One of the widespread economic distortions that I’m going to hammer at again and again – and one I’ve touched on previously – is this absurd notion that growth is good and sustainable. In no system of any kind observed anywhere in the known universe have we seen evidence that supports this assertion. Anything that grows indefinitely will eventually collapse. This is for any number of reasons, but as a general rule, I want to restate my First Principal of Natural Systems of Behavioral Organization: In nature, all things that grow will always eventually contract, and that which has contracted will eventually emerge in new growth.

We have lied to ourselves about this truth, insisted that our man-made systems of behavioral organization – economics, governance, population, etc. – are somehow synthetic, not of nature, and therefore transcend natural laws. This is simply not true: Any thing that is of us is of nature by extension of us. This may not be a perfect syllogism, but, rhetorical logic aside, the facts bear my assertion out. Observed without the blinders of dogma, any human created system behaves like a natural system that exists independent of human creation. If a system’s growth is overstimulated beyond its natural limits, rather than contract the system will collapse.

In our lust for wealth, we have artificially stimulated our economy well, well beyond its natural growth limits, and we’ve propped it up well past the point at which it should’ve collapsed. It’s unfortunate: Had we allowed the economy to take its own course and naturally contract, it’s extremely likely that we would’ve benefited from it with a renewed and leaner economy, refocused society, and healthier consumer appetites. Instead, we’ve become addicted to economic growth and bloated ourselves on riches arrived at through parasitizm. It’s deeply unfortunate: Somewhere along the way, we intentionally exchanged peoples for profits in our economic model, and rather than using health of communities as our economic barometers we chose quarterly gains on various stock markets. Desirous of ever greater profits we whipped companies on and on toward higher share prices, regardless of the impacts those whippings had on local communities. CEOs, once shepherds of corporate heritage and stewards of corporate futures as well as community well-being, now stand wholly accountable to corporate shareholders, too often among whom they are shareholder #1. Wealth has entirely subsumed well-being. All the while, economists, the Wall Street Elite, and even Main Street Americans have equated growth with success and economic health. Unfortunately, this hasn’t been true for quite some time – since the 70s, frankly. Reagan propped up and avoided what should’ve been a significant contraction of our economy, and Bush I and Clinton accomplished something similar a decade later. Our economy was not allowed to contract, not allowed to relax its energies after a period of growth, not allowed to regroup its energies and refocus on its next growth.

As we contemplate the next iteration of our society – life after the Depression – we would do well to remember the distortions we’ve been fed about growth, the bald myth that it can go on indefinitely and unprotracted. This, above all other matters, is the lesson we must learn.

It’s obvious to anyone watching that the world is changing – changing rapidly before our eyes. In the calm after the bailout, smart Americans – and everyone else, for that matter – are wondering, “What’s next?” While the talking heads on CNBC and PRI’s Marketplace are celebrating the bailout as a success with reckless prematurity, most of us have a strong sense that this isn’t everything. And, as I’ve been saying, that sense is right. There’s still a lot more to happen with out economy before the dust settles. There’s still a lot more that will go wrong, and even more that could go wrong. Perhaps politicians and talking heads are truly blind to this; perhaps they’re telling us only what they think we need to know – to stem widespread panic. And perhaps they’ve isolated the rich intentionally? In the last week, I’ve watched and listened to pundits and reporters chastise conservatives for asserting that consumers are just as much to blame for this crisis as banks; liberal pundits, and even some neocons, are incensed and outraged that Main Street Americans should be blamed for this crisis. It certainly makes it easier for the average American to swallow if blame can be narrowed, and if already despicable people are the culprits. It’s easier to maintain calm. Easier to question the system’s proponents and leaders. Perhaps even the system itself. Than to face the reality of our own culpability – not only in bringing us this far down, but in being instrumental in the coming months in bringing us even farther down.

The health of our economy isn’t the only tipping point we’re facing, though. Free market capitalism isn’t the only dogma we’ve begun questioning.

The election has made it clear that a new kind of populism has emerged, one in which Americans expect not only a higher quality of character from their government, but a more services as well. More entitlements. Perhaps coming off a period of heedless selfishness, heedless mindless consumerism and selfish interpersonal isolationism, heedless reduction of our fellow American’s to easily disdained and forgotten functionaries, we’ve been confronted at last by the spiritual bankruptcy of our foul habits? Perhaps we yearn for a new altruism, a new unity to heal that bankruptcy? And Obama has stepped in, focused that formerly formless malaise along lines of communal hope? And McCain has sloppily, cravenly attempted to co-opt it? I think these conditions are true. I think that Americans are truly yearning for more – not only from their government, but from their society, their peers. Perhaps even from themselves. It’s been a formless anxiety – we haven’t had a clear, widespread sense of it. But we’re seeing it manifest along social nodes – as we near tipping points.

