by Chris Martenson, Peak Prosperity:

Here in the brief period between Christmas and New year’s, as a writer I am obligated to say happy, wishful things. I have to confess, I’m just not feeling it this year, so I’ll just do the minimum here and return to being a curmudgeon, because that’s what the times call for.

So, happy new year. I hope everything works out well for you in 2019.

There, with that behind us we can now return our attention to the true state of the world, which is deteriorating and getting worse.

For most people things will be decidedly worse, not better, as things progress along their current trajectories. The only planet we’ve got to live on is being killed by human activity and gross inattention, while economically the greatest and most ill-advised credit bubble in all of human history flirts with the sort of sudden disaster that follows shortly after the subsequent failure of one’s reserve parachute.

As I’ve often repeated, I truly wish this weren’t the case.  I don’t have a “bummer gene” that relishes bad news nor do I enjoy being “that guy” who says what no one wants to hear.

Many of you reading this know exactly what I’m talking about.  You, too, had to keep your lips zipped over the holidays lest the strained family small talk and opening of cheaply-made forgettable gifts be ruined by any talk of ‘reality’.  Sure, everyone can inwardly wince at uncle Jack’s sixth bourbon and tolerate the buffoonery and social awkwardness sure to follow because  “it’s only once a year.”

But collapsing insect populations, species loss, shrinking aquifers, and the utter betrayal of the younger generations by the “olders” running the fiscal and monetary policies of the world are not as easily dismissed. There’s no relief at the end of the day when the problem will head off home.

Instead, these many predicaments lurk and fester, as stubbornly as a rotted beam in the basement.  An adult with a problem beam in the basement deals with it.  But the immature person pretends the problem doesn’t exist, and then scolds and shames anyone who brings it up.

Well, for those of us in the mature reality-based camp, we can point out not one but many dozens of rotten beams in the basement, and the walls, and the roof.  So, holidays are quite often more a burden to us than a comfort.  “Why, yes, Aunt Karen, that is a nice set of coasters you gave to John” as you think to yourself “I wonder if those are made from pressed microplastics or virgin rainforest?”

To be completely clear, I deplore the decisions that got us to this point in history. But here we are.

I wish the Federal Reserve, the ECB and the rest of the world’s major central banks had not printed up $16 trillion of thin-air money and caused the greatest collection of asset price bubbles in all of history. I wish that the US had heeded Jimmy Carter back in the 1970s and developed a workable long-term energy strategy that made sense.  I wish that disappearing insect population were not relegated to the back pages of major newspapers, and instead were front and center each and every day until responsible actions were undertaken.  I wish that savers, pensioners and the young hadn’t been sacrificed upon the altar of bank profits so that the obscenely wealthy could become even more so.

But, that’s not how things turned out. So now we’ve just got to make the best of it individually, whatever may come.

Two Questions

Back in November of 2018, I participated in a superb evening event put on by modern Poet-Historian Stephen Jenkinson where he posed the following to the audience, which mostly consisted of people with grey hair.  He said that every older person needs to be ready for the day when a younger person walks up to them and asks them two questions:

1. When did you know, and


2. What did you do about it?

When did you know about the many problems and predicaments facing our world today?  When did you find out about species loss, and peak oil, the generationally destructive policies of your peers, and the unsustainability of our entire economic model?

And what did you do about any of it?  Did you make any changes at all to your behavior, or did you close your eyes and slip into a strategy of false hope? Hope that ‘somebody’ would do ‘something’?  Did you fight at all for the things in which you once believed?

These aren’t easy questions to face, because they cut right to the heart of the matter. They put our integrity into question and threaten to expose whether we have any at all.

Not easy stuff, to be sure.

So, by way of preparation for what’s coming, let me act as a stand-in for that future young person and be the one to ask you:

When did you know?

And what did you do about it?

Psychological Projection

Psychological projection is a defense mechanism in which the human ego defends itself against unconscious impulses or qualities (both positive and negative) by denying their existence in themselves while attributing them to others.

(Source)

In the US, the older generation, the Baby Boomers, have a lot to answer for.  I’m among them, so I’m pointing my accusing fingers right back at myself, too.  It’s incumbent on every group to be its own best critic (a credo the FBI, many police departments, large corporations, and political parties seem to be woefully ignorant of).

Instead of being appropriately self-critical, 2018 was the year the entire mainstream establishment decided to engage in a mass act of psychological projection instead. With Millennials as the hapless targets.

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