But it feels so good. And when the dust settles, and some truthy bits emerge from the haze and confusion, there’s going to be hell to pay. The price of fucking up on such a colossal scale is so high as to justify some extreme measures (in the early stages) to keep the truth at bay, and (later on) engage in some major obfuscation and suppression of reality. That could get pretty ugly. It feels as though the economy and political system have been drifting free for a number of years now; to the close observer there is nothing but disillusion and cover-up going on anymore. The core is hollow and the grownups have left the table.
What will be interesting to watch is how the system reacts to a mass-scale disillusionment. It’s one thing to wrap ideology in acceptable untruths, so long as things are ticking along to everyone’s relative satisfaction; but when the majority of people start waking up to discover that they’re worth nothing and have nothing and believe in nothing… then the ideological mechanisms will strain to keep up. And probably fall apart and get sold off for scrap.
There is a part of me that can’t wait for this to start happening. (I guess it has already, but I want it to start happening out in the open, with some kind of critical mass of acceptance that we have been living in a fiction for a few years now.) There is another part of me that really dreads this, though, because by the time it becomes common knowledge that industrial capitalism has failed, the effects of this failure will be dreadful and horrifying. The horror is made worse by the fact that not to go through this catastrophe will only mean worse catastrophe in the future.
We can’t talk the tightrope walker down off the line. He can’t even hear us above the noise of the crowd. Time to make sure that the safety net will hold. That’s our job.
