Erstwhile Urban Wanderer

February 26, 2009 – It seems there is a fundamental difference of philosophy about how to live life.

By Dave Eriqat

It’s interesting the way thoughts unexpectedly pop into one’s head. I was sitting here contemplating a disturbing piece I read this morning, titled The Final Word. As a therapeutic exercise in mental escapism I started daydreaming about, and visualizing my long harbored dream to live cabin in the mountains, with a pastoral view of distant peaks and meadows out the window, fertile fields off to one side, some horses peacefully munching grass off to the other and a lazy dog napping on the porch.

All of a sudden my idyllic fantasy was rudely interrupted by the recollection of something an old friend once told me. He said he had always wanted to live in such a place as well! Now, he’s old, retired and wealthy enough to realize his dream, so I asked him what’s stopping him from pursuing it, because if I were in his position I’d pursue my dream posthaste. At the time I shrugged off his reply as a sensible one. Only now did it strike me as indicative of a fundamental difference between my friend’s philosophy about life and my own.

My friend, who has some medical problems but is by no means sickly, said he cannot leave his urban locale because he requires access to medical care. What occurred to me only today is that what my friend is doing is sustaining his life, not enjoying it. He’s placing maintenance of his life above enjoyment of his life. Granted, one should seek balance in life, between reckless abandon and obsessive responsibility, but as one gets older they can afford to be a little more reckless and a little less responsible. What is the point of spending one’s final years desperately trying to sustain one’s life in lieu of enjoying it to the fullest? Paradoxically, it seems that people who truly enjoy life live the longest anyway! Look at all the painters, sculptors, composers, writers and philosophers who lived hundreds of years ago, many of whom living to ages that would be considered old even by today’s standards. Could it be that their enjoyment of, and passion for life kept them alive, even without the benefit of modern medicine?

I’d do the exact opposite of my friend. Even if reducing my access to medical care shortened my life, which is debatable, it would be more than offset by the satisfaction of fulfilling my dreams and the pleasure of living in such a beautiful place. I have spent most of my life chasing my dreams rather than working hard for some future reward. That’s why I’m poor, yet simultaneously content. I never feel like “I wish I had done such and such” because I have done pretty much everything I ever felt like doing. Ironically, the least happy time of my life has been the last decade or so during which I applied myself more “responsibly,” although I’m quite not sure why. If I were to die tomorrow I wouldn’t have any regrets about all the things I had not done because there are few. I would regret not being able to continue enjoying life, which I truly do despite the superficially pessimistic tone of some of my writing.

Many people, of course, have noted the fallacy of working hard to attain a future reward, only for the hard worker to discover when the future arrives that they are too worn out from all that hard work to enjoy their reward. I think my friend suffers from that syndrome as well, which is all the more reason to pursue one’s dreams while one is young.

As the pressure from the crushing changes enveloping us cracks my mental egg, I find that once preposterous fantasies, long shelled within my subconscious mind, are spilling into my conscious mind as genuine possibilities. Oddly enough, considering the dire future rushing toward us, I feel optimistic, as if the only thing standing in the way of my enjoying life once again is my habit during this past decade of placing sustaining life ahead of enjoying life. I admit that I am in a fortunate position to be able to reverse my priorities and resume enjoying life, of course, while maintaining a degree of balance. I find, however, that today’s circumstances not only permit exploring new ideas and dreams, but demand it, and that’s exactly what I intend to do.

February 25, 2009 – In the eye of the storm, people wait for a sign.

By Dave Eriqat

Perhaps it’s just me, but I sense a fatalistic zeitgeist. I read more and more people saying, “I have nothing to say,” or something to that effect. It’s as if people are starting to recognize that whatever course we’re on is irreversible and so utterly palpable it requires no further comment, the way wide-eyed passengers might stare at one another in disbelief during those few breathless, wordless moments between their train speeding off the edge of a cliff and its arriving at its final resting spot below.

I sense an eerie calm, like that found in the eye of a hurricane. People, floundering against the economic tides, seem barely able to maintain their civil composure but are patiently waiting for a sign. Governments seem to be getting itchy, as if contemplating preemptive actions against their putative enemies or their own citizens, yet are also patiently waiting for a sign. Meanwhile, the pressure on both parties to act builds.

Optimism, despair, anger and fear all seem to have taken the backseat, while anxious anticipation sits in the front seat. Many people are desperate for some good news to indicate that things are going to turn around and improve. Others have resigned themselves to accepting that the news isn’t going to get any better, but likely to get worse. No longer believing they can make a difference in the outcome or open peoples’ minds, let alone “save” people, these enlightened ones are withdrawing and looking after their own lives, relinquishing their fate to forces beyond their control. Even those hopeful believers in change aren’t angry at the deception they are beginning to acknowledge, but merely disillusioned, like a child inexplicably beaten yet again by an abusive parent.

The human world today is so outrageous, so bizarre, so unjust, so uncivil that it’s as if we’re not even living in a real life garden of eden, but in some kind of satanic Willy Wonka chocolate factory, where everything is wicked and deadly. I don’t think human civilization has ever before lived under such bizarre circumstances, a world so twisted that governments are on the verge of declaring CO₂, a life-giving gas essential to plants and an inescapable byproduct of our very existence, to be a “dangerous pollutant.” I suppose that will instantly transform all of us who breathe into “dangerous polluters,” criminals, terrorists. Yet this is just one of many examples of the self-destructive social climate in which we find ourselves today. The sum total of all the acts of institutionalized lunacy, criminality and deceit we have to cope with every day leaves us bewildered. Some people no longer have words to express what they see and feel, so in order to preserve their sanity, they shake their heads, tune out and say, “I have nothing to say.”

My own – possibly irrational – reaction to the world we live in is to un-tether myself from my mooring and allow my balloon to float across the land, driven solely by the winds of fate.

February 22, 2009 – I spend a lot of time thinking about the future, maybe too much.

By Dave Eriqat

During the last few years I’ve spent a tremendous amount of time trying to envision the future. I look at where individual trends are at the moment, the trajectory they’re on, and try to visualize where they will be at some time in the future. I repeat this process for numerous distinct trends and also consider how distinct trends interact because, after all, everything affects everything else to some degree.

While considering my own living situation recently, my vision of the future played the dominant role in my decision, much more than my own financial circumstances did. So for fun, here’s what I see for our future. These are no-brainers and there is nothing revelatory here. Unlike some people, I don’t see an abrupt change in, or collapse of anything in our immediate future, barring that caused by insane actions undertaken by people in power. However, as these trends progress in drawn out fashion they will weigh more and more heavily on us, eventually crossing some unarticulated threshold of tolerance, whereupon one day the great mass of people will wake up and wonder what the heck happened to their world while they were asleep.

Rising “health” care costs

More and more people will be forced by financial realities out of the health care system. Simultaneously, the quest for higher profits will cause costs to keep rising, especially for programs that are paid for by the government, such as the Medicare drug benefit. In order to forcibly create more “customers,” the health care industry will push for mandatory vaccine injections, especially if there arises any kind of disease epidemic, and mandatory health insurance. People that cannot afford to buy health insurance will have it paid for by the government. Either way the health insurance companies will enjoy a boost to their revenues. Drastic changes need to be made to the health care system, but the required changes are 180 degrees opposed to what’s in place now and what maximizes profits for the corporations that control the health care system. So no effort or expense will be spared to prop up the existing failed model.

Rising energy prices

Although we are enjoying a respite from high oil prices, sooner or later the diminishing supply due to peak oil will start driving prices back up relentlessly. In addition, natural gas is facing its own peak which is not unrelated to peak oil since the two resources are often found together. One-third of the electricity supplied in the U.S. is generated from natural gas, so as it goes up in price, so will electricity.

Rising food prices

I know that the government’s thoroughly trustworthy CPI statistic shows inflation abating. Nevertheless, every time I go to the grocery store I encounter higher food prices, and that’s the statistic that matters to me.

Between financial problems, global shipping problems, rising protectionist sentiment, depletion of global grain stocks, droughts and the continuing folly of countries pursuing ethanol fuel, grain prices are poised to rise. Other foods, including breakfast cereal, bread, pasta, meat, cheese, eggs and liquor are derived from grains, so their prices will likely continue rising as well.

Shortages and surpluses

Besides the increased likelihood of food shortages stemming from a supply reduction, the food distribution system is quite fragile. Financial problems alone could cause a disruption in the distribution system. So I expect to see increasingly common shortages of essential goods, especially food. The government may attempt to “remedy” the problem by rationing goods, which will probably make them scarcer!

