Distractions

Apparently, last night was the Golden Globes, or tonight, or something. Some guy named Ricky Gervais talked about something. A cruise ship, the Costa Concordia, sank because the captain decided to go "showboating" (heh, heh) off the coast of a small island. Tim Tebow, who does something with prayer and parabolic trajectories, lost some sort of sports contest. Finally, almost as a footnote to the news, many countries in the Eurozone were downgraded.

I could go on and on about the seemingly endless ability of modern Americans (and people around the globe as a whole) to distract themselves from the systemic problems facing the world. Maybe it's a defense mechanism, leftover from the days when we lived in clammy stone huts and wore animal skins (who wouldn't want a distraction, then?). The problem is that we, collectively speaking, at the wheel of a car that is hurtling down the road at a hundred miles per hour, when the roads are icy and getting narrower and narrower. Oh, there's a canyon nicknamed "Peak Oil" just ahead.

The downgrade of the Eurozone countries is going to be waved off by a lot of people. It'll be called a political move, fearmongering, unwarranted hysteria, whatever label happens to fit the narrative that any given person sees the world through (and therefore pushes). The real way to interpret is that it is a collective judgement on the soundness of the European economy. If you look at credit ratings, the point is to determine the ability of a person or institution (or coutry) to repay a debt. By downgrading the rating of countries in Europe, the collective judgement is that these countries can no longer maintain themselves economically the way they have intended to (or have, to this point).

Essentially, this means that we're not expecting to patient which is modern industrial society to pull through. While this is, at first, a problem for the politicians and bankers who have created this system, it is going to quickly became a problem for the people who live in these nations as the wheels that have allowed modern populations to exist and thrive suddenly grind to a halt and we all find ourselves in strange new territory. We cannot even begin to address these issues, so late in the day that things have become, so we find ourselves looking for newer and better distractions until the clock finally winds down and we return to a world where real meaning is found when simple existence itself becomes a struggle.

What strikes me is the responses to the crisis at hand. Some people, who have not examined the situation, may ask "what crisis?" Simply put, the fact that we're at the end of the road and don't know where to go, because none of the answers are acceptable in mainstream society. We place quasi-religious faith in "alternative solutions" such as alternative fuels, we pretend that there's not a problem, we believe that we can find a political solution to overspending (which in nature would be too many deer eating too little forage). We want to dream our way out of reality and into a new golden age.

In none of this is the realization that we are on a downward slope and need to adjust to it, but we only do so when we are forced into it, kicking and sreaming.

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I would recommend that everyone who has already not done so follow Ed's recommendation and read John Michael Greer's latest post at The Archdruid Report. Quite a good read and is well worth it alone for the discussion about our modern narrative.