James Howard Kunstler: It's Time To Be Honest With Ourselves

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The ever-eloquent James Howard Kunstler returns to our podcast this week to discuss the dangers of the 'comprehensive dishonesty' he observes in our culture today.

We occupy ourselves with distractions (e.g., the fear du jour that our media continually manufactures) and diversions (e.g., our empty social media addiction), while ignoring the erosion of the essential systems around us. Making matters worse, the leaders we assume are focusing on these issues aren't or are woefully out of their depth.

It's time for society to take a hard look in the mirror and be honest about the shortcoming it sees. Identifying them then opens the door to deciding what to do about them.

Without the courage to be honest, we condemn ourselves to a failing status quo that likely has little remaining time left:

What we’re seeing is the result of behavior of people who have no idea what they're doing. Most of the major systems that we rely on are entering a state of failure of one kind or another. And, of course, the larger problem is that they're interlinked, and that their failures will be mutual and self-amplifying.

These systems include the energy system that has powered industrial civilization, the oil and gas industries which you’ve talked about a lot and I think that our listeners understand pretty well -- although the finer points of it, like the 'energy return on investment', is something that’s certainly not understood by the general public, or most of the officers in our government, and certainly not in the New York Times, Washington Post or other major media outlets. They just don’t get that.

That energy problem is reverberating through everything, including agriculture and our inability to use the oceans in some way that's not going destroy them. And the medical system. The education system. All these systems are blowing up. In the absence of being able to run them coherently in any kind of economic way, they’ve turned in to rackets -- basically, people are trying to make a profit off of them dishonestly one way or another.

Because we’re immersed in comprehensive dishonestly in our culture, we no longer recognize what we’re doing or what the truth of our situation is. It’s pretty dismaying to see our culture flounder, particularly in trivialities and bad ideas(...)

My own guess is that the denouement to all this is going to involve disorder in the financial realm, because finance is the life blood of the techno-industrial society we live in. When that gets into trouble, the problems are going to thunder through all the other realms of our culture, and then we’ll be forced to pay attention. And I think that these financial disorders are not far off. When they happen, things are going to change.

You and I have been quite frustrated over the last eight years at the ability of certain authorities in our culture to manipulate prices and levitate markets and intervene in the physics of our economy. That just can’t go on forever. Even though it’s frustrating to watch, it looks to me like it’s climaxing. The disorders that are already present in our economy are manifesting now in our politics. And that to me is a pretty dangerous sign.

It’s like when you have a chronic metabolic disease that all of a sudden starts to present shocking and alarming symptoms. That should be an alarm to us that we’re really in trouble. 

Click the play button below to listen to Chris' interview with Jim Kunstler (54m:31s).

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://peakprosperity.com/james-howard-kunstler-its-time-to-be-honest-with-ourselves/

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I think that general Lee should stay on his monument he served!

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I think that general Lee should stay on his monument he served!
Let me complete that statement for you. I think that General Lee should stay on his monument, he committed treason by serving in an army that took up arms against his own nation. There, fixed it. Doesn't sound so cut-and-dried when placed in the proper historical context, does it? Only in a nation and culture that completely disregards any understanding of history could the honoring of individuals who engaged in treasonous behavior be deemed somehow "patriotic".
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I think the situation with Lee is much more complicated than you make it out to be. He was fighting for State’s rights… was that anti-patriotic? Has a structure of Federal mission creep really served us in the US or has it sunk us?
Nothing is simple when it comes to Lee;

There is a terrible war coming, and these young men who have never seen war cannot wait for it to happen, but I tell you, I wish that I owned every slave in the South, for I would free them all to avoid this war.
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There is something poetically sad and symbolic when we invoke the civil war. Not for the usual reasons but perhaps for the current. As our guest speaker points out, we are facing common global problems and very likely, common global enemies. As the stress begins to show, we seem to be fighting amongst ourselves over race, useless political labels and other limitless categories that should instead be working together to face challenges the human race has never faced before. I hope we can come together.