Paradoxically, there may well be huge surpluses of nonessential items, such as automobiles, televisions, computers, consumer electronics, recreational vehicles, furniture, granite for countertops, clothing, all cornerstones of our housing-bubble-fueled consumer economy, when people had more credit than cents.

Rising and long-lasting unemployment, homelessness and crime

What’s finally dawning on people today is that the last few decades of “growth” and “prosperity” have been an illusion. We gradually departed from our productive heritage, believing with hubris that we could substitute “services” for productive activities. Well, that worked out dandy as long as we could manufacture asset bubbles to create the illusion of wealth while masking our declining prosperity. Now, with no more asset bubbles left to blow, we’re having to acknowledge the truth: productive activities generate wealth; providing legal services, selling real estate, selling insurance, securitizing debt, selling retail goods, fast food and so forth do not.

The problems in our economy are structural and cannot be changed overnight, but we aren’t taking even baby steps in the right direction. Quite the opposite, we appear to be running headlong toward a mirage of the Goldilocks economy.

What we need to do is utterly remake our economy, emphasizing localized production and labor, and deemphasizing consumption, especially globalized consumption. Unfortunately, that’s 180 degrees opposite the design and desire of the oligarchy in charge of the economy and the government, so such change will not happen. Instead we will witness ever more desperate and harebrained schemes to prop up the failed system we have in place, which will delay the needed changes while dragging the nation further into debt and ruin. The government’s approach – or rather, the oligarchy’s approach – to coping with the financial crisis is only going to prolong it.

Meanwhile, more and more people will lose their jobs and their homes and predictably, crime will rise. Once enough people have nothing left to lose and can tolerate the pain no longer, civil unrest will begin to break out. At first it will be limited to small, infrequent pockets of eruption. As pain and desperation spread, the unrest will become more frequent and widespread, eventually becoming an endemic background simmer.

Initially, the government may succeed in hauling the unresty citizens off to detention camps, but eventually the number of malcontents will reach proportions too large for the government to handle. That, combined with failing government finances and the means to pay local police forces, will lead to a toleration of increased levels of violence, crime and general lawlessness. We the people will increasingly be left to defend ourselves and our property, ironically, even as the government continues trying to take away our guns while offering us less protection!

A continuing and prolonged debasement of the dollar

A lot of people and governments outside the U.S. use the U.S. Dollar and have an interest in propping it up. The dollar will also continue to benefit from a lack of alternatives. The Euro, once the most promising alternative to the dollar, suddenly appears doomed. A new regional currency, sponsored by countries such as Russia and China, perhaps under the auspices of The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, and backed by gold could challenge the dollar’s global dominance.

Nevertheless, with all the bailout activity, expanding military “adventures,” soaring federal budget deficits and the disinclination of foreigners to lend us more money, not to mention the unfunded entitlement obligations increasing right now as the baby boomers retire, I don’t see how the dollar can escape being severely debased, even if it takes far longer than I think it should. (One observation about making predictions is that it’s relatively easy to predict what will happen, but it’s difficult to predict when it will happen.) After a prolonged debasement, public sentiment may shift, lose confidence in the currency and usher in hyperinflation as people try to get rid of their dollars as fast as possible, especially to purchase necessities that are in short supply.

Growing likelihood of new wars, perhaps even World War

War has often been used to “recover” from, or conceal the cause of economic problems, and so it may be again. In addition, competition for resources, particularly oil and water, is intensifying, another age-old rationale for war. I think war is likely to break out in the Middle East and draw in more and more combatants, eventually reaching the proportions of a World War. Countries far from the Middle East may use that war as an opportunity to reign in recalcitrant territories or acquire resource-rich territories of their own, causing the World War to spread wider. In addition, there appear to be some rather evil people in positions of power who see major wars as convenient opportunities to kill off significant numbers of people whom the evil ones regard as “useless eaters.” And, of course, governments like wars because then they can usurp additional powers as exigencies of war.

A continuing assault by the government on the Constitution and our civil liberties

Believe it or not, we still have a lot of freedoms left to lose. Gun restrictions, vehicular mileage taxes, carbon taxes, mandatory health insurance, censorship of free speech, forced labor, banking restrictions and travel restrictions are all in the offing. Ironically, as governments and corporations extract more from us, they will deliver less to us.

Governments will become increasingly “insane” and tyrannical

The “insane” bailout activity is just a taste of what we can expect from government in the future, as is the Israeli government’s ‘insane” attempt to portray Israel as a “victim” in its barbarous assault on the Palestinians. Governments and their corporate partners are increasingly in competition with the people for survival because there isn’t enough wealth available for both parties, so the government-corporate fascist bloc is hoarding the wealth for itself, at our expense.

As I told a friend recently, the upper echelons of government and business worldwide have been taken over by psychopathic criminals. They are behaving exactly as one would expect such people to behave, but unfortunately, their behavior is being mimicked by their underlings (anyone care for a ride on the taser?). With any luck this trend will eventually be arrested, hopefully in conjunction with the arrest of the people in charge. But for the foreseeable future, we’d better prepare ourselves for continual assault from the deranged people who are in charge of everything and sincerely believe they are in charge of us as well. As I said in a comment on a blog recently, I’m ten times as afraid of people who work for the government as I am of petty criminals. Maybe that’s what the government wants, for people to fear it.

In truly Orwellian fashion, crimes against society, humanity and nature are now legal and opposing this new order is criminal! Of course, the people responsible for this perversion control the governments, write the laws and own the media corporations that dispense so much propaganda, so they are in a position to declare what is a crime and what is not. What was the golden rule again? Oh, yeah, he who owns the guns makes the rules.

There is hope

Maybe after all this coming turmoil, people will get fed up with the “system,” abandon it and form their own communities based on old-fashioned moral, even religious values. By necessity, such people will become productive and trade among themselves, content to eek out a sustainable existence. Meanwhile, the failed “system,” starved of its diet of tax and “consumer” revenue, will wither away and die. That is my hope and my dream.

Update – 25 March 2009

Sure enough, Mr. Obama’s plan for forced labor is speeding through Congress with its enthusiastic blessing. Legislation birthed featuring innocuous “voluntary” participation has, through discrete, back room amendment, morphed into legislation which introduces the concept of mandatory service. What’s more, the same legislation, H.R. 1388, with the Orwellian nickname of “GIVE,” and which sailed unobstructed through the House of Representatives, includes a rather sinister attack on the First Amendment of the Constitution itself. Now that’s “change we can believe in”!

February 20, 2009 – Thank you, everybody who took the time to give me some much needed advice. Some people asked me to keep them informed of my plans, so I’ve made this painful and reluctant decision: I’m outta here.

By Dave Eriqat

First of all, thank you all for your advice. I considered it all thoughtfully and decided that leaving was better than staying. The truth is that despite the odious weather, the dilapidated house, the endless battles with varmints, insects and plants, I really love it here. So, then, why don’t I stay?

Partly it’s a matter of pragmatics. My cost of living is exceedingly low, as low as $500 per month, for the time being anyway. But even at that paltry rate of expense I will run out of money within a year. And the way the dollar is being debased, my expenses could easily shoot up unexpectedly through no fault of my own, a situation I don’t want to get caught up in.

Another reason to leave is that I want to do other things, live in other places. This house and all my possessions are like a ball and chain around my leg, securing me to a place which offers few opportunities to start a business or attend school. I’m even reluctant to travel out of fear of my house being burglarized in my absence, although the town is quite safe. Nevertheless, that security could disappear swiftly as the economy deteriorates. Besides, I like the idea of getting rid of almost everything and “starting over.” It’s truly liberating and invigorating.

The final reason I want to leave, and perhaps the most important one of all, is that I feel this is one of those critical junctures in history when one must not be complacent. I have a fantastic life right now – I love it. But the circumstances swirling around me are growing more ominous by the day. To pretend that I’ll be OK if I just hunker down at home and wait out the storm defies the historical record. There are ample instances of people feeling secure and complacent at one time, only to regret a few years later not making the difficult decision to take drastic action when they had the chance. Sometimes it’s better to walk away from a good life while one has the chance and settle for a tolerable one, than to be complacent and lose everything. That’s how I feel about the present. I might be wrong, but even if I am, I’ll still be poised to do whatever I want: attend school, develop my mountaintop property in northern California, buy a farm in Argentina. I’ll certainly be in a more flexible position than I am now.