The economy’s health, obviously, is one. Healthcare is a significant tipping point that we’ve reached – a desire for greater personal health, and greater ease of access to such care. We’ve recontextualized – broadly – what was once a luxury into an entitlement, and we yearn for its fulfillment, believe ardently in our right to it. Our environment is another tipping point we’ve reached – weather patterns have changed and food and gas prices have increased enough that people don’t need to read news reports about shirnking icecaps, dwindling rain forests, drowning polar bears, vanished salmon, and violent hurricanes to realize that our planet is sick and we’re the cause. Another yearning there: for leadership and new initiatives leading us to new “clean” energies. And with our economy dwindling and corporations who’ve already betrayed their communities by spending the last decade shipping ever more of our jobs overseas shedding still more American jobs now, we want some assurance – again, an entitlement – that we will be employed, earning paychecks at a fair wage.

There are even more tipping points we face – notions of patriotism and a unified vocabulary of the American experience, new moral values are appearing with American more and more interested in substantiative matters of well-being and less and less interested in how people fuck each other. But it’s the matters above – pertaining to exchanges and jobs and perpetuation of our way of life – I’m most interested in for the moment.

We consider ourselves a capitalist society, and have so since our inception. The notion of the “American Promise” has largely rode on a presumed correlation between excellence and personal worth – if you work hard, you’ll gain more. The very mechanisms of the middle class. Capitalism, we’ve told ourselves for our long history, is the only economic vehicle that can truly drive such individual successes. Free market capitalism as we became aware of it in the last half of the 20th Century was thrilling in its dynamism, in its obvious propensity not only to translate hard work into wealth, but brilliant and shrewd ambition into astronomical wealth and power. Though attained only by the shrewdest of us, we told ourselves again and again that we all might soar to such heights.

Look at us now. Calls for massive governmental interventions to save us from our widespread, selfish economic malfeasances. Debt relief, for the rich and consumers alike – even “anti-regulatory” politicians like Senator McCain calling for government buy-ups and readjustments of financings for home mortgages. Partial privatization of major financial institutions. Demands for government-assured entitlements to health care. Demands for government-assured jobs, clean energy.

It’s not just our economy Americans are calling for nationalistic interventions of – we’re calling for a great number of services to be nationalized as well. Our politicians are responding, even egging us on. When once we yearned for more individual power and politicians fed us separate-seeming advances that quietly led to the broad implementation of free market capitalism, now we yearn for nationalized industries – without realizing the extend of our yearnings – and our officials are leading us quietly down the path to socialism, again with no public discourse.

The virtues of capitalism and socialism are just as clear to me as their corruptabilities. I consider both virtuous for very different reasons – they approach human well-being and social health from very different angles, and make very different presumptions about human nature in order to suggest paths to individual and social health. I believe neither is superior to the other in theory – and both are just as susceptible to top-down corruptions. I do believe that capitalism is less capable of handling the strains of larger and more complex populations with access to increasingly scant resources – I think socialism may have inherently better mechanisms for managing exchanges between large numbers of people, and that our numbers now have exceeded capitalism’s ability to manage. I do not have a problem with us moving increasingly toward socialism – if handled healthfully, I believe that we will benefit greatly for it.

Yet these quiet moves from one economic model to another, moves without public discourse and investigation, have led to damaging corruptions, particularly in this last quiet shift to the free market. Clever men, seeing the direction of the breeze well before the rest of the population, have aligned themselves strategically, entrenched their social and monetary power, and subverted laws and society to their aims. They were able to sneak these movements past us because none of us looked up from our lives long enough to notice – the course our society was taking, and the steps powerful men were taking to codify those trends, but extract fantastic power and wealth from it.

We must not repeat this error. We must not move ever closer and along seeming-unrelated fragmentary initiatives toward moderate socialism, perhaps even into full-blown socialism, without public discourse, inquiry.