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Jim H wrote:

I think the situation with Lee is much more complicated than you make it out to be. He was fighting for State's rights... was that anti-patriotic? Has a structure of Federal mission creep really served us in the US or has it sunk us?
This right here is one of the great myths of the Civil War, that somehow the cause of the antebellum South was in any way, shape or form related to their defense of states' rights. The reality is literally 180 degrees from that idea. It was the Southern states that tried to use the Federal government in order to force their "peculiar institution" founded on normalized murder and legitimized rape on the rest of the Republic. It was the Southern states, and their representatives in government, who pushed for the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which compelled residents of Northern states to capture and return escaped slaves to those who claimed to own them in the South. It was the Southern states who rejoiced at the Dred Scott decision in 1854, which effectively extended the rights of slaveholders into those states and territories that had rejected slavery. States' rights did not become a thing in the South until the segregation battles nearly 100 years later. The South has always been, in a word, hypocritical about this cause. They rejected it when doing so supported their goals, and they embraced it later when it was fashionable to do so. This is not a snap judgment on my part, it is born from studying the period of the Civil War and Reconstruction as a history major at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. I can fully appreciate the complexity around the South, especially with regards to the legacy of the yeoman freeholders there (the proverbial baby that got thrown out with the bathwater), but that's not what we're discussing here. We're discussing maintaining memorials to the high officials of the Confederacy, and the Myth of the Lost Cause of the South. My father's family is from the border region between WV and VA, a town called Moorefield about 40-50 miles from Winchester, VA. It was a staunchly Confederate region during the Civil War (see: McNeill's Rangers), despite being forcibly torn away from the rest of VA and incorporated into WV. My grandmother kept a portrait of Lee hanging on the wall at the bottom of her stairs. After she died, it was the one thing of hers that I received, and I still have it hanging in my basement office today. Not out of any kind of affinity for Lee, but because it is something that reminds me of my Nana every time I see it. Yet, each time I look at it hanging I feel conflicted because I'm reminded of what it represents. It represents the segregated town that my dad grew up in, a place where a not insignificant portion of the population was given no opportunity to live out their life in accordance with their God-given gifts and talents. It represents the campaign of terror, exemplified in lynching, that carried on after the war in order to keep that population in an inferior social and legal status. It represents the fact that so many of these men decided that the cause of chattel slavery -- and all its attendant evils with which they were intimately familiar -- was more important than the cause of national union (despite what ills we can now see as being attributable to it). The continued veneration of these men -- monuments and commemorations that came about during the height of Jim Crow and, later, desegregation -- is designed as a wink and a nod to that poisonous past, a continual reminder to the disenfranchised portion of their population to "remember their place"... or else. As for Lee himself, perhaps he was in a position where he could only be swept up in the tides of history, condemned to a role assigned to him by America's original sin committed generations earlier. What we do know about him, though, is that he was hardly a kindly slavemaster. He was known to be on the cruel side, and even administered whippings to his slaves with his own hand. He broke with tradition in his wife's family and regularly broke up slave families. And he took up arms against the nation he had previously sworn to protect in order to preserve this arrangement, one that he saw as being divinely ordained. I fail to see what is worth honoring here, to be honest. Especially when those former Confederate generals who later took up the cause of reconciliation and black enfranchisement have been literally whitewashed from Southern history.
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Great conversation, much needed truths are what is missing. And we’ve got a metabolic disease, that isn’t being addressed. Are 2 important take aways. What I found missing from these ideas and concepts for its application, as these ideas elude to an important reality. We are all one! As anyone in a mid life crisis is able to restructure to the discomfort because all cells have a shared vested interest. How can we can talk about ourselves as if we are one metaphorically, yet we can’t say it, as if it isn’t true? How do you reason that this discomfort gets encoded for change with a money’d, political reality that refuses to acknowledge this reality? How can you charge people for peakprosperity premium content when this is one reality that keeps us all divided? That isn’t an actual criticism, because I would do the same as you. As to do it any other way probably wouldn’t work well and then there would be no messages. Yet still needs to be questioned.

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dictates History.
we only know the version we were taught