Many people feel most secure in their homes. The better equipped and fortified their homes are, the more secure such people feel. That’s fine. I don’t disagree. Each person must do what they feel is right for them. I, on the other hand, have always felt more secure when mobile, not chained down. I suppose it has to do with my nomadic Bedouin ancestors, some of whom appear in the photo below.

Bedouins of the Arakat tribe

Who knows? Maybe I’ll end up astride a camel in the desert.

At the very least, I’ll be among my family and living in a really nice place. Even without a job, money, food, water, electricity, natural gas or gasoline I can be happy in a place where I can just throw up my hands, dismissively utter “whatever,” and ride my bicycle to the beach like I did as a kid. While I’m figuring out what to do next, I won’t have to worry about freezing to death in the winter for lack of utilities; I won’t have to worry about the water pipes freezing; I won’t have to worry about the roof leaking or the house settling unevenly, leaving cracks in the walls. And hopefully I’ll be a help to my parents.

I shall certainly miss the friends I’ve made here, including my dog friends like my neighbor’s beloved dog, Boo Boo, shown below. I’ll miss my roomy house and my nice furnishings. I’ll miss the Mississippi River, although I’ll be able to kayak on the even nicer Mission Bay or in the Pacific Ocean. I’ll miss the extraordinarily nice people here and the mellow culture.

Bye, bye, Boo Boo, I’ll miss you the most

If I had a job still or if I could get a job around here, and if the economy wasn’t going down the tubes, and if the country wasn’t on a bullet train to Orwellian totalitarianism, I’d stay. But I feel as if external forces are imposing this change upon me. If things were not changing so rapidly and future conditions were more predictable, I might be tempted to stay here until my money ran out, but the way things are I feel that I have a rapidly closing window of opportunity in which to make my move or be stuck here. A year from now, or even three months from now may be too late to act.

At the present I feel like I’m swimming upstream against the current of history and economics. Even if I can keep that up for a while, I’m not making any progress upstream. I might as well quit struggling, “go with the flow” and see where I end up, which hopefully won’t be at the top of the falls.

February 17, 2009 – Leaps tall kitchen islands in a single bound. Crosses a room faster than a speeding bullet. More powerful than a locom…climbs vertical surfaces like a locom… Oh, forget it.

By Dave Eriqat

For the last few months I’ve been tormented by a mouse I dubbed Supermouse, truly an Olympic champion in the mouse world. That designation was based on my having captured the silly thing rooting around in my trashcan one day. I pulled the trashcan out from under the kitchen sink and listened in astonishment as it rooted around at the bottom, momentarily unaware of the peril facing it. But my few seconds of hesitation was all Supermouse needed to leap several feet straight out of the trashcan, dash across the room in the blink of an eye and disappear under my washing machine. Racing to the laundry room, I managed to slam all the doors before Supermouse could escape. Slyly planting mousetraps around the laundry room, I closed all the doors and left for the night, confidently expecting to find Supermouse’s tiny mangled body the next morning.

Oh, how I underestimated Supermouse. Somehow he managed to climb straight up the wall and escape through a previously unknown opening in the ceiling of the laundry room. I know that’s how he escaped because that evening I heard Supermouse rooting around in the wall adjacent to the laundry room. Exasperated, I collected my mousetraps and put them under the kitchen sink, which heretofore seemed to be Supermouse’s favorite venue.

For the next few days I walked around the kitchen as quietly as a mouse, hoping for a second chance to catch Supermouse in the trashcan. The next time I wouldn’t hesitate. But he was too clever to get caught like that again. No, he discovered a way to get into the drawer where I keep my cooking implements and went to town. He pooped in the back of the drawer, which went unnoticed by me until I saw a little yellow stain on the paper lining the drawer. Touching it and sniffing it, I thought, “That smells like mouse pee.” It was only after pulling the drawer entirely out that I saw the mouse droppings in the back of the drawer and gagged, wondering how long the poop had been in the drawer. I pulled everything out, washed it, washed the drawer, relined it with paper and put everything back. I also applied copious amounts of masking tape to the inside of the cabinet to seal off all of Supermouse’s entry points. While cleaning the cooking implements I also discovered that the funny notches in the tips of my nice new spatulas were actually mouse teeth marks! The same for my plastic-coated dough hook – teeth marks! The little bastard had committed the ultimate sin, messing with my cooking stuff.

Still willing to live and let live, I used masking tape to seal up every conceivable opening that Supermouse could use to enter my cabinets. I laid on my back and stuck my head into the cabinets and taped up everything I could. For several weeks there was no evidence of Supermouse, and I figured that he had resigned himself to the basement, where I have no problem with him living.

But then two days ago I found fresh mouse droppings on my kitchen island again and realized that Supermouse had broken our truce. It suddenly dawned on me that Supermouse had a penchant for yeast dough. He had chewed up my nice new spatulas, not the old ones; had chewed up my dough hook; and had left droppings twice around my electric mixer. I use all these implements to make bread dough. Angry, I decided, “OK, if Supermouse likes dough so much, I’ll give him some dough.” Fortunately, I had some pizza dough in the refrigerator, so I took a pinch out and affixed some dough to each of several mousetraps, placing one behind the washing machine in the laundry room, in between his presumed entry point and the kitchen island.

This morning when I got up I was surprised and – I regret to admit this – pleased to find Supermouse stiff and cold behind my washing machine, his poor little mousy head trapped in the mousetrap. At first I was delighted and felt no remorse, on account of the torment he caused me for months. But as the day wore on I felt increasingly remorseful. He was a cute little fellow, brown and rather large, as mice go. And he did perform a service by exposing many openings in my house capable of admitting not only mice, but mud daubers and other insects as well. He never ate any of my food, just what scraps he found in my trashcan, although he did damage several of my cooking implements, which in my house is bordering on blasphemy.

I was willing to peacefully coexist with Supermouse, as long as he stayed in his space, the basement. But he crossed the line when he started messing with my kitchen.

I gave Supermouse a send off in the bushes, figuring he might as well be food for something. I’ll miss ya, Supermouse, but I sure hope none of your brethren follow your lead.

February 14, 2009 – Does the great mass of people even recognize it’s in a class war, and that it’s the target?

By Dave Eriqat

For years I’ve observed a broadening, yet largely concealed class war, perpetrated by the “elites” against the “masses.” It’s a one-sided class war because the victims don’t even seem to recognize that they’re in a class war.

Who Are These Classes That Are At War?

Today it’s best to think of government and corporations as a single fascist regime, exploiting each other’s strengths in a symbiotic relationship.

As always, since the dawn of history, government seeks power and legitimacy. In a land in which corporations have come to dominate virtually every aspect of daily life, government gains the most power and legitimacy from the support and cooperation of big business. One would normally think that a government’s legitimacy ensues from the voting public, but the voting public is increasingly irrelevant to the government, as the highly unpopular profligate bailouts and expansions of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan demonstrate.

Big business is a partner in the government’s “war on drugs,” for example, subjecting increasing numbers of private sector employees to a “whiz quiz,” and demanding that employees stop smoking. It proselytizes employees with the government’s mind-controlling messages of political correctness. It pays a shrinking share of corporate taxes to the government and serves as the government’s tax collector to its employees. It finances the political campaigns of many aspiring public “servants,” or as I like to call them “serpents.”

The age-old holy grail of corporations is money, and they can never seem to get enough of the stuff. Contrary to the fables told of our illustrious “free market” economy, corporations do not earn money through free market competition; corporations hate competition. No, they earn money the old fashioned way, by exploiting workers, driving competitors out of business, rapaciously exploiting naive people in other lands, using their armies of neatly dressed lawyers to make their actions all nice and legal. Corporations purchase laws from the government that legalize their immoral behavior and enable them to expand their monopolies. They rely on government – its law enforcement agencies and if necessary, its military – to enforce the laws that serve the corporations. In some cases, such as with the Recording Industry Association of America or the Business Software Alliance, the corporations themselves acquire the authority to enforce their laws. When all else fails and corporations permit their greed to make bad decisions for them, they can depend on the government to bail them out as many times as necessary to ensure that no corporate executive goes unpampered.

The two of them, government and corporations, which are really one today, are themselves controlled by a small group of people I refer to as the elites, who are engaged in an unrelenting assault on the rest of us, while we sit idly by and tolerate it, afraid to act out of fear of losing our job, our house or our access to health care, all of which we’re losing anyway.

