Johnstone on Propaganda (and dangerous stupidity)

Most Propaganda Looks Nothing Like This. Caitlin Johnstone. May 28, 2023


When most people in the English-speaking world hear the word “propaganda”, they tend to think of something that’s done by foreign nations who have governments that are so totalitarian they won’t even let people know what’s true or think for themselves.

Others understand that propaganda is something that happens in their own nation, but think it only happens to other people in other political parties. If they think of themselves as left-leaning they see those to their right as propagandized by right wing media, and if they think of themselves as right-leaning they see those to their left as propagandized by left wing media.

A few understand that propaganda is administered in their own nation by their own media, and understand that it’s administered across partisan lines, but they think of it in terms of really egregious lies like weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or babies being taken from incubators in Kuwait.

In reality, all are inaccurate understandings of what propaganda is and how it works in western society. Propaganda is administered in western nations, by western nations, across the political spectrum — and the really blatant and well-known examples of its existence make up only a small sliver of the propaganda that our civilization is continuously marinating in.

The most common articles of propaganda — and by far the most consequential — are not the glaring, memorable instances that live in infamy among the critically minded. They’re the mundane messages, distortions and lies-by-omission that people are fed day in and day out to normalize the status quo and lay the foundation for more propaganda to be administered in the future.

One of the forms this takes is the way the western political/media class manipulates the Overton window of acceptable political opinion.

Have you ever noticed how when you look at any mainstream newspaper, broadcast or news website, you never see views from those who oppose the existence of the US-centralized empire? Or those who want to close all foreign US military bases? Or those who want to dismantle capitalism? Or those who want a thorough rollback of the creeping authoritarianism our civilization is being subjected to? You might see some quibbling about different aspects of the empire, some debate over whether we should de-escalate against Russia so we can better escalate against China, but you won’t ever see anyone calling for the complete end of the empire and its abuses altogether.

That’s propaganda. It’s propaganda in multiple ways: it excludes voices that are critical of the established status quo from being heard and influencing people, it amplifies voices (many of whom have packing foam for brains) which support the status quo, and, most importantly, it creates the illusion that the range of political opinions presented are the only reasonable political opinions to have.

The creation of that illusion is propaganda. It’s not something solid that you can point to easily because it’s comprised of an omission of something rather than a concrete thing, but it warps people’s perspectives in ways that have immensely far-reaching consequences. It’s something that doesn’t stand out too sharply against the background, but because people are exposed to it continuously day in and day out, it plays a huge role in shaping their worldview.

Another related method of manipulation is agenda-setting — the way the press shapes public thinking by emphasising some subjects and not others. In placing importance on some matters over others simply by giving disproportionate coverage to them, the mass media (who are propagandists first and news reporters second) give the false impression that those topics are more important and the de-emphasised subjects are less so. As political scientist Bernard Cohen famously observed way back in 1963, the press “may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about. The world will look different to different people depending on the map that is drawn for them by writers, editors, and publishers of the paper they read.”

Ever noticed how the fact that our governments are increasingly tempting nuclear war seems like it ought to be a front-page story pretty much every day of the week, but instead the news is full of stuff like the US presidential race and people arguing over what products Target should sell during Pride Month? That’s agenda-setting.

The press could easily have spent the entire Trump administration screaming about the dangerous aggressions Trump was advancing against Russia instead of calling him a Putin puppet, and mainstream liberals would have fixated on Trump’s warmongering insanity instead of calling him Putin’s cock holster. But that wouldn’t have served the interests of the empire, which had been planning to ramp up aggressions against Russia for years. They set the agenda, and the public fell in line.

Another of the mundane, almost-invisible ways the public is propagandized from day to day is described in a recent video by Second Thought titled “You’re Not Immune To Propaganda“. We’re continually fed messages by the capitalist machine that we must work hard for employers and accept whatever standards and compensation they see fit to offer, and if we have difficulty thriving in this unjust system the fault lies with us and not with the system. Poor? That’s your fault. Miserable? Your fault. Unemployed? Your fault. Overworked? Your fault.

The continual message we’re fed every day is that there’s nothing to rebel against and nothing to oppose, because any problems we’re perceiving are our own fault and not the fault of an abusive, exploitative system which is built to extract profit from the working class and the ecosystem at the expense of both. The system cannot be a failure, it can only be failed.

Then there’s the ideological herding funnel we discussed recently, which herds the population into two mainstream factions of equal size which both prevent all meaningful change and serve the interests of the powerful. Anyone who can’t be herded into either of these mainstream factions is instead herded into fake “populist” factions, which eventually corral them back into the mainstream factions. Those few politically engaged people who can’t be herded toward any of these groups are so small in number that they can simply be marginalized and denied any sizeable platform from which to spread their ideas, and “democracy” does the rest because the majority are supporting the status quo.

Maybe the most consequential of all the mundane, routine ways we’re propagandized is the way the mass media manufacture the illusion of normality in a dystopia so disturbing that we would all scream our lungs out if we could see it with fresh eyes. The way pundits, politicians and reporters will talk about the Biden administration surrounding China with war machinery without also talking about how freakish and horrifying it is that we’re looking at rapidly escalating brinkmanship between nuclear-armed countries. The way American cities are full of homeless people and it’s just treated as a normal and acceptable thing to simply let them stay homeless and push them out of wherever they try to be. The way nothing ever changes no matter who we vote for but we’re still herded into the voting booths and told to vote better.

As a character in the movie Waking Life puts it, “We all know the function of the media has never been to eliminate the evils of the world, no! Their job is to persuade us to accept those evils and get used to living with them. The powers that be want us to be passive observers. And they haven’t given us any other options outside the occasional purely symbolic act of voting — do you want the puppet on the right or the puppet on the left?”

They don’t just tell us what to believe about the world, they tell us what to believe about ourselves. They give us the frameworks upon which we cast our ambitions and evaluate our success, and we build psychological identities out of those constructs. I am a businessman. I am unemployed. My life is about making money. My life is about disappointing people. I am a success. I am a failure. They invent the test of our adequacy, and they invent the system by which we are graded on that test.

Over and over and over again, day after day, we are fed seemingly small messages which add up over time. Messages like,

• The world works more or less the way we were taught in school.
• The media have some problems but basically tell the truth.
• The status quo is working basically fine.
• Democracy is real and voting is effective.
• This is the only way things can be.
• Our government might have its problems, but it’s basically good.
• You can earn your way into happiness by working harder.
• You can consume your way into happiness with more spending.
• If you think the system is dysfunctional, you’re the dysfunctional one.
• Those who oppose the status quo are weird and untrustworthy.
• Things might get better after the next election cycle.
• Any attempt to change things is a silly waste of time.

By feeding us all these simple, foundational lies day after day, year after year from the time we are very young, they lay the groundwork for the more complex, specific lies we’ll be told later on. Lies like “Russia/China/Iran/etc is a real problem and its government needs to be stopped,” or “People are struggling financially right now, but it’s just because times are hard and it can’t be helped.”

All the mundane lies serve as a primer for the lies we’ll be told later, because once our worldview has been shaped by them, our basic human cognitive biases and predisposition to reject information which conflicts with our worldview will ensure that we’ll take on board the information which confirms our biases and reject any evidence against it. They construct our worldviews for us, then let our normal cognitive defense systems protect it.

Their messages don’t even need to be well-evidenced or well-argued, they only need to be repeated frequently due to a glitch in human cognition known as the illusory truth effect which causes us to mistake the feeling of having heard something before with the feeling of something being true.

Add to all this the recent development of things like Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation and the deck becomes stacked against truth even further, because someone’s odds of stumbling across information which conflicts with the propaganda they’ve been fed goes dramatically down. Even if they’re actively searching for information which conflicts the mainstream worldview, algorithms by Google and Google-owned YouTube often make it almost impossible to find.

So that’s what we’re up against. There’s a failure to appreciate just how pervasive and powerful the empire’s propaganda machine is, even among those who are very critical of empire, because propaganda in our society is like water for fish — we’re swimming in it constantly, so we don’t see it. You have to step way, way back and begin examining our situation from its most basic foundations to get any perspective on how all-encompassing it really is.

Finding your way out of the propaganda matrix takes a lot of diligent work, tons of curiosity, the humility to admit you’ve been completely wrong about everything, and more than a little plain dumb luck. But if you keep hacking away at it eventually you get there, and then you can help others get there too. It’s a hard slog, but if our chains are psychological that means they’re ultimately only made of dream stuff. All that needs to happen is for enough of us to wake up.

Everything’s Getting Way More Dangerous And Way More Stupid. Caitlin Johnstone. May 26, 2023

Moon of Alabama has an article out on how an uncomfortable number of relatively restraint-oriented foreign policy officials have been exiting the Biden administration, while a China hawk has just been appointed the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Antiwar has an article out about how New York congressman Jerry Nadler told an Epoch Times reporter that he “wouldn’t care” if Ukraine used US-made F-16s to strike Russian territory, and doesn’t find the possibility that they might do so concerning.

