I don't require false optimism to function.
"Please, please, help me, make it go away, make me forget about it, do something, make it go away! Will it go away? Oh, will it? Yes, it must, oh it must! Yes, it will! Of course it will, we cannot be allowed to experience this as it is, it is too horrible, and we must make it better, and so we surely will, all together, and good people will help us all, and they will make us better!" does not make it go away.
Don't get me wrong, it would be lovely if it did. I commiserate. One would have to be brain-dead though. More than one person, another. More than them, a group. Group by group, all still and stalled. Eventually, a majority, frozen. Open consideration, decision-making, thinking, strenuous self-education, the healthy collective action based upon a guiding moral principle, a guiding myth, a foundational source of pride and regeneration, this makes it go away. Motion is impossibly hard when all are paralyzed, and by that point, their panic and mob desperation is not enough to ensure their survival, despite their numbers. There is no limit on this excuse making, this sloughed responsibility otherwise. Beyond the drying bricks of this new wall, annihilation clatters and burns, charging. The statues will be obliterated when they are put, teetering on feet of clay.
I phoned Ali to discuss the economy. He immediately began to tell me about his theories on improving the railway system, namely, full nationalization. I groaned internally. This is not The Third Reich. In our globalist post-war liberal sprawl of grim Statist authoritarianism and deliberate economic and environmental mismanagement, allowing the system to gain any more footholds over the private sector, near obliterated already post-covid-19 by land grabs, the decimation of small business, the housing market manipulation, and this gross global public-private partnership, giving them a taloned claw in yet one more door is never a good idea.
I tried to explain to him that, though he claimed it would save (his?) money, which I doubted anyway, that expenditure would still be swallowed up by the State as fares, and a replacement of independent company workers by government-hired employees. Where would the capital for this scheme be coming from, as per usual, as per always? Like with the high-speed Scotland to London rail-line, which I forget the name of, in planning for quite a while already, promising to provide cheap, luxury-standard convenience for a new flow of internal jobseekers and commuters from the North. I didn't know there was any great public need for that, as I've never heard that voiced by the citizens. I imagine it will both decimate the countryside, including our ancient woodlands, become an audible pollutant and eyesore, and be of use only to elite bureaucrats and internationalist busybodies who wish to ferry themselves up and down the country in style, saving perhaps an hour or two in the process, waving out of the window at the broke devastation all around them.
I really haven't been interested in that issue in the slightest, so have not reviewed the proposed technology in full, although I am assuming it will be electric-powered. The same basic safety downsides as with electric cars then. That and the fact that it would take a thousand years to mine enough resources to keep that industry afloat in the present, and anyway, there’s a spiralling energy crisis, unfixable by net zero crap, and the technology wouldn’t be able to run. Yet more covert audio amplifiers and facial recognition surveillance everywhere also, one would expect. Scrolling TV screens and mini-billboards for the latest atrocious government agit-prop. Still not a great deal less expensive than flying there.
Anyhow, I couldn't really say this to Ali. I made a few abortive attempts. He's too stubborn though, too much of a know-it-all, and very petulant if you point an error out to him. His flaw is that he is dogmatically optimistic. Ignorant, rigid, and unfalteringly optimistic. It makes him very irritating to talk to about any cons in a new initiative. All he sees is the pros, and, when confronted with bad news, he wiggles away from it, telling me not to be "negative", or that I'm "missing the point", or accusing me of "overthinking this", or getting stroppy. Any rude, arrogant rationalization will do for him. His bright future must be there, regardless of the contrary reality, and, though there may be some silly little hiccups (though probably aren't), everything will go well, and the pros are so much more valuable, and it must be this way, really it must, and there can be no hinderance to that. In a nutshell, his First World War English officer insistence, a brutal moronic fecklessness, is the sort of thing that gets people killed.
Hitler examined the English in his fascinating, insightful, polymathic Table Talks as recorded by Martin Bormann. They're used to having it all handed to them, a relic of the Victorian era colonial market dominance. That familiar Protestant work ethic pedagogy exists simultaneously though. That brutal utilitarianism liberalism, and lack of concern, once they have reached a suitable comfort, for any of their countrymen who do not just "get on with it," no matter what. I noticed other observations of a similar nature in Roger Scruton's England: An Elegy. I don’t keep so many of his books anymore, as his enthusiastic comments on the countryside community fun of foxhunting ‘adventures’ riled me too much.
Though Scruton's conservatism is wistfully apologetic to them, he makes it clear that the English are standoffish, and emotionally muted. Their reserve is not enough to compensate for their puritanism, or indeed for their sheer indifference to suffering and misfortune, not an empathetic nation in the slightest. They have a propensity for blank cruelty, and a terrible, ill-deserved pride. One sees it today regularly.