Business

One of the things that made the U.S. the great country it once was, and the acknowledged engine of job growth is small businesses. We used to have an economic and legislative climate that was friendly to small businesses and sought to level the playing field for them. No more. Huge corporations, irritated by the competition from small businesses, have utilized their political muscle to pass more and more laws that are primarily aimed at making the cost of doing business too high for small entities to remain in business.

Mega retailers drive mom and pop stores out of business, leaving behind vacant and boarded up main streets; large banks, the recipients of lavish taxpayer bailouts, use the money to acquire smaller banks, putting their small business owners out of business and reducing the competition for us banking customers; family farms are driven out of business by government regulations such as the nonsensical National Animal Identification System and corporations that make seed costs prohibitive. Here is an outstanding, but sad and troubling story of a small business owner who fought off stricter and stricter government regulation for years, futilely trying to comply with the government’s demands, realizing only at the end that what the government wanted was for him to go out of business. No doubt, the products this small business used to manufacture are now manufactured in some other country.

It’s bad enough that small business owners sometimes end up working for the very corporations that put them out of business, but the loss of a business represents a loss of self-determination, as well as a loss of healthy competition that benefits customers and fosters innovation.

Jobs

While I have nothing against women in the workforce, it seems intuitive to me that as the number of women in the workforce has increased, wages have decreased. Obviously, with more people working, especially in the face of rising productivity, wages must go down. So now households with two wage earners are living no better than households did with a single wage earner thirty years ago. In fact, I think households today are worse off.

In addition to increased competition from more American workers, we’re also having to compete increasingly with foreign workers, both outside and within our borders. Jobs are outsourced to foreign countries, diminishing the supply of good jobs remaining. In addition, foreign workers are brought into our country to take the jobs that remain, both the good ones and the lowly ones. Law firms exist that specialize in helping corporations operating within our country to avoid hiring an American worker and instead hire a foreign worker for less pay. And of course, illegal immigrants, tacitly encouraged by the government and corporations, happily take the low-paying jobs, which is a win-win proposition because the illegal immigrant workers earn more money here than they would at home and the corporations gain a totally disposable workforce, one they don’t have to worry will become too uppity. If the illegal immigrant workers do become too uppity, the corporations can simply call in their government law enforcement team to eject the workers, pay a minuscule, token fine to the government for hiring illegal immigrants in the first place, and then when things cool down a bit, hire new illegal immigrant workers. Needless to say all this competition for jobs undermines wages.

One of the consequences of declining wages is that debt has been substituted for wages in order to maintain our “nonnegotiable” standard of living. Of course, debt is also one of the principal weapons being deployed against us in this class war, which I discuss in more detail below, so it’s a clever strategy to get us to rely on debt instead of wages.

Another consequence of sending both mom and dad into the workforce is that it renders the children unsupervised, making them easy targets for televised brainwashing or state-supervised day care. It also creates the impetus for more government schooling. After all, we can’t leave the children unsupervised because they might start thinking for themselves, and mom and dad are working. So the obvious solution is to let the government “care” for them in school.

Education

Government and corporations have been increasingly involved in our education. First, universal, compulsory education was introduced, which admittedly had some benefits, such as making the populace more literate.

Now there are increasing efforts to lengthen school terms and get kids into government schools as early as the preschool level. There has simultaneously been an intensification of efforts to demonize and eliminate the dreaded homeschoolers. We can’t have people thinking for themselves, after all.

Vocational schools have been largely taken over by for-profit corporations which have transformed these once useful alternatives to college into little more than diploma mills. These “schools” aren’t at all concerned with teaching, their primarily objective being to collect tuition from naive, hopeful students who don’t seem to understand that even if they successfully graduate with any sort of credential, they aren’t likely to get a job in their field of study. I once considered going to a culinary school because I have a passion for cooking and a natural talent for it. Upon reading the school’s course catalog, however, I discovered some statistics way in the back of the book which revealed that only 10% of the school’s graduates actually end up being chefs or even cooks. I suspect that the statistics are similar for many of the vocational schools one sees advertised on the television.

Thanks to government-sponsored student loans, the cost of higher education has reached prohibitive levels, again, leaving graduates encumbered with debt before they even enter the workforce armed with their shiny new degree.

Finally, the agenda of higher education is increasingly shaped by government policy. In the obsequious scramble for government grants, schools are forced to promote the government’s agenda. Any professor or student that bucks the system will quickly find themselves going nowhere fast. Tenure will be rescinded, grants withdrawn, degrees withheld. Just ask Norman G. Finkelstein or Peter Duesberg what happens to independent thinkers in that bastion of enlightenment known as higher education.

Debt

Debt is the most refined tool of enslavement because those who are bound by chains of debt usually encumber themselves voluntarily, albeit often after being goaded by slick marketing campaigns produced by corporate advertising firms.

Every activity today seems to involve the acquisition of debt: buying a house, buying a car, getting an education, obtaining medical care and even paying for everyday needs with excessively abundant credit cards, which probably outnumber people here in the U.S.

Our dependence on debt has given our “betters” considerable leverage over us. Besides overt laws, such as the draconian bankruptcy law passed in 2005, the so-called “credit score” has become a powerful lever of control. We are subjected to seemingly contradictory advice regarding the use of credit in order to maintain our precious credit score: don’t have too much debt, don’t have too little. Our credit score is even a factor in employment today, although the relevance escapes me. Nevertheless, the possibility exists that a perfectly qualified job applicant cannot get a job because they have a poor credit score, even if it’s the result of having no debts!

Even those of us who shun debt are subjected to it anyway against our will, since our very money supply is essentially created with and backed by debt. Then there are the generous bailouts given to corporations, which leave the government, that is the taxpayers, that is us, saddled with debt. A person with no debts may think they are unaffected by debt, but when every person and every business and every government around them is mired in debt, the economy as a whole suffers. In such a case, which is precisely what exists today, instead of spending money on productive activities and creating jobs, money is spent on debt service. So one way or another, debt is a tightening chain around all our necks.

Nutrition And Health Care

For many years corporations have pushed unhealthful “foods” on us: convenience foods, processed foods, fast food. Of course, we lapped it up as well, preferring the pseudo-satisfaction of a tasty, salty, greasy, sugary meal to the genuine satisfaction of a healthful, nutritious meal we prepare ourselves.

Yet when people do choose to eat healthful foods, the government seeks to destroy their nutritional value, as with its incipient vegetable irradiation program that will no doubt be expanded until all natural food is rendered devoid of nutritional value.

The government is also embarking on a program to regulate nutritional supplements of all kinds as drugs. First it attacked herbal supplements as “unsafe.” Now it’s seeking to regulate ordinary vitamins as drugs. If one follows this program to its logical conclusion, food itself may eventually be regulated as a “drug.” After all, governments are presently considering classifying a perfectly natural substance which is essential to plants, CO₂, as a dangerous pollutant. Would classifying garlic as a controlled medicine be any more farfetched? Of course, regulating food is consistent with the “war on drugs,” granting intellectual property rights to the owners of harmful GMO seeds and tagging all animals under the NAIS program. There appears to be a coordinated effort to control what we put into our own bodies.

Ironically, herbs, vitamins and good food do more to promote good health than all the pharmaceutical drugs in the world. While all these food and nutrient controls are being imposed on us, for our own protection of course, pharmaceutical drugs kill more people every year than all illicit drugs and herbal supplements combined! In fact, it appears that the pincer-type agenda is to force feed us pharmaceutical drugs – look at how they’re pushing such drugs onto kids and healthy people today – and deprive us of truly beneficial nutrients. Why, I saw a television commercial the other day that floored me. It said, simply, “Sitting for long periods of time causes headaches,” or something to that effect. Then the name of some pain relief medication faded onto the screen. My immediate thought was, “OK, so get up and move around,” but the corporations would rather we imbibe their drugs instead.

Of course the water supply is needlessly and increasingly contaminated – or perhaps “poisoned” is a better word – with fluoride. And the air we breathe is increasingly saturated with chemtrails, again, for reasons not elucidated to us peons.

One of the consequences of our induced poor health is cognitive impairment and a weakened will to resist what’s happening to us. That might explain the unbelievably bizarre fact that although Congress had something like a 10% approval rating, even lower than that of Dick Cheney, if that’s even possible, Congress enjoyed a 95% reelection rate! It’s as if Americans are suffering from multiple personality disorder, one personality that complains about all the evils being perpetrated on it, and the other that robotically continues repeating the same actions over and over, expecting different results each time.