This comes days after we learned that the Biden administration has signed off on Ukraine getting F-16s while also greenlighting an offensive on Crimea using US-made weapons, a nightmare scenario which greatly escalates the risks of nuclear war.

There are no adults behind the wheel of the vehicle that’s driving us toward World War Three. We’re on a bus that’s being driven straight toward a cliff, and it’s being driven by infants. If we survive this it will not be because of the experienced leadership of western governments, but completely in spite of it. ...........

OK Doomer: Real Talk

Life at 2030: Real Talk. OK Doomer by Jessica Wildfire. May 27, 2023.



Like me, you’ve probably spent some time wondering what your life will look like by the year 2030. Conversations around climate change have settled into three main groups. You have the climate deniers who believe it’s all a scam. You have the climate activists who demand urgent action. Now we have climate minimizers, who assure us we’ll be okay in a world with 2-3C of warming.

Well, let’s consider what’s happening now:

Farmers in the U.S. have already abandoned more than 30 percent of their winter-wheat fields this year. It’s the biggest drop in production in 100 years. Grain traders predict it’s going to get worse over the summer. It was a hard winter across the midwest, hit by drought and severe cold.

Even Fox News calls it “devastating.”

It’s not looking good for beef, either. The nation’s cattle inventory is reaching all-time lows this year. As of April, inventory was down 4.4 percent. Again, drought is hitting pastures hard. It’s driving up the cost of feed. Worse, the long-term data shows a clear overall decline over the last 20 years. Even when the beef industry “expands,” we’re producing less than we did during the 1990s. Most agriculture experts will tell you: Beef is in decline, and prices will only go up from here.

For the first time ever, nations are seriously considering a plan to vaccinate chickens and turkeys against avian flu, during the worst outbreak in recorded history. During the last 18 months, the global poultry industry has culled 200 million birds. It’s been having a real impact on prices. All that sounds great for vegans, but that doesn’t change the simple fact that our breadbasket is slowly failing. If it’s not drought and heat waves, it’s the growing threat of disease.

It’s not just in the U.S., either.

Asian countries have already been seeing record-breaking temperatures as high as 112F. China is bracing for another summer of extreme heat, alternating between drought and flooding. Experts predict it will threaten “to disrupt more commodities, even niche ones like rubber and peanut crops.” As of April, drought has already caused delays at 80 percent of the country’s rubber plantations.

Back in February, Britain was rationing fruits and vegetables.

According to CNBC, stores were limiting the purchase of tomatoes, peppers, and cumbers “to three items per customer.” The cause? Extreme weather across southern Europe and northern Africa.

Experts predict that even coffee is going to become a luxury item as climate change kills off 50 percent of farmland by 2050. We’ve already seen coffee farmers in Central America abandoning their fields.

Does this sound like fearmongering?

These are all reported facts.

Here’s the big picture:

We haven’t even crossed over the 1.5C threshold yet. That’s the number climate scientists have told us to stay under, if we’re going to avoid the worst fallout of global warming. Recently, they predicted there’s a very good chance that we’ll breach that limit within the next few years, decades earlier than expected. Artificial intelligence models are predicting it’s guaranteed.

Climate scientists have held back from making detailed predictions about what our lives are going to look like by 2030. They hedge. They don’t want to get blamed for causing panic. They talk in relatively vague terms. Nobody wants to be wrong. Climate “alarmists” like Bill McGuire or Gaia Vince have painted vivid portraits of what to expect down the road. Meanwhile, we’ve seen the rise of climate minimizers over the last few years, people who consider themselves experts who go around insisting that 2C of warming won’t be that bad.

Increasingly, the mass media has started to condition us for life in a 2C world. They’re already working on their minimizer rhetoric.

Are we surprised?

For the last year, they’ve worked hard to convince everyone to accept mass death and disability at the hands of a virus. It’s starting to look like that’s the strategy of choice for unavoidable climate change.

I’m not afraid of sounding like a doomer.

Here’s what I think we can reasonably expect our lives to look like by the year 2030. I think it’s important to talk about. I’m not trying to scare anyone. I’m trying to prepare them, rationally and emotionally.

First, I think we can expect inflation to continue. The vast majority of politicians and economists still live largely in denial when it comes to climate change. They’re not factoring it into their models. It doesn’t matter how much the Federal Reserve keeps hiking up interest rates. That’s not going to help, either. The real problem here is twofold. First, there’s just straight-up corporate greed.

Second, the midwest and southwest are sinking deeper into a geologically predictable megadrought. Climate change is going to make it even worse.

We’re talking about a second Dust Bowl.

Large parts of the U.S. are already seeing the return of dust storms. Earlier this month, a dust storm caused a 72-car pileup in Illinois. More and more, farmers are reporting drought on par with the 1920s and 1930s. As a farmer in Nebraska told local news: “It’s just wildly dry here…and this is the wet season, so we should be soaking up a lot of rain… that’s a little bit scary.”

Severe weather in general will keep getting worse.

According to the American Farm Bureau Federation, severe weather in 2022 cost the U.S. more than $21 billion in crop losses. That’s a minimum estimate that doesn’t even include livestock, structural damage, or other factors. The National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration calls 2022 the third worst disaster year in American history, with the worst happening in 2017. So anyone trying to claim that we’re seeing less severe weather is…lying.

Meanwhile, lines at food banks keep getting longer. As pandemic SNAP benefits expire, demand is going up everywhere from Utah to California.

When you combine corporate greed with megadrought and soil depletion, it doesn’t take a genius to predict a vast expansion of poverty and hunger by the 2030s. Food is just going to keep getting more expensive.

Rationing and shortages will become the norm. We can cross our fingers and hope that the vegetation zones will simply shift, and that other states can take up the slack by growing more food.

That’s a big if.

Homelessness is going up, anywhere from 6 percent a year in some states to 23 percent in states like Oregon. Housing is just too expensive. It’s partly greed, but also driven by climate change as warmer weather brings disease and insect infestations to the world’s timber supplies. There just aren’t enough houses for people, and investors treat them more as commodities than living spaces. Again, we could adapt by replacing timber with bamboo.

We’re not doing that (yet).

Summers will become unbearable in large parts of the U.S. We’re talking about heat indexes in the 110s on a regular basis.

Forget going outside.

More people are going to rely on air conditioning 24/7. People in Arizona are already using oven mittens to open their car doors.

In an optimistic scenario, we’ll build more solar farms and wind turbines to handle the grid pressure from more people blasting their AC. In a more realistic scenario, you can expect power disruptions and curtailments.

If you’re lucky, it won’t be life-threatening.

Just extremely uncomfortable.

Severe weather is beating up our economy, despite what the deniers and minimizers say. In 2021, damage from natural disasters totaled $145 billion. Americans are feeling it, with 90 percent of us paying more for home insurance. A lot of insurance companies have started to abandon areas prone to extreme weather. They’ve been paying out more than $1 billion a year, a sixfold increase from the 1980s. Ten insurance companies went bankrupt in Florida just over the last two years. Contrary to logic, people are choosing to move to dangerous areas. They’re simply not thinking about their long-term future.

By 2030, you can expect to pay a lot more for insurance depending on where you live. It’s going to get so expensive and hard to find, a lot of Americans will simply start choosing to skip it altogether.

It’ll become another luxury.

We could go on, but I think you get the idea.

This is what the world kinda looks like now, and we haven’t even breached 1.5C of warming. So that’s what we can expect by 2030: We’re going to be paying far more for food. We’re going to be buying a lot less meat, and probably fewer fruits and vegetables. There’s going to be long lines at food banks.

A majority of Americans will be broke and food insecure. We’ll struggle to cool our homes. We’ll struggle to find insurance. We’re going to see people wind up poor and homeless than we didn’t expect.

The year 2030 is going to look a lot like 1930.

The difference is that we’ll already be in a prolonged war with China, because that’s what our politicians and military seem to want more than anything. We’ll very much feel like we’re living through a Second Great Depression, except it’s going to last longer. It will probably be the new normal.

So, a lot of us aren’t “doomed” just yet, especially if we start preparing now. That would mean moving to a plant-based diet. It would mean thinking about a tiny house or an earth-sheltered home with earth tubes instead of some huge structure on the coast or the middle of the Arizona desert. It would mean building or joining a climate-resilient community, and embracing a life that’s framed more around sustainability and homeostasis. On a larger scale, it would mean demanding better public housing and better public transportation. It would mean demanding more efficient use of resources, including water.

We’re in the business of climate adaptation now. Adapting to a hotter earth does two things at once. It helps us in the short term, but it also achieves a lot of the goals that climate optimists say they care about.

I’m writing this because climate minimizers are going around telling us not to worry about a world that’s 2C warmer. They’re trying to convince us that it’ll be fine, that it won’t really have an impact on us. You know, it sounds a lot like climate denial, just in a different outfit with different makeup.

They don’t want us to think about the future in concrete terms like food and housing shortages, and unaffordable home insurance.