Part of our lax response to these great movements is a notion of entitlements and temporalities. We are comfortable with movements toward healthcare and jobs because we’ve seen the successes of such initiatives in our history – a unification of government and people during the New Deal brought us renewed stability, principal, and prosperity; a unification of government and people made us the spectacular victors of World War II; a similar unification rallied our resources to drive human contact with our moon. At the same time, as Americans violate certain economic taboos – investing American taxpayers in the banking system – we tell ourselves that these violations are only for a little while, just until things stabilize. These incursions are temporary.

Of course, there are no guarantees that these are temporary. Certainly, so long as matters are dire for us, we will persist in our investment. And once things stabilize and government tastes the profits of stock dividends, who’s to say that we’ll relinquish these newfound revenues, and influence? Who’s to say that banks won’t enjoy perpetual federal protections – socialization of losses, privatization of profits? Truly, only leaders of great principal and integrity will relinquish these involvements. We’ve seen a dearth of such leaders for a good long while.

We must be realistic about the direction of our country. We cannot excuse such broad cultural shifts as little, isolated, and easily rationalized. We must recognize the trend for what it is now. We must admit to ourselves that what we crave is a kind of socialism. Despite the shame we held for proponents of it in the last century, there is no shame in longing for such movements now. We must shed those shames. We must face the reality – the reality of ourselves. And we must open the dialog about the direction of our society, address it head-on. We must hold our powerful elite to a high standard as we make these movements, make these initiatives and changes. We must demand that they do not abuse our trust in them yet again, do not skew these new social mechanisms toward gains limited mainly to their persons. History has taught us that such distortions, particular so early on in the advent of these new systems, lead to the very inherencies of instability that bring those systems down. We must be farsighted, demand integrity, and so assure that a similar crash does not shadow us again. Or, at least not in our lifetimes.

I’ve rewritten and re-posted posts 167 and 168. Both have benefitted from additional concision and clarity (though both are still long and present mildly complicated socio-psychologic/-philosophic arguments). If you’ve read them before, please consider reading them again. If you have not, I humbly submit them for your consideration. I hope you agree that both are worthy additions to our current cultural dialog.

167.All hinges on the persistence of the value of debt.

168.Value and worth.

Post 167 was a bit bloated in terms of its reasoning, largely because I was working out the ideas as I wrote them. This weekend, I plan to rework and rewrite it for clarity and concision because I think its fundamental tenet – that the value of debt hangs in the balance and the very well-being of society as we know it hangs with it – is of vital contemporary importance.

Post 167’s argument hinged on one semantic: value. Today, I want to try to distinguish what I think value is, how it differs from worth, and why – as with understanding the distinction between ethics and morality – it’s important, particularly now, that we have a distinguished understanding of these concepts.

We tend to think that both these terms describe an inherent quality to objects, actions, and ideas – that these things, such as money and gold and food, have an quality to them independent from our engagement with them that makes them important and desirable to us. I do not believe this intrinsicality is so. Value and worth, to my mind, do not describe intrinsic qualities and desirabilities, but instead define the types of relationships we socially agree to have with these objects, actions, and ideas, and with each other, when relating to these objects, et al, in a broad and engaged social context.

Value and worth are not the same – though we frequently use the terms synonymously. Like mass and matter, and ethics and morality, value and worth approach a shared basic notion – in this case, how we socially agree to relate to a thing – from different vantages, and consequently bring us to differing understandings about the actuality of our relationship to the thing.

Worth, as I have come to understand it, describes a relationship where the thing in question, based on its transferable usefulness, defines the relationships we socially agree to have with it and around it, and those relationships are generally not capricious (which is to say that they are generally more resilient in instances of social attitudinal shift than value by comparison). This is largely based on what I call its transferable usefulness – an object that has worth is consistently useful in the same ways to more people than it is not. Worth does not frequently occur spontaneously, nor is it typically an imposed quality; it is one that evolves organically as we relate to a thing and determine the nature, degree, and transferability of its usefulness over time. It is also a quality that gains social traction and temporal durability the more tactile and concrete the object or concept in question exists as. Consequently, worth very frequently is broadly recognized over cultural boundaries. Food has worth. Raw materials have worth. Items that are uniformly useful such as homes, tools, and even exchangable currency (which is a confusing animal on the value/worth spectrum) have worth. We even say that people have worth, based largely on the quality and degree of their ethical and/or virtuous actions.