Access to health care has been under assault for years. Long ago, when I was a kid, people simply went to the family doctor. Then HMOs and health insurance companies arose, which restricted access to health care. Now the government is even more stringently rationing access to health care in the latest but not the last “stimulus” bill. If this trend continues, we will eventually be paying through the nose for mandatory health insurance and getting nothing in return. This, in fact, appears to be the grand plan of the great “change”-master now residing in the White House, which will be a boon to corporations that sell health insurance, but just another burden to us.

Actually, were it not for the fact that our food, water and air is under attack, reducing access to the sick care system we euphemistically call the health care system would be a benefit!

Surveillance And Control

All forms of communication and all financial transactions either are, or can be monitored today. Not satisfied with that level of penetrating scrutiny, governments are collecting our DNA, often against our will, and putting it into a database, the purpose of which isn’t disclosed to us. Is it for the purpose of enhanced surveillance, perhaps with the introduction of sensors that can identify our DNA as we pass by? Is it for the purpose of identifying genetic weaknesses in order to develop gene-specific biological weapons? Is it to provide health insurance companies with secret insight into their customers’ health? Or is the explanation more banal, that the government run amok simply now considers us all criminals until proven otherwise, so it might as well collect all our DNA just in case we go postal?

It’s bad enough that we have to submit to a near strip search, complete with cavity searches when boarding a flying cattle car, but now such absurd precautions, which haven’t netted a single would-be airborne “terrorist,” are being extended to trains and ships. After all, we wouldn’t want some terrorist to drive a train or a ship into a skyscraper, now would we? Soon we’ll need a government-issued Real ID card to ride a municipal bus or subway, start our car or even ride a bicycle. Here’s a time saving idea. Embed electric taser probes in the seat of our cars and bicycles. If we fail to insert our Real ID card into the card reader within, say, three seconds after sitting down, we get a nice jolt to our derriere. No longer will police suffer confusion between their pistol and their taser. In fact, they won’t even have to stop munching on their donut to electrocute us because we’ll be electrocuting ourselves!

Automobile transportation is already tightly controlled by the government, whether people realize it or not. Between licenses, registration, insurance and constant threats to lose one’s license or have their vehicle confiscated for using drugs or hiring a prostitute, it’s a considerable burden for people to operate a car. They just don’t recognize the burden because they’re used to it, but if one lives without all those things for a while it’s very liberating. Of course, not having a government-issued driver’s license is viewed with considerable suspicion by corporations, as I once discovered when I attempted to use an expired license to identify me when withdrawing money from my bank account. Somehow, the fact that the license was expired magically made all the information on it suspect and the bank refused to give me my own money. So I went outside and withdrew it from the imminently more intelligent ATM machine.

Guns, of course, have always been and always will be a huge threat to tyrannies, whether governmental or corporate in nature. The demonizing of guns begins at the youngest of ages today, wherein even kindergartners can be expelled for merely drawing a picture of a gun during art class. Hand-winging, politically correct “progressives” are the useful idiots to tyrannies seeking to remove the guns from our hands. Ironically, it’s governments that kill the most people with guns, whether in far off lands or right here at home. Even their “safe” tasers kill remarkably often.

For those few recalcitrant, free-thinking individuals that remain there’s always the burgeoning for-profit gulag. The government can expand the prison population easily by criminalizing more and more innocuous and formerly legal behaviors. In the biggest irony of all, the “war on drugs” is the richest source of bodies to man the for-profit gulag, yet governments around the world are among the biggest producers and traffickers of illicit drugs! So they traffic in this stuff, then when some hapless person buys their product, the government sends them to prison to be a slave laborer for some corporation.

Conclusion

The elite class is not encumbered by rising costs and declining wages like the rest of us. With the exception of Ted Kennedy, it is not subject to travel restrictions like the rest of us. It is not as much a target of surveillance as the rest of us and has greater means to avoid it. It has access to better quality nutrition and health care. In all cases, it is the elites who are pulling the strings of the corporations and governments which are assaulting us.

It’s hard to believe that all these observations are manifestations of a well thought out, long term plan to enslave us as a permanent underclass, but that’s what it looks like, and I alluded to it in an earlier post titled Peak Human. Plan or no plan, the end result is the same, namely, that we are victims of a class war being waged against us by the elites. Will we recognize it? Or will we sheepishly continue to tolerate it?

Update – 18 February 2009

The esteemed Paul Craig Roberts makes a strong case in favor of an ongoing class war in his recent essay titled, President of Special Interests, in which he writes:

Congress has had a parade of CEOs, ranging from Bill Gates of MIcrosoft and IBM brass on down the line, to testify that they desperately need more H-1B work visas for foreign employees as they cannot find enough American software engineers and IT workers to grow their businesses. Yet, all the companies who sing this song have established records of replacing American employees with H-1B workers who are paid less.

Just the other day Microsoft, IBM, Texas Instruments, Sprint Nextel, Intel, Motorola, and scores of other corporations announced thousands of layoffs of the qualified American engineers who “are in short supply.” [My emphasis]

Could the intentions of these corporations be any more plain? What I absolutely cannot fathom is the shortsightedness of their policies. The largest market in the world is the U.S., correct? The corporations, with the full aid and abetting of the government, are driving down the standard of living of American, correct? And they wonder why retail sales are falling off a cliff? Eventually Americans will not be able to buy anything except bare subsistence items.

Update – 20 February 2009

Even the World Socialist Web Site recognizes the ongoing class war in an article titled, US automakers outline massive attack on jobs, wages:

The Obama administration is seeking to use the near collapse of the two industrial icons as an opportunity to permanently restructure class relations in the US. The assault on autoworkers—long among the best paid industrial workers in the US—will be used as a precedent to roll back the conditions of the entire working class to levels of poverty and exploitation not seen since the 1930s. [My emphasis]

I guess this is what “Mr. Change” meant by change, the eradication of the working class, at a time when we need productive people, not parasitic bankers. I sure hope the people who elected this guy are happy with the results because so far, all I see is a continuation of the Bush-Clinton-Bush elitist cabal.

Update – 23 March 2009

Cindy Sheehan has written a breathtaking synopsis of our ongoing class war in her Intro to Myth America. It’s so heartening to me to see people starting to “get it,” to understand how this country is really structured, that “freedom” does not exist and that we’re really all slaves to the oligarchy, at least in their eyes.

Appropriately enough, she quotes a loathsome man in the introduction to her introduction, who allegedly said,

There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.
Billionaire Robber, Warren Buffet.

I’ve never understood why people fawn over this guy, as if he were a kindly old grandfather. Nice people do not become the richest in the world. People often talk about about how he lives in a modest home in Omaha. Well, his modest “little” home of 6,000 square feet is more accurately described as an estate. The second richest person in the world lives in a house that’s over 40,000 square feet in size. These two individuals alone have hoarded enough wealth for a million people, and those same people find that laudable? I’m no socialist, but at what point does one possess enough wealth? At what point does an individual’s pathogenic pursuit of wealth become detrimental to society?

Were these two individuals wealthy because of their own hard work, innovation or determination, I might say they deserved their “success.” But their “success” is less a result of their own merit and more a result their cleverly figuring out how to take advantage of our system, which has been systematically restructured over the decades to facilitate this type of plundering of society, as Ms. Sheehan observes. The frenzied bank bailout activity we’re witnessing with such anxious impotence is merely the predictable final consequence of all the wealth transfer mechanisms that have been quietly erected.

Ultimately, however, we do have the power to restructure our system to ensure more fairness. We simply need to become aware and educated and take an activist stance toward electing people to office, not on the basis of seductive television advertisements, but on the basis of documented accomplishment and a firm commitment to represent the people who put the elected representatives in office. And should our elected representatives fail to do our bidding, then we have an obligation to remove them from office. Should we fail to be vigilant and stern in this regard then we deserve to remain slaves to the oligarchy.

I find it baffling how Congress could have a public approval rating hovering around an embarrassing 10% yet enjoy a better than 90% reelection rate! This is what must change in America. If Congress has a 10% approval rate, that suggests to me that only 10% are worthy of reelection, not 90%.

February 11, 2009 – An unusual plea for advice. Any takers?

By Dave Eriqat

This may seem an unusual post for a blog. Most blog authors like to pontificate – myself included – as if they are fountains of wisdom. The truth is that I find myself facing indecision all the time, and right now I’m facing momentous indecision. My dilemma is simple: stay here in Kentucky or go back to California and live with my parents for a while until I figure out what to do next.