If people did that, they would get angry.

They would demand action.

They would do something.

The Real Enemy is Normal. OK Doomer by Jessica Wildfire. May 26, 2023

Here’s the thing:

A Yale study on climate change communication found that 70 percent of Americans are worried about climate change. More than 30 percent of them are deeply worried. And yet, only 9 percent are talking about it.

That’s a huge gap.

Margaret Klein Salamon puts her attention on that gap in the second edition of her book Facing The Climate Emergency. It comes out in a few days. (Yes, she asked me to write about it. No, she’s not paying me anything.) Last year, I wrote about the first edition of her book and how it changed my life. Salamon’s writing has been there for me in the same way that my readers tell me my work has been there for them. When I get dragged through the mud for spreading doom, her book reminds me that it’s healthy to express our sense of grief and especially our outrage at the inaction and sanguine complacency that surrounds us.

People need to hear it. ............

Hagens: The Real Global Macro

 The Real Global Macro | Frankly #28

Tsakraklides: We were never in control

We Were Never In Control. George Tsakraklides. Apr. 7, 2023.


Contrary to what humanity’s impressive technological milestones and achievements may suggest, the surprising truth is that we have never been in charge of what happens to us. As a biological organism aiming to maximize its chances of survival, all of our accomplishments and decisions were blindly driven with this primary survival objective in mind: economic growth, technological evolution, population increase. Whatever it takes, at whatever cost to us, or to the planet. From our humble beginnings as a monocellular life form and up to today’s complex industrial civilization, evolution has never stopped self-selecting for exactly the same traits in humans: greedy and exploitative tendencies, and the physical and mental skillsets that accompany these – given that, it is these precise skillsets which are the most likely to avert extinction in the short term. Our brain therefore was enlarged and optimized to become a resource exploitation logistical device: it was customized to “mine” all aspects of its environment for resources efficiently, quickly, and most importantly, at terrifying scale. The seemingly quantum leap in data processing power that evolution gifted us with is so immense, that its impact has still not fully been realized. Our brain is still able to keep up with any sophisticated technology we develop, just about. Humans with exactly the same brain as us, living just a few thousand years ago, would never have imagined that their brain can do all this, and keep up with it.

Humans aside, our greedy tendency is the natural, evolutionary driver of any species, whether it is an amoeba or a Nobel prize winner. However complex and sophisticated our DNA becomes, it will always self-select for attributes that favor its successful replication into the future. Social intelligence, philosophy and ethics cannot weed out greed, ever, simply because greed will always be supercharged by the evolutionary process. Therefore, although we often erroneously think of ourselves as the only species with true sentience and “free will” to take our own decisions, the reality is that we have never really been in charge. The most important factor in any of our decisions is, and will always be, our own personal survival in the very short term. This is a permanent, indestructible feature of our hardware that came with our factory settings: our DNA. This DNA codes for mental skillsets and hormonal responses which influence our attitudes and behaviors, and which our popular culture often likes to classify as social “norms” which are determined and shaped by our environment in different societies and timepoints in our history. While much of this is true to an extent, the big elephant in the room is the part of our greed which is DNA-based: it simply cannot be tackled.

Of course, this is not good news when it comes to addressing the apocalyptic catastrophe we have in store for this planet. Implementing any of the myriad of already existing solutions for stopping our self-destruction would require us being able to step outside of the context of economic growth and exploitation, which is so paramount to our identity. We simply lack the faculties to do this, and proof of this is that the more solutions to climate change emerge, the more conscious our discussions become on what it is we need to urgently do, the more obstinate our resistance grows towards implementing any of it. Our greedy personal survival instinct is much stronger than any rational or technological solution which benefits the greater society or ecosystem. Are we introspective enough to recognize this, rise above it and begin to cultivate the mental tools we desperately need, despite this pre-disposition? It is a question of nature vs. nurture, and nature is overwhelmingly winning thus far, hands down, for the overwhelming duration of our history. Addressing climate change and the ecological apocalypse is not an issue of yet another technology or increased processing power, these have both run their course. It is an issue of truly, genuinely claiming our own destiny, for the very first time in our 200,000 years of existence as modern humans. The expectation is almost impossible, as much of humanity does not even believe we are responsible for what is happening. Those who accept no responsibility have already given up on their potential to make a difference in the course of events.

It is of course a profound disappointment, not to mention a paradox, that evolution didn’t know any better than select for some of the most ecocidal attributes in humans. But evolution is not an infallible process. Its drawback is that it can only operate based on current wisdom, that is, what it knows at the time of mutation. It is always completely oblivious to the future. We evolved in an era of abundance on the planet, which is not the case today. New evolutionary mutations, new species of humans are needed urgently in this new, depleted environment we have created. The life forms that evolve after we’ve wrecked Earth will probably have no choice but to be a bit more thrifty, at least for the first few million years. As far as humans go, we cannot simply redesign ourselves like a new iphone version. Evolution is a cumulative process and DNA code can only be amended, not rewritten. We have gone too far down the evolutionary path to remove greed out of our biological system. Crocodiles are much more ecological in comparison: they can go without a meal for 12 months, and don’t even get grumpy about it. They have more patience and Zen wisdom than our own Dalai Lama.

I know that many philosophers, environmental activists and economists will disagree with me. They believe that we have the power vested in us to take control of our destiny. I wholeheartedly hope that they are right, and that I am very wrong, but I come to this conversation from a biology perspective, and biology eats philosophy, economics and social theory for breakfast any day. Biology is the raw blood and bones of who we really are. Our hormones and our “wiring” do determine much of our behavior, unfortunately.

Look at today’s world. Despite all of this technology and sophisticated civilization, do we really think any of us are in charge of our lives? The same survival instincts still rule at large, the same irresistible “lifeforce” within each organism to greedily appropriate as much resource from its environment as it possibly can. The difference between humans and other species is that greed for us is as much an instinct, as it is an institutionalized, perennialized and sophisticated economic system that controls every aspect of our daily needs, and every corresponding natural resource catering to these. The irresistible survival instinct that all species have is, in the case of humans, harnessed and monetized by an organized economic system that has become impossible to escape, unless one goes off-grid and completely checks out of society. As an organized industrial society, we have long ago outsourced our future to this economic system, which supersedes any national or global political entity.

What is also unique to our species is that the survival of this economic system has become more important than the survival of humanity. The system only cares about propagating itself, and it does this by farming more humans and creating more consumer needs in order to increase its revenue. We are all strongly encouraged, and with the utmost urgency, to keep on consuming, polluting and having more children. Not for our benefit, but solely to prevent this toxic, unsustainable capitalist system from collapsing into itself any earlier than it will anyway. The industrial revolution, institutionalization of society and digital marketing all evolved with the same, common goal: to scale up consumption and create easy-to-manage identical humans, who all helplessly depend on this system like a hospital patient hypodermically connected to a drip feed. Modern human life is as unnatural as that of a chicken, living and dying under electric light in a chicken factory. We have relinquished control of our lives long ago to this factory, addicted to its hallucinogenic drugs and growth hormones and not knowing any better. Moreover, this system is completely watertight. There is absolutely no escape. The “chicken humans” do not even know what free-range means, growing up in a cultural context which legitimizes a completely artificial life, yet one that feels vividly real to all of us, given that it is the only reality we have ever known of.

From this dystopian but pragmatic perspective, human civilization is technically no longer run by humans. It is run by profit and algorithms, both completely selfish, non-human entities that have zero ethics or social and environmental conscience (arguably we lack these as well). Human or other life therefore already has no value within this matrix. We have effectively been hijacked, turned into working zombies, simply so that this system can continue, regardless of our own well-being or future. Just like true zombies, we have no idea that we are technically dead.

This system would have made sense to an extent, if at least it was a sustainable economic model that could continue into the future, securing our survival within a mutually parasitic/symbiotic relationship. But it isn’t, as it is based on the exponential leveraging of the very resources which it destroys. It is exhausting its own fuel, and it does so at an accelerating rate, much like stock market derivative instruments which rely on fake money. All of Earth, including its beings, resources, climate systems and all of humanity, is being parasitically exploited by a non-human, semi-sentient, self-destructive Ponzi scheme entity we shallowly call capitalism. It is now in full control of our lives, and of the planet’s resources. This is a sure death sentence for human civilisation, a large proportion of biological life on Earth, and, depending how bad things get, a significant hurdle to any new complex life forms who may try to emerge one day out of the planet’s radioactive ashes.

The system of course has evolved to give us the impression that we DO have full control and choice over our lives. But both the list of choices as well as the decision options are limited and prescribed. They represent different flavors of the same option, which aims to maximize returns for an economic system addicted to profit. Sentenced by birth to be stakeholders of this scheme, we are purposely miseducated and groomed to become greedy, insatiable consumers, running around all day working, purchasing, paying bills and destroying Earth in the process. We have not simply lost any rudimentary control over our lives, but our own lives simply do not matter. It is the preservation of the hard, cold profit indexes of the economic system that matters, and which all of us work for.

