# The Archdruid Report

Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society

## Wednesday, July 13, 2011

### Salvaging Quality

It’s been a busy week for those of us who keep watch over the industrial world’s deepening tailspin, as politicians in the United States and Europe play a game of chicken using sovereign debt in the role traditionally filled by fast cars. The issue in the United States is simple enough: the most that either side is able to offer, given its political commitments, is less than the least either side can afford to accept, and the occasional turns toward demagoguery on both sides haven’t exactly helped. It’s still possible that some last minute compromise may be hammered out, but the odds against that are starting to lengthen, and if that doesn’t happen, the financial end of the federal government will start seizing up in about three weeks. It should be an interesting spectacle.
Europe is a more complex situation. Greece, the current poster child for sovereign debt dysfunction, did what poor countries so often do, borrowed in foreign markets far beyond its ability to repay, and now can’t meet its bills. Unfortunately the normal way to resolve such problems – defaulting on the debt – would bankrupt quite a few large banks in other EU nations, and these latter have put pressure on their national governments to stave off a Greek default. The problem here is that Greece is going to have to default sooner or later; the question is purely a matter of when The Greek government is in hock far beyond its ability to repay, and the austerity measures pushed on it by the cluelessly doctrinaire economists at the IMF have worsened the matter considerably by putting the Greek economy into a tailspin. So it’s simply a matter of waiting for the inevitable to happen, and the credit markets to go into spasm accordingly.
Mind you, the horrified utterances currently being splashed around the global media, claiming that default is unthinkable and unprecedented, are nonsense of the most blatant sort. Nations default on their debts all the time. Russia did it in 1998, Argentina did it in 2002, and both nations survived; most European nations, for that matter, have defaulted on their debts more than once over the course of their history, and bankrupted plenty of banks in the process – that’s where we get the word bankrupt, you know. Defaults have always been one of the inescapable risks of lending to governments. EU governments could get realistic about this, let Greece do what countries with too much debt normally do, and spend their time more usefully writing letters of condolence to the bank executives who will be out of a job shortly thereafter.
Come to think of it, it’s just possible that this is what EU governments are actually doing. The current flurry of handwaving and emergency meetings may be no more than a source of plausible deniability – we’re sorry, we did all we could, it was the fault of (fill in the blank to conform to local prejudices) that Greece crashed and took half Europe’s banks with it, blah blah blah. For that matter, it’s not completely beyond the bounds of possibility that politicians on this side of the Atlantic are playing a similar game. The US is up to its eyeballs in unpayable debts, loaded down with entitlements and international commitments that it can’t afford but that no elected official dares to touch, and lurching toward a default as inevitable as Greece’s but on an almost unimaginably vaster scale. Nearly the only way to get out of the resulting trap with some chance of national survival would be to trigger a run on Treasury bills, now, that will force a default on the national debt in the near future, when both sides can conveniently blame it on the intransigence of the other party and the perfidiousness of foreign lenders. It does seem unlikely that this level of public-spiritedness is at work in Congress and the White House, but I’d like to believe that it’s possible.
These latest consternations, in turn, provide all the more relevance to the theme I’ve been discussing in the last couple of posts here, the possibility of shifting over here and now to the salvage economy that’s already beginning to emerge outside the narrowing circle of scarcity industrialism. This week I’d like to bring up another dimension of that shift, and talk about one of the unspoken and unspeakable realities of life in a declining industrial society: the pervasive phenomenon of stealth inflation.
By this I don’t mean inflation in the sense in which economists use the word, the decrease in the value of money driven by the expansion of the money supply relative to the supply of goods and services. That kind of inflation deserves much better press than it gets; though it’s denounced by all right-thinking people these days, it’s one of the safety valves by which a capitalist economy’s tendency to produce excess paper wealth gets brought back into step with the actual wealth in circulation, the nonfiscal goods and nonfinancial services that meet actual human needs. It thus serves exactly the same role, in a much more subtle and flexible way, as the negative-interest currencies being proposed by would-be financial reformers these days.
Stealth inflation is a good deal less laudable. It’s the process by which the price of goods and services remains the same, while the value of what’s provided for that price diminishes. It’s sometimes done by decreasing quantities – most Americans over forty, for example, will remember the days when cans of soup and candy bars were a good deal larger than they are now – but far more often done by cutting quality. Sometimes this is a minor, even a subtle, factor; in other cases, it’s neither, and can quite easily become lethal in its effects.