I usually make such decisions myself and my track record is pretty good, more satisfactory than not. But I find myself agonizing over this decision, so it occurred to me to ask for advice from my fellows in the blogosphere, whose opinions I have great respect for.

The Good

The truth is that for the most part I enjoy my life here in Kentucky. I have an old, crumbling house, but it’s comfortable and stocked with everything I could possibly need. I enjoy being in my house. Shallow as it may sound, I’ve spent decades acquiring furniture and household goods to last the rest of my life, preferring to buy something nice just once rather than keep replacing things.

The people here are nice and sincere and wave to me when I go for walks. I must have waved to half a dozen passing drivers during my walk today.

Even the animals are friendly. Often when I go for walks, dogs run up to me, starved as they are for attention. Frequently they accompany me during my entire walk of several miles. Today I had two dogs tag along, one for half my walk and the other all the way home. When I opened the door to go inside the dog waltzed in, seemingly content to take up residence. I would have been amenable to such an arrangement except that I know that dog already has a home, although having encountered the owner of that home I don’t blame it for wanting a different one!

Other aspects of life around here are pleasant as well. Kids play the way I did as a kid, carefree and unconcerned about our contemporary over-the-top precautionary mindset. During the spring and summer, when the weather isn’t acting up, it’s beautiful around here, green and lush. The Mississippi River can be magical. In the summer, I so love kayaking up into the swampy areas, shielded from the intense sun by a cool, green canopy of trees.

The Bad

The weather here is the most vile I’ve ever seen anywhere. Certainly other places have more extreme weather of a specific nature, but the weather here seems to cycle through a series of one abysmal weather phenomenon after another. I must consult the real-time satellite maps ten times a day in order to see what new weather horror is coming. Many days I have to console myself by imagining how great it will be once we “get through” the current patch of rough weather, hoping, usually in vain, that the subsequent weather might be “nice” for a little while. Two weeks ago we had a vicious, destructive ice storm. We haven’t even fully recovered from it yet, I only moved back into my house a little over a week ago, and since then we’ve already had two days of subfreezing temperatures that froze my water pipes again, two days of strong winds, two days of torrential rains, and today, 60 mile-per-hour winds which interrupted power briefly, something which I’m still highly sensitive to after being without power for a week. As I said to my mother, one day in ten is what I would call a “nice” day. I’m even told a meteorologist moved here precisely because the weather is so volatile. In the last week we’ve had daytime high temperatures ranging from 28 degrees to 73 degrees, and that sort of volatility is normal. As I recall, last year I was using the heater until mid-May. To assert that I hate the weather here does not adequately convey my feelings, especially when I think of the truly nice and consistent weather I could be enjoying year round in coastal California.

While the weather is depressing, what bothers me most about it is that every time we have some extreme weather, my house suffers a bit more damage. A few weeks ago a wind storm ripped a two-pound hunk of copper off the weather van atop my garage. The poor thing looks ready to topple over, but it’s too high for me to reach without special equipment. I’m even afraid to climb on top of the rickety old garage because I’m not confident it will support my weight. During today’s wind storm I witnessed another half dozen roof tiles do a Sister Batril impersonation and litter my yard. Then after about five hours of hellish wind, I heard a crash and discovered a ten-foot chunk of rain gutter lying in the yard. Of course, this is in addition to the damage my house suffered during the ice storm two weeks ago. I honestly cannot keep up with the existing backlog of repairs the house requires, let alone the new ones mother nature adds to my list. It’s wearing me out struggling to keep up, seemingly in vain. It always feels like one step forward, one step backward.

I suppose if the only bad thing I can think of is the weather, things could be worse.

The Ugly

What has evoked my dilemma more than anything is the economy and the “collapse.” I face a bit of personal economic collapse myself, since my job as a computer programmer was outsourced to India. I saw the writing on the wall years ago, which is one reason I moved to Kentucky and cut my cost of living. Nevertheless, now that I’ve had no income for the last few months, combined with unexpected expenses related to the ice storm, I’m suddenly appreciating the tenuousness of my existence here. I have enough money maybe to get me to the end of this year, after which I might be able to sell some assets to sustain me for a little while.

I’ve considered getting a job, but given the current economic environment, it’s probably a waste of time to even pursue it. I would like to learn a trade, such as plumbing. That’s a skill that’s always in demand and cannot be outsourced. I even asked my plumber recently if he needed an apprentice, but he didn’t seem very receptive. I think he was threatened by the idea of competition, even though the demand around here for tradespeople exceeds the supply.

Then there’s the political direction this country is heading. In a nutshell, it’s ominous. Black and white film footage of demigods standing before vast marching armies keeps flashing through my mind. “Civil unrest” and martial law seem inevitable, as do financial controls, rationing of everything and increasingly intrusive surveillance. Meanwhile, the corporate oligopoly continues to run amok, almost as a parallel government. I’ve been thinking about leaving this country for the better part of two decades, and never more so than today. Going back to California and living with my parents while I liquidate my property would position me for a graceful exodus from this country when the time comes.

On the other hand, I moved to Kentucky in part because I foresaw the “collapse,” and wanted to be someplace where I might have a better chance to endure it. There are farms all around me, I can grow my own food, there’s ample fresh water (in the river), abundant rainfall and it’s far from any major cities. Moving back to California would surely be going the wrong direction if the collapse materializes in any form close to what I’ve envisioned.

Other Issues

Sometimes one has to admit defeat and throw in the towel. To refuse to acknowledge defeat in the face of the facts is foolish. Goodness knows I feel defeated. I’ve always abided by the rules, done the right thing, been a decent person, but I feel like a fool sometimes, especially when I see others I know living in greater material comfort as a result of their not leading so pure and noble a life.

Although the idea of living with my parents, free of responsibility and the burden of caring for my demanding house appeals to me as a kind of escapism, I think my aging parents could benefit from my help, and I’ve always liked the idea of multi-generational households. The notion that each generation should have its own household has never struck me as particularly laudable. Each generation has something to offer the others. Separating them is a disservice to all of them. Larger households are also more efficient in many ways, and we’re heading into an era in which scarcity and soaring prices will force people to become more efficient. The era of austerity and adversity looming ahead of us demands that we pool our resources, hunker down and work together to cope with it. The main thing such multi-generational households need to thrive is tolerance.

I expended a lot of thought and effort to be here in rural Kentucky in order to weather the collapse, and I’m positioned better than most people. Going back to urban California definitely seems like going backward with respect to surviving the collapse. And yet it doesn’t seem to matter anymore. I’m not sure I really care if I survive or not. As my cousin in California pointed out, if we’re all going down with the ship anyway we might as well do it together. He’s got a point.

I’m also wrestling with the issue of failure. To be honest, I don’t feel like a failure. Quite the opposite, I feel like I’ve lived a good life. Yet for a middle aged guy to go live with his parents carries the social stigma of failure, even if it is for practical or strategic reasons.

I also feel like there’s a brief and shrinking window of opportunity to liquidate my house and property right now. A year from now I fear economic conditions may be far worse and it may be impossible to sell anything, so that’s adding some urgency to my making a decision.

Conclusion

So I ask you, my friends, what do you think I should do? Stay here in Kentucky and make it work somehow? Or throw in the towel, go back to California, and possibly prepare to leave this country?

By the way, should anyone wish to join me here, it would make staying here a whole lot easier. I have a spare bedroom. Admittedly, I didn’t really sell the weather here very well, but it’s not a bad place to live. If you are an intrepid, resourceful and creative person who doesn’t mind getting their hands dirty, and you can tolerate someone who’s isn’t the product of any societal cookie cutter, why, this might be just the place for you.

February 5, 2009 – With peak everything else, maybe it’s time to consider the notion of peak human, not the peak of the human population, but the peak of human evolution.

By Dave Eriqat

Have we humans reached the zenith of our evolution and social advancement? That’s a question I often ponder, especially after being driven to the brink of insanity by some nearby abjectly poor kids who, for several days leading up to last Forth of July, blew up in the street what I estimated to be at least $50 worth of fireworks.

People may assume that evolution automatically produces steady improvement in every species, but that’s not how evolution works. Evolution produces “improvement” (improvement being a relative quality) only when it confers upon the species a survival advantage (actually a gene propagation advantage) in a particular environment. Mutations that do not confer such advantages either whither away or linger as benign characteristics, such as hair or eye color. Should the environment change, then organisms which possess or develop mutations complimentary to the new environment will then have an advantage over other organisms and fresh evolution will occur.

