The Dawn of Neo-Feudalism By James Reed
The idea that we are moving into neo-feudalism is not new, and I have heard various people make the claim over the years, including me; meaning, I have heard myself make the claim, which is a bit disassociated, but I pass on. From the Left, my very favourite Luddite, James Howard Kunstler, who has nice apocalyptic views, that oddly give me hope, or at least the urge for a hot chocolate to warm my freezing body:
“The self-proclaimed socialists are actually seeing the world through a rear-view mirror. What they are really talking about is divvying up the previously-accumulated wealth, soon to be bygone. Entropy is having its wicked way with that wealth, first by transmogrifying it into ever more abstract forms, and then by dissipating it as waste all over the planet. In short, the next time socialism is enlisted as a tool for redistributing wealth, we will make the unhappy discovery that most of that wealth is gone.
The process will be uncomfortably sharp and disorientating. The West especially will not know what hit it as it emergently self-reorganizes back into something that resembles the old-time feudalism. We have a new kind of mass squalor in America: a great many people who have nothing to do, no means of support, and the flimsiest notions of purpose in life. The socialists have no answers for them. They will not be “retrained” in some imagined federal crusade to turn meth freaks into code-writers for Google.
Something the analysts are calling “recession” is ploughing across the landscape like one of those darkly majestic dust-storms of the 1930s, only this time we won’t be able to re-fight anything like World War Two to get all the machines running again in the aftermath. Nor, of course, will the Make America Great Again fantasy work out for those waiting in the squalid ruins of the post-industrial rust-belt or the strip-mall wastelands of the Sunbelt.
Most of the beliefs and attitudes of the present day will be overturned with the demise of the industrial orgy, like the idea that humanity follows an unerring arc of progress, that men and women are interchangeable and can do exactly the same work, that society should not be hierarchical, that technology will rescue us, and that we can organize some political work-arounds to avoid the pain of universal contraction.
There are no coherent ideas in the political arena just now. Our prospects are really too alarming. So, jump on-board the socialism ship and see if it makes you feel better to sail to the end of the earth. But mind the gap at the very edge. It’s a doozie.”
We have the Left to thank for pulling civilisation down into the dust of death. Whatever will be done to repay this great gift in the future Mad Max world, for the short time that the remnant cares about such things? Kunstler deals with that in his Made by Hand books, which are well worth a read while we try to keep warm in this mini ice age, sorry, winter, sorry, global warming, wah!
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