It is impossible to prefigure the salvation of the world in the same language by which the world has been dismembered and defaced.

                --- Wendell Berry

I don't know if most people feel the same, but it seems to me like a lot of things are winding down. As I described many moons ago, the equations that make up the American Algorithm are just not fitting together any more. Things we learned growing up, adages about labor and education and family, don't pass the sniff test any more. Hard work doesn't necessarily pay off. Playing by the rules may not ensure even modest success. Even more importantly, violations of long-standing modicums of decent and responsible behavior, especially in business and finance, not only go unpunished, they actually and vastly increase one's chances of entering the controlling elite.

More specifically, the advanced form of capitalism in which we operate has become undeniably cannibalistic. Labor, whether skilled or unskilled, has been degraded. Even though we live in complex societies and economies, systems that require all manner of service and maintenance, it is becoming increasingly difficult to make a comfortable living unless one possesses a narrower and narrower range of coveted, high-tech skills. Though we are all physical beings, living in actual corporeal space, surrounded by concrete environments and objects that need creation and tending, we have decided that only ethereal and abstract professions like financial derivative management and computer network programming are deserving of major reward. We wouldn't dream of telling our children that farming, tinkering, garbage-hauling, cobbling, or ditch-digging are worthy pursuits, even though these activities will always be around, and will always need to be performed by someone. 

No matter what kind of bargain our 'advanced' societies make with capitalism (the welfare states of Europe, the turbo free-markets of America, or the directed production of China), the relentless forces of various technologies and their evolutionary, financial offshoots are pounding away at any type of lifestyle that might bring personal dignity and ecological stability. In short, nowhere are economic forces actually serving the people. It's vice-versa. Even in the rapidly expanding economies of China and India, the middle classes are not actually swelling. The same forces that propel wealth and power to a small minority in the Western world are starting to work their diabolical magic on Eastern societies as well.

All around us is evidence that the whole damned thing is shot. Europe is a shambles, with countries and cultures that are thousands of years old being held hostage by the iron-grip of, gulp, bond markets. How is it that countries with millions of people and thousands of domestic industries can be declared too naughty to participate in the global game of borrowing, spending, and consuming? How can huge swaths of geography and demography be put in a financial 'time-out' and told to clean up their profligate ways, or else? How is it that bond vigilantes can plunge millions into an austerity, when almost none of the problems can be traced to regular people, workers, and citizens? Well, it happens because the universal Hoover that is consumer capitalism has already sucked out all of the excess value created by the labors of the many, and parked that cash in the Caymen Islands or Icelandic default swaps or Indonesian bonds, or some other god-forsaken place where it can do no good for the people that actually created that value in the first place.

And we certainly don't need to belabor the situation in the US. Epic unemployment, persistent stagnation, swollen stock markets alongside tepid labor markets, the surging coffers of the 1%. We all know how fucked up everything is here.

But aside from the Occupy Wall Street crowd, there really hasn't been much uproar. Much like the boilerplate criticism of OWS (which is actually both fair and unfair, depending on how you look at it), this is probably the result of no one really knowing what to do. "What's are the OWS's demands? What do they want?", everyone keeps asking. As if anyone really knows what the hell would fix everything (or anything).

We're all waiting around for something to kick in. We're waiting for low interest rates to spur lending and investment and hiring. Or we're waiting for school reform to take root and start creating the next generation of competitive American workers (because by God, we may be the most individualistic, screw the deadbeats, get-a-job-you-hippie culture in the world, but when it comes to global economic competition, we're suddenly all in it together to make us better than those brown and yellow devils who are out-competing us, fur fuck's sake). Or we're waiting for the government to give us a real jobs plan, with real training for the green industries of the future. Or we're waiting for the GOP to take power, so that we can finally shrink down the government, turning loose the furies of economic creativity and dynamism. Woop woop!!

No matter what form it takes, we're all waiting for something to happen, something that will save us from the excesses and failures of the system itself. This is a sure sign that we are ideologically exhausted, spinning our wheels and hoping against hope that the identical workings of the same system will somehow produce different results. Needless to say, this is supremely irrational. We are essentially hoping to hit the lottery.