During the period of recorded history humans have for all intents and purposes mastered their environment to such a degree that the relatively minor environmental fluctuations we’ve witnessed – changes in climate, resources, food and population – are but inconveniences, insufficient to trigger true evolutionary changes in our species. We are capable of adapting our behavior to a changing environment or even altering the environment itself, so our genes don’t need to adapt for us to survive. Once a species epitomizes its ability to survive and thrive in its environment, as humans have done, there is no further environmental imperative for evolutionary improvement.

Historical observation of the repetitive, atavistic, malignant and self-destructive behavior of our species during the last few centuries quickly undermines any assertion that we’re steadily evolving for the better. It appears to me that without active intervention, such as through eugenics, the human species will not evolve any further. In fact, considering how many “defective” genetic and psychological traits we actively protect and preserve today, it seems likely that any authentic evolutionary improvements will be counterbalanced by the retention of these defective traits, meaning that at best, our evolutionary progress will be arrested. At worst, we may actually devolve!

I’ve never had any philosophical objection to eugenics. I don’t see anything wrong with trying to improve our species, especially when certain improvements, such as the elimination of our proclivity to destroy, are desperately needed. The word eugenics is often associated with the word extermination, as of putatively “inferior” people. I certainly don’t advocate any such thing! But why can’t we intervene in our own evolution to preserve and accentuate our positive traits while allowing our negative traits to wither away and disappear through attrition? In any case, this essay does not seek to advocate eugenics, but to ask the question, “Can we expect further spontaneous improvement in our species without active intervention?” If the answer to that question is “No,” then we can consider eugenics as one means to effect that active intervention, provided it could be carried out ethically.

Some of what I want to talk about below is delicate. Please don’t think that I think I’m better than anybody else or harbor ill will toward anybody for any “deficiencies” they may harbor, or that I perceive them to harbor. If one wishes to attain true understanding, they cannot shy away from topics just because they are sensitive. In a perfect world, discussing sensitive topics topples the barricades impeding free thought, opening peoples’ minds to identify and embrace genuine solutions instead of tap dancing around a minefield of political correctness, failing to actually solve anything.

Intelligence

IQ test scores, while not a perfect or complete measure of intelligence, do provide some insight into intelligence and possibly evolutionary progress in that area. According to this research, which strikes me as relatively sound, mean global IQ is forecast to drop steadily from about 92 in 1950 to about 86 in 2050.

World Population and Mean IQ, 1950–2050 (source: Fourmilab)

Some of what we commonly designate “intelligence,” and part of what goes into an IQ test is actually knowledge. But if we accept that assertion, then the case that humans are becoming less “intelligent” is even stronger, because they seem to be becoming less knowledgeable too.

People long ago, even those not formally educated, seemed to harbor more knowledge than people today. Ancient people knew how to grow food, fabricate tools and furnishings and clothing by hand, take advantage of basic physics, using wind, water and gravity to operate mechanical devices. People today know how to send e-mails, push buttons on TV remotes, hook up bluetooth earpieces to their cell phones and fill up their car’s gas tank, but how truly valuable is such knowledge in the realm of evolutionary progress?

What’s interesting is that while a tiny sliver of humanity possesses fantastical amounts of specialized knowledge, we claim that knowledge as belonging to all of us collectively. We all claim to possess superior knowledge compared to our ancestors, when, in fact, only a tiny minority of us can credibly make that claim. The majority of us are just as uncritical, superstitious and easily misled as our ancestors, and worse, we lack even the basic, practical knowledge that our ancestors possessed! So are we truly more knowledgeable than they were? If not, and since knowledge is a component of what we call intelligence, then we may well be less intelligent than even our most distant ancestors.

SAT test scores are another useful measure of intelligence, in the same vein and possessing similar caveats as IQ tests.

U.S. SAT Scores, 1972–2007 (source: Wikipedia)

While the SAT scores shown above don’t represent conclusive evidence that we’re getting stupider, they are trending in that direction. At the very least, the SAT scores shown above do not appear to be rising. At best they’ve plateaued, which is the principal point of this essay, that the human species has peaked.

Of course, one could argue that these are U.S. test scores, and we know that U.S. students are increasingly being left behind by their foreign peers. Perhaps foreign SAT scores or their equivalents paint a different picture.

One particularly interesting observation is that the scores shown above have fallen from the time I have long regarded as the peak of economic affluence in the United States, the mid-1970s. I also made the observation to a friend recently that the peak of U.S. affluence seemed to coincide with the peak of U.S. domestic oil production, and that the peak of the world economy seemed to coincide with the peak of global oil production. Could all these things really be related?

Embrace of Anti-Intellectualism and the Abandonment of Reason

Anti-intellectualism is one of today’s fashionable buzzwords. While it accurately describes the mentality of a growing segment of our population, it’s hardly anything to extol. I recently ran across a comment on a blog, a portion of which succinctly portrays this new mentality:

I had a guy last Friday tell me to stop making sense. He said that every time he heard me talking, I was telling the truth and making sense. And it pissed him off. He was annoyed. I was amazed. Thats where we’re at.

Has anybody seen the movie Idiocracy, one of my favorite movies? The comment above could have been lifted right out of that fictional movie, in which “intellectuals” are ridiculed as “gay.” Unfortunately, the comment above isn’t fiction, it’s the modern reality!

I recently watched a stunning video (who knows, perhaps it’s a fake) in which people who voted for Mr. Obama were interviewed and asked the simplest questions about modern politics. These were truly simple questions, like, do the interviewees recognize the names of the Speaker of the House, the Senate Majority leader and so forth. Very few could answer these questions, but they were certain that Mr. Obama was their man. How could they be so ignorant of our political system and yet be so certain of their choice for President? This is evidence of a society gravitating away from reason and toward faith. Of course, that’s been going on for a long time. After all, not only have our politicians advocated “faith-based” initiatives, but the declining quality of a public education has increasingly left people with little alternative but to rely on “faith” to make decisions.

Politics and Sociology

While politics and sociology may not be directly correlated with our genetic development, they are at least indirect reflections of our evolutionary progress. In that context, then, we have clearly ceased to evolve, because, as I asserted in a previous post titled What Is Progress?, our political and social structures have been stagnant for thousands of years. In fact, we may even be regressing, thanks to our deteriorating ability to think. Nearly a century ago, the peerless curmudgeon, H.L. Mencken said:

The larger the mob, the harder the test. In small areas, before small electorates, a first-rate man occasionally fights his way through, carrying even the mob with him by force of his personality. But when the field is nationwide, and the fight must be waged chiefly at second and third hand, and the force of personality cannot so readily make itself felt, then all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most easily adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum.

The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron. (Baltimore Evening Sun, July 26, 1920) [My emphasis]

Source: Wikipedia

“On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.” – I think we can now all agree that we’ve been there, done that.

At the risk of igniting a firestorm of controversy, if not condemning protest, it seems reasonable to me that there are racially correlated differences in intelligence. After all, we accept that intelligent parents are likely to have intelligent children, which implies that there is a genetic component to intelligence. We also accept that certain obvious traits, such as skin color, are genetically determined. So why is it so difficult to combine the two beliefs and accept that there might be a connection between race and intelligence?

I don’t view acknowledgment of such innate differences as grounds for discrimination or persecution, but I think many people fear that precisely such consequences will automatically ensue from such an acknowledgment, which is why examining the idea, no matter how scientifically valid, is taboo. Nevertheless, if there are such innate differences then we are going about addressing the issue of socioeconomic inequality all wrong. Instead of mandating equality by fiat, through programs such as affirmative action, perhaps we ought to be seeking to equalize “intelligence.” I quote the word intelligence here because what passes for intelligence is in some part knowledge. In other words, we can elevate peoples’ “intelligence” by simply committing more effort to educate people who require more educating. Sadly, we’ve instead chosen to lower educational standards so as to not hurt anyone’s feelings, which has had counterproductive consequences for society.

Isn’t our society better served if we make an effort to elevate those who need help – regardless of race – to higher standards? Isn’t that the only way we’re going to “evolve,” by seeking to improve our species?

Whereas parents who are intelligent, engaged in the childrearing process and serve as good role models for their children seem to have fewer children, parents who aren’t so “evolved” seem to have children in abundance, litters of them, so to speak. If “inferior” people reproduce at a higher rate than “superior” people, then the aggregate human condition will never advance beyond a certain plateau. It appears we have already arrived at that plateau and have perhaps even begun to regress a little bit.

