magically create a new age of pollution free prosperity. Now people don’t want EV’s and China can make them much cheaper, it’s all falling apart.
The same goes for importation of vast numbers of foreigners. Now the political talk in Canada is of doubling home building to accommodate the subcontinentals they imported in a crazy bet. And the talk is also of putting families in apartments, reviving post WWII building plans and prefab houses. The predictable result is a fertility crash.
"Breaking Together" is a great book on the subject of Elite Panic. The elites are in a state of panic because they really don't know how to handle the top-heavy economy in combination with a shrinking economy. They're all looking for a magic bullet that doesn't exist.
Entrepreneurship 101
If you can convince them you have the magic bullet, then they’ll pay out the nose for it because they’re desperate.
I haven’t heard of that book… based on quick googling, seems like a John Michael Greer type. To me, the problem with any book is that events so rapidly supersede it.
A pure panic in some sense would be better in that it might prompt some welcome changes in approach. But what we seem to get is dumb complacency leading to panicky lurches when reality intervenes. So many leaders get this panicky look when expected to improvise or react. Kamala is classic.
Lashing out is the next step. You can also find a lot of bug eyed Trudeau videos online.
Checking out reviews of Breaking Together, it seems like an attempt at friendly leftism or communitarianism that would inevitably end in authoritarianism, sort of like a Jacinda Ardern shouting Be Kind while she ruins your life.
I feel like this program would start with cajoling and end with a migrant family being assigned to live in my house.
It has gigantic gaping flaws. His view of materialist leftism basically has profound spiritual holes that are easily filled by a Christian conservatism but are left empty because he can't fathom that he might be wrong at the spiritual level. I reviewed the book recently on my substack: https://alwaysthehorizon.substack.com/p/book-review-breaking-together
If you can get past all the trite whining, it does paint an excellent picture of how the elite view these climate/resource issues. It helps substantially to understand that most of our elites are incompetents who retain power only by the perception of strength. They have no answers and are in a panic trying to keep their system chugging along despite the tremendous flaws in it.
It’s not about the environment. It’s about winning government contracts.
DC is in Dissolution.
Anything tied to DC whether people, funds or resources is tied to Disaster already, the Democratic Party is in dissolution, DC and all national and international arrangements and institutions which are tied to the Democratic Party are in dissolution. The Democratic Party is the government above state. It’s usually the government above Local or County. This is a choice made a century ago and no, the Republicans are not ready.
Manage all ties to DC as a disaster that will drag you down and sever ties. The regions states, counties and localities that sever ties to a dissolving central government in DC faster than the others will recover faster.
As America is very densely federated, we are naturally very resilient. There are 85,000 distinct governments in America 50 states for territories with its own national guard often air and ground National Guard 20,000 police departments at least emergency services and planetary powers are usually local. The population is well armed, and very skilled. We have rich lands of boundless resources guarded by matchless geography.
The chief danger is the dollar is of course tied to these national and international institutions centered in DC as DC goes. Our currency goes. The danger of this is this will break the food distribution system unless something that has real value as money replaces the dollar. Without actual valuable money, the food distribution system will break so therefore, after some months, the chief danger is famine. The dollar should be replaced with money a real value all things considered for sometime and from different angles and seeing other countries collapse, including ones collapsed by the United States government, Pat is probably the best basis for an interim currency. This is insurgency economics 101. You can get there or the gangsters and insurgents (same people) can get there first but with petroleum the food distribution system can run. Without petroleum the food distribution system breaks along with every other distribution system. The worst danger is Food running out, which makes the big killer famine in a few months.
Good luck .
Great article. The liberal world order sees itself as all-powerful and unstoppable, but it has two fatal weaknesses: its systems are overly complicated and it selects for ideological conformity instead of competence. What good are your systems of control if you have no competent people to maintain them?
By the way, I can't stand KaiserBauch. He's an insufferable doomer. I'm convinced he's part of some op meant to spread demoralization propaganda.