The lottery is actually a good metaphor for our current state of affairs. As I'm sure we're all aware, the lottery is the ultimate regressive tax. Poor people are the disproportionate consumers of lottery products, sapping much of the earning power of the lower classes as a whole. The state has already gotten a lot of these people's money through the various 'sin' taxes: alcohol, cigarettes, etc. Then what's left of their meager paychecks gets scanned back into the government ledgers one grease-soaked Keno ticket at a time. And the scratch tickets?! Dear god, what an amazing advance in the technology of lottery looting. Throw some pretty pictures of baseball diamonds, Christmas trees, or corn fields on those tickets, and straight-up money-squandering is magically transmogrified into a 'game.' And games are good, right? Fantastic. Never mind that the odds of someone winning a substantial sum in the lottery, even just breaking even for years of ticket purchasing, are ridiculously small. As long as there is even the slightest chance that I might win, then by all means, let it ride!!

That's what our waiting around for external socioeconomic salvation is like: the lottery. We keep hoping that the same tired arguments that have been used for decades to rationalize the wholesale looting of America and the global push for reckless growth will suddenly, somehow, flip their functions around and do the opposite of what they have been doing all along. Stale platitudes from the right and the left are being relentlessly retread: trickle-down economics, educational 'reform,' public (quasi-public, at best, in its Obamacare form) health care, economic stimulus, quantitative easing, 'entitlement' reform. All these things are just fancy ways of saying, "Yes, yes -- we know that the economic fruits of the last 40 years of grassroots hard work and progress have been filched away to inflate private portfolios around the globe. And yes, we all know that those fruits can never be gotten back. But it's too late to cry about that now, so here's another way for you to change your behavior and your expectations, so that corporations and banks can begrudgingly agree to participate in the domestic economy again."

Well lucky us! How fortunate we are that the titans of business and government are working to discover new ways for us to receive less compensation for our hard work and overarching anxiety. They're the job creators, right?

In lieu of this ridiculousness, many are simply going with the regular, old-fashioned dreams of the actual lottery. All we really want is to hit the big one, quit work, and start traveling around the world. We want to check out of all the day-to-day bullshit and just get away from it all.

This is lottery porn, the self-titillation that comes with dreaming the wish-lists of unlimited wealth. And being a semi-regular purchaser of lottery tickets myself, I have to say that I almost never dream of things that I want to buy. My thoughts almost invariably leap to travel and escape, to beaches and leisure and cocktails. Now, I'm sure other people are different, and actually do plan out their Ferraris and 150-inch TVs and South Beach mansions and whatnot. But I would bet that an equal number just dream of the freedom that would come with winning, the freedom from an oppressive work life and degraded public life. For many, the lottery is just a ticket out of a way of life that is stultifying, undignified, and inhumane. 

Well, we're not all going to hit the lottery. We're not all going to get that golden ticket out of our current predicament. And even those that may hit it big and 'escape' will still have to live in the midst of a collapsing culture and civilization, as the glacial power of our current arrangements ground all of their compatriots' lives into dust. We will not all hit the mother-lode.

But we are, in fact, all each other's winning lottery ticket. We have the power to provide each other all of the security and comfort that would come with a gajlillion dollar payout -- and actually much more. After all, what is it that we all really want? As Wendell Berry asked, "What are people for?" I'm convinced that most people have relatively modest desires. We want to have security, shelter, dignity, and self-reliance. We want to live in humane environments and communities, with real power to shape the contours of our existence. We want dignified work, some of it complex, but most of it simple. And perhaps most of all, we want to be around people that we like and love, living in convivial and robust settings. 

That winning lottery ticket is available to all of us, which is why I tend to be bit more optimistic than some other Peak and Post-Peak commentators. I think that there is real potential for rapid change towards a more collective social form, one that will replace the One Person/One Job-One Family/One Dwelling structure that we have now (see the American Algorithm link above to read more about our current social structure). A more collective social form would be the biggest lottery hit of all time, because it would provide security, stability, and true freedom not just for a lucky few, but for millions.  

Here are some of my postings on what that way of life might look like.