Under anarchy, the natural system that prevailed for most of human history and still dominates the natural animal world, people had to think for themselves and make few mistakes, or perish. It was a form of natural selection that improved the species. Modern government, which promises to do peoples’ thinking for them, has given people the opportunity to shut off their thinking skills, secure in the knowledge that if they screw up some social safety net will catch them. While such dependency serves the interests of government, what with its insatiable appetite for control, it diminishes peoples’ capacity for thought and progress.

I have long said that humans are intelligent enough to destroy themselves, but not intelligent enough to avoid doing so. Maybe I need to augment my axiom by adding that humans are intelligent enough to subsist, but not intelligent enough to evolve.

Environmental Factors

The environment plays a huge role in our development, both at the genetic level and in our daily health. No matter what aspect of our modern environment one examines – pollution, drug use, food and water quality, exercise – today’s environment is vastly degraded compared to that of our ancestors, implying that our own condition must also be impaired. Obesity alone is pandemic, and is a clear indication of our ill-health as a species, despite our living longer. Ironically, although we’re living longer than our ancestors, we’re not necessarily living better, nor are our genes necessarily better than those of our ancestors. We’re simply more accomplished at obscuring our defects and compensating for them with medical technology, including medications. The rising rate of mental illness and depression globally is also evidence that we’re not living better than our ancestors. The point is, if the suitability of our environment on which we depend for sustenance has “peaked,” how can our own evolution not have peaked as well?

Preservation of Hereditary Defects

Until recently any individual cursed with a hereditary defect would likely die at a young age, taking their defective genes to the grave with them. Today those defects are preserved and propagated. I’m not implying that we should allow such people to die, but it appears that by keeping them alive we may be doing our species a disservice. It’s a very sensitive philosophical question, what to do about people harboring defective genes. Certainly, I do not advocate exterminating them! And if we have the means to keep them alive, it seems morally imperative that we do so. And while it may be prudent to discourage people from propagating their defective genes, how can one person impose such chastity on another? The only approach I can think of that’s fair and sensitive is to educate people about genetic diseases and hope that they do the right thing and not propagate their defective genes.

I regard mitigating genetic defects as one area where benign eugenics could help us to make real progress. If, for example, it were possible to identify genetic defects prior to conception and correct them using genetic engineering techniques, I would view that as a worthwhile use of such technology. If I were having a child and knew it was going to be born with a genetic defect, and I had the means to correct the defect beforehand, I would seriously consider doing so.

Unfortunately, there is no clear demarcation between what constitutes ethical and unethical use of such technology. We would have to trust people to employ good judgment in making such godlike decisions, but such trust would not be misplaced if we made a sincere effort to actually improve peoples’ “intelligence” through education.

Life Expectancy

Although our life expectancy has risen substantially from that of our ancestors, it definitely appears to be leveling off, as shown below.

U.S. Life Expectancy, 1850–2000 (source: infoplease)

Interestingly, looking at the graph above there also seems to be a correlation between rising life expectancy and increased energy consumption, suggesting that during the heyday of free abundant energy, humans enjoyed a surge in life expectancy. Does that imply that as we enter the era of diminishing energy resources that our life expectancy will also fall?

Regardless of the answer to the above question, it appears that our life expectancy has stopped increasing. In other words, like every other human characteristic, life expectancy for most people has essentially peaked.

Hubris and Repeating the Same Mistakes

I don’t know what it is, perhaps it’s hubris, but human beings seem incapable from learning from the mistakes of others. Either we don’t believe others actually experienced the consequences chronicled in the historical record, or we arrogantly believe we won’t suffer the same consequences. The end result is that human beings repeat the same mistakes over and over again with a regular periodicity that seems to be related to the length of our reproductive generations. Economic theory is riddled with such cycles, many of which have merit. How many times in history have we seen a currency debased into worthlessness? How many pointless, ruinous wars have we seen? How many times have we seen countries swing from freedom to despotism?

It seems that after a couple of generations, we “forget” the lessons of our ancestors and have to relearn them. More likely, we don’t forget the lessons, we simply choose to ignore them, believing ourselves superior to our simple ancestors and able to avoid the consequences they suffered.

Because of this hubris, we are incapable of learning from history, which today comprises an immense tome covering nearly every conceivable circumstance humans are likely to encounter. Were we to consult the historical record from time to time and use it to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, we could start making real intellectual progress, but we don’t, so we won’t. In other words, we have ceased evolving intellectually and philosophically. We’re as good as we’re ever going to be.

Is the Human Species Splitting Into Two?

Observing humanity as a whole, one could be forgiven for concluding that the great mass of humans are, well, idiots. What’s more, they are reproducing like crazy, propagating their intellectual weaknesses in conjunction with others like them, certainly not “evolving.”

On the other hand, there is a tiny group of elite people who are well educated, aggressive, selfish, and think nothing of dominating the vast majority of “lesser” humans. These elites also reproduce among themselves, in effect, implementing a program of self-selected, voluntary eugenics.

It appears, then, that the stage has been set for the human species to diverge into two genetically different groups: a large number of people who are of low intellect, sickly, unambitious, plodding workers; and a small group of people well suited to dominate and exploit the others. That state of affairs is in its incipient stages today in the realms of society, politics and economics, but it’s not yet accompanied by genetic differences. However, following a period of sufficiently strict self-segregation of the elites and the masses, I believe a genuine genetic divergence could occur, especially if accelerated by means of advanced technology which might become available only to wealthy elites.

My vision is reinforced by the book, The Bell Curve (Chapter 21, The Way We Are Headed), by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, which reads:

Predicting the course of society is chancy, but certain tendencies seem strong enough to worry about:

• An increasingly isolated cognitive elite.

• A merging of the cognitive elite with the affluent.

• A deteriorating quality of life for people at the bottom end of the cognitive ability distribution.

Unchecked, these trends will lead the U.S. toward something resembling a caste society, with the underclass mired ever more firmly at the bottom and the cognitive elite ever more firmly anchored at the top, restructuring the rules of society so that it becomes harder and harder for them to lose. [My emphasis]

Not only did this book, written fifteen years ago (in 1994), prophetically anticipate modern events, what with all the financial shenanigans going on for the benefit of the elites at the helm, but if the tendencies cited above are followed to their logical conclusions, the bifurcation along “cognitive” lines will eventually be followed by a bifurcation along genetic lines.

Ironically, although our advancing technology and knowledge of human science makes it likely that some humans will be able to live for well over a century, the vast majority will not. The humans who will have access to these life-extending technologies will be the elites at the top of the cognitive and genetic pyramid. They will have everything going for them: superior intelligence, better genes, better health, greater longevity and, of course, a much higher standard of living. These qualities will create a positive feedback loop which will benefit them and accelerate their evolutionary divergence from the rest of humans. We’re getting a glimpse of this feedback loop today. It’s one of the reasons why the standard of living of the wealthiest humans has diverged so sharply upward from that of the rest of us. In the not too distant future, the elites may well be a de facto different species by virtue of all the above advantages, and over time they may well become a genetically different species from the masses.

Conclusion

According to every metric, except perhaps technological progress, human evolution seems to have peaked. But I repeat, the expertise behind technological innovations is housed in the minds of a very small number of people. Self-imposed improvements are generally isolated among a tiny fraction of the species, but are grossly overwhelmed by the stagnation or regression among the vast majority of the species.

In the end, perhaps it’s only “traditional” humans who have peaked. Perhaps a new species of more intelligent, cunning and self-centered creatures is incipiently evolving from the traditional human species, people who will someday be as superior to contemporary humans as Homo sapiens was to the Neanderthal.

Update – 16 February 2009

Well, this is just too funny. This article reports that scientists, apparently not content with the pace at which the human species is already regressing to Neanderthal stature, are halfway along to being able to clone Neanderthals!

Researchers announced that they had finally managed to reconstruct the entire DNA of the former species in a world breakthrough that follows a similar feat for the mammoth.

Now they believe the milestone could help discover why Neanderthal man, a short hairier version of a human, became extinct 30,000 years ago.

It also raises the possibility – although played down by scientists – that the code could be used to clone a living version of the creature.

Why is it we take such delight in using our technology to regress instead of to make progress? With each technological advance we design ever more destructive and lethal weapons; resurrect eradicated, wicked viruses like the 1918 Spanish flu virus; enable post-menopausal, elderly women to have babies, as if we need more people on the planet; and now home in on resurrecting an inferior hominid species.

I love the scene in the movie Jurassic Park in which the mathematician, Dr. Malcolm, sagely observes,

Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.