A good example of the first kind came my way a while back when a friend, knowing I like to cook with cast iron pans, found an elderly example in a secondhand store for some absurdly small price and gave it to me. Because my wife has celiac disease – a severe enough case that relatively small traces of gluten can have unwelcome effects – I had to strip off the natural coating that cast iron cookwear gets when it’s well treated, and reseason the pan again, just as though it had been bought new. Even with this rough treatment, though, the old pan proved to be a much better piece of cookwear than any of the more recently manufactured cast iron pans I’d been using for a decade or so previously. Its inner surface has a much smoother finish, its metal conducts heat more evenly; this evening’s fried zucchini (fresh from the garden) was cooked in it, because no other pan I have does as good a job.
This isn’t simply a matter of chance or a personal quirk. Ask any cast iron aficionado and dollars will get you doughnuts – perhaps these days I should say “credit swaps will get you crullers” or something like that – you’ll hear a similar story; the cast iron cookware you can buy in your local hardware store simply isn’t as good as the same products made a quarter century ago, and the difference is no small thing. I’ve heard the same thing in the very different context of craftspeople who work with old tools; the quality of the metal, they say, as well as the workmanship tends to be dramatically better in tools that are at least a quarter century old.
In some cases the differences are enough to kill. One of the nasty little secrets behind the rising toll from food poisoning in the United States and elsewhere is that a great deal of it could easily have been prevented by common sense sanitary procedures that used to be standard, but have been cut for the sake of lower per unit costs and higher quarterly profits. What makes this all the more embarrassing is that this is America’s second encounter with what happens to the safety and quality of processed food in a capitalist system under economic stress; Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle probably ought to be required reading for the pundits, and there are many of them just now, who fatuously insist that government regulation is always and everywhere a bad idea
The same purblind mania for gutting sensible regulation that freed the banking industry from the Glass-Steagall Act and its equivalents in other industrial nations, and at a stroke brought back the devastating bubble-and-bust economics that dominated the industrial world before the Glass-Steagall Act was originally passed, has had equivalent effects in many other sectors of economic life. An acceleration in stealth inflation through declining quality is among the results. Still, there’s a deeper force pressing in the same direction, and it comes from the relentless mathematics of fossil fuel depletion and its impact on an economy founded on the expectation of constant growth.
There has been a great deal of talk recently on the leftward side of the economic spectrum about the need to “decouple” economic growth from increases in the supply of energy. Still, as Zen masters are wont to say, talk does not cook the rice; insisting that economic growth can continue while energy supplies are stuck in a bumpy plateau does not make it so. The production of real, nonfiscal goods and services requires inputs of energy, as well as raw materials (which must be extracted by using energy) and labor (which in America, at least, usually uses a fair amount of energy, too). The only goods and services that can grow unchecked as energy supplies flatline are financial goods and services – that is, “goods” that consist of the essentially arbitrary tokens our society uses to allocate real wealth, on the one hand, and “services” that consist of shuffling and exchanging these tokens in more or less intricate ways, on the other.
As the cheap abundant energy that provided the basis for three centuries of industrial civilization stops being cheap and abundant, then, one of the consequences is a widening disconnection between the production of nonfiscal goods and services and the production of money in all its various forms. Left to itself, the natural result would be a rising spiral of inflation in which the value of money declined steadily, to stay more or less in step with the amount of real goods and services available to buy. This natural result, though, is utterly unacceptable to the political classes – the people who take an active role in the political process – anywhere in the industrial world.
This has imposed any number of distortions on the global economy, but one of them is a constant push to keep the nominal rate of inflation as low as possible, thus sparing politicians the hard task of explaining to their constituents a reality that neither the politicians nor the constituents have yet begun to understand. That push drives the widespread juggling of economic statistics across the industrial world, but I’ve come to believe that it also provides an important motive force behind stealth inflation. Large corporations have plenty of interfaces with governments, and governments have plenty of levers by which to influence corporate behavior for political ends; if the politicians in Washington DC, let’s say, decided that it would be really helpful if businesses increased their profit margins relative to their costs by some means other than raising prices, it doesn’t seem at all unlikely that this preference would be heard in corporate boardrooms, and play at least some role in shaping their decisions.
