Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: The Twilight of Neoliberalism Page 9 of 12

The Riots to Come… and The Revolution?

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On July 28, 2020

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This map, from CNBC, sort of says it all:

Assume the numbers are half that, you’re looking at 15 percent to nearly 30 percent of renters facing eviction in many states. Assume 75 percent of these numbers, and, well…

This is an apocalypse. If this won’t cause riots and revolution, nothing will.

Remember, the people who did this have names and addresses, as do those who bailed out the rich and left you to die on the street.

Don’t forget Wall Street, the Federal Reserve, and every CEO of a Fortune 500 company. Every private equity guy, etc.

Do remember to display your displeasure to Congress when it’s in session and at the White House.

This, children, is what happens when you elect a woman like Thatcher who says, “There is no such thing as society,” or Reagan, who agreed. Trump is just a stage in the disease, and the choice to not do moratoriums, etc… was up to Congress. Likewise, the Fed has exceeded its legal authority multiple times for trillions of dollars to bail out the rich, and could have chosen to bail out ordinary people.

This is a choice. Not even Britain is making the choice this badly (though rest assured, Britain is a weak state, heading towards being a failing state, and having rejected Corbyn and chosen Johnson (who wants, among other things, to suspend jury trial), they will get there too.

I wonder if other neoliberal nations, like my own Canada, and Australia, Germany, France, and so on will take the lesson.

I’d like to think so.

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American Social Collapse Is Far Closer than Most Will Admit

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On July 27, 2020

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A rather lovely article on US social collapse by Susan Zakin includes this summary of the stages of failing states.

In State Failure and State Weakness in a Time of Terror, Harvard’s Robert Rotberg writes that while every country is different, the signposts tend to be the same. It is worth attending to the characteristics he describes. They should sound familiar:

  • In a weak state, basic services such as education and health are privatized; public facilities decline. Infrastructure, including schools and hospitals, shows signs of neglect, particularly outside of major cities. Journalists and civil society activists are harassed. Tensions among ethnic, religious, or linguistic groups increase, but widespread violence has not erupted–yet.
  • In a failing state, a single leader gains control of the legislature, law enforcement, and the judiciary. The leader and his cronies are enriched while ordinary citizens are left without basic services.
  • In a failed state, living standards deteriorate rapidly. Citizens feel they exist only to satisfy the ruler’s greed and lust for power. The potential for violence increases as the state’s legitimacy crumbles.
  • Finally, in a collapsed state, warlords run the country. The market rules to the exclusion of any other concerns, while the social compact has been completely eroded. “The Id is unleashed.”

There’s no question that, by this measure, the US is a weak state. Trump is not the man on horseback quite yet, but if he gets a second term he may well be–not because he seems to really want it, but because people under him are working to bring the remaining pieces of the state (the military and judiciary) under his complete control.

Trump probably isn’t going to win re-election, and Trump’s brownshirts, made up primarily of the various services clumped under the Department of Homeland Security, especially ICE, aren’t up to taking on the military. Yet. The cops, of course, would back Trump in a heartbeat, and the national guard will break down essentially by how red or blue their state is. The military is the last bastion, oddly, standing against a centralization of power.

So let’s say Biden wins, which is probable, mostly because of Covid-19 and Trump’s fumbled response–including the economic response. He’ll inherit an America with a 20+ percent unemployment rate and tens of millions of homeless people. Hunger will be widespread.

He’s already said he won’t change anything. His solution to the problem with the police is to give them more money for “training,” a solution which has never worked in the past and won’t work this time. He has told corporate America that he won’t be changing how business works. He’s against Medicare For All.

Etc.

Biden is the pre-Trump status quo, except like all Democratic presidents since Nixon, he won’t actually undo most of what his Republican predecessor has done. He isn’t going to push for getting rid of the Patriot Act, breaking up DHS, a wealth tax or high corporate and marginal income taxes, saving the post-office, breaking up monopolies and oligopolies, stopping pharma price-gouging or, well, changing pretty much anything which makes the US a weak state according to Rotberg’s scheme.