This Ponzi scheme of “wealth creation for wealth creation’s sake” has been an Armageddon of natural wealth destruction for the planet so far. Most of us are just not able to see it, as we think we were getting something out of it for ourselves. In reality, we abandoned all 8 million other species of this planet when we signed under the dotted line to join the ranks of this Ponzi scheme corporation, forgetting that we are one of these 8 million species ourselves. Ironically, the better the profit numbers look, the poorer we become, eventually stealing from each other in an oversubscribed betting scheme that is heading for collapse. We, collectively the stakeholders, will of course pay the full price. As for the “system”, it is non-biological, non-sentient, and will simply hibernate until the next big civilization it manages to hitch a ride with.

Climate Realism not Doomerism

A critique of the WaPo article : Why climate ‘doomers’ are replacing climate ‘deniers’


An article called “Why climate “doomers” are replacing climate “deniers” ” by Shannon Osaka was published on March 24th 2023 in the WaPo. I consider myself to be somewhat of a climate doomer so I thought it would be interesting to see what they had to say about “doomers”.

The article starts with the story of a young man, Sean Youra, who learns the truth about climate change, we are basically screwed, it’s too late, climate change is going to destroy the world as we know it. But apparently, according to “scientists and experts”, his discoveries are just “defeatism”, which could “undermine efforts to take action” and “may be just as dangerous as climate denial.”

Really? I’d be interested to learn how these efforts can change the fact that the concentration of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere is now above 500ppm CO2e, which will warm the planet by about 10°C in the long term, according to the latest paper by James Hansen.

We are then introduced to Zeke Hausfauther, a contributor to the IPCC report, who says “It’s fair to say that recently many of us climate scientists have spent more time arguing with the doomers than with the deniers”. I dug a little to learn more about the fellow. Zeke is the typical paid climate scientist who spreads absolute non-sense, like the myth that “climate change stops at net zero”.

I recently wrote a thread on this subreddit debunking this myth. The gist of it is that the biggest contributor to climate change are the 1 trillion tons of CO2 already in the atmosphere, not current emissions. It can sound counter intuitive, but current emissions are keeping us cool because burning fossil fuels also produce aerosols which cool the planet by about 1°C. But unlike greenhouse gas, who stay in the atmosphere for thousands of years, aerosols only stay there for a few days/weeks. Net zero will therefore accelerate global warming and not stop it. Net zero is not even possible anyways since just to feed 8 billion people, you need fertilizers made with fossil fuels. And like we saw above, with current GHG concentrations, 10°C of warming are locked in.

We are then introduced to Guy McPherson, with whom many here must be familiar with. Guy claims that humans will be extinct within 10 years. I don’t want to enter in a debate about this claim or the person behind the quote, but knowing how much global warming there is in the pipeline, even if it’s not in 10 years, is it that crazy to believe that humanity won’t make it?

She then describes Guy McPherson as the type of conspiracy theorist who claim that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is downplaying the seriousness of the issue. Is it even a conspiracy theory at this point? The IPCC has consistently been downplaying the pace and severity of climate change. One good example from the link I just shared : “The IPCC has always confidently projected that the Arctic ice sheet was safe at least until 2050 or well beyond 2100.” How is that going?

We are then introduced to a man called Andrew Smith. I’ll leave the full quote because I believe that Andrew is completely right, and he is probably the sanest person quoted in this article.

Andrew Smith, a retired engineer from Yorkshire, England, is slightly turned off by the term “doomer.” It provokes, he says, a sense of being on the fringes of society, or visions of doomsday preppers filling their bunkers with canned food. “For me, a climate doomer is simply a person who’s taken a look at the peer-reviewed science, taken stock of the natural world around them, and come to a conclusion,” he wrote in a message via Twitter. Smith believes that the world is on track to warm 4 to 8 degrees Celsius compared to preindustrial times.

The author then mentions 2018 as the year that doom really started spreading, with the strikes from Greta Thunberg, protests from Extinction Rebellion, the publication of Deep Adaption by Jem Bendell – I somewhat agree with this, it’s the time when I started opening my eyes too.

That same year, the IPCC Special Report on 1.5°C was published too. The author quotes Hausfather again regarding that report, who says that “part of the problem is that climate targets — say, the goal to limit warming to 1.5C — have become interpreted by the public as climate thresholds, which would drive the planet into a “hothouse” state. In fact, scientists don’t believe there is anything unique about that temperature that will cause runaway tipping points; the landmark IPCC report merely aimed to show the risks of bad impacts are much higher at 2C than at 1.5.”

Again, Hausfather is spreading nonsense. First off, it's not possible to limit warming to 1.5°C or 2°C. Climate change is driven by GHG concentrations in the atmosphere. The study of paleoclimates has clearly shown that. During the Pliocene, 3 millions years ago, GHG concentrations were around 400ppm CO2e and temperatures were around 3-4°c higher. We are now at more than 500ppm CO2e, why does he think it’s possible to limit warming to 1.5°C or 2°C?

The 1.5°C and 2°C objectives are an invention by people like William Nordhaus, an American economist from Yale University. They have no basis in science, it’s all based on what he thought capitalism could get away with. The idea was that we were only at 1°C of warming, that we still had a “carbon budget” and that we could keep emitting greenhouse gas for a while, for the sake of economic growth. He even got a Nobel Prize for economics in 2018 for being such a good defender of the status quo.

Funnily enough, Hausfather is a fellow at the Breakthrough Institute, founded by no other than Ted Nordhaus, William’s nephew. The Breakthrough Institute advocates for technological development, and increasing economic growth, through a combination of nuclear power and urbanization. While people are starting to cook to death, the Nordhaus family keeps its priorities straight : infinite economic growth!

The author then quotes, Kate Marvel, a climate scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute, who has said that while humans probably won’t go extinct due to climate change, “not going extinct” is a low bar. I hope that Kate has some solid advice for surviving in a +10°C world, because I frankly don’t. It’s funny that it’s pretty much always people with kids like Kate who spread hopium. I guess it’s easier than telling your kid that all they will ever know is a dying world?

At the end, we learn that Youra corrected his way, rejected doomerism and embraced hopium, with congratulations from the Washington Post.

Now here is my advice. I don’t know how long civilization or humanity have, or how exactly this will end, but I can see the ship going down with the next few years or decades. We are beyond screwed. The first step is to accept this reality. You may feel terrorized by this, you may feel numb, powerless, and it’s a completely normal reaction to have, many have gone through this in this space. Then it’s up to you to decide what you want to do with the time you have left. I would personally recommend not having kids, preparing at least a little, both physically (storing food, water, etc.) and mentally, not working too hard, and just doing what you enjoy most while you can.

R.I.P. Will Steffen

Will Steffen’s crucial climate ideas on “Hothouse Earth”, tipping cascades and non-linearity. David Spratt, Climate Code Red. Feb. 1, 2023.

(go to Spratt's article at Climate Code Red for active links)


The eminent Australian climate scientist, and former Labor government advisor and head of climate at ANU, Will Steffen, who died early this week from complications following cancer surgery, will be remembered for some of the big, crucial ideas he and his collaborators contributed to the understanding of the Earth System, particularly planetary boundaries, climate tipping point vulnerabilities and cascades, risk and nonlinearity, and the “Hothouse Earth” scenario.

Particularly in the last few years, Steffen was very clear and forthright in communicating the threat and the dynamics of the climate system, and the trajectory towards collapse:

"Given the momentum in both the Earth and human systems, and the growing difference between the ‘reaction time’ needed to steer humanity towards a more sustainable future, and the ‘intervention time’ left to avert a range of catastrophes in both the physical climate system (e.g., melting of Arctic sea ice) and the biosphere (e.g., loss of the Great Barrier Reef), we are already deep into the trajectory towards collapse … That is, the intervention time we have left has, in many cases, shrunk to levels that are shorter than the time it would take to transition to a more sustainable system.”

More recently, Steffen and others asked:

“Could anthropogenic climate change result in worldwide societal collapse or even eventual human extinction? At present, this is a dangerously underexplored topic. Yet there are ample reasons to suspect that climate change could result in a global catastrophe.”

And in a recent book chapter, "The Earth System, the Great Acceleration and the Anthropocene", he recognised that climate change was already dangerous:

"It is clear from observations of climate change-related impacts in Australia alone – the massive bushfires of the 2019–2020 Black Summer; the third mass bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef in only 5 years; and long-term cool-season drying of the country’s southeast agricultural zone – that even a 1.1 °C temperature rise has put us into a dangerous level of climate change.”

Steffen was the key scientific climate advisor to the 2007-2013 Australian Labor government. In that role I often disagreed with his political advocacy, and told him so. Will’s advocacy stuck pretty rigidly to the 2°C, 450-ppm-CO2 goal that was de rigueur in global and national policy-making circles in those days, even as the science was already clear that it was a dangerous goal, and Jim Hansen had persuasively outlined the case for a goal of under 350 ppm, which had been adopted around the world by some more progressive parts of the climate movement.