What this means for the individual green wizard, in turn, is that there’s every reason to think that a good many of the goods and services sold to consumers are going to continue to decrease in quality in the years ahead. That in turn implies at least two things. The first is that the strategy of salvaging energy discussed in last week’s post has an additional advantage, because what’s being salvaged in a good many cases is not simply an equivalent of what’s on the market today, but a better product, one that tolerably often will work better and last longer than a new product of the same type. As we approach an age in which many goods may stop being available at all for extended periods, this is not an opportunity to ignore.
The second implication is that those who learn the skills needed to take older products that are no longer working, or no longer working well, and recondition them so that they can return to usefulness, may find themselves with a job skill of no small importance in the emerging salvage economy. It’s not too hard, for example, to find old handsaws for sale very cheaply at flea markets and estate sales. Fairly often, after being handed down through a couple of generations, these have rusted blades, teeth that are dull and bent out of their proper set, cracked and damaged handles, and the like. The steel of the blade, however, is very often of much higher quality than the equivalent new product in a hardware store today, and it doesn’t actually take that much in the way of skills and tools to remove the rust, polish the blade, reset and file the teeth, make a new handle out of hardwood and attach it to the old blade, and so on. The result is a saw that can be handed down for several more generations, and do a great deal of useful work in the meantime; it’s also a product that can be sold or bartered to craftspeople at a premium price.
In at least a few cases, it’s also possible to go one step further and figure out how to manufacture products on a small scale to old specifications. I don’t have anything like the metallurgical knowledge to figure our what makes the difference between my old cast iron pan and my newer pans, but the information’s surely out there, and could be tracked down by someone with the necessary background. Whether or not there would be enough of a market to make this a paying proposition anytime soon is another matter; there are odd little niche markets that might at least pay the bills.
Myself, having more facility with words than with metals, I’m contemplating tracking down a basic letterpress and exploring the honorable profession of Benjamin Franklin. The printing press with movable type was invented in the Middle Ages, after all, and very likely can remain a viable technology no matter how far down the slope of decline we end up sliding. Under current conditions, it can help pay its own bills via handprinted wedding invitations and the like; as conditions change and the complex supply chains that keep computer printers and copiers functioning become more problematic, a printing press powered by human muscle and capable of running on supplies no more complex than paper and homebrewed ink may turn into a serious asset.
Your mileage will unquestionably vary, and a second income refurbishing old items or using some outdated but sustainable technology will be the right choice for some people and the wrong choice for others. I mention it here partly because a good many readers of these posts have asked about potential businesses and income sources in a deindustrializing world, and partly because a fair number of people out there in the peak oil blogosphere don’t yet seem to have thought through the fact that they’ll need to earn a living in one way or another during the long slow unraveling of the industrial economy,
That unraveling may have its sudden jolts, to be sure. If the politicians in Washington DC and an assortment of European capitals fumble the current situation spectacularly enough, this autumn could see an economic crisis on the grand scale, with markets seizing up, banks shutting down, and governments facing abrupt replacement by legal means or otherwise. Still, we’ll come out the other side of it, no doubt poorer but still faced with the ordinary challenges of the human condition; if learning how to recondition old tools allows someone to barter for necessities during the years ahead, that’s a positive step, and such positive steps on the individual scale are the raw materials from which the deindustrial future will gradually emerge.
*********
On a related note, those of my readers who have been following The Archdruid Report for a while now will have seen me more than once pointing out that, challenging as the decline and fall of industrial civilization will doubtless be, it’s not the end of the world. With the help of an enthusiastic publisher, I’ve had the chance to make that point a little more clearly. This September, San Francisco’s Cleis Press will be bringing out my next book, Apocalypse Not, a wry survey of the apocalypse meme – the notion that sometime very soon, history as we know it will suddenly be replaced by a new osmos that just happens to bear a close resemblance to our favorite daydreams – and its role in inspiring the last three thousand years or so of End Times that weren’t. The Rapture, the Singularity, the prophecies of Nostradamus, and of course the upcoming 2012 brouhaha, among other things, all come in for discussion Though the subject’s a serious one, the book is a good deal shorter than my three peak oil books, and a lighter read as well. On the off chance that you’re interested, dear reader, it’s now available for preorder.