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Christopher H wrote:
... he committed treason by serving in an army that took up arms against his own nation.
I haven't found succession specifically prohibited in the constitution. I'm not a lawyer. Perhaps I missed something. If succession is not prohibited, perhaps the confederate states were within their rights to succeed? If so then President Lincoln is responsible for declaring war on a neighboring country. Perhaps the Lincoln memorial should be torn down. Clearly, any monuments for or references to George Washington and Thomas Jefferson need to be removed, since both of them owned slaves. Who needs Mt. Rushmore? Actually, I don't have a horse in this race, so to speak. I think it's a shame that people need to destroy history to feel better about themselves, but that seems to be the condition we have degenerated into. To my knowledge there is not a slave owner or former slave alive today. My ancestors were not, but I am a native american. I was born here. When do we let go of the past and learn to live together. Apparently, the melting pot is broken.
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I haven't found succession specifically prohibited in the constitution. I'm not a lawyer. Perhaps I missed something. If succession is not prohibited, perhaps the confederate states were within their rights to succeed?
No, secession is not specifically prohibited in the Constitution. But to set the historical record straight, what started the Civil War was NOT the North declaring war on the South. Rather, it was the Confederates' bombardment of the Union garrison at Ft. Sumter that was the opening salvo of the Civil War. Now, we can fault Lincoln for his call for volunteers to put down the rebellion, but the fact remains that this was a response to aggression from the South, and not the other way around.
If so then President Lincoln is responsible for declaring war on a neighboring country. Perhaps the Lincoln memorial should be torn down. Clearly, any monuments for or references to George Washington and Thomas Jefferson need to be removed, since both of them owned slaves. Who needs Mt. Rushmore?
Now this is false equivalency between monuments to those who were fighting to preserve the institution of legalized murder, legitimized rape, and normalized violence that was chattel slavery with monuments to those who are memorialized for other reasons central to our nation's founding (or other achievements). In short, Confederate monuments have been erected solely on the basis of fighting to preserve chattel slavery. Monuments to Jefferson and Washington were erected for their contributions to the founding of the nation, not for the fact that they owned slaves. Furthermore, Jefferson himself wrote extensively about the conflict he felt about owning slaves, and that he hoped that the institution of chattel slavery would come to an end much sooner rather than later. The Confederates memorialized, on the other hand, commonly referred to slavery as being ordained by God. Huge difference.
I think it's a shame that people need to destroy history to feel better about themselves, but that seems to be the condition we have degenerated into.
Another false equivalency. Monuments do not equal history. When I was in my university history programs, we did not learn history from monuments. We learned it from books and primary documents. No one is saying that those should be erased in any way. What people are asking is whether we should really be venerating these individuals through monuments. They're asking what the motivation was behind putting the monuments up in the first place (hint: they were pretty much ALL put up during the height of Jim Crow and again during desegregation). Another HUGE difference. My personal thought on all of this is that for every monument to a Confederate hero, there should be an additional monument alongside it or across from it that commemorates someone who contributed to the struggle against slavery. Frederick Douglass alongside Robert E. Lee, Nat Turner alongside Nathan Bedford Forrest, Robert Smalls alongside P.T Beauregard, and so on -- and if people don't want to go along with that then take them down. But I also don't live in those areas so it's not my call.
To my knowledge there is not a slave owner or former slave alive today. My ancestors were not, but I am a native american. I was born here. When do we let go of the past and learn to live together. Apparently, the melting pot is broken.
Wait, wait... in the previous paragraph you decried how history is being destroyed, and now you're decrying why people can't just let go of it? Your logic here is wholly inconsistent. Americans are not born with a tabula rasa, rather it is our history that informs our outlooks and how we approach the world. Unless we are willing to not only explore it, but to do so from the multiple points of view that are present within it, we will never be able to move beyond any of these problems. America's original sin continues to plague it to this day.
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Hi Les,
I believe you are referring to secession, which is different than succession.
Tim

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I have to say that I was clenching my teeth for the first couple of minutes in this conversation when it seemed that Jim was drawing an equivalency between Neo-Nazis and Neo-Confederates on the right and Antifa on the left. Personally, I’m not one who buys into that notion, and although I have issues with Antifa tactics, I view those forces on the right as way, way worse. However, the conversation quickly moved beyond that and I found much to agree with.
One thing that I think needs discussed in greater detail – and acknowledged no matter how dire the potential outcome – is what happens when the old institutions start to fail because they long ago removed the possibility of reform. That’s where we’re at right now. The primary political and economic institutions have broken down, with insiders using them primarily to perpetuate their own power and wealth. On the outside of those circles, we then have traditionally marginalized groups AND a growing pool of the marginalized who find any attempts to reform the status quo blocked at every turn by that same inner circle. The end result is a constant ratcheting up of tensions to the point at which when they finally break, it is almost as if there is an immediate sigh of relief before plunging into a paroxysm of violence and bloodshed. The most recent time we experienced such a sea-change on a global scale was likely the period from 1914-1945. I also agree with one of the posters above that it’s somewhat apropos that we’re discussing memorialization of the Civil War so much right now, as we’re going through a similar process.
Truth be told, I don’t think there’s anything we can really do to stop this. It’s baked into the cake by now, the result of an accumulation of consequences from past decisions. We can only prepare and try to weather the storm. One trap I think that people of middle age and older fall into, though, is denouncing the “extremism” on opposing sides of such conflicts without a full accounting of, and understanding of, how those directly involved have reached this point. I say this not as any kind of indictment of Chris or Jim, but rather an acknowledgement considering that I now find myself in middle age (albeit a little bit earlier).

