First, I am not Dr Dave–that would be my dad. He was an old school (graduated in 1924) medical doc who spent a lot of time dealing with public health matters. He often said it was his opinion that the success of doctors had caused more problems for the world that had been solved and what the world needed was either more wars or pandemics to fix some of what medicine had unwittingly caused.
On the flip side, if we lose fossil fuels as a primary source of energy, animals and people will have a lot more to do in the future world. It takes a lot of mule team wagons and drivers to even equal one semi.
I guess this is a good place to ask this question: how do you deal with the Pandora's Box you open after you accept that our reality is manufactured by the government? Once you accept 9/11 for what it is then that opens up a whole trail of conspiracy theories of varying plausibility and quality that get me questioning almost everything non-scientific I believe. But who am I to know otherwise? I have no real explanation for who is controlling society and for what purpose. And the evidence would seem to support most of these conspiracy theories if one cares to look without bias.
How far do you go? Or do you just accept that you won't know and leave it at that, and just shut off all of mainstream and live your life? Some of the conspiracy theories seem to go quite far and it's probably not appropriate to specifically talk about them here. But they identify repeating cycles which has relevance to this discussion.
get the mare bred (I'm going to harp on this husbandry thing for a while) and teach the children that there is joy in the act of husbandry
We tend to be very materially focused here and for many good reasons. I have a very different perspective, one based on the primacy of idea and spirit, which I believe are the progenitors of the material world. Perhaps this a perspective born of the sixties and seventies, before things decayed into sex, drugs and rock and roll. Nothing wrong with those things in there proper place of course, but to me they were the more ephemeral expressions of a deeper transformation that was sweeping society. There was a not so subtle awaking of consciousness, some who I think wrongly put the emphasis on the use of psychedelic drugs, that was primarily the result of eastern spiritual traditions finally rattling Descartes cage.
We finally broke through a dark material determinism that had us in a near death lock, the result of which created a cultural exuberance that resulted in some unfortunate excesses, but transformed us as a planetary culture. Writers of the times and those who's works created the fertile bed the decades before, like Teilhard de Chardin were transformed by thoughts of the spiritual evolutionary possibilities of mankind. Material progress and the limitations there of were finally understood, but the possibility of a transformed human being had everybody transfixed. The realization that there was another view of reality, one not dominated by the past, but of an optimistic future, despite the current cultural turmoil.
The fringe is becoming the center and the centers of power are slowly being relegated to the fringes. The darkness, corruption, inequity has always been all about us. The nation state has always been this bad, the media this filled with propaganda. The pending catastrophe has always been around the corner, we were just not aware of it. The odds have always been this bad, things always this ugly, but we have made it through before, this time we are going to do it consciously.
One of the best culture historians I have every read is William Irwin Thompson. He can get it little obscure and academic at times, but some of the titles I really enjoyed were "Passages about Earth", "At the Edge of History" and "Darkness and Scattered Light". This is a very in depth look a the nature and structure of human culture throughout time and a detailed study of what the implication of are of current events. Our reference points have become to close together which is creating to much psychic instability. We must broaden our perspective or will become drowned the growing amplitude of the current changes. Our reference points must stretch out way beyond the few recent generations of a already very dysfunctional narcissistic culture. We are in the process of transcending this dying culture, time to let it go.
One of the most profound pieces of advice given to me regarding the raising of children (and probably children that have been raised) was that 'Children never ask a question unless they are ready the hear the answer.' I think that is why I paid so little attention in many of my elementary through high school classes—I wasn't interested in answers to questions I never wanted to ask.
Much of our formal education seems to produce what Harry Potter would call 'stupefied' adults.
However, it sounds like your approach with kids is much like an engineering curriculum. One of the best effects of an engineering degree is the skill set that it develops to solve problems. You must be bent on raising a generation of engineers to solve the problems of our future world. Give them experiences that stimulate their desire to ask their own questions. Overwhelm whatever formal education they have gotten. Go for it!
Mark_BC,
Interesting you ask this question. My favorite BIL and I were discussing this very issue. He stated, "Once your eyes have been opened, you can never go back." And he added, "I don't know whether to thank you or curse you."
As to what to believe and why things happen as they do, I can't help much. As you stated, 911 was a wake up call. Anyone with an 8th grade education should know the odds of 3 buildings collapsing free-fall, in their own footprint, are incredibly miniscule.
I now have a jaundiced view of almost every happening, new rule or regulation, law, financial advice, even religious doctrine I'm exposed to. I believe it was Chris who coined the phrase, Massive Systemic Corruption. And that is how the world works these days-and maybe always has.
