The Age of Denial. (Guatemalan goats will kill us all.)

"Some say the end is near.
Some say we'll see Armageddon soon.
I certainly hope we will.
I sure could use a vacation from this
Bullshit three ring circus sideshow of freaks" - Ænema, Tool


So.
Happy new year everybody, and congratulations. You survived to celebrate life in a giant feast of fireworks, food and alcohol. I know I did. We didn't blog up and die. Our bodies didn't go all wonky and betray us with a random heart attack. The titans of the world didn't cause any wars or catastrophes that killed us. Lots of other people, but not us in particular.  Congratulations.
Now I'm going to tell you why we are all doomed.

Early morning on the first day of the year 2015, I had a long conversation, some of it about this blog. Normally, I don't remember much of anything after drinking for 12 hours, but sometimes I come out at the other side, with a alcohol fueled brain and a clearness of thought that's denied me on most days. You are reading the result.

The reason we are doomed is money.
I've touched the subject before, but I'll do it in detail now*. 

In the good old days, when things were really crappy, we didn't have money. We bartered. Then we got kings, emperors and pharaohs. They made money, which is great. Money means you don't have to trade sexual services, manual labor, food or trinkets for those exact same things from others. Coins were soon minted in various precious minerals, like copper, brass, gold and silver**.
It became a bit of a hassle to walk around with heaps of gold and silver in your pocket when you wanted to go shopping, so we collectively agreed we could make symbolic trade tokens of very specific values instead. And there you have modern paper money and coins.

But really, say you were the monarch of Guatemala or some such person. You couldn't just declare your paper tokens to be worth 5000 goats a piece.  You still went by the gold standard. Your country had this much gold and silver and such? Well, that's what your money represented and was worth.
Simple enough. But not very convenient if you were the monarch of Guatemala and had no gold but lots of goats. So we agreed that your country's currency could have a relative value. This relative value would be directly linked to some big solid currency, backed by lots of gold, goats and other natural resources. A currency everyone could trust. The mighty dollar. Your goat-backed Guatemalan lire is worth this much compared to the American dollar. Simple enough.***

Let's fast forward through some wars, and presidential assassinations to our old friend and all time favorite Tricky Dick Nixon, creator of masks, slogans and president of the USA. Also a fine magician. His greatest magic trick, was this. He told the world that USA would no longer base the worth of a single dollar on how much gold it would get you from Fort Knox. And the world said "Fine." We all went along with this idea of make-believe value of money, and an entire economical system that only works IF YOU DON'T THINK ABOUT IT. That is quite some trick.

So the next question is, what does the president of USA do, when his nation needs more money. Unlike his friend from Guatemala, he can't just ask the farmers to get more goats. We are no longer on a goat standard. We are on NO STANDARD. The president simply asks the big bank called the federal reserve to make him more money. He will promise to pay them back. This is a promise he cannot keep, but we all pretend otherwise. While the Americans are sticking their head in the sand, what do the rest of the international community do? We invest in their operation to ram our heads our asses and DON'T THINK, by buying USA's national debt to the federal reserve. I have frankly no idea why. It is like gentleman's agreement to not see what is in front of you and piling denial on top of that. There is an old idea that the dollar and capitalism cannot fail, maybe it just force of habit - invest in USA, invest in dollars, it cannot fail. It cannot fail. Holy crap. You remember when those big banks failed in 08? Because of bad debt? They were considered too big to fail. Remember the shit-storm that followed? We are still feeling consequences world wide from that. That was a cozy walk in the park compared to what is coming. Society as we know it might blogging end. We are FUCKING DOOMED. I'M NOT JOKING!****  We are all depending on everyone else not telling the king that his clothes are invisible and in fact not there at all. And you can tell that that one little kid with the stupid look on his face is about to start yelling. The signs that the age of denial is coming to an end. Maybe the crack in 08 paved the way for new thoughts. Authors, journalists and standup comedians are comfortably dropping references to the dollar being hollow in their material and books. The thought has made its way to popular culture.

American government  neither can nor will pay their debt to the federal reserve. Not a snowball's chance in hell. We are buying their debt. We are basing the world's economy on this debt. The sums are gargantuan.

We have an economical system that is based on eternal growth. Show me one single example of a closed system that can keep growing eternally. No? This is why nations have a license to print money. This is why we have inflation. This is why the smaller denominations of currency keep on disappearing and the numbers on the bills are getting higher.
We are clinging to a trickle down system of money that makes very, very few people richer and the rest is in fact getting poorer, in terms of divide. All this is of course false, because the money is not actually there.

Current world debt: 55 000 000 000 000$.
Over 95% of all systemized value in the world is debt. We are getting by on IOUs and money that don't exist other that theoretical numbers on screens and bits of paper. There are not enough goats in the world to barter you out of this mess, my friend. We are, in fact, utterly blogged.

I still fear I fail to make the point clear. This is because this issue is so spectacularly grand in scale, that I can't fathom it myself. I am myself a victim of this age of denial. My only weapon, the written word, isn't sufficient.. My disappointment in the powers that be, 99% of every person with a degree in economy, and people in general is too great a thing to put in words.
This cake is the biggest collective lie in our history.
Google is your friend.
Good night and good luck.




*General, vague details.
**Also, salt has been popular.
***Not really.
****Seriously.