Kunstler

"I consider our techno-industrial economy a transient phenomenon, and many of the assumptions and ideas about it as erroneous, especially the sci-fi fantasies du jour, invoking a dazzling robotic nirvana to come. My book The Long Emergency detailed exactly the dead-end we find ourselves in. And the follow-up, titled Too Much Magic, describes the cargo cult of wishful thinking that arose after 2008, when the fragility of our phony-baloney banking system was exposed as the matrix of fraud that it is. Our pornified culture, with its overlayment of mass murder, drug abuse, gluttony, and celebrity idol worship is the epitome of decadence—anything goes and nothing matters. My view is that we’re heading into profound systems failure and the outcome will be a re-set to a far less complex human condition. We’ll be lucky, when the dust settles, if we can land back in an early 19th century level of activity, but we could go full medieval, or worse. At the moment, we can’t construct a coherent story about what is happening to us; and therefore we can’t make any coherent plans to act in the face of it. Our current politics reflect this sad state of affairs."

an-interview-with-james-howard-kunstler