I have to cut in here after watching tonight's Storyville-inside Job.
Seriously it has made my blood run cold. Of course I have read and seen all this before but never put it all together.
It appears to me that we are on the edge of the end of civilisation. It's not possible to separate any part from any other, each part is both complicit and reliant on the current monetary system.
We have been sold a dream, it worked as long as no one got too greedy. The trouble is we all did. You cannot blame it on anyone, it was inevitable that a system based on a free market with an ever demanding population would eventually implode. It's not rational to exploit the worlds resources and continue to want more and more, it's exactly the same as a nuclear chain reaction and the results will be just as devastating.
I can clearly see that the only way out of this situation for any ruling party is just more of the same. The reactor is in melt down, we push the rods in to slow it down, we try and reduce expectations by cutting and slashing expenditure, reducing expectations and aspirations, but eventually we are forced to turn the reactor back on. When we do it goes into melt down even faster. It leaves two options, either leave the reactor to go completely critical (leave the banking system unregulated) in which case the monetary system collapses and everything comes to a grinding halt, or we leave the reactor shut down ( stiff banking regulation)and everything comes to a grinding halt. It's no wonder so many weapons research scientists went into banking after the end of the cold war, working for a blinkered, despotic, civilisation, we have eventually managed to create the perfect weapon. It causes no destruction, no pollution, kills no animals, kills and maims no one, but destroys the very thing we have fought to maintain, our present western civilisation.
Yes, there are those at the top we can point the finger at but it does no good. For the moment they have simply dodged their own bomb, sitting behind a wall of money like some paper nuclear shelter. They are both architect and wrecking crew depending where we are in the cycle. At present they are the evil wrecking crew, tomorrow, supermen saviours of the free world. Needed and despised at the same time just like all the best Super Heroes half the time worshipped like religious idols and then condemned as the ultimate evil.
You can see the start of this breakdown around the western world with riots, looting and tented homeless, looking exactly like refugees from war. This is why the banks were bailed out, this is why we are enduring the beginning of austerity measures, spiralling cost of living, crumbling social support, health service and education. Governments are powerless, they realise that we all have to go back to a time before the times of milk and honey, when you paid for health, worked or starved. They are just hoping that some miracle will reverse it and the only ones they can look towards are the very people who we now see as the culprits.
Is there an answer?
I don't think there is. Like all civilisations it's hard to spot when exactly things started to go really wrong. Look at all the great civilisations of the past, eventually it was greed and corruption that felled them, made them easy pray for whatever hostile conditions prevailed. It certainly won't be the end of all civilisations, but it will be an end to our present one. It wont happen over night, it may be measured in years or even decades, but I think it is a logical outcome.
Tonight, for the first time I realised just how fragile this whole system is and how incredibly dependent I am on civilisations trappings. One thing is for certain, I'm not taking it for granted anymore.