Hitler remarks on the crassness of American culture and art even then, and on the comparatively philistine musical works and architectural labours and monuments of the British, relative to the exquisite sculptural beauty of Italy, or Croatia, even in their simplest dwellings. I find this myself listening to the music of British composers, and vastly prefer continental European Classical works. I cannot stand American composers. Although there are a few American painters I find some merit in, overall, I prefer the artists of the French, Dutch, and Russian 19th century realism movements, and just onto the sane boundaries of Impressionism, a little Baroque work, and some of those of the Italian Renaissance, with a tolerance for segments of the near-realist work of a couple of the earlier Expressionists, generally in the French Expressionist school, though the Second World War German artists are ok, and I very much like the pencil portraits, and some of the amateur work in the field.
There’s something oppressive and impenetrable about the vast piles of intaglio aquatints and line engravings created by the British in the early 18th Century and I find their overloaded composition ugly and anatomically imprecise, and their themes plebian and cheap, or at other times soulless, like dead technical draughtsmanship, devoid of character or Beauty, as would suit mass production. Rococo can be a little garish to my tastes, and somehow quaint, a provincial amateurishness.
Anyhow, Ali left shortly afterwards, hanging up perfunctorily as he always does, just a matter of fact “Ok. Goodbye”, with no warmth. He left me with the information that his Dad had just given him £40,000 as a gift. "As you know Ben, I'm very well off, like, very well off. Recently my father gave me this on top."
He asked me what I thought of investment, remarking that “crypto seems to be doing pretty well”, him having invested already quite heavily in Ethereum, and well as various top-end share-bundles (although he knows I no longer hold any Bitcoin, or Monero and Ohmcoin, much to his surprise and panic, trying to goad me back into it without overtly saying so).
I mentioned Gold to him, and Silver, as usual, again, as always. I try explaining pessimistic Austrian economics, and context-driven empirical observations in advanced macroeconomics to him now and again, but it always fails. He listens to my reply, and always asks again each new time, but he never picks up any precious metals, not once. He says the investment return isn't big enough, and looks down on them, I sense, as the 'poor man's choice', from the position of a total snob.
He's f**ked on account of this. What happens when that money, in either currency medium, turns worthless, crashing, or disappearing from his bank account altogether, swallowed up by failing banks, and possessive as it is of no intrinsic value the while. A loan. A ledger of what he is owed. More useful fundamentally to the banks than to him, hence their enthusiasm for new customers. Stock prices plummeting, and cash flow impeded, to the point that most companies can’t survive and are forced to shut down. Pan-spectrum bond defaults, and nothing ever paid out. Currency value plummeting. Valueless anyway, these little pieces of plastic ‘paper’ tat and empty digital manipulations, bar a man-made system of exchange, and supplies and resources may not always be there, between supply chain logistics mismanagement and energy failure, or just in general as an obvious principle given that we have a set primary resource limit on this planet, and getting at them isn’t always easy, or indeed the refining process, and then there’s peak oil to consider (which I am never quite confident over the specifics of, much as I don’t deny it), and quite a lot on farming and harvests, and patterns in drought and extreme weather, and terrible government interference and corporate greed, and all the usual complex system horrors, rendering any currency (yes, even my own) worthless in the mid-term, much as only mine can preserve wealth intergenerationally through the blackout of a feral 100-year Dark Age, once infrastructure has collapsed, and been neglected and left to decay.
I do shy away from Platinum and Palladium though, knowing their value is reliant on a stable market, primarily for electric vehicle components, and tied to this success of this technology. I have tentatively considered stockpiling some 5kg Copper bullion bars as a low-key side investment, much as I know they’d take up space and I’m not sure if I could even store them properly knowing how reactive the metal is, especially given all the physical books I own, liable to contribute sulphur to the atmosphere where really I’d need a temperate-controlled nitrogen environment. It would, as usual, be a matter of shopping around. I see there’s a main initial search results UK Copper bullion dealer, but they seem to have quite high margins and I’m not sure the spot-price is real-time, much as I’d expect VAT anyway, and Copper, though very cheap anyway (and exceedingly so now, down to a few British pounds (/lb t) from almost £60 in 2011) and thus volatile – yet stable at base on account of perennial versatility – doesn’t work out so cost-effective as cast bullion bars when I look at the other metals I tend to go for, and the specific denominations, much as advertised Copper investment lots are out of my budget range.
Expecting power to fail, I wonder as to whether copper’s common use in electrical wiring may come to be vital at societal level, as signals drop and wireless networks fail, and as home-owners and businesses are obliged to re-wire their lighting and heating for generators or proxy power sources, or indeed address their plumbing and piping, and their long-lasting roofing repairs given that it’s unlikely the useless, tied-up government can step in with any of their glitzy, ineffective schemes and grand, high tech quick-fixes, and there’s the heat exchange of industrial machinery to consider, and perhaps, given the collapsed NHS and the steady possibility of mass public ill-health, its usefulness as an antibacterial electroplate coating for bed-rails and baths, or indeed for the electrolytes of batteries, surely one of the most useful manufactured items.
