How to Comport Ourselves in an Era of Shrinking Resources

Abstract

A few of us lonely voices have long been warning (e.g., Wolfensberger, 1994, 1997) that the culture of modernism, as embraced by the United States and more or less all other Western societies, is not sustainable, and that collapses both are bound to occur and could be very sudden. Experts on systems theory are well aware that complex systems in particular can collapse much more quickly and drastically than simple ones and are also more difficult to restore. The recent economic crisis is the result of one such unsustainability, and happened with such startling suddenness that even the world’s leading economic experts were taken by surprise. There are several points about the current financial crisis of relevance to our discussion. 1. The current crisis has been brought about by a combination of the country living beyond its means and a systematic transfer of wealth by immoral (even if legal) means from the lower and middle classes to the uppermost—and widely unproductive, parasitic—class. There is no work that warrants someone getting paid $464 million a year, as many hedge fund managers were in 2008 (Armangue, 2009). No one creates any real new wealth like that, even in a lifetime. Strangely enough, even the economic experts of the world, and the world-class mathematicians (‘‘quants’’) who built the mathematical models for the financial market, not only failed to foresee the coming disaster but even contributed to it happening, yet they cannot fully explain it. They have not yet understood the dynamics of postprimary and postsecondary production economies like ours that produce less and less and surrender much manufacture and agriculture to other countries, from whom they then buy commodities and products by going into debt. This is said to ‘‘save money’’ when, in fact, it ruins a country over the long run. Ironically, the leading ‘‘quant’’ who was a major actor in bringing about the 2008 collapse, Daniel Xi Li, was well on his way to a Nobel Prize when his theories blew up (Philips, 2009). 2. Societal developments always find expressions in the domain of human services, and a big expression at present—and the one we are concerned with here—is a reduction, as well as feared further reduction, of public funding of human services and advocacy. Even such bodies that are privately funded are experiencing hardships because of reduction of their investment income, capital, paying clients, and/or private donations, the latter despite fairly desperate appeals. When all of society suffers hardships, service and advocacy bodies, and families of vulnerable people, should not imagine that the hardships will pass them by. 3. Economic hardships are known to have particularly severe impacts on already vulnerable people. 4. There are many authorities in economics, politics, and the media who tell us that the current crisis will be short lived, that recovery will soon (or ‘‘is bound to’’) take place, and that economic growth will continue where it left off in 2007. However, there are also some doubters, myself included, who suspect that we will never see the prosperity of 2007 again, or for very long. Also, we need to face the fact that as the lonely voices keep pointing out, an even bigger collapse of Western cultural ways is inevitable, sooner or later. Yet, a large proportion of the population does not want to hear these things. They want to be given ‘‘good news’’ and what they call ‘‘hope’’ —in other words, they want to be lied to. 5. Even if the financial markets recover somewhat, sooner or later, things must get much worse. There are at least eight reasons why it is doubtful that economic recovery will occur, or will last long if it does.