Conversely, I think value defines a relationship where desirability is imposed on a thing by society, and where we agree as a society how that thing is to be related to, and those agreements and relationships are fundamentally capricious in nature, and exist independent from the tactility and concreteness of the thing value is to being imposed onto. We can impose value on anything – especially socially institutionalized abstractions – regardless of its transferable usefulness. So long as social attitudes align agreeably to relate to a thing as valuable, it retains its value. Once society decides that thing no longer has value, that value ceases to exist. Values determine not only how we price and want certain things – like fashionable clothing, iPods, automobiles, soy vanilla lattes – but they also determine our attitudes toward popular and unpopular ideas, opinions, and ethical and moral actions, and other abstract mechanisms of behavioral organization, such as democracy, economics, and religion. Currency, as I’ve said, is a weird animal; currency has worth because it usefulness is almost always transferable, but the degree of it’s usefulness is determined by the capricious value society imposes on that currency on any given day. As I wrote yesterday, debt exists only as social abstraction we give value to and it has no intrinsic worth.

We could say, then, “Worth is discovered, value is imposed.”

As with ethics and morality, mass and matter, et al, these concepts of worth and value frequently overlap. We do impose value on things that have worth, and when values become so socially intrinsic as for us to lose awareness of their true natures as abstract social constructions, we come to believe that those values are based on or have inherent worth as well. Indeed, worth can be discovered in a thing that was first a value. The internet is a great example of thing; as it was initially evolving, it progressed from being a thing we related to as an exciting novelty (value) to a ubiquituous tool for social and commercial interraction whose usefulness is broadly transferrable (worth). Automobiles, computers, and telephones have arrived at worth via similar means as well. Here, society discovers that a manufactured good it had initially valued as novel has proven durable and transferably useful over many relatings, and so that valued-as-novel good comes to have genuine social worth.

Fads are a great way to look at value in action, and typically value that is independent from worth. Take the example of the Tamagochi in America during the late 90s. The tamagochi was a goofy little “virtual pet” (read: a lite artificial life simulation) housed in a palm-held “egg.” Using three interactive buttons, you took care of this abstract “animal,” and controlled its health and quality of life. The thrill about the thing was that it could “die.” It was extremely popular with school children and Wired magazine reading hipster technophiles. As a society, we agreed that this colorfully packaged videogame was extremely novel and charming, and we imposed certain values on it – such as a cache of coolness, urgent individual demand for it, and a $50 pricetag – but I don’t think that we ever fooled ourselves into thinking it had worth. When the fad had faded, tamagochis across this land lost their extraordinary value and we rediscovered what their actual worth was – which is, not very much at all.

When we talk about a “crisis of values,” what we’re describing is an unsettling instance wherein a significantly disproportionate and/or incongruous relationship exists between the value we assign to a thing and its actual worth. These distortions can be profound and cause deep social affliction due to widespread toxic actions informed by inaccurate presumptions. An example of a dangerously overvalued concept is American home values over the last 15 or so years, which have ballooned disproportionate to their actual worth. An example of a dangerously undervalued thing is our relationship to, understanding of, and attitude toward our planet – upon which and ourselves our overconsumptions have finally taken their toll.

Where I think ethics is a superior concept and approach to human interaction to morality, I do not make such distinctions between worth and value. I think both are very important concepts as they describe how we approach relating to things, and in understanding the natures of those relationships – their transferrability, their usefulness, and their capriciousness/durability. Socially agreed to values have just as much power and valid import in conditioning a healthy human reality as worth; indeed, without value, such concepts as ethics and morality both have no foundation from which to derive their meaning and power.

I think finally we’ve all come to an understanding of just how dependent the global economy is on debt. We don’t spend real worth so much as we create, spend, and consume debt. With all this attention on the disasters at the Wall Street end of our economy, though, a lot of ordinary Americans are left wondering how this crisis effects them, if it ever will, and if it really is even a crisis at all? It all seems so impractical, so abstract, so unreal – all thunder, no storm. It sometimes seems, even to doomsaying me, as though this storm really will miss Main Street.

But an strong trend of decreasing spending and increasing job cuts has only just begun, and it’s folly for me to suggest that ordinary folks like you and me may skate past this train wreck unharmed.

There really is a Main Street core to all of this – a you-and-me level of granularity that is the inescapable fibre threading through the entire fabric of this crisis, holding it together. And everything in this tragedy-verging-on-calamity hinges on it. Debt has value only so long as you, I, everyone we know, everyone they know, and everyone else all agree that it does. The value I’m talking about here isn’t the income stream that banks are so nervous about. There is no item of intrinsic worth we can point to. It’s the value of social relevance.