Growing up as a farm kid it never dawned on me why the cattle buyer always has a new Buick or Cadillac and a brand new truck and John Deere tractors. Why did the auctioneer have a brand new truck and drive fancy new cars? Why were the auction clerk from the bank and the local attorney who bought the widow's farms best buddies? The answer is because these people were Predators and there was EASY, fast money to be made. This is how its done on the local level. Imagine what happens on the state level, and then multiplied by exponential numbers, on the federal level.
I have given you no answer, but want you to know that you are not alone in asking how far do you go down the conspiracy road, if at all. I'm afraid that if you have an inquisitive mind you will have much difficulty ignoring what you intuitively feel to be true.
I sure relate to the comments of Mark_BC and Hotrod above. Once a person becomes very certain that 911 was a fabricated event, then what? How many other things we believe to be true are just not so?
Catherine Austin Fitts has developed a unique perspective that includes a massive entirely secret global governance structure. At this conference they are calling this group The Breakaway Civilization.
Here's the ultimate truth: if "they" were all powerful, they wouldn't need to keep things secret.
The more conscious we all are, the less we will be tricked into going along for the latest ride. And the more people that become conscious, the less powerful "they" will be.
I had my eyes opened to a simple thing many years ago: the construction of news stories, by Wall Street, to manipulate the public into doing their bidding. They use news to get us to buy at the highs, and sell out at the lows. Of course if they were all powerful, if all they needed was to run sophisticated algorithms to move the market wherever they wanted it to be, they wouldn't need to resort to silly tricks like that.
This sort of thing pervades society - operating in secret using influence rather than control, because actual control is impossible. We, the people, always set the trend.
Resisting the cultural programming takes work. More importantly, it takes being first conscious of the programming, and then deciding for yourself where you want to go.
We don't need to storm barricades. We just need to wake up.
What I do, is I go with what I can prove, what comports with the physical evidence, and what makes the most sense. In this regard there are a variety of national narratives about major events that are flat out wrong. I may not know what the right ones are, but I can tell you for certain the existing ones are false.
Next, I really do operate on trust. Once you've violated my trust, I do not accept anything else from you at face value for a very long time. Trust is earned, not given. On this front, I accept nothing from the mainstream media because they have been caught red-handed, over and over again, flat out lying.
And not just some accidental junior reporter getting something wrong coupled to a sloppy editorial process. I mean concerted, talking points style repetition of obvious falsehoods that have to be happening as part of a conscious program to deceive.
But I draw the line at the next stage where people, either for legitimate or illegitimate reasons, spiral off into the unprovable which is usually speculation about the 'who' and the 'why' of certain events. There's not a lot of value in that for me, and I think it's where a lot of legitimacy is lost and where even the science and facts get tarnished by association.
The reason I devote time to trying to understand what has really happened is because they become our shared narrative and it is the story that drives everything. Just look at how ISIS is now driving the next stage of our never-ending war machinery. As soon as the populace tires of that, or it goes away, then there will be some other manufactured reason to keep spending a trillion or more per year on some other hobgoblin.
But if we didn't have that narrative of fear lodged near the beating heart of our nation, then ISIS would have no sway…after all, they are very far away and do not threaten US shores in the slightest. And where did that narrative of fear come from? In large measure from 9-11. Thus it behooves us to ask very carefully if the narrative of 9-11 is true or false. I can say without any doubt whatsoever the official story is complete hogwash. It's scientifically impossible for the official narrative to be true, therefore it is false.
However, that is, unfortunately, all water under the bridge and at present the US has no national appetite for self-reflection and the truth (like a proper forensic examination of 9-11 with full subpoena powers) so I am preparing my life as if the US is going to have to live out its false narrative to some form of empire-busting conclusion.
The larger context is to always self-question your main narratives and assumptions to assure you've got the most robust ones in play. On that front, our collective global narrative around endless growth itself fueled by fiat debt-based money, is utterly and scientifically unsupportable as a sustainable and workable idea. But at present I see no evidence that the global community has any appetite at all for the self-reflection and truth necessary to shift out of that narrative and so I am preparing as if a global currency cataclysm is the conclusion to that particular false narrative.
