The world is toast. Really. All of you must have heard the calls—and the cries—of the scientific community. Yes, the scientists. They’re not a whiny lot, are they? I mean, you may well discard summarily autistic Swedish girls and bizarre long-haired tree-huggers, but you can’t do that with articulate nerds who boast a PhD in chemistry or physics. You wouldn’t do that with your own physician, would you? Unless, of course, you are the US President, or some nutjob injecting bleach into the bloodstream.
Now, if we don’t want the toast to incinerate completely and make the whole house—not just the kitchen—smell like the Titanic’s engines, then we’ve got to do something. Something really BIG. And we have to do it now. Not tomorrow, not by 2050, not as a sorry task for our children and grandchildren. If anything, if business-as-usual continues going as business-as-usual, our children will die, and nobody is going to have any grandchildren or great-grandchildren. Well, maybe Mad Max will do, but that’s quite a horrid prospect. Besides, Australia is too hot and far away. Anyway, let me explain things in a more structured manner.
Back in the 1970s, the US were mired in one of their many colonial wars, which have always been fought, apparently, for liberty’s sake and for the progress of mankind. God bless America! Gosh; one wonders why they keep encountering so much resistance… Anyhow, since wars are profitable for arms manufacturers but expensive for the public purse, Nixon decided to disconnect the US dollar from the value of gold and, with that move, to bring to an end a thirty-year-long successful experiment in thwarting the financial speculators who, in the 1920s, had made an economic killing, but also killed the economy. The Great Depression, worldwide fascism, and the bloodiest war ever seen were the nasty offspring of guys like the Great Gatsby. Don’t forget that. Never. Behind each and every present or future Hitler there is a prior Gordon Gekko run wild. Keynes and a whole generation of policymakers had realised this crucial fact most adamantly. Regulatory eugenics was thus deemed preferable to letting financers play their game as they pleased. Until the 1970s.
At the same time, the ‘glorious’ experiments of forcibly non-unionised labour relations and supposedly ‘free-market’ top-down privatisations were conducted in Chile. If you want a Guinea pig, then you must look for it in Latin America. Geography is not a perfect science, evidently. Or maybe the pig is from Guiana, and somebody’s messed up the spelling. Certainly, error is part of this gory picture; one of the worst pages in recent history.
Inspired by the best and brightest economists from Chicago, general Augusto Pinochet made sure that those who disagreed with this forcible exploit of liberty and progress were duly drugged, loaded onto airplanes and jettisoned into the ocean. It was part of Operation Condor. People sank to the bottom of the sea so that new business opportunities could surface to the top. At the same time, a democratically elected majority in an allegedly free nation was brutally suicided. There comes the fanfare: Stars-and-stripes forever! Thank you, Dr Kissinger.
Given the tangible and undisputed successes of Nixon’s cut-short administration and Pinochet’s cut-throating junta, the latter’s good friends Maggie Thatcher and Ronald Reagan decided to pursue analogous policies inside their own native countries, in their satellites, and, over the years to come, all around the world, which they eventually ‘liberated’ from socialism, communism, extremism, radicalism, colonialism, as well as any possible misguided or wrong use of their newly acquired freedom. To this end, new heralds and new heroes were found. Useful idiots and bribed collaborators too.
As a fruit of all such liberating labour, leaping young tigers were oft saluted, which generally aged fast and turned into sacrificial lambs—but that’s not something to be talked too much in public, is it? In any case, a new global capitalist reality was established, in the end. It was essentially completed soon after the End of History, as Fukuyama christened the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, which, since at least the end of the Second World War, had obliged Western politicians to show some consideration for their nations’ common workers. Bygones were bygones, at that point. The new game in town—a town called “Earth”—was to be global finance capitalism.
How does this game work? Quite simply, anyone who has got any more-than-sufficient amount of money invests it into anything which can be turned into a source of more money for the investor, even if it means the depletion, ruin and destruction of the thus-used means. Rich societies, poor societies, peoples, their free time, their jobs, their working standards, their health, their illnesses, their internal organs, external homes, hard-won savings, few left hopes, aspirations, fears, natural habitats, the plants and the animals of those habitats, the bacterial flora of the soil, the microscopic algae of the oceans, the world’s fresh waters, the air, the upper strata of the atmosphere, the outer space. Anything that can be turned into a source of money for moneyed interests is and has been targeted, whether as a point of extraction, transformation, transportation, consumption or disposal that can serve the one and only supreme goal: making more money for already-accrued concentrations of money.