What this means is that Biden won’t stop a damn thing. At best, he is a pause. More realistically, the state will continue its slow descent under him, as it did under Obama.

And then the next Republican will become President in four to eight years. He will have learned from Trump that the US is ripe to fall into a strongman’s arms; that many Americans want that. He will run as a right-wing populist. And when he becomes President, he will systematically, in a way Trump is personally too senile and incompetent to do, take control of all the levers of power, including the military.

When predicting the future, the greatest mistake is often to not take into account reversals of trend.

But I’m having a hard time finding a cause for reversal of trend, at least in time. It is true that the Boomers are about done. Pelosi, with her corruption and weakness, is 80 years old. There will be a generational changeover, more to Millennials than to GenX, but it’s unlikely to be large enough to put a progressive majority in place. Neoliberals will continue to be the alternative to authoritarians, and neoliberals don’t actually care enough about authoritarians to fight them because they genuinely believe that the state shouldn’t be doing much, that there is no such thing as society, and that markets should rule. They can’t really oppose state collapse, because they are the ones who weakened the state, deliberately, due to their profound belief that the state is bad.

So, avoiding the next stage of the disease requires a rather fine needle-threading. It requires something like Biden stepping down after four years (because he’s already senile) and being replaced by a progressive, who then wins an election and is able to do enough to start reversing the decline. But this President will be working with a judiciary and a civil service systematically purged of people who believe in a strong communal state, not just by Republicans but by Democrats.

This isn’t a likely scenario.

The only other real chance of change, then, is a popular revolt that forces the current governing class out of power. That’s more possible than many people think, because they haven’t taken into account the mass homelessness, hunger, and unemployment coming down the line.

But is it likely? Are the odds good?

History is odd and one never knows, but I suggest that readers look at the situation hard in the face. The US is an un-developing nation, well on its way to being a failed state. Because you live among the infrastructure created by the great engineers of the Lost, GI, and Silent generations, it’s hard to see that, but that infrastructure is rotten–and so are the institutions and the souls of the people who run your society.

When the US goes bad, it’s going to go bad in truly awful ways. Americans have over 300 million guns, and an ethos that says violence is not just okay, but good. The right has been pushing eliminationist rhetoric for generations now; they think “liberals” are evil and need to be hung from lamp posts.

The odds on this turning around are terrible. Not impossible, any gamer or gambler knows you can roll one percent.

But while you can roll one percent, you shouldn’t bet your life on it, or risk rape and torture (no, don’t even pretend, many right-wingers believe rape and beat downs are suitable punishments).

Make your plans.

If you think I’m wrong about this, well, work it through. Carefully. Make the argument. What is going to go right to stop this trajectory? What is going to change? What are the odds?

Don’t just go with a feeling. Do the work. See if you still believe it’ll all turn around.

Protect yourself. Because if you’re American, odds are that within ten years, no one else protect you. And it could be a lot less than ten years. Stop putting off whatever it is you need to do to protect yourself.

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The Portland Seizures Are the Next Step to Latin American-Style Fascism

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On July 18, 2020

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As you my have heard, masked men without badges are jumping out of unmarked vans and grabbing people in Portland.

This is a clear violation of due process. They appear to choose their victims primarily by looking at videos of protests, identifying people, and grabbing them when they see them.

This is essentially a light version of what the US taught Latin American nations to do at the School of the Americas. It doesn’t yet, so far as I know, include torture and rape once the victims reach the sites where they are held, but if this is allowed to continue, that sort of thing is next on the menu.

The people doing it appear to Department of Homeland Security; primarily ICE–border control agents. They’ve always obviously been trained as brownshirts; that’s why they brutalize powerless people for a living, including children (something that happened under Obama, though it became worse under Trump). Brownshirts need to be dehumanized, and you dehumanize thugs by making them dehumanize other people.

If it isn’t clear, such seizures are a terror tactic, designed to break the will to resist. They are enjoyed by authoritarian followers; they feel that the people being brutalized deserve what happens to them, which includes beatings, arbitrary arrests, torture and rape (when those last two occur).