The above in bold is actually something I had been pondering for several years ever since reading The Fourth Turning. They focus more or less on American history I know, but since their theory would apply to all humans to some extent, wouldn't it be reasonable to expand it to see how it might (or might not) apply to non-Western cultures? Our family stretches between two nations/cultures in very different places in their respective generational cycles, yet how does the interaction of these and other cultures, especially in the highly connected information age, affect their respective generational trends? Will their generational cycles 'sync up' over time? Will one region's current fourth turning or crisis more or less envelop the entire world this time given the connected nature of the world and the now global race for resources? I think Howe and Strauss were definitely onto something in their book, but it feels 'incomplete' for lack of a better word. This is not a slam on the authors by any means and is not meant to diminish what they already accomplished, but rather I'm simply hoping that Howe works to further expand on this generational theory…
[quote=nickbert] They focus more or less on American history I know, but since their theory would apply to all humans to some extent, wouldn't it be reasonable to expand it to see how it might (or might not) apply to non-Western cultures? […] Will one region's current fourth turning or crisis more or less envelop the entire world this time given the connected nature of the world and the now global race for resources? [/quote]
I think that they stick to the American case because it is the authors' expertise and because American history is as stable as national histories have been over the time period considered. A quick look at Argentine history, Czech history, South African history, and Iraqi history shows no similar pattern. The pattern is also totally lacking from so-called traditional societies (e.g. !Kung, Masai, Quechua), who train their youth through rites of passage to more or less replicate previous generations. While Fourth Turnings might be a feature of the evolution of American society, it is a demonstrably untenable theory for the progress of human histories outside of the American context. As such, the more I think about it, the more it it may not necessarily apply if exogenous events disrupt its rhythm, i.e. it may be a good theory to explain the past, but may not be predictive of America's future.
I think this is what Mark_BC is asserting
[quote=Mark_BC]I don't doubt that at some point human optimism will again reassert itself. My concern is that before we get to that point we are going to see a LOT of suffering and destruction. How are societies going to supply the energy and food needed to continue along in at least quasi stability, when the ability to provide those basic needs disappears? [/quote]
in his above post. I suppose what I was trying to get at with the Toba example is that optimism ebbs and flows sometimes in ways that do not align with material prosperity. Another case in point is the optimistic tone of Augustine's City of God, written at the veritable moment of Rome's fall, which is literally the end of the world as they new it. And just as Rome depopulated from around ~800k in 400 A.D. to ~100k by 500 A.D. (http://davidgalbraith.org/trivia/graph-of-the-population-of-rome-through-history/2189/) so too might our cities–but the larger point is that there will be periods of both optimism and pessimism the whole way to the end of the Club of Rome graph, because sometimes strife creates optimism as a mechanism of hope to make perserverence possible. We talk here at PP about maintaining a narrative of personal optimism and abundance despite fewer resources. That is the essence of personal resilience.
Perhaps one cause of optimism, to respond to Jim H,
[quote=Jim H] So, do you think that if we get even more Kardashian spin-offs and maybe a longer football season, that we will continue to boil and smile while we cook to perfect doneness? [/quote]
is that the existential search that crises occasion will probably rid us of Kim K, her escapades, and her new alien-looking face. What will replace the "bread and circuses"? Likely, something that tells people how to live and why they are here, despite the suffering. Sociologists of religion are fond of painting religion as an explanatory device to making suffering intelligible. For this reason, I suspect a reversal of secularization, and a revival of all religious/spiritual modalities–institutional, new, and personal.
Another cause for optimism is the growing body of research on permaculture, which suggests that such systems can achieve similar yields to conventional farms, but without substantial fertilizer/pesticide inputs, and without mechanization. A common critique of permaculture–that it is unsuitable to the industrial scale–may be the best part! if we can bring the arable land which is currently in a suburban holding pattern called a lawn gradually into production over the next few decades of descent. If one ascribes to a racheting down mechanism (see Greer The Long Descent) instead of a cliff, then a certain amount of optimism might still be warranted 
I come to PP rather than zerohedge to feel a little less powerless in the face of such macroscopic risk, and what permaculture has to offer if widely evangelized is central to my personal narrative of tentative optimism. Then again, maybe it too is a cargo cult, but let's hope not!
Dave,
Have you got any recommendations with regards to reading material for studying these cycles? It's a subject i've been meaning to sink my teeth into for some time. The only thing i've read so far is the Fate of Empires by John Glubb.
All the best,
Luke
Your reflection on the effect of different cultures on the fourth turning theory is important. One of the primary changes that the industrialization brought to Western countries was a break down of the organic intergenerational woven structure of family. Partly due to the rapid changes in technology and also the accompanying necessity of relocation the generations old skill sets became basically useless and were not passed on. So, as a consequence there is a sine wave type of recurrence of cumulative mistakes in the economy and the culture. Good thoughts on this subject, especially if we are looking at a deindustrialized future.