In physical terms, debt exists purely as abstraction. Yes, banks give you money, and that’s the tangible end of the thing; but obligation to repay that bank has almost no physical reality whatsoever. There are no tangible hooks that the bank has into you for this debt. The bank doesn’t have an IV linked into your bank account steadily sucking funds away from you until your debt and interest have been repayed. You’ve promised to repay; the neural connections that compose the memory of that promise in both your mind and the bank’s mind, and the digital connections made on the bank’s harddrive are as physically tangible as that obligation will ever get. Banks certainly have some legal protections here, and should you stop paying them can take you to court to persue repayment, will typically win such engagements, and you suffer considerably for it. But that can happen only so long as the parties involved, save perhaps for you, agree that the debt in question has value. So, regardless of what you think about debt’s value, society validates that it does have value, and society penalizes you for dishonoring that value when you don’t make good on it.

Debt has value only because we as a society agree that it does, and that agreement defines how that value is to be administered and interracted with. But society does not have a mind of its own – it’s a consensus of minds’ attitudes toward specific values. And in all societies, there are tipping points where consensuses about certain values change radically, and in extreme instances such changes can be swift and thorough. Observed historically, social attitudes about values are capricious, and what is taken as a valuable in one iteration of society can be quickly and irrevocably swept away, perhaps even ushering in the next iteration of society in its wake. I think exaclty this kind of consensus shift is about to happen on the value of debt If our leaders fail in their endeavors to stabilize society, I believe every kind of debt will lose its value.

This is such a radical scenario that it probably seems implausible – even crazy – for me to suggest it. But abstraction is the true reality of debt. It’s totally a social construct and nothing more. Yet despite its fundamental fragile nature, we have come to see how prevalently it holds god-like sway over us all.

This understanding may seem a strange notion of the application of “value,” particularly because the presumption of debt’s worth is so utterly widespread. Instead of having supra-socially intrinsic worth, like food or raw materials, debt has intra-socially assumed worth and that assumed worth is tightly encoded into society. There’s no tangible object of worth that such value can be assigned to – we assign value to a pattern of behaviors and to the expectation that those patterns will be fulfilled by debt’s participants.

Repayment without social and legal enforcement is a losing gamble for creditors for the sad fact that most humans require frequent reinforcement to reassure them that the abstractions they’ve taken advantage of have real consequences. Debtors generally repay, then, because they see everyone else is repaying and because they see that those who don’t pay lose their stuff and are denied credit for seven or more years. Creditors are able to enforce the value of debt on debtors largely because the logistics of recoupment from defaultors have so far been manageable, primarily because only a small percentage of debtors historically have actually defaulted.

This whole notion of debt’s value rides on two preconditions: The vast majority of debtors must agree and act to repay moneys borrowed, and creditors must successfully manage the logistics of recoupment on most of those who do not. If one of these pillars fails, the entire social value of debt collapses and exists no more.

Again, this is a radical idea: the value of debt is so ingrained in our social thinking that it will seem absurd – even insane – to many that I suggest that it is truly a social whim. Yet if banks cannot collect payment and enforce defaults, they can’t preserve their pillar and debt becomes unenforceable and valueless. And if everyone just stops paying, debt becomes an equally unenforceable value.

I don’t believe we all have to stop paying on our debts for all debts to lose value. I think there’s a tipping point where, lets say, only 33% of debtors need to stop paying their debts in order for all debts to spontaneously lose their value. I think the percentage can be much smaller if the defaults are visible enough. Regardless, there is a default threshold beyond which banks and the legal system cannot manage the logistics of meaningful recoupment. Once that threshold has been exceeded, that pillar falls. Broader society will observe that the system cannot effectively enforce debt repayment; society then acknowledges that debts have lost their value. After that, it’s only a matter of time before everyone stops paying.

Example: Portland home mortgage defaults are on the rise. If today 10% of Portland mortgagees are defaulting and their banks are able to seize and resell most of the properties and succesfully take other forms of recourse against defaultors, banks’ losses are recouped in a socially visible and meaningful way – affirming the overall value of mortgage debt. But lets say banks’ maximum capacity to manage the logistics of recouping defaults caps out at 15% of Portland mortgagees. As soon as 16% of Portland mortagees stop making their mortgage payments, the logistics of recoupment begin to exceed banks’ abilities to manage them. It’s here that one of those pillars starts to falter and the value of debt is drawn onto shaky ground.