Americans have spent a lot of time teaching other people how to do this, and in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, where the US acted as “advisors” have engaged in such behaviour themselves. It was inevitable that such tactics would be used against American citizens when/ if they ever became too uppity.

Biden, or whoever runs his administration, will not take steps to change this. He may not do it himself, but he will not move to disband the Department of Homeland Security, get rid of the indefinite detention act, or end the Patriot Act, and so on. Children will no longer be detained in cages alone, they will be detained in cages with their families. Americans will continue to encourage other countries to engage in these behaviours, will continue to occupy Afghanistan, and will continue to degrade their military and police class to ensure that they will hurt civilians on command, and get off on it.

A momentary “cease fire” in this behaviour, assuming one happens (remember, Obama assassinated American citizens, killing without due process), is not a push-back. The second a Republican, or even a Democrat, wants to do this again, it will be easy to do–the people, organizations, precedents, and laws will all be available.

I don’t consider this a massive step up from what’s already existed (beatings and executions of Americans by people with badges), but it is a step down the path to authoritarianism. Fascism, if you like–but the model isn’t 1930s Germany, it’s Pinochet and El Salvador, and so on.

This is who and what the US is. It is what Americans have inflicted on others, and it is coming home. The question is whether enough non-degraded, non-authoritarian Americans remain to resist it.

I hope I’m wrong, but my suspicion is the answer is “not enough.” Certainly your lords and masters generally approve of the direction the US is headed, though they may “regret” this sort of activity, somewhat.

Make your own evaluation, and act based on it.

And remember, in a nation like The US is becoming, who you trust is the most important decision you will ever make. Trust one wrong person, and rape and torture will happen to you or those you care about.

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The Current Trendline Is Full-fledged American Social Collapse

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On July 17, 2020

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… or a full fascist turn.

Jared Diamond wrote a long book on why societies collapse.

Let me summarize his findings.

Societies collapse when elites are isolated from the consequences of their decisions as experienced by the rest of the population.

Here’s America:

Imagine that. The numbers nationally are worse. There is NO reason for the people who run America to change their Covid-19 strategy. None. Less than zero; the strategy is working brilliantly for them. Your suffering and deaths make them richer. Understand this. Understand it.

So, what does that mean?

It doesn’t mean that the US is likely to have 550K more deaths. Why not? Because the number one rule for understanding the US in the age of neoliberal greed is this:

No matter how bad you think something is in the US, it’s worse, even if you take this rule into account.

So, 550K is now the “good case scenario.” The case against it is based only on “lot of the old people have already died, and we’re better at keeping people alive now than at the start.” It’s not based on numbers of infections, which are already past the initial peak and nowhere near the top.

Then there’s those 32 percent of people who couldn’t make their housing payments in July, 22 percent of small businesses going bankrupt, etc.

So, I’ve been pounding this issue but today, looking at all this, it became utterly clear that the perceived self-interest of American elites is now so completely detached from the rest of American society and everyone else that there is no recovery without a revolution, peaceful or otherwise (and a non-peaceful revolution could trigger the collapse all by itself, while peaceful revolution is… unlikely).

Nonetheless, ordinary Americans are being pushed to the wall: broke, homeless and hungry will become normal for some number of Americans in the tens of millions. The actual economy will contract, but the rich will be richer.

Complete and absolute disconnect. This was visible in 2008, when the rich were bailed out despite being bankrupt and not just allowed, but encouraged, to set up an assembly line to steal ordinary Americans’ houses.

This is not recoverable.

It is not sustainable.

The Age of America is nearly done. Empires do not die cleanly. Russians died like flies when the USSR collapsed, and Russians were in far better shape to handle collapse than Americans are because they had garden plots and housing that wasn’t going to be taken from them.

Biden will probably win this election. He will not stop this. He will delay it somewhat, while furthering the conditions that made it happen.