I had wanted oil barrels at one point, having spoken to a businessman acquaintance briefly about making a private deal to rent part of his industrial warehouse premises for my storage, but I decided against this in the end, and I didn’t find his location on the outskirts of London secure enough (given a leafy though devolving satellite area with a dangerous big city nearby, and a major road just across the street, with a society disintegrating in violence, theft, and political instability), as well as knowing that he’s got a casual – and so perhaps unprofessional – skeleton staff and is out of the country a lot.
I tell him to bulk up on food, and seeds, and fuel, and survival aids, and consider land, and raw materials, something like a 15+ acre woodland freeholding that could be utilised for partial woodcutting, and personal timber stores for private trade, as well as providing indefinitely for descendants (depending on their micromanagement of it). I tell him about primary resources, the commercial goods that come from secondary resources, and the artificial bubble-world of the over-inflated tertiary sector. Loads on fractional reserve central banking and debt-based systems and how rising interest rates are unstoppable, and inflation (and hyperinflation) inevitable, and the ramifications of 1970's 'peak oil' and the loss of the Gold standard and the 2008 crash and the repo market collapse, and to look at the broad picture of a complex system. If there's nothing to buy, so what?
One cannot boost the economy indefinitely by principle in a system of finite resources. In practice, it's a terrible idea to keep expanding it, let alone propping it up with government schemes, denying the inevitable. This isn't negotiable and is not a doomsayer's amateur pet theory. There is no way to solve this. Optimism and brainstorming it will, by now, make absolutely no difference. It's important just to accept that collapse is well on the way, a matter of years even and not decades. Under five years to be precise. Noticeable easily in less than two. Not a sharp collapse all at once, but a gradual, lingering global depression that will ‘peak’ in the late 2030s and is unlikely to lift before the final decades of this century, if not even longer.
One can argue all they like out of denial, but this is the reality, and it is – totally – unavoidable. A matter of fundamental mechanistic processes, and empirical observation, and not one for the blind optimism at all costs of a self-deceiving coward with a lot of identical oafs as backup. Perhaps he simply doesn’t understand what I mean by exponential moves. If I showed him the famous water droplet in a Stadium example, he’d just shrug it off, as if it was a one-off incident somehow tied to that exercise alone.
Just another bit of kooky ‘did you know…’ for him to judder over while pulling away, another resented “yeah, that’s interesting,” another sheet of 2-ply toilet paper for his imagination. Not once does a word I say make a tangible impact on him. He prefers the computer game of seeing little numbers pile up. He's single also, having never had a girlfriend, though he tries regularly to have dates, attempting to impress them by moaning about jobs and the need for us all to be boosting the economy, being in possession of no tangible hobby or cultural interest bar a love of Warhammer 40,000 Imperial Guard miniatures, talking about the paramount importance of his profession as an engineer, and the occasional game of hockey or cricket, and never lends to a friend, or family member, and certainly would never donate to an external cause. It literally just piles up in his accounts, up and up and up. No wife, no children, no descendants to provide for.
He has mistaken the purpose of life in the unbroken chain of European racial history. His life is to make that money, and to make others do so, and grow irritated at them if they do not want to, or cannot, and will patronize them if they make less. He dies then, and it's over. He has effectively ended his line by that point. Anathema to life, and to the natural order. If there was money for him then, it would be worthless to a corpse in a large, lonely house, stolen by enemies, or forgotten and wasted, beyond others' reach.
Thankfully (from the point of view of teaching him to be less pig-headed about this), I suspect the upcoming collapse will knock his happy go lucky millions out the window. Knowing he's a miser, I asked him what he planned to do with the latest 40 grand. "Oh, I don't know", he replied, "probably ski holidays."
Hitler was right, the English only learn humility when they have been knocked down in the bluntest way possible. An old nation, set in its ways, possessing the fiercest, basest, more ignorant pride. I can't say I'm very fond of them myself. I never see much that indicates they have a racial soul, within the European understanding of the hierarchy. Somehow, thinking of Ali's barbarous mercantile dispassion, they're closer to Jews in some ways. That mixed with Tolkien's Hobbits, most literally.
Tolkien himself was a compromised children's author optimist, a Christian propagandist, and a plagiarist, if one considers the Nibelungenlied and Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle. Provincial minds, from being locked on a cosy island slave-mill, closer to Scruton's countryside than to each other, the land their only real national treasure and font of inspiration, and not really in possession of the passion and nobility of the race of Men, though they seem to boisterously tag along.
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