But Steffen was far from alone amongst scientists around the world who become jammed between politics and science, in the struggle for balance between research knowledge and wanting, or sounding, to be politically relevant to governments either in denial or unwilling to grasp the size of the task.

At the same time, Steffen was keenly aware in 2008 that “the scientific community is underestimating the speed at which the climate is changing”, warning that the world's sea levels could rise by up to four metres by the end of the century.

And whilst Ross Garnaut’s 2008 report for Labor on climate change had contemplated the 450 ppm and 550 ppm goals (with short-term warming of around 2°C and 3°C respectively), Steffen in a 2009 report for the climate change department had recognised that 550 ppm (a doubling of the pre-industrial CO2 level) could lead to 6°C of warming:

“... when ice extent is treated not as a forcing but as a climate system response, so that both fast and slow feedbacks are included, the climate sensitivity approximately doubles (Hansen et al. 2008). Therefore, the eventual temperature rise in response to a doubling of CO2 is at least 3C and likely up to 6C, depending on the behaviour of the slow feedbacks.”

Many scientists and collaborators have already expressed their sorrow at the death of Will Steffen and paid tribute to his legacy, for example here and here and here.

Steffen’s passing is a great loss to climate understanding and advocacy in Australia, and to the research community at a global level. I will remember his work particularly for publications over the last fifteen years that dealt with system-level analysis of climate change, boundaries, risks and dynamics. In no particular order, some key papers and contributions in which he was either lead author or a co-author include the following:


1. “Climate tipping points — too risky to bet against” (2020)

Authored by Timothy Lenton, Johan Rockström, Owen Gaffney, Stefan Rahmstorf, Katherine Richardson, Will Steffen and Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, this paper was the first peer-reviewed paper (to my knowledge) to recognise the climate emergency as constituted by existential risks: “We are in a climate emergency… this is an existential threat to civilization” and “the evidence from tipping points alone suggests that we are in a state of planetary emergency: both the risk and urgency of the situation are acute”.

The paper pointed to “biosphere tipping points which can trigger abrupt carbon release back to the atmosphere.. Permafrost across the Arctic is beginning to irreversibly thaw and release carbon dioxide and methane… the boreal forest in the subarctic is increasingly vulnerable.”

The authors said that:

“the clearest emergency would be if we were approaching a global cascade of tipping points that led to a new, less habitable, ‘hothouse’ climate state. Interactions could happen through ocean and atmospheric circulation or through feedbacks that increase greenhouse-gas levels and global temperature. Alternatively, strong cloud feedbacks could cause a global tipping point. We argue that cascading effects might be common. Research last year analysed 30 types of regime shift spanning physical climate and ecological systems... This indicated that exceeding tipping points in one system can increase the risk of crossing them in others. Such links were found for 45% of possible interactions. In our view, examples are starting to be observed.”

The conclusion to be drawn from all of this is that the threat, the risks, are overwhelming. And it is a slap to conventional economic modelling of climate risks, when they write that:

“If damaging tipping cascades can occur and a global tipping point cannot be ruled out, then this is an existential threat to civilization. No amount of economic cost–benefit analysis is going to help us. We need to change our approach to the climate problem.”

2. “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene” (2018)

With Steffen as lead author, this paper known colloquially as the “Hothouse Earth” paper, and one that captured the public imagination, was downloaded 270,000 times in just the first few days after publication.

A “Hothouse Earth” scenario is described, in which system feedbacks and their mutual interaction could drive the Earth System climate to a point of no return, whereby further warming would become self-sustaining (without further human perturbations). This “Hothouse Earth” planetary threshold could exist at a temperature rise as low as 2°C, possibly even in the 1.5°C-2°C range.

Steffen also said that: “even if the Paris Accord target of a 1.5°C to 2.0°C rise in temperature is met, we cannot exclude the risk that a cascade of feedbacks could push the Earth System irreversibly onto a ‘Hothouse Earth’ pathway.”

In other words, even 1.5°C of warming could be so dangerous that further warming would become self-sustaining; a warning seemingly ignored by policymakers and most advocates.


3. Climate Endgame: Exploring catastrophic climate change scenarios (2022)

This paper published last year by ten authors, including Steffen, cannot be underestimated in bringing together a high-level analysis of the need for climate research to focus on the worse-case high-end possibilities:

• “Prudent risk management requires consideration of bad-to-worst-case scenarios.” We know that temperature rise has “fat tails”: low-probability, high-impact extreme outcomes. Large uncertainties about dangerous surprises “are reasons to prioritize rather than neglect them.” Thus “a thorough risk assessment would need to consider how risks spread, interact, amplify, and are aggravated by human responses”.
• “Climate damages are likely to be nonlinear” and result in an even larger risk tail. There are feedbacks in the carbon cycle and potential tipping points that could generate high greenhouse concentrations that are often missing from models.” There are even more uncertain feedbacks, which, in a very worst case, might amplify to an irreversible transition into a “Hothouse Earth” state [including] “recent simulations suggest that stratocumulus cloud decks might abruptly be lost at CO2 concentrations that could be approached by the end of the century, causing an additional ∼8 °C global warming. Large uncertainties about dangerous surprises are reasons to prioritize rather than neglect them.”
• Feedbacks and future warming: Declining emissions does not rule out … extreme climate change [due to] feedbacks in the carbon cycle and potential tipping points that could generate high greenhouse concentrations that are often missing from models. Examples include Arctic permafrost thawing that releases methane and CO2 , carbon loss due to intense droughts and fires in the Amazon, and the apparent slowing of dampening feedbacks such as natural carbon sink capacity. These are likely to not be proportional to warming… instead, abrupt and/or irreversible changes may be triggered at a temperature threshold. Particularly worrying is a “tipping cascade” in which multiple tipping elements interact in such a way that tipping one threshold increases the likelihood of tipping another.

4. "A safe operating space for humanity" (2009)

Led by John Rockstrom and Will Steffen, with 27 others (including Hansen and Schellnhuber), this landmark paper proposed that a safe level of atmospheric carbon dioxide should not exceed 350 ppm:

"We propose that human changes to atmospheric CO2 concentrations should not exceed 350 parts per million by volume, and that radiative forcing should not exceed 1 watt per square metre above pre-industrial levels. Transgressing these boundaries will increase the risk of irreversible climate change, such as the loss of major ice sheets, accelerated sea-level rise and abrupt shifts in forest and agricultural systems. Current CO2 concentration stands at 387 p.p.m.v. and the change in radiative forcing is 1.5 watts per square metre. There are at least three reasons for our proposed climate boundary. First, current climate models may significantly underestimate the severity of long-term climate change for a given concentration of greenhouse gases. Most models suggest that a doubling in atmospheric CO2 concentration will lead to a global temperature rise of about 3°C (with a probable uncertainty range of 2–4.5°C) once the climate has regained equilibrium. But these models do not include long-term reinforcing feedback processes that further warm the climate, such as decreases in the surface area of ice cover or changes in the distribution of vegetation. If these slow feedbacks are included, doubling CO2 levels gives an eventual temperature increase of 6°C (with a probable uncertainty range of 4–8°C). This would threaten the ecological life-support systems that have developed in the late Quaternary environment, and would severely challenge the viability of contemporary human societies."

5. “Human impacts on planetary boundaries amplified by Earth system interactions” (2020)

In this paper, Lade, Steffen et al surveyed and provisionally quantified interactions between the Earth system processes represented by the planetary boundaries and investigated their consequences for sustainability governance and identified a dense network of interactions between the planetary boundaries. The resulting cascades and feedbacks predominantly amplify human impacts on the Earth system and thereby shrink the safe operating space for future human impacts on the Earth system. The three key findings for policymakers were:

• Interactions are crucial to understanding the planetary boundaries and humanity’s impacts upon them. For example, biophysically-mediated interactions have almost doubled direct human impacts on the planetary boundaries.
• Most interactions we found were amplifying, meaning that impacts on one planetary boundary lead to increased impacts on other planetary boundaries. Cascading of human actions through multiple components of the Earth system complicates governance of the Earth system. On the other hand, these interactions offer substantial scope for synergies: if impacts on one planetary boundary are decreased, impacts on other planetary boundaries may also lessen.
• Interactions between planetary boundaries lead to trade-offs between the boundaries. For example, interactions between agricultural activity and carbon emissions mean that high levels of both cannot be maintained. On the other hand, these trade-offs offer humanity some freedom in choosing how to navigate to a safe operating space.

6. Model limitations

Will Steffen was clear about the limitations of models and a quantification fetish when dealing with hard-to-project non-linear change and “Hothouse Earth” possibilities, for example in this Guardian article from 2018:

“I think the dominant linear, deterministic framework for assessing climate change is flawed, especially at higher levels of temperature rise. So, yes, model projections using models that don’t include these processes indeed become less useful at higher temperature levels. Or, as my co-author John Schellnhuber says, we are making a big mistake when we think we can ‘park’ the Earth System at any given temperature rise – say 2°C – and expect it to stay there”.