Once Biden’s done, another right-wing “populist” will win the election, because the center would rather elect a fascist than even a 50s-style left-winger.

That President is likely to either turn the US full fascist or cause its collapse, or both.

When US passports start working again after Covid burns through the country, get out if you can. If you can’t, prepare as best you are able.

The time to get out or start preparing was 2008/9. But if you leave it too late, your life is on the line, or much worse.

Do not discount this, please. The numbers are staggering, but worse, those numbers are seen as good by the people who run US society. They want the displacement, because it is an opportunity for them to increase their wealth and power.

They will wind up ruling over rubble, but you will live in the rubble.

Do not discount this if you are American.

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The Course of Empire by Thomas Cole

The Cycle of Civilization and the Twilight of Neoliberalism

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On June 11, 2020

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Many mainstream pundits now admit that the rise of the right-wing populism is due to the neglect, over the last 40 years or so, of many people, leaving them to rot, as the rich got richer. Four decades of stagnant wages, soaring housing prices, shitty jobs, and so on, have left people willing to vote against the status quo, no matter what they’re voting for.

This is all very nice. It is even a good thing.

But the warnings were given for decades. I remember very well warnings about rising inequality as early as the mid-eighties, and doubtless some were warning sooner, and I missed it due to my youth. The people doing the warning often said, “This is bad because it will lead to the rise of very bad people, like in the 30s.”

Yeah.

Learning after reality hits you in the face with a shovel, repeatedly, is good, but it’s not as good as avoiding getting hit in the face with a shovel.

Of course, the problem is that elites, and their “pundits,” only got hit in the face with a shovel recently. The last 40 years may have been a terrible time to be a peon, but they were the best time to be rich, or a retainer of the rich, in modern history. Maybe in all of history. Yeah, Babylonian kingdoms and Roman emperors were richer, but what they could buy with their riches was limited (though sex, food, and the ability to push other people around are the basics, and have always been available).

So, the people with power saw no reason to stop, because the policies were making them filthy rich and impoverishing people they didn’t know or care about. Heck, impoverishing ordinary people was good; it made services (and servants) cheaper.

For quite some time, I pursued a two-pronged (worthless) strategy. I told the people being fucked that they needed to fight back and scare the shit out of the elities, or the elites would keep hurting them. Then I told the elites that, as much as the peons seemed to be willing to take it and take it, eventually they would rebel.

Neither strategy worked, and even though the peons are now in revolt, they are backing policies which may help them somewhat in the short run, but which will be bad for them in the middle term–at least so far. (I have some hope that the left will win some in Europe. Spain’s leftists and Corbyn are the most promising signs so far.)

This is, really, just the normal cycle of history. There are bad times, and people eventually learn from them, and create good times, and the people who grow up in good times are weak and don’t really believe the bad times can return, so the bad times return, and the bad times at least make people tough and sometimes get them to pull together, and then they create good times.

Sometimes that cycle breaks down–usually because the bad times make people meaner and more desperate and break them down rather than bring them together, and then you get dark ages. Other times, the good times last for a few generations, not completely destroying the virtue of the people and their leaders immediately, for reasons I’ve touched on in the past and will discuss more in the future (you can read Machiavelli in Discourses on Livy if you need a fix now).

While this is the normal cycle of history, and it may be usually yawn-inducing, if tragic to those caught in it, we are unfortunately also at a point where we’ve done so much damage to our ecosystem that we’re in the middle of a great die-off. We also have climate change which, I suspect, is now not just beyond stopping, but which has reached an exponential, self-reinforcing period of its growth.

On the bright side (sort of), the technology which let us dig this hole gives us a better chance of digging ourselves out, but only a chance.

This is where we are at, and the hysterical reaction of many to Trump and to Brexit is a bad sign, because it hasn’t even begun to get really bad yet. It is going to get so much worse than this that people will look back to the reign of Trump as good times.

This is what we sowed, it is what we are going to reap, and it is what we are going to have to eat. It’s just that simple.