#### 217 comments:

«Oldest ‹Older 201 – 217 of 217

Glenn said...

  GHung,
  "Carpenter (I suppose boatbuilding gets Matt there.)"
  In spades! A good wooden boatbuilder can build anything out of wood. It's the most generalized specialist trade I know. Boatbuilders have to "specialize" in several skills, and have be very good at problem solving; especially for re-building and repair.
  Besides a Coast Guard career, I've been a woodworker most of my life. Ranging from cabinet making to construction. I've never been as fast as a framer, roofer, flooring guy or concrete mason. But I'm better at doing new things because of my analytical skills and problem solving abilities. I've discovered this is crucial to the boatbuilding process, and not just in wood.
  It's not just your education, it's what you do with it.
  Glenn
  Marrowstone

  7/20/11, 6:40 AM
Adrian Ayres Fisher said...

  I accidentally posted this comment on an earlier post's thread:
  @Cathy, thanks for mentioning Juniper Time. That scenario is what I've sometimes imagined, so it will be interesting to see what a novelist does with it.

  7/20/11, 6:49 AM
sgage said...

  @ Cathy and CO,
  I would encourage you to take the time to keep a written Garden Journal. I have been gardening in this location for 18 years, and treasure my Journals!
  Your memory most likely isn't as good as you think it is, and so much valuable data can be accumulated about dates of planting, harvest, the weather, frosts, performance of different varieties under different conditions, etc.
  Another good idea is making a rough sketch of your garden layout each season - really helps in planning rotations. I can barely remember what was where a year later, much less two years later.
  And after a couple of months of down time after "putting the garden to bed" for the Winter, it is tons o' fun to pull out the Journal in mid-Winter, and recall the year's triumphs and disappointments, and plan the coming campaign...
  Keep a Journal - I promise you'll be very glad you did!

  7/20/11, 7:19 AM
Adrian Ayres Fisher said...

  @GHung re professions; and your son--
  Good advice to your son to do art but know how to do something else. My daughter majored in literature/creative writing (!)--I can just hear the snickers from some of the practical-minded folks on this site. ;)
  But part of her training was to work with children specifically on their writing, something regular teachers often don't have time to do. She now earns a decent living as a bartender and is learning to brew from my brother. But she also writes.
  To your list of professions I'd add:
  Midwife
  Healthcare not involving really high-tech stuff but a good knowledge of the basics + herbs.
  Teacher: if you know how to do something people value and can teach it you have something to barter with or charge for. Being able to do something and being able to teach it well are two separate skill sets: having both is worth something.
  Architect with a knowledge of practical, appropriate-tech, region-appropriate building design (and hands-on carpentry).
  Entertainer/musician
  Record keeper/scribe/librarian/writer (maybe as a sideline): There will be a need as there always has been.
  Artists who can work in low-tech media (and can actually draw)--again, maybe as a sideline.
  It's just this odd computer/technology/photography age that has reduced the value of the human hand and eye and the human talent for seeing and drawing. One wouldn't want folks in the future to have to rediscover how to do perspective all over again.
  Our lists reflect our own biases and experience which adds to the good of dissensis. I'd like to see what others come up with.