“Even at the current level of warming of about 1°C above pre-industrial, we may have already crossed a tipping point for one of the feedback processes (Arctic summer sea ice), and we see instabilities in others – permafrost melting, Amazon forest dieback, boreal forest dieback and weakening of land and ocean physiological carbon sinks. And we emphasise that these processes are not linear and often have built-in feedback processes that generate tipping point behaviour. For example, for melting permafrost, the chemical process that decomposes the peat generates heat itself, which leads to further melting and so on.”

This is important because so much policymaking has been based on a goal of climate getting towards 2°C and then assuming that could become stable, when in fact the paleoclimate history suggest that 2°C is not a point of system stability, but a signpost on the road to a much hotter 3–4°C outcome.

And with William Knorr in The Conversation, Steffen warned that due to model limitations, we will not know exactly how the climate crisis will unfold until it’s too late.

Finally, Steffen’s capacity to communicate clearly and succinctly is well encapsulated in an interview with The Intercept when he said getting greenhouse gas emissions down fast has to be “the primary target of policy and economics” with something “like wartime footing”.

That sounded to me like a very short, effective description of the climate emergency.

Fabio Vighi on Senile Economics

please see his site for more of his writing, but this piece was too good not to re-post in its entirety: 

Fabio Vighi: Senile Economics: Bubble Ontology and the Pull of Gravity

What are the drivers of senile capitalism? I will list five of them in no particular order, and then proceed to discuss their interconnections:

1. Debt. The only road into the capitalist future continues to be signposted by liquidity creation programmes. Creating cash “out of nothing”, and setting it in motion as credit, is the elementary monetary strategy that keeps our societies from staring into the abyss – like the cartoon character who, having run off the edge of a cliff, floats in mid-air before acknowledging gravity. However, the pull of gravity is now irresistible, and the descent has begun with a violent bout of currency devaluation.
2. Bubbles. Financial bubbles, inflated by cheap credit feeding a delusional mechanism of perpetual motion, are the only meaningful measure of wealth-production left. Nothing but keeping the bubbles from popping matters to the minions of the “beautiful machine”. While the financialised economy balloons away from its social bond, human existence turns into collateral for the speculative algorithm.
3. Controlled demolition. Wage dumping and downward competition for fewer and fewer jobs is the necessary other side of the bubble paradigm. For the speculative markets to persist, the “work society” must be gradually downsized, since today’s artificially inflated financial assets and real demand are mutually exclusive. Simply put: Main Street is a liability for Wall Street, which is why consumer capitalism is now morphing into the management of collective immiseration.
4. Emergencies. Our existential condition during the terminal phase of bubble-to-bubble capitalism is an intrinsically terroristic meta-emergency ideology, a permacrisis that must accompany us from cradle to grave. In this respect, the pseudo-pandemic of 2020 was only the icebreaker. Let us not delude ourselves: a world that is set on defending so fanatically its own implosion has many more shockers in store for us.
5. Manipulation. Media propaganda in the age of digital hyper-connectivity comes naturally, so it is only natural that senile capitalism, sensing its collapse, makes the most of it. A stubborn confluence of blind stupidity and cynical calculation is at work here. As George Orwell predicted well before the internet, it comes down to telling lies while believing them: ‘The process [of mass-media deception] has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt.’[i] Jean Baudrillard called the result of this process ‘hyper-reality’.

Capital’s perpetual-motion machine

Having run out of monetary tricks, the financial elites have painted themselves into a corner. The debt-based speculative system they have pumped for decades through money printing and artificial suppression of interest rates can no longer be sustained without significant “collateral damage”. Bourgeois economic theory’s illusion that money can move autonomously, as if through a perpetual motion machine, is finally being exposed. The current inflationary spike is the first obvious symptom of a cancerous disease rapidly spreading through the social body, forcing a large share of the population – including the increasingly insolvent middle classes – to choose between putting food on the table and paying the bills. By now it should be sufficiently clear that any money-creation programme – which are desperately needed to prop up the financial sector – will cause further erosion of purchasing power, therefore requiring new creative methods to control the impoverished masses. The alternative to this scenario is for Central Banks to keep on raising rates until the market bubbles pop – which would get us straight to the hard-landing scenario.

The illusion of financial perpetual motion works as follows: the expansion of credit pulls money into risk assets whose valuation grows as demand increases; soaring financial assets then serve as collateral for more borrowing, setting in motion a feedback loop where credit feeds asset valuation feeding collateral feeding credit. Under the illusion of eternal liquidity expansion, leveraging capital to buy assets to use as collateral for more credit is all that matters. And as long as the self-fulfilling loop holds, debt-service obligations can be rolled over. But if interest rates rise and collateral drops in value, suddenly the borrower begins to sweat and starts selling assets, which soon turns into herd behaviour. With the deterioration of collateral, assets are at risk of dropping below the outstanding debt, which causes liquidity to dry up and, eventually, bubbles to pop. This is the stage we are approaching, where the fake wealth-creation loop reverts into a death spiral: asset valuations fall, collateral shrinks, credit collapses. The paradox of our time is that the speculative money inflating the bubbles has no real value substance; but if the bubbles burst, all hell breaks loose.

It is worth reminding ourselves that in the globalised West we have already pawned everything we own. That is to say, we (states, businesses, families) own nothing but our debt, which is falling underwater. And, as the global casino threatens to go bankrupt, our puppet masters understand all too well that they must act swiftly if they are to retain power and privileges. Crucially, they know that their only chance to continue to flood the markets with the necessary amounts of artificial liquidity requires controlling (through authoritarian measures legitimised by emergencies) the freefall of the real economy as it shrinks into stagflation. Inaugurated in style by the pseudo-pandemic, today this process continues to take place under the coordinated watch of Central Banks, whose rate hikes only tickle inflation but further depress real demand.

In this respect, the recent rise in the cost of energy must also be viewed contextually as part of the wider attempt to decompress a highly flammable system – the equivalent of carefully defusing a bomb. The sanctions to Russia have been a farce and, for Europe, a masochistic exercise from the start, for the simple reason that Russia sells its oil and gas to China at a discount, and China then exports them to Europe at a premium. Similarly, the aim of the corporate-led “fight against climate change” is to impose lower living standards upon those working and middle classes who, until only a couple of years ago, were still lured into embracing the utopia of endless growth and mindless consumption. Ukraine can be seen as today’s tragic symbol of such controlled economic downsizing: thanks to a cynically prolonged proxy war, the country is facing the obliteration of its industrial infrastructure. Significantly, on December 28, 2022 Larry Fink (BlackRock’s CEO) and the deified Volodymir Zelensky agreed to coordinate investment to rebuild Ukraine, confirming the familiar pattern whereby the devastation of an entire society is an opportunity for financial expansion. Here is a reason why the West is sending hundreds of billions of dollars to the Ukraine, rather than peace negotiators.

A controlled demolition of demand in the real economy is now essential if the financial aristocracy is to prevent and postpone the deflagration of the speculative bubbles. This means that capital can only self-reproduce by widening the gap between a handful of super-rich owners (the “key financial players”) and the impoverished plebs, who are expected to 1. Own nothing and also be happy; 2. Sacrifice their personal freedoms (including the freedom of speech, increasingly stifled by a grotesquely hyper-regulated cultural discourse); 3. Surrender their right to exist to the State, whose biopolitical role is to administer such right on behalf of transnational capital. Unfortunately, this dark phase of “crisis capitalism” has been vastly underestimated – to use a euphemism – by our “radical” left-wing intelligentsia (from Noam Chomsky to Slavoj Žižek) who, like Pavlov’s dogs, have greeted the “return of the State” as a sign of emancipation. Their reluctance to grasp the elementary nexus between a global economy hooked on growing mountains of credit without substance, and State authoritarianism, suggests they are now embracing a very sinister form of conservatism.

The depressing short-sightedness of the left was particularly painful to observe as the recent global health emergency unfolded. COVID-19 was not the Bubonic plague of the new millennium, but a financial coup enabled by the largest and most spectacular brainwashing operation ever experienced by humanity. It served to hide the fact that the system was infected by terminal sickness, not the global population. Ironically, or predictably, what the left seems unable to accept is that capitalism itself, with all its familiar categories, is fading into obsolescence, and can only fake a life it does not have by mobilising fear to beat the immiserated masses into obedience. COVID-19 was most of all a pandemic of fear, whose damaging consequences on the human mind and body remain unknown. With “vaccines” mandated as a magic bullet (95% efficacy we were told!) against a disease with a 99.8% survival rate, how could anyone fail to smell a rat? By the same token, none of our anti-capitalist gurus felt perturbed when Pfizer admitted they did not have a clue whether their serums actually stopped transmission – when stopping transmission was sold to the public as the indisputable scientific truth behind the discriminatory mandates. Similarly, no outrage when the “Twitter Files” where released (on December 26, 2022), revealing the pressure exerted by US government agencies to manipulate the scientific debate on COVID-19 and silence critical journalism. How far right has the radical left moved if it fails to recognise the criminal sleight of hand of emergency capitalism? By supporting global discrimination and destruction under false ethical pretences, most of today’s left does the job of the right more efficiently than the right itself.