None of this means there is no hope. Some stuff will work out startlingly well, as was the case with the US and FDR in the 30s. Some stuff will be far worse than any but the most realistic thinkers are willing to contemplate, and in the middle of this it will still be possible for many to be happy, to find love, and to live satisfying lives, just as it was during the Great Depression and World War II.

It’s a weird metaphysical question, “Could this have been stopped?” and I’ll leave it aside for now. If we believe in free will, and if we want to have some hope that the future won’t follow the same pattern until we drive ourselves extinct, let us hope that it could have been stopped, not for what it says about the past, but what it says about the future, and about humans.

I’ll write more soon about our current period, best called The Twilight of Neoliberalism. For now, gird your loins. There will be ups and downs, but basically, it’s going to get worse. Find the happiness you can in the middle of it, and don’t let your happiness or well-being rest on geopolitical events you cannot control as an individual.

Originally published Nov 29, 2016.

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A Long, Hot Summer

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On June 3, 2020

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Back when Obama was elected, I was still an A-list blogger, and had some access. We advised Obama and the Senators creating the new financial laws that the correct action was to take over the banks and break them up, while bailing out Main Street. Criminal charges should be laid against bankers under RICO statutes for fraud, to ensure nothing like this happened again.

If they did not follow our advice, we warned that it would eventually lead both a strengthening of the populist right and to civil unrest.

Of course, they didn’t take that advice, and given who Obama chose to run his administration that should hardly have been a surprise. Indeed, it was Obama who pushed TARP through after it failed the first time–Pelosi was not going to pass it if Republicans would not vote for it in equal percentages, and they wouldn’t. Obama twisted arms, and the reports I received were that the threats were absolutely savage. TARP was, though most Democrats will not admit it, ultimately Obama’s bill, whether it was originally Bush’s or not.

It is after the 2008 financial crisis that American pathology starts going off the charts: We start seeing declining life expectancy among the working class, the opiate crisis spreads to poor and many middle class whites, and so on. It takes years for jobs to return, and inequality soars; it was worse under Obama than any other previous president. Yes, this is a continuation of trend, but Obama could have stopped it, simply by enforcing laws as written.

The response to the financial crisis set the standard: Bail out the rich, fuck the poor people–they receive some crumbs. This was repeated when Covid-19 hit, with multi-trillion dollar bailouts for the rich, and a single $1,200 check for everyone else, with some technocratic fixes around the edges. Billionaires gained control over more of the economy, small businesses were and are being gutted, and crisis capitalists are waiting to snap up billions in distressed businesses and properties.

The rich get richer, the poor get poorer.

Meanwhile the neoliberal playbook, which was always about making the rich richer and everyone else poorer and about gutting the middle class the New Deal order built, kept the poors down by locking them up and with routing police brutality. Incarceration soared under neoliberal rulership, and Joe Biden was one of the architects, though you can see the trend starts under Reagan.

And so here we are, with protests and riots throughout the US. This was a long time coming, and it came because the lords and masters in the US refuse to throw anybody but the rich more than scraps. They funnel gold and caviar to the already wealthy at every opportunity; cat food to everyone else. They beat down anyone who acts uppity, giving cops massive license to be brutal, arming them with military weapons, and having them taught by Israelis whose experience is in beating down Palestinians in the occupied territories: people with no rights, regarded by Israelis as subhuman (no, don’t even pretend otherwise).

The cops see violence and brutality as their right. Any challenge to their authority is met with cruelty and abuse of power. They are fundamentally cowards, because they don’t believe their victims have any right to fight or even talk back. (Their essential cowardice has been proven when they are threatened, and is a weakness which could easily be exploited.)

Right now there is no reason to believe than any of the new Covid-19 bills will do more than give crumbs out. Food stamps are under threat of further restriction and, in New York, Governor Cuomo (whose popularity has increased despite his complete malign incompetence in handling Covid-19) used the crisis as part of his excuse to cut Medicaid, while keeping non violent offenders locked up in prison so that Covid could kill them.