I would also like to urge any of you who have not delved into Permaculture more deeply to do so. The basic beginning is to do a "Permaculture Design Course" (PDC). This was until a few years ago a major time away from home commitment since most required an onsite week or two at a minimum. Today there are two or three online versions that are very good. The one I took two years ago was put on by Geoff Lawton. Here is an intro on his offering- http://permaculturenews.org/2013/05/08/tour-of-geoffs-online-pdc-and-farm/
One of the basic outcomes for me is that I now cannot look at a piece of land - suburban or rural- without trying to envision some food production on it. The more of us who have this thought process imbedded the better able the culture will be to adopt this when it is needed.
Permaculture, which I am a big theoretical fan of, is a great philosophical framework to think about big picture issues. Perhaps for a small area of an orchard space for experimentation, but has not proved itself practical at any rational scale yet IMHO. There are much better practical examples of folks who have been making a living creating real production, that have proved already (nothing theoretical about it) that organic production is real viable alternative to the current industrial system. Even that is understating the issue, localized organic production will necessarily need to come rescue of a collapsing fossil fuel based production which is not a maybe, which are little more than soil and water mining systems. Guys like Coleman and Salatin are much better models for those aspiring to get into food production. Get a PDC by all means, but better off volunteering a well run CSA.
CAF and davefairtex summed it better than I have in all my lengthy babbling hear, "if your not in a conspiracy, you need to start your own", and "we don't need to storm the barricades. We just need to wake up." What else can be said, time to wake up and start our own conspiracies!
Interesting that you would bring this up treebeard…here is a recent self-critical discussion of just that perspective on permaculture.
Luke-
Hmm. The thing that put it all together for me was Martin Armstrong. His claims are out there regarding his AI but I think the basic philosophical approach is sound, especially about each type of thing in the world having its own cycle, and that all things interact to a greater or lesser degree, and the interference patterns that items have on one another makes it difficult to just analyze the cycle of one item and come up with an answer as to what will happen.
Here's a brief article he wrote recently that summarizes this.
http://armstrongeconomics.com/2015/03/17/complexity/
I look at correlations between markets (USD, gold, SPX, commodities), and he's right, if you do some math on the correlations some surprisingly regular patterns appear. I haven't quite found the pony yet, but I think the little guy is in there somewhere.
Mostly, I think, cycles come from either the physical world, or from the way humans work. How long does it take the average person to forget something relatively unpleasant? 4-6 years? That's the business cycle. How long will people hang onto hope - hope their house will sell for what they paid for it, for instance? Then when it turns to dispair and they sell at the bottom, that marks the low.
How long will it take a society to forget something really unpleasant? Perhaps 80 years? Debt super cycle.
Banksters know about the cycles, and how to amplify the human emotions that tends to drive them. That's why I try not to read too much news. I don't need my emotions amplified, thanks anyway.
This echos something Chris said - knowing where we are in a cycle helps me to be patient with society. Until the cycle turns, you can spend a whole lot of energy resulting in no action at all. "How come nobody is listening?" Or put another way, "why can't we have an adult-sized conversation about this critical issue?"
But then once the cycle shifts, suddenly no effort at all is required.
Take Greece. The people there still cling to the dream of the Euro. Its not yet time for a real change. The cycle there is not complete.
As a student of history his death always puzzled me. We all have stories that we read about, and we think, "something doesn't ring true there." This was one of them for me.
I haven't read the book, but the synopsis in the article sure resonated with me. And it was right in line with our discussion here on mainstream stories and earned trust, etc.
Rep. Jonathan Stickland (R) introduced House Bill 3916 (HB3916) on March 13. The legislation would prohibit any political subdivision in Texas from providing water or electricity to any federal agency "involved in the routine surveillance or collection and storage of bulk telephone or e-mail records of any citizen of the United States without the citizen's consent or a search warrant that describes the person, place, or thing to be searched or seized."I would have to describe this as "finding one's voice.""No water and no electricity means no super-computers. That will shut down NSA operations in Texas. If Congress doesn't want to reform the NSA then we'll just turn it off."
The Limits to Growth chart crops up quite frequently and I think it's a really useful guideline. But I wouldn't plan my future based on it - the map is not the territory.
We know the oil curve is likely to be much steeper on the down-slope than originally depicted by Hubbert for various reasons that have become apparent in the mean time. Similarly the Club of Rome curves illustrate general trends but not necessarily the way they will unfold. For example it is assumed critical infrastructure will remain intact while resources run down. Tipping points resulting in rapid change or catastrophic breakdown are not part of the model.
All I'm saying is we can't count on having another generation before things really deteriorate. The real world is not that predictable.