While the awareness of mass deception is now slowly emerging, most people prefer the head-in-the-sand solution: better not to know than question their levels of gullibility. And yet, there is little point recriminating. What instead remains crucial is to remind ourselves that Virus was the invisible shield utilized to avoid a banking & financial crisis that would have put 2008 to shame, while simultaneously ushering in a pan-emergency strategy for the coordinated management of mass impoverishment – not only in the peripheries of the capitalist world, but also in its centre. It is especially revealing that we are now being persuaded to accept the economic freefall as fate: a somewhat mythical stagflation originating in external and largely uncontrollable triggers (the pandemic, war in Ukraine, climate change) rather than in the rotting away of our economic model. In retrospect, one could even appreciate the evil genius of a system that conceals its massive social, economic, and cultural implosion behind a tiny, invisible scapegoat.


Wobbling bubbles

Many critical issues have threatened the global financial casino during 2022. In total, equities and bonds lost more than $30 trillion. The Nasdaq index closed the year at – 33%, its worst performance since 2008. The global volume of negative-yielding debt shrunk from $18.4 trillion in December 2020 to $686 billion in December 2022 (which, despite misleading media reaction, is bad news for the global debt bubble, as it means that bonds are tanking). Naturally, rate hikes are being held responsible for the loss of market value. The latter, however, took place against the backdrop of record-breaking corporate buybacks (which artificially increase share prices while also boosting corporate profits). Ergo, while taking a hit, today’s markets continue to behave like casinos on the Vegas strip, with Central Banks happily playing the House (who always wins). With the Quantitative Tightening regime currently in place, the system is stalling. Yet, the central bankers’ cavalry will return with more sustained monetary injections as soon as deemed necessary – most likely, under the protective shield of the next emergency.

Moreover, if the global liquidity index is now deteriorating fast (after more than a decade of artificial growth) the last day of 2022 registered an all-time high in reverse repo deposits at the New York Fed: $2.5 trillion by 113 counterparties. This means that, as we ordinary people try to figure out how to pay mortgages and bills, investors park inordinate amounts of cash at the Fed as the reverse repo facility guarantees higher returns than market investment (the current repo rate stands at 4.3%). While it would only take a small increase in counterparty risk for this repo business to backfire, it still means that large volumes of insubstantial liquidity, carrying a massive inflationary potential, are trapped in the financial markets, thereby not appearing directly as real demand – precisely the strategy that, since the 1990s, was employed to keep inflation suppressed. However, this stopgap has now passed its use-by date, for the heap of fictitious capital has swollen to a magnitude that can no longer be contained. In fact, it has long started cannibalising the real economy.

For quite some time, global capital has been dancing to a “bubble-to-bubble” tune. Since the start of the millennium our world is captive to the cloning of financial bubbles, from tech to housing to sovereign bonds, each of which depends on frantic liquidity creation and bond rate suppression, courtesy of Central Banks. More importantly, the above is what keeps real capitalist production (i.e., our societies) going. The original logic is therefore inverted: speculative bubbles are now systemic drivers, while in the past they were isolated phenomena both in time and space. Their current ontological character makes them incomparable with, for instance, the Dutch tulip bubble of the 1630s, or the South Sea Ponzi-scheme of 1720 (built on profits from the slave trade), for when those bubbles burst, they gave way to new cycles of real accumulation – i.e., new mass exploitation of labour-force – while today a popping bubble can only morph into another bubble. The main implication is that an enormous share of real production is already part of the speculative process. At the same time, the financial conveyor belt has reached near-total disconnection from the work society. We have been kidnapped by an invisible self-perpetuating mechanism, whose abstraction is so great that its comprehension eludes us.

Let us recap the key point. Bubble inflation requires “hot air” in the form of borrowed liquidity. The lung capacity of the system is its bond market, the place where debt securities are traded. If capital needs to be raised for asset investment, or to finance State expenditure (including wars), bonds are issued, which obliges the issuer to repay their cost at a negotiable maturity date and interest rate. Corporations issue bonds, and so do governments. Our system is now existentially dependent on skyrocketing piles of bonds, through which investors secure the credit they need to speculate in financial markets. Borrowing aggressively in order to invest is the risky strategy known as leverage that makes up the DNA of contemporary ultra-financialised capitalism. In 2019, the bubble economy was, again, on the verge of a nervous breakdown due to toxic derivatives behaving hysterically and interest rates rising steeply in the repo market. COVID-19 was the answer to this cataclysmic risk: a cynical response to a looming financial Armageddon. A recent data dump by the New York Federal Reserve revealed that a total of $48 trillion in term-adjusted cheap loans were given to distressed mega-banks during 2019-2020 – well beyond what the looniest of tinfoil hatters could have possibly imagined. This would not have been achieved without lockdowns and other restrictions helping to ‘insulate the real economy from deterioration in financial conditions’ – to borrow from the BIS paper published in June 2019.

We are now approaching what for bubble-capitalism is an existential moment of truth. The fuse to the next bomb deflagration is the debt market, and it has already been lit. Bonds are no longer “fairly priced” in line with a by-now mythological law of supply and demand. According to this law, when a bond is in high demand, its price rises, while its yield (and therefore its repayment rate) falls; conversely, when bond demand drops, its price also falls, and its yield (and repayment rate) rises. Higher bond rates should provide a release of “hot air” in any asset bubble, for less affordable bonds lead to a liquidity drain. That is to say: the bond market is supposed to blow off steam when bonds carry high rates, thus preventing the economy from overheating. However, the entire financial metaverse is now systematically distorted by Central Banks, who, through the massive liquidity injections of the past decades, have created a Frankenstein monster they can no longer control. The current heavy turbulence in bond markets across the world, with yields showing signs of structural instability, suggests that Central Banks are running out of glue to cover the cracks in the credit-doped system. If in principle there is no end to credit creation, the consequences of uninterrupted artificial asset inflation are no longer manageable through economic policy alone. As COVID-19 should have taught us – including those pseudo leftist academics and intellectuals who have long retreated into the safe haven of “culture wars” – the elites are preparing for total social warfare.

The destructive potential of the debt avalanche is immense, to the point that it can no longer be hidden. Or rather: it is so threatening that it has to be hidden. Last December, the BIS issued a warning relative to a staggering $80 trillion-plus off-balance sheet debt held by financial institutions and funds – an amount greater than the total stocks of dollar-denominated Treasury bills, repo and commercial paper in circulation combined. This is derivative debt that is not being captured through regular statistics: mostly complex speculative instruments like foreign exchange swaps and forwards. The BIS claims that this invisible debt has grown from $55 trillion to $80 trillion in a decade, with daily foreign exchange (FX) swap deals totalling a whopping $5 trillion a day. US financial institutions and pension funds have twice as much FX swap dollar obligations as the amount of dollar debt listed on their balance sheets. Foreign banks have $39 trillion in derivative debts that also are not showing, which amounts to ‘more than 10 times their capital’. This debt burden is a ticking time bomb at the heart of the global economy.

While in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis the Fed claimed it started running stringent stress tests for the Global Systemically Important Banks, the BIS disclosure of undeclared derivative debt brings us back to Alan Greenspan and his Fed Chairmanship from 1987 to 2006, when Wall Street was allowed to build the pile of toxic derivatives which blew up in 2008. That nothing has changed is an open secret, for credit bingeing has been the system’s modus operandi of the last four decades. In an interlocked environment, however, contagion is always lurking. At a time when dollar-denominated debt is more expensive due to rising interest rates, the default of a globally interconnected bank, or a fire sale of financial assets, are concrete possibilities, and so is the ensuing meltdown. For this reason, the system must find reasons to keep itself liquid at all costs, while also managing the consequences, including currency devaluation and recession.

In fact, the only option left for a debt-soaked bubble regime would seem to be currency debasement. As some financial analysts have been forecasting for a while, the prospect we are facing is that the greatest bond heap in history will be washed away by a tsunami of mouse-clicked liquidity. Despite the central bankers’ current hawkish posture, they might soon be forced to destroy their fiat currencies in an attempt to protect the bond markets. Then, a debt bubble morphing into a monetary bubble could pave the way to the widely announced CBDC-based system. In fact, more inflationary money printing is already with us, as evidenced not only by the slowing pace of rate hikes but also by the Fed’s injections of repo liquidity, which already dwarfs Powell’s timid Quantitative Tightening (-2.4% in 2022, compared to +76.7% in 2020 and +18.9% in 2021). The bottom line is that our social bond remains hostage to the astronomical expansion of speculative liquidity. In this respect, the crucial problem faced by transnational entities like the BIS, the WEF, the IMF and the World Bank, is how to save the wobbling bubbles while selling us the story that the contraction of the real economy (which in truth is a slow-motion collapse) is the consequence of an unfortunate series of events.