  7/20/11, 7:33 AM
Glenn said...

  Bill,
  Re: Climate
  It's not just Prof. Mass, he happens to be only one I know the name of off hand; I prefer to attribute information to my source. In general climate change is stronger the further from equator due to the Hadley convections cells; and climate change, like current weather is less extreme on the East side of an ocean and more extreme in continental interiors and on the West side of an ocean _in mid latitudes_. I think I mentioned that the normal oscillations are still stronger than the climate change signal here.
  Don Mason:
  Southwest and West
  If you want a better understanding of the West and water issues, you can do little better than the classics, "Late Great State of California" (Kurt Gentry, I think?) and Mark Reisner's "Cadillac Desert"; "Sons of the Profit" provides an amusing window into the settling of Seattle, and Annie Dillard's "The Living" a more serious look at the Bellingham, Washington and San Juan Islands area.
  Glenn
  Marrowstone Island

  7/20/11, 8:01 AM
Hal said...

  I wouldn't expect river channel maintenance for boat traffic to go away for many generations. Pre-fossil fuel the Mississippi and it's tributaries were trafficked quite heavily. I have a letter written to my great-grandfather in the late 1800s, the address is simply "Tallahatchie River." Apparently it was successfully delivered. Also seems that the bigger plantations must have had their own landings, which makes sense for transporting and loading something as bulky as cotton.
  I don't see the Southeast separating from the North again. With the slavery issue settled, it just makes too much sense for them to stay together. The South does a lot better in the national political process as part of the union anyway. I'm not happy about that, as I'm definitely in the minority around here.
  But the advantages of staying unified were obvious to Lincoln, and they would be for anyone trying to build or maintain an empire. And those glacial Yankee boys are amazingly able to endure hardship and carnage to uphold a weird little abstract concept like "union." As I write this, I'm looking out my back yard at an area those brave souls probably marched through during the Vicksburg campaign in 1863. They got whooped that time and had to fall back, but we all know they found a way.
  Though I sit on a prime piece of rich Mississippi Delta land with easy river access, ideal in so many ways for post-peak purposes, it's most likely I'll end up in N. California. That's where my children and their mother are, and I don't see them pulling up everything to come here. I would like to make the change sooner rather than later, to try to get something going that will eventually help them. But California farmland is too overvalued for me to make any kind of worthwhile exchange. Eventually, I expect that to level out somewhat, as values around here rise, and the consequences of depending on unsustainable levels of irrigation begin to be realized by the agricultural sector out west.
  For those considering Don Mason's hierarchy of regions I would also point out that the Lower Colorado River valley had one of the highest population densities in pre-conquest N. America. The West Coast in general was second only to the Mississippi/Ohio River valley. In prehistoric times, the Southwest was quite densely populated. Check out Mesa Verde or Chaco Canyon sometime. Those areas were just population hubs made possible by irrigation opportunities, but the surrounding countryside supported quite large numbers of people on wild game and corn/beans/squash agriculture. Climate change long ago made the difference, so that will be one of the wild cards going forward.

  7/20/11, 8:15 AM
Kirby said...

  Further question re the petrochemical industry: isn't there going to be a post-oil chemical industry, albeit on a different scale, etc.?
  At least some of the primary feedstocks - methanol, ethanol, methane, formaldehyde, phenol and acetic acid, for example - are obtainable in ways other than by processing fossil fuels. So manufacture of a number of chemicals and other products may well be feasible with NO fossil fuels at all.
  The petrochemical industry also (according to what I've read) "only" uses 5% of the oil - so it may hang in there for some time. We won't be able to afford cheap plastic garbage, but maybe some more important things can be produced indefinitely.

  7/20/11, 8:33 AM
peacegarden said...