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For those who pronounce treasonous the actions of Confederate Soldiers in fighting the war between the states, I suggest taking a deep breath and realize how fatuous such a statement is. We weren’t there, and can only imagine what was going through the minds of those unfortunate men. The fact is that over 75% of those in the south held no slaves, so I would think that wasn’t their main cause. It is not difficult however, to understand their desire to defend against an invading northern army that is burning down your house and pillaging your neighborhood. Certainly, such defense cannot be called treasonous. It is not our place to judge or minimize or shame their actions, but rather attempt to empathize and learn from them. We are becoming the rats in the electrified cage, lashing out at each other. There is enough of that on countless other forums. Please, not here.

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For the well reasoned arguments. I looked more deeply and did find evidence of reprehensible behavior on the part of Lee;

So Mr. Norris said he, a sister and a cousin tried to escape in 1859, but were caught. “We were tied firmly to posts by a Mr. Gwin, our overseer, who was ordered by Gen. Lee to strip us to the waist and give us fifty lashes each, excepting my sister, who received but twenty,” he said.

And when the overseer declined to wield the lash, a constable stepped up, Mr. Norris said. He added that Lee had told the constable to “lay it on well.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/18/us/robert-e-lee-slaves.html?mcubz=3

In a later post, you seem willing to apologize for Jefferson because he at least wrote of being conflicted.. but where does one draw the line really?

In any event, the earlier quote I posted, unless it is simply wrong, suggests that Lee himself was not fighting to perpetuate slavery. Maybe this quote from Lee helps to explain better why he would not fight for the North;

With all my devotion to the Union and the feeling of loyalty and duty of an American citizen, I have not been able to make up my mind to raise my hand against my relatives, my children, my home. I have therefore resigned my commission in the Army, and save in defense of my native State, with the sincere hope that my poor services may never be needed, I hope I may never be called on to draw my sword...

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We’re talking about the leaders of the Confederacy. The slaveholders themselves. And the cause of chattel slavery for which they fought.

We weren't there, and can only imagine what was going through the minds of those unfortunate men.
While we weren't there, it's wholly inaccurate to say we can only imagine what was going through those men's minds. This is what historians do -- plow through the primary sources of the past in order to reconstruct past events as viewed from particular perspectives. There are literally thousands upon thousands of letters from Confederate (and Union) soldiers home to their families that tell us EXACTLY what was going on in their minds, along with scores of very talented historians who have gone through those letters in order to tell us their story. I seem to recall Ken Burns doing a little film about this very topic some time ago.... I'm actually all for humanizing the soldiers who fought on both sides of this terrible war. And having studied the period in a considerable amount of depth, I actually have a considerable affinity for the "common" southerners who were caught up in it all (and bore a much heavier price that the planter class). They were truly the last vestige of the old Revolutionary yeoman ideal before it was swept away in the oncoming tide of industrialism, formerly proud men transformed after the war into "po' white trash" to be denigrated by southern elites and northerners alike. But that ain't what this argument is about.
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Thank you for keeping this conversation civil, in spite of the fires around the topic that seem to be raging right now. Much appreciated.
I was actually not apologizing for Jefferson. Rather, I was stating that our monuments to Jefferson, Washington, and other founders who owned slaves are for their contributions to the founding of the nation, as opposed to their defending a society that was founded upon the lash.
Confederate figures are memorialized for defending a society that was founded upon the lash. Period. Full stop. I’ve read numerous statements from Lee regarding his reasoning for resigning his commission and then accepting command over the Army of Northern Virginia. However, at the heart of it all is the fact that in defending his relatives, his children, and his home he was defending a society founded upon the lash.
I’m not saying that the man should be condemned to the ninth circle of hell for his decision. In many ways, he was little more than flotsam and jetsam swept up in the tides of historical events – as pretty much all of the participants in that terrible war. I’m just saying that defending a society founded upon the lash is not something we should erect monuments to, nor glorify. And when we do so, it’s done with a specific purpose of reminding the descendants of former slaves to “know their place.”