Think about it. What has not been sacrificed to money investments, whether as something to be extracted, transformed, transported, consumed, or turned into either junk or a junkyard? The air we breathe, the soil we farm, the water we drink have been degraded to the microscopic level. The climates of the planet have been screwed up and the oceans filled with plastic islands. Living species no longer live, from big carnivores to tiny insects, including pollinators. The poverty that all were said would disappear with the End of History is still with us, while inequality grows within and between nations. Young people, who were promised flexible cool jobs, are left out in the cold: unemployed, underemployed, overworked, and/or with rising bank debts that will ensure their status as iPhone-hooked peones for the rest of their lives. The best advertising strategists that money can buy sell them as eminently ‘modern’ also all the poison that agribusiness and factories produce without pause: contaminated, pathogenic, addictive junk foods and ‘commodities’.
Looking at things from the medical side is always a healthy habit when thinking about the economy. Mens sana in corpore sano means this as well, if you reflect a little on the old Latin motto. Ladies and gentlemen, today, in our world of consumerist wonders, we have managed to create a generation of human beings that are both obese and malnourished. Unsurprisingly, new illnesses abound among us. In particular, non-contagious diseases have become the world’s biggest killers—cancers above all—with cures addressing only their symptoms and not their social and economic root-causes. If anything, cancer is conveniently reduced to an individual matter. It is either a punishment for a personal failure (aye, right, try resisting the ads selling you tobacco or hamburgers!), or a glorious battle to be fought (and yes, someone will profit from that struggle, which requires a lot of expenses).
On the institutional side of things, the known public agencies and collective bodies that could and should impede all this nonsense are underfunded, defunded or defunct. Police-state laws and methods have become the new norm, extra-judiciary assassinations included—as usual, in the name of liberty and progress. Wars continue to occur, despite the End of History. They even get privatised, so as to squeeze more blood from the usual victims. Check out the earnings of Blackwater, which was purchased by a plethora of investors and rebranded ‘Academi’ in order not to recall the journalists and other civilians that had been killed in Iraq. In parallel fashion, critical monitors are turned into propaganda pushers, such as corporate media and business-friendly academia. Public sectors and services are streamlined, rationalised, privatised and, once gutted, closed down. Tax evasion, elusion and fraud are made into art forms. Tax havens prosper with shell companies, special vehicles, and other Chinese boxes, loopholes and black holes. Everything gets sucked into them, and all is lost—well, almost.
Meanwhile, without their own assets, enterprises and fiscal revenues, public bodies are told to reduce spending, avoid monetary expansion (because inflation is the devil incarnate), and forced to take on debt in order to survive. Then, the same public institutions are regularly downgraded by private rating agencies for their high debts and pushed to promise more to their creditors. Consistently, albeit madly, these institutions engage in yet more rounds of cruel self-mutilation, in order to be appealing to these investors, who have somehow more rights than the citizens recognised by the national constitutions and international human-rights covenants.
Like anorexic persons, States and public administrations become weaker and weaker. It is inevitable. As a result, a hurricane, an earthquake, or something as small as a virus can bring down with ease any State that is in such a sorry state, for their institutional public bodies no longer have the antibodies needed to resist and counteract. In this feeble condition, the States grow more and more unhealthy and prone to catching more diseases. It is the medical logic at work, once more.
Stunted growth is also an outcome of this credit-driven feebleness. Thus, developing nations never become developed. First-world nations self-cannibalise and transform themselves into third-world nations. Second-world nations no longer exist. Their memory is damned and only their horrors are recalled, occasionally, as a bogeyman to scare the children who ask irreverent questions or dream of alternatives. Meanwhile, their transition to boundless plenty is still going on, thirty years after the collapse of the Berlin Wall. This is the sick, dying world we live in. The End of History may well have unleashed, or aided, the End of the World. Crazy, isn’t it?
Note ~ This article is one of a series, as follows:
Eco-Stalinism: A Tongue-in-Cheek Manifesto
Part 1 -
The Barking Madness
Part 2 -
Left and Right
Part 3 -
Magicians and Medics
Part 4 -
The Green Man of Steel
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Born in Genoa, Italy, Giorgio Baruchello is an Icelandic citizen and works as Professor of Philosophy at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Akureyri, Iceland. He read philosophy in Genoa and Reykjavík, Iceland, and holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Guelph, Canada. Since 2005 he has been the editor of Nordicum-Mediterraneum: The Icelandic E-Journal of Nordic and Mediterranean Studies. He has authored several books, including Why Believe? Approaches to Religion with Garrett Barden. His publications encompass several different areas, especially social philosophy, theory of value, and intellectual history. Northwest Passage Books has published five volumes of his collected philosophical essays.
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