Now lets say that default rate continues to rise – to, say, 33%. At this point the banks simply lack the ability manage the logistics of recoupment – they can’t kick them all defaultors out of their homes, sell all those houses, and recoup all those losses. The job is simply too big and too complicated to manage, and home market values can’t sustain a flood of defaulted homes for sale – banks couldn’t sell those homes and come close to recouping their initial investments in the mortgages. Banks may succeed in recouping a fraction of those defaults at best, but it’s not a victory. All those defaulted mortgages are practically valueless because their values of most of them cannot be enforced. So, for most of that 33%, there are no tangible consequences for not-paying.

It’s at this point that the remaining 67% of Portland mortgagees take notice that morgage debts are unenforceable; the incentive to repay is quite suddenly minimized for all but the most principalled among us. Very quickly, we jump from 33% to the vast majority of mortgagees defaulting – the tipping point I believe exists has been triggered – and banks totally lose their social leverage to enforce the value of those debts. Mortgagees do become theives at this point – possessing houses that they haven’t completely paid for – but it’s in this wake of evaporated value that we discover the truth of the old axiom that “possession is 9/10ths of the law.” The legal system doesn’t have the resources to enforce the prosecution of 100% of its population for theivery, nor does it have the resources to 100% of them to give what they’ve partially paid for back to the banks. People aren’t theives at this point because the values rendering them so have become unenforceable. The houses are theirs now, and meaningful little can be done about it.

I don’t think that the loss of debt’s value is going to be limited to one or even just a few kinds of debt – as in the example above. I think there’s a threshold at which all debts spontaneously lose their intrinsic social value. We’re headed there fast. More and more people can’t make their mortgage payments, as we well know; but also increasing numbers of people are defaulting on student loans, medical debts, car payments, and, most frighteningly of all, credit cards; and increasing numbers of businesses are having the similar problems meeting debts that cover their operational costs. How close we are to the tipping point is anyone’s guess, but we’re close enough that people in high places are starting to freak out. And that’s what this whole bailout is really about.

The bailout does act to stem bank losses, but it also obfuscates the social visibility of the fact that banks are almost totally unable to meaningfully work out these bad loans. So long as banks’ failures are sheltered from view, society doesn’t notice that one of the pillars of debt has actually fallen down, debt retains its intrinsic social value and our over-indebted economy staggars on. But if the bailout doesn’t adequately obfuscate from larger society the fact that banks aren’t able to manage the logistics of recoupment, debt’s value is immediately imperilled and Americans actionably question whether or not there’s anything that they really have to “pay back” to anyone. After that, as I wrote earlier, it’s only a matter of time…

This is not an impending fate to be rejoiced over – Shangrila is most definitely not nigh, and spectacular calamity will follow when debt loses its intrisic social value. Considering that every commercial function in the first- and second-worlds on this planet is reliant on debt – from the shipping of food and gas to your local stores to the very payroll your paychecks are drawn from, to the funds hospitals use to pay for the health care you recieve today and the finances your insurer will pay your hospital with tomorrow – the sudden social irrelevance of debt will result in a broad, systemwide crash in which scarcity of resources – and all the social tragedies linked to such scarcities – inevitably follows.

I believe this is the reason underlying why politicians and financial regulators are truly scared shitless right now, and growing more frightened by the moment, and why they’re attempting so desperately to stabilize the economy as they are. It isn’t to keep the rich rich (although the fuckers are even now looking for loopholes that they can sneak fat, ill-gained bonuses through), but to guide the crashing economy into a manageable depression, which can only happen if debt retains its value. As soon as debt loses value, the economic world – not the world of Wall Street, but the world of social exchanges of basic goods and services – comes to a dead halt. This isn’t to keep us all on the hook; it’s literally to keep us all fed.

If they do succeed, we sincerely face not a recession as everyone has been saying but a Great Depression, and it’s there these powerful people hope they can slowly and stably fix this clusterfuck over a period of years. Debtors won’t get out of their debts and will continue to repay them, but we will continue to enjoy the basic priveledges of our society that debt fuels – likely only enough of them for us to get by.

If politicians and regulators fail, though, debt will experience a spontaneous loss intrinsic social value, available commercial capital will vanish, deliverers of basic goods and services will be unable to operate, and the resulting infrastructural collapse will look nothing like anything humanity has ever known. I am terrified to ponder the kinds of consequences that await us should that happen, and you should be, too.