A sense of perspective

The real paradigm shift within capitalism occurred a few decades ago, when a new type of financial capital emerged, one that is qualitatively different from its precursor.[ii] Since the 1980s, financial abstraction (i.e., speculations on asset prices) is no longer an appendage to a thriving and expanding “real economic abstraction” – the sociohistorical discourse based on the correspondence between a given amount a labour time and a given amount of monetary compensation (wages). Rather, the financial “industry” is now both the driver and the escape route of the social narrative that around five centuries ago founded capitalism – when labour-power first appeared as a commodity exchanged on the market. As discussed above, there is now a growing cleavage between the massively stretched credit chain and the total mass of value originating from labour, which means that keeping up appearances is increasingly problematic. Since 2001 we have seen a huge transfer of liquidity into the bond and real estate markets, generating unprecedented bubbles not only in the US and UK but also in China and Europe. This created a qualitatively new mix between speculative growth and the economy based on the real production and consumption of goods.

For a period of incubation, the escape into the future of insubstantial credit did not generate inflation. Today, however, it is absurd to continue to believe that the mass of fictitious and speculative capital remains trapped in the financial sector. Rather, it has colonized the real world, eroding both our purchasing power and the model of capitalism we still believe we live in. The internal limit to real accumulation acts as an external propeller, pushing capitals toward the virtual space of transnational circulation of financial assets, which is powered by growing stacks of self-cannibalising debt. This is not a pathological corruption of the original capitalist model, but the logical consequence of its structural crisis: the overall fall in the mass of surplus-value is larger than the increase in the relative surplus-value of individual capitals competing with each other through reductions in the cost of labour-power.

This means that the capitalist discourse is now broken, having irreversibly damaged the pillars of its socio-historical narrative. Starting with the Third Industrial Revolution in the 1970s, the productive use of cost-cutting technology has made productive wage labour increasingly redundant, thus inhibiting the creation of new surplus-value and triggering an implosive spiral. Since then, the financial supplement to the work society has turned into its basis and raison d’être. Financialising the economy was the historical answer to the demise of Fordism. Today, our lives remain hostage to the grand illusion that, while making its original formula obsolete, financial capital is capable of turning into a perpetual motion machine. Yet, because global unproductive labour has crossed a critical threshold, currency devaluation is inevitable – an economic shock that is bound to turn into a violent shock for social consciousness in general.

A bubble-system of the current magnitude cannot coexist with real growth, i.e. flourishing mass consumption and mass production. If today’s volume of fictitious capital were to circulate freely in our societies, it would spark hyperinflation – which so far has been exported to the neglected peripheries of the globalised world.[iii] The endgame scenario we are in is the result of the extraordinary growth of credit-dependence during the 20th century, which means that money could not preserve its previous form, i.e. its convertibility into a hard asset. Already WWI showed it was no longer possible to finance a war with gold-backed currency. The increase of debt that came with WWII and the following Fordist boom eventually lead to the decision, in 1971, to abandon the gold standard. At this stage, money lost its substance, something which bourgeois economic theory (or neo-classical economics) could never quite comprehend in its radical implications. In this respect, even Keynesianism was merely an attempt to save capitalism from itself, specifically through deficit spending: more State debt supposed to reignite the labour economy. At the same time, Marxist labour movements never fully assimilated Marx’s critique of value. Instead, they focussed on struggles for redistribution, but always within the ontological horizon of capital. After 1971, money as a “store of value” became a mere convention without objective foundations in the social bond. The logical and inevitable consequence of this loss of value-substance – which under neoliberalism led to the ideology of “jobless growth” – is structural devaluation: either inflation, or a violent deflationary wave triggered by a market crash.

This trend is irreversible. No sector of the economy can reignite real growth and bring us back to something even vaguely similar to the Fordist period, itself already powered by extraordinary injections of State credit. When the Fordist accumulation cycle hit the buffers, no new mass reabsorption of labour could be mobilised, which is why fictitious capital today has achieved ontological status: it compensates for the permanent loss of surplus-value creation. The dream of constant growth sustained by mass consumption is turning into a nightmare, with most of today’s consumers already tapped out. The dystopian capitalist phase we have entered is characterised by productivity without productive labour, which means that the work society as a whole is dying. Many businesses, of course, will continue to compete by making use of increasingly sophisticated technologies, while exploiting the immiserated workforce; but the social bond organised around wage labour can only continue to disintegrate.

Gaining a sense of critical perspective on the implosion of senile capitalism requires, as a fundamental precondition, resisting the onslaught of deception and distraction relentlessly churned out by the info-sphere. Mainstream media will never inform us about the causes of a structurally insolvent economy, for the simple reason that they are a branch of that bankrupt system. On the contrary, they will try to persuade us to look elsewhere: pandemics, wars, cultural prejudices, political scandals, natural catastrophes, and so on. While the reactive media can no longer hide the downfall, they have learnt to blame it on exogenous events. In truth, our economic predicament is the second instalment of the 2008 crisis, part of a systemic collapse so acute that its cause is now systematically displaced on ideologically manipulated, or fittingly manufactured, global emergencies.

Arguably, understanding our condition requires the effort of thinking against ourselves, since, as a rule, a subject who ‘organically belongs to a civilization cannot identify the nature of the disease which undermines it.’[iv] Conformity and wilful ignorance are infinitely more contagious than the strength needed to overcome the biases of our time. Most of us are determined to remain asleep, preferring to believe that what we are experiencing is only a temporary glitch. Yet, we must gather the courage to see through the smokescreen that hides the decaying substance of our world. Defensive reasoning crushes the vitality of thought. It colonizes not only consciousness, but especially our unconscious attachments to the obsolete categories of a collapsing civilisation.

Every civilisation immunises itself by drawing a line between its own constituent order and a malevolent other. Evil-doing must be projected outside the dominant social body if the latter is to retain the illusion of its consistency. Yet, a global civilisation on the verge of defaulting on its own value (the self-valorising value called capital) can no longer rely solely on fighting localised enemies – it must unleash global and ubiquitous villains. This is why, having replaced the pandemic, the Ukrainian war was from the start portrayed as a kind of synecdoche for global conflict: we must constantly be reminded that a “Dr Strangelove moment” is always behind the corner. The fear of Virus has been replaced by the Doomsday Clock. This way, the war really turns into the ideal continuation of Covid: an ideological screen dissimulating the painful everyday reality around us, from recession to structural inflation and mass corporation layoffs. Furthermore, the war allows both monetary expansion by financing the military-industrial complex, as well as systemic self-immunization via re-drawing the line between us (morally and culturally superior) and them (the barbarians). In this respect, the geopolitical tension between the US-led globalized Western model and the multipolar world in the making (BRICS+) is, strictly speaking, an effect of the ongoing economic collapse. The “new Cold War” in the making has already been factored-in, as none other than Morgan Stanley claim that rewiring for a multipolar order is now a priority.

Regardless of where you are on the geopolitical chessboard, the common problem faced by every capitalist state and its overseeing transnational aristocracy is, and will continue to be, how to control the waves of mass discontent stemming from increased immiseration. We only need to browse the recent G20 Bali declaration, or the latest WEF programme at Davos, to see that the elites’ main concern is to make sure the growing levels of global poverty are met with “global solutions” ranging from digital IDs linked to vaccination programmes, to the releasing of Central Bank Digital Currencies. Global cooperation is the ideological catchphrase of the jet-setting ultra-rich who seek to regiment the increasingly stagnant world population. In this regard, the neo-feudal spirit of our time is best captured by the “lockdown model”: on the one hand, we tend to forget that millions of socially excluded humans were already living under “lockdown conditions” before the pandemic, confined to suburban slums and rural peripheries of the world, without access to work and basic goods; on the other hand, iterations of the lockdown model will be extended to most of us in the near future, allegedly to protect us from global threats.

It is crucial, then, to realise that we are facing total socioeconomic breakdown. Those who drive the financial gravy train will continue to promote conflicts and divisions of all kind to hide systemic collapse. Every conflict, geopolitical or otherwise, begins and ends within “crisis capitalism”. The demise of Socialism in the 1980s lifted the veil of Maya. Since then, as a Buddhist would say, “duality is a delusion”: there is only One socioeconomic dogma, and it is no longer working. Keeping consumer capitalism alive while also expanding debt toward infinity is now impossible. The pile of IOUs is reaching beyond what we own as collateral (essentially, our assets, labour power, and lives) while fiat currencies have long started their journey to the land of rubbish. The entire banking system is closing in on folding, which is why it so desperately needs new inflationary liquidity to keep afloat. The Great Reset is our owners’ authoritarian attempt to respond to this systemic threat by taking control of the collateral (our lives) and remain in the driving seat. All the rest is perception management.