Long and short, neoliberal elites don’t know how to give. They don’t have the instinct that New Deal elites, for all their flaws, had, that the job of government is prosperity for the masses. They know it is prosperity for the few, they feel in their bones that anyone who is poor doesn’t deserve more than a little bit of pity charity, and their instinct is punitive; the poor and middle class are undeserving and if they get uppity, what they need is a good smack.

Covid is not going to go away this summer. Multiple states have reopened without getting it even remotely under control. Testing has been reduced, but even so numbers show only minor decreases.

So we have a pandemic, a population nearing 30 percent unemployment, people who can’t pay the rent, and 40 years of impoverishment and brutality.

This summer has been a long time coming, and it’s only starting. Even if this wave of protests is crushed, or dies down, the smart money is that it isn’t the last wave.

And that’s a good thing.

Because as long as your lords and masters know they can only give you scraps and feed themselves at gold plated troughs, that’s how it’ll be.

If you are reading this, understand that this dynamic means that there can be no peace while the current ideology rules. The only possible peace is the peace of impoverished serfdom, of people beaten so far into the ground that they simply accept that everything will keep getting worse for them while the rich feast.

There is no good future for the US if neoliberalism, and neoliberal elites, continue to rule.

Take that into account in your planning.

And get ready for that long, hot summer.

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Why Read or Write About the Grand Affairs of Humanity?

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On May 27, 2020

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I’ve been thinking hard about why I write. It started as an attempt to fix the big things, by explaining what was wrong and how to fix them.

That didn’t work.

Really didn’t work. Almost 100 percent failure.

Unfortunately, much of my writing has continued in this mode: Explain the big wrong things. Didn’t work in the 00’s. Didn’t work in the 10’s. Unlikely to work in the 20s.

I’ve lost a lot of my heart for it. Explaining the world to people makes very little difference to the world, at least when I do it. Predicting trends and events years in advance, same.

So I’m going to change the emphasis of my writing. Oh, there’ll still be grand explainers, but I’m going to write them less with the hope that they’ll change the world, and more so that they help individuals and small groups navigate the world better. That way at least I’m more likely to help people

The big stuff is pretty much locked in now: We’ll see really bad climate change, we’re moving to a two-polar or multi-polar world, surveillance societies will be the norm until collapse, inequality will keep increasing in most countries, etc. Some is more locked in than other stuff; we could, in theory, reverse inequality (and we will, the question is when), but climate change is here to stay, and the international trade order is falling apart.

Back in 2000, when Bush v. Gore happened, my friend Stirling Newberry said, “We’re going to ride this bucket all the way down to hell.”

He was right.

But, as I emphasized yesterday, even in very bad times, some people are doing well, and others are doing better than they might have. Perhaps we’re unlikely to change the big picture, but more of us can change our picture and those of smaller groups.

Knowing how the world works, how governments, large corporations, and billionaires work, and knowing how non-human systems like the environment work, will be useful to those people. You may not be able to change the world (though keep trying if you want, someone will), but you can adapt better or worse to it.

This doesn’t mean I won’t keep writing the bigger pieces. I’ve spent most of my adult life building a world model of which I’m proud. It’s different in some ways from anyone else’s (this doesn’t mean better, though I hope it is better than most), and I want to get it out into the wild. My book “The Construction of Reality” is part of that (and stuck at the editor who is overwhelmed thanks to Covid-19), and there will be other books, long essays, and so on.

Maybe that world view will find an audience in the future or be useful to the future, maybe it won’t, but I want to give it a try.

But on the blog, I’m going to shift the emphasis in articles to not just what’s going to happen but why and try and pull out more of the reasoning so that readers can learn to do the analysis themselves, and can use it plan for and react to the world’s changes over the next few decades.

Things are going to be bad–really bad–for a lot of people. The time is past where most of that can be stopped, and the odds of stopping that which can still be stopped are, in most cases, small, and beyond the reach of individuals.

What is not beyond our reach is helping ourselves, those we care about, and–hopefully–some people beyond that circle.

And it’s in hope of that, and of a future where people and their leaders are willing to do the right things, the good things, that I am going to reorient my writing.