  Eshonti Grey,
  Could you be paying down your present mortgage with large extra principle payments each month, while adding infrastructure that can be moved to your “dream” location? I ask because that “getting twice what you paid for it” seems more and more unlikely as we navigate these times.
  We bought our present home in 2006…5 years ago. We didn’t need to “fix up” much here, but we made mostly cosmetic changes the first year or so.
  We may well have been underwater on our 30 yr fixed rate mortgage by now, if we hadn’t started making substantial extra payments each month 3 years ago. It has been a fun challenge to pare down the non-essentials so that we can add even more to the pre-payment. I am proud to say that we will be mortgage free in a little over two years from now.
  We have decided to make our stand here. But if we did want to sell, we would be in a better position to do so.
  You sound like you have what it takes to make a go of it either way; I wish you and yours peace and prosperity.
  Peace
  Gail.

  7/20/11, 8:49 AM
Don Mason said...

  @ Glenn
  I think our major point of disagreement is about carrying capacity.
  Glenn said: “We have 300 million people in the U.S. If 100 million Mexicans came here, my family could take in 1. If every family did the same, it could work.”
  My concern is: how are we going to feed the 300+ million people who are already in America without importing oil?
  America is eating petroleum. Mexico is eating petroleum. Asia is eating petroleum.
  When the Export Land Theory starts to kick in with a vengeance, our oil imports are going to drop like a stone. We’ll be down to domestic production (about a third of current consumption) and even that will be dropping. How can we feed the huge population we already have, let alone any additional people?
  The resource and demographic numbers imply that tens of millions of Mexicans and hundreds of millions of Asians are going to be at risk of premature death; and the geography implies that they may be headed to the Southwest and the Pacific Coast, because they would have no other realistic choice. Where else could they go for food?
  For me, this has been a very enlightening discussion. I started out the discussion looking at it one way: how do we maintain our land communications network to keep the West in the Union?
  Now I’m thinking: the Western third of the United States is lost. The West was a bad investment of Eastern capital.
  The mineral wealth has largely been extracted; its agricultural productivity disproportionately relies on technology-dependent irrigation rather than no-tech rain; it’s overpopulated and about to get overrun with starving refugees; and it hates everything in the East and aspires to splinter into smaller and smaller heavily-armed but mutually-incompatible political units.
  Why try to keep this area in the Union? It’s going to be nothing but expenses, with no long-term payback.
  The former American West is a McMansion in a Las Vegas subdivision that was originally valued at $300,000; is currently valued at $125,000; and will eventually be worth the value of the raw land minus the cost of demolishing the house - and since the raw land will be worthless, this means that the house has a negative value of ($10,000).
  Why continue to pay the mortgage? Just chalk it up to experience, put the keys in the mailbox, and walk away.

  7/20/11, 9:20 AM
Matt and Jess said...

  Hi ghung, well I definitely appreciate all comments, negative and positive, because that's why I asked! Thanks. It's helpful to see what others have experienced with that path. My husband is dead set on it and I am not, so maybe we can balance that out somehow.

  7/20/11, 10:37 AM
idiotgrrl said...

  The Gateses unclear on the concept!
  http://www.fastcompany.com/1768210/bill-and-melinda-gates-foundation-toilet-sanitation-42-million
  High tech solutions for the developing world. Elaborate ones. Sheesh.

  7/20/11, 6:25 PM
GHung said...

  Matt and Jess--
  "My husband is dead set on it and I am not, so maybe we can balance that out somehow."
  Woe be unto me if I interfere in your afairs. That said, Matt seems to be set on a clear path.
  What's your plan? I suggest you set some goals for yourself, and it would help if they mesh somewhat with your husband's. Puget Sound has a lot to offer, and not just for guys who want to build boats.

  7/20/11, 7:46 PM
Bill Pulliam said...

