Never mind the official definitions; for you and I the real issue behind a recession or depression is a decline in the standard of living. In other words, everything we have gotten used to will cost more, and we’ll be getting along in the future with less of it.
Here in the West, our technological advances are no longer resulting in more jobs for more people. Basic unalterable fact: If people aren’t making or harvesting stuff other people want, there is no economy. Entertainment and information isn’t “stuff” by that definition. Such intangibles have to be supported by something more fundamental to life. Well, we long ago passed the point of saturation on stuff. And now we aren’t coming up with any wholly new technologies, at least not here in the West. You should expect to see them in places like China, India and Brazil, as their economies blossom, but they won’t really get roaring until they work out how to break loose from the Western banking powers.
So if that’s not bad enough, we got more problems. It may be pretty hard to get food at any price after this whomping big freeze, following upon a couple others. We kept reading all these experts talking about how, any day now, the sun should reawaken the heavy sunspot activity because it’s that time in the cycle. It’s not happening. That single greatest factor in our climate is not cooperating, and the mythology of Global Warming is coming apart, even as the faithful proclaim all the more loudly how this is all a result of anthropogenic climate change. The point is, we have every reason to expect this winter was just the first in a long series which could so easily become an ice age.
But just for the current time frame of this year alone, we will have serious food shortages coming on top of a general decline in economic activity, and government oppression coupled with profligate borrowing which could hardly be sustained in the best of times. Think about this: An awful lot of people alive right now here in the US will soon die before their time. No other result is possible.
The wealthy elite know it’s coming. We can argue they planned it and caused it, but the point is they knew it was coming and have taken measures to ride out the storm. Not that they should necessarily escape the wrath of the masses, or at least the few out of the masses with an understanding and a penchant to act, but they have prepared. Most of us have not. Instead, we kept buying into their lies and buying their junk, and neglecting the preparation for disaster. Fear we have aplenty, but action is missing. Instead, we are going to see vastly increasing activity based on panic response, along with an exponential increase in predatory crime. That predation will come as much from government people as from the non-government competitors. There is no restraint largely because we have tossed aside any real civilizing influences in favor of something cheap and superficial. The wealthy elite have been preying upon us so quietly and secretly all these years, promoting that decline as they consolidated their control.
Not that it was so challenging to bring us to this place. Western Civilization was never much to begin with, being so completely materialistic and worldly. When all you have to hope for is more and better stuff, you completely ignore the moral nature of everything around you. All the energy was expended in getting and keeping things which just don’t matter. Thus, it peaked very high and very quickly, and the decline will not be gentle.
