The Really Big Picture

Notice how every year there is a general lament that we are saving less and getting more and more in debt, while at the same time there is panic at the prospect that people will do less Christmas shopping this year than they did the last? This makes no sense. You can't give the middle class less of the national income and then ask them to both save and spend more.

There is plenty of wealth in America. There is enough housing, enough food for everybody to eat decently, enough fans and air conditioners and heating oil and toothpaste for everybody to stay cool and warm and minty fresh. But when there are 10 pieces of pie, and one person has 3 pieces, the other nine people will have to share 7 pieces. The free enterprise right has tried to convince us you can always grow the pie and everyone will be happy, but that magical thinking has led us right into the current mess. 

If we expand this model to the world, then the United States become the 1 with the 3 pieces of pie, Europe has 2 pieces, and the rest of the world is divying up the rest.  It's why 500,000 women in the developing world died in childbirth last year for lack of access to medical care.  They can't live on crumbs.

The world has enough resources to comfortably support perhaps 2-3 billion people. We are now at 6 billion and it won't take long to hit 8.  Economic and political systems are cracking because it is impossible to fairly and efficiently manage the sheer masses of individuals competing for a finite amount of resources.   Throw in the drama of rising expectations that occurs when the bottom half starts to imagine they can live like the top half (the middle classes of China and India each are as big as the entire United States population) and you have a recipe for global disaster.

We possess an inner optimism as human beings, a belief that over time, things get better.  I think we evolved it so we wouldn't throw ourselves off cliffs when we couldn't find food. But there's really very little evidence to support that this isn't actually just a dressing up of the basic will to survive.  

So it could be that we are making decisions as one mass organism, and in order to survive as a species it will be necessary for billions of us to die off, through disease, starvation, the consequences of human-caused climate change or all of the above.  This sounds horrible, but 99% of us could die, and there would still be 6 million of us left to repopulate the planet.  On a level we are not even aware of, we could be creating the conditions in which that will occur to save ourselves collectively as homo sapiens in the long run.  

I can focus on how idiotic the Republicans are, and while that may be true, I do believe the current crisis is symptomatic of something much, much larger going on, part of a great historical process that we can't see while in the middle of it any more than the Romans understood in 400 A.D. that the Dark Ages were around the corner. 

It's not a very optimistic message, but I find it comforting, somehow.   There may be much more method to the madness than that which meets the eye. 

MCO 2008