  Don -- I'm having trouble with your whole premise here. Capital investment in the West was a bad idea because the region is not sustainable in its present form? No region of the developed world is sustainable in its present form. You really think the American economy has not benefited as a whole over the last century from all the infrastructure that made present-day California possible (and makes present day California also doomed, just like all major agricultural-industrial-urban complexes around the world)? As for allocating future capital investment, I'm kind of wondering, WHAT capital investment? We are already in the depreciation phase, the catabolic part. We are going to be dismantling and salvaging capital, not deploying more.
  Las Vegas is also a bit of a Straw Man for the American West. Only a small portion of the Western population actually lives in hyperdeserts like Las Vegas and Phoenix. Even the LA basin, overpopulated though it may be, actually has significant autochthonous environmental resources.
  Glenn -- with only two major Northern Hemisphere oceans in the world, it's kind of hard to generalize too much about patterns. Europe, by the way, is downwind of the Atlantic; they are not expecting to be spared climate change the last time I checked. Sure, the Atlantic is smaller; but the PNW has no equivalent of the North Atlantic Drift. As for distance from the Equator, you might want to check the latitudes. San Francisco is only a bit south of D.C., Portland is parallel with central Maine, Seattle is north of Duluth, and Vancouver lines up with Newfoundland. I just think that any hypothesized climate change scenario is a poor basis for decision making, other than to be prepared for unpredictable shifts.

  7/20/11, 8:17 PM
Alexander said...

  A great example of stealth inflation ice cream. The stuff available at grocery stores now is either in smaller containers (take a close look at that "pint" it is now probably 14 ounces) or have more air whipped into them.
  Some have been debased to the point that they can no longer legally be called ice cream. Instead they are "frozen dessert product."
  It seems sad to me that kids now will grow up not knowing what ice cream is supposed to taste like.

  7/25/11, 11:14 PM
nuku said...

  Re products getting smaller: In the late 60’s I had a friend working for Genetech, one of the first modern genetic manipulation companies. He told me about a contact with the big chocolate company Hershey for genetically altering almond trees to produce smaller almonds which would then be “in scale” with the "new" Hershey Bars (hence less likely to draw attention to the smaller size of the new bar). The new bars did indeed come out a few years later, at the same price as the older, larger bars...

  7/26/11, 6:30 PM
Dale Asberry said...

  JMG - "The absurd bonuses “earned” by bankers in recent years are only the most visible end of a pervasive culture of executive profiteering, aided and abetted by both parties and shrugged off by boards of directors who have by and large misplaced their fiduciary duty to the stockholders."
  Actually, these boards of directors are made up of chief executives from other corporations. And, as they are the primary stockholders they then are indeed serving the fiduciary duty to one another.

  8/18/11, 6:46 AM
A.K. McKay said...

  JMG I see many parallels in your idea of cultural senility and Derrick Jensen's idea of toxic mimics. It is explained here: "Toxic mimics...take a very real, necessary, creative, life-affirming, and most of all relational urge and turn it -- pervert it -- until it furthers not fully mutual relationships at all but instead superficial relationships based on domination and control. Toxic mimics...can cause people to forget those original relational urges, to forget mutuality is possible, to forget depth is possible, to believe control is natural and desirable."
  So as you pointed out we have such cultural absurdities such as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, that simply rehash and commodify old ideas so that someone can make a few bucks. I have a strong idea of which one people will remember in another 50 years time and it isn't the one with the zombies.
  Rape is a toxic mimic of sex. War is a toxic mimic of play. The bond between slave owner and slave is a toxic mimic of marriage. Care bears is a toxic mimic of The White Stag.
  The better we become at identifying these toxic mimics and removing them from our lives the better we will be equipped when systems really start becoming disrupted in our part of the world. It's about removing the veneer from the modern world and looking at what lies underneath it and learning to do those things for ourselves.
  Buying food from a supermarket is a good example of a toxic mimic of the old ways of growing your own food and buying or trading what you can't grow yourself with your nieghbours. Interactions like this bring a whole range of other benefits with them such as a sense of community, a knowledge of how everything is produced that we put into our bodies as well as environmental benefits.
  I could carry on listing all the toxic mimics I can think of but I think I've made my point. Thanks very much for you're writing, it's the number one thing I read each week.
  Regards

  8/20/11, 1:56 AM

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