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RoseHip wrote:
Great conversation, much needed truths are what is missing. And we've got a metabolic disease, that isn't being addressed. Are 2 important take aways. What I found missing from these ideas and concepts for its application, as these ideas elude to an important reality. We are all one! As anyone in a mid life crisis is able to restructure to the discomfort because all cells have a shared vested interest. How can we can talk about ourselves as if we are one metaphorically, yet we can't say it, as if it isn't true? How do you reason that this discomfort gets encoded for change with a money'd, political reality that refuses to acknowledge this reality? How can you charge people for peakprosperity premium content when this is one reality that keeps us all divided? That isn't an actual criticism, because I would do the same as you. As to do it any other way probably wouldn't work well and then there would be no messages. Yet still needs to be questioned.
If Chris and Adam don't charge for premium content, they don't eat. They will starve, dry up and blow away and be unable to be part of the greater whole.
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ecb wrote:
For those who pronounce treasonous the actions of Confederate Soldiers in fighting the war between the states, I suggest taking a deep breath and realize how fatuous such a statement is. We weren't there, and can only imagine what was going through the minds of those unfortunate men. The fact is that over 75% of those in the south held no slaves, so I would think that wasn't their main cause. It is not difficult however, to understand their desire to defend against an invading northern army that is burning down your house and pillaging your neighborhood. Certainly, such defense cannot be called treasonous. It is not our place to judge or minimize or shame their actions, but rather attempt to empathize and learn from them. We are becoming the rats in the electrified cage, lashing out at each other. There is enough of that on countless other forums. Please, not here.

if you read about pre-war Europe it is very easy to empathize with the German people, too. Their lives were terrible. And then someone came along who promised jobs and ‘respect’ after what had been a long sorry humiliation after the First World War. Should we refuse to judge Nazi war atrocities because we understand how they felt?
Rallying around symbols of slavery is just plain wrong, a total disrespect for blacks.

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LesPhelps wrote:
Christopher H wrote:
... he committed treason by serving in an army that took up arms against his own nation.
I haven't found succession specifically prohibited in the constitution. I'm not a lawyer. Perhaps I missed something. If succession is not prohibited, perhaps the confederate states were within their rights to succeed? If so then President Lincoln is responsible for declaring war on a neighboring country. Perhaps the Lincoln memorial should be torn down. Clearly, any monuments for or references to George Washington and Thomas Jefferson need to be removed, since both of them owned slaves. Who needs Mt. Rushmore? Actually, I don't have a horse in this race, so to speak. I think it's a shame that people need to destroy history to feel better about themselves, but that seems to be the condition we have degenerated into. To my knowledge there is not a slave owner or former slave alive today. My ancestors were not, but I am a native american. I was born here. When do we let go of the past and learn to live together. Apparently, the melting pot is broken.
you think it is wrong that black people and those who sympathize with their current and former plight would like to see the most offensive symbols of their oppression removed? You will learn to live together, for starters, when you become aware of systematic repression. I am not talking 'snowflake.' Look way beyond the nonsense that distracts, coming out of academia and look at the criminal justice system you CURRENTLY have.
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The name “Civil War” is in itself a myth. By definition it wasn’t a civil war because civil war is when two groups fight over control of the same nation. It was a war of secession.
It is not clear that the root cause was slavery. There is much evidence that the root cause was economic as the north pushed through severe tariffs which significantly harmed the south.
A good overview of the alternate arguments can be found at http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2017/08/23/know-called-civil-war-not-sla…
Others have written at length about the tariff issue.
The war did have the laudable result of ending slavery. Unfortunately it came with the not so good side-effect of a much stronger federal government. Our economic manipulation by the US government is a common theme on this site. I therefore find that part of this history very relevant to today.
Monuments are generally built to perpetuate myths. Most Confederate monuments were built comparatively recently and were almost certainly done to intimidate the black population. As such, I agree that they generally ought to come down.
My take on the discussion between Chris and Jim was that they felt there weren’t many Neo-Nazi’s and their presence, regardless of how reprehensible their beliefs might be, didn’t justify a violent response by the “Antifa”. Their other point, at least what I understood, is that the overblown coverage was another way the powers that be keep the masses focused on the wrong thing. Everyone up in arms about Neo-Nazis is spending emotional energy they could be venting on the Federal Reserve and its destruction of our economic lives. The Fed has much more negative impact on the average black person in this country than the all the Neo-Nazis put together.
My own opinion is if they had been ignored they would have gone away and we’d all be better off. The fact that they had to recruit people from a dozen or more states to get a crowd of less than 1,000 speaks volumes about how ignorable the entire thing should be.
These bozos crave attention. Don’t give it to them. Next time they march don’t cover it on TV, don’t march against them (at least not the same time and place) and arrest them if they resort to any violence or destruction of property.