Be well.

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Telling an Adventure Story with Your Life

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On May 25, 2020

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One of the most popular articles on my site is The Philosophy of Collapse and Decline, whhich about how to live in a civilization where you know bad things are going to happen, and you can’t stop them.

This is a topic I keep thinking about. At one point, I threw myself into the fight to stop evils like climate change, massive increases in inequality, a surveillance society, war, and increasing authoritarianism.

Lost those fights. Pretty much all of them. Not just me, us.

While some things will get better, there’s a lot of bad shit coming down the line. Most of is either unstoppable, or stoppable by having worse things happen. For example, facial recognition may be stopped or very delayed if no Covid-19 vaccine can be created, since people may be wearing masks in public most of the time.

Yeah, didn’t see that coming.

Totalitarian states, likewise, may be stopped by economic collapse caused by bad-case climate change.

Mmmmmm, fun stuff.

I don’t want to tell people not to fight the big fights. The best way to lose big fights is to not fight.

But the fact is, we’ve already lost some of the most important ones, for example, climate change. We ain’t stopping that, it’s happening–anyone who says otherwise is expecting a miracle. Now, I’m willing to give Fate, God, or the Wyrd a chance, but I’m not big on counting on any of them, so yeah, happening.

When people look hard at the crap rolling down civilization’s hill, when they do the work, and have their “Oh SHIT!” moment, they tend to lose said shit. Depression ensues, or all the stages of grief.

Go ahead and do that, because generally you have to go through it.

But what’s at the other end? There’s all of the, “Well, love and sex and cookies still rock,” (Hey, try all three at the same time!), and if that’s your path, go chill in the Philosophy of Collapse and Decline with the Chinese gentlemen (and, today, women) getting drunk on fine wine, composing poems, and admiring beautiful men, women, and mountains (sometimes, yes, all at the same time.)

Another model is the adventure hero(ine) model.

I read a lot of fiction as a kid, heck, I still read a lot of fiction (gestures expansively at the many thousands of books I’ve had to abandon over my life). Now, there are angsty protagonists, having a shit time as they labor through their lives, yes. There are the hopeless schmucks of literary fiction, endlessly examining their navels.

But there are also protags who look at bad shit and think (and feel, more importantly), “This is an interesting challenge! How can I manage this?”

Then they manage it and often have fun doing so.

The world is always going to hell, yup. Just depends where you are, when. Roman empire is collapsing, other places doing great. America is booming in the 50s, Chinese are starving. It’s the 60s, there’s a Rock and Roll invasion, dope, LSD, lots of sex, and, hey, the Vietnam war and lots of Vietnamese dying, some being burned alive.

Someone’s always having a shit life. Someone else is always having a good life.

Now, I’m not suggesting you become an asshole: You don’t have to make someone else’s life miserable for yours to be good. You don’t have become the sort of prick who doesn’t understand that other people are suffering.

But perhaps, just perhaps, because the world is going to hell, it doesn’t mean you have to go to hell. Perhaps you can say, “Well, people lived through World War II and some of them even had a good time, and goddamn, I’m going to be one of those.” Perhaps you can look at the challenges and think, “How do I get around this? Is there a good life for me and mine to be had anyway?”

The first art of winning your fights it to choose your fights, “Jet Li or Woody Allen, hrrrrm?”

You’re one person, there are over seven billion people in the world, and a lot of them are a lot more powerful than you. Events like climate change have momentum that an individual can’t stop (you can still contribute), but there are fights you can win, and there are good lives that will be possible even as the world goes to shit.

This is how adventure heroes act, think, and feel. “Well, that’s terrible, but hey, I have a plan.”

And I’d like to encourage some of you reading this to do that. You can’t save everyone, but you may be able to save yourself and some others, and have fun doing it. Heck, maybe you can even look stylish doing it.

And the mountain, wine, and beautiful men or women will all still exist. (So will the cookies, unless we go full Mad Max, in which case, well, remember, apocalypse in style!)

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