Shadowlands of Trivial Pursuits

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Since it seems that The Wonder Springs Chronicle is the only voice, anywhere, describing the end of the Industrial Age and in the process being replaced with an Individual Age, this week we will continue those developments.

We initially chose the term Individual Age, because of the rise of personal computers and all the rest of related technologies, in combination with emerging social media. Additionally, the similarity of the terms makes for easy associations. A lot of these changes will turn out to become a cacophony, but we truly need to look beyond the past as a model for the emerging future.

However before we get into that we need a little reality check, to make sure you realize these stupendous changes are not going to be without pain, perhaps suffering, and even that endangered term: sacrifice.

Until last Wednesday, for a week or two I found myself hesitant to do something I thought I should do. It really wouldn’t take that long, just get on the Internet and place an order. While this purchase wasn’t really expensive, under $100, that is still more than just a trivial purchase for me.

Friday morning I woke up to the news that Japan had experienced an earthquake, now rated at 9.0 on the logarithmic Richter Scale. The purchase that I finally accomplished Wednesday afternoon, after I completed last week’s “Individual Age” was Friday reclassified from hesitant to procrastination. The order, which arrived in my mailbox Saturday morning from some Nowhere spot in upstate New York, to this Nowhere spot in Washington State, is what would be best described as a survival knife.

In terms of my definition of survival knives, this is my second such purchase. It replaced one I had purchased when I got out of the military and had been stolen when some neighbor kids broke into my cabin up here in the woods, maybe a dozen years ago. They also took a double bitted axe, which I really didn’t consider a big loss.

A couple of years ago, I finally got around to get another Gerber replacement for my first survival knife, but in reality it was just a small fixed blade hunting knife, that would function quite well as a general utility knife for a wide range of applications.

If you watch a lot of the survival shows on television you see some participants generally carry a knife with a blade less than five inches long which works well for cutting and knife like chores, it really isn’t big enough to do any chopping operations. On the other end of the scale other survivors carry a knife like tool with a blade of maybe eleven inches, which makes quick work chopping materials to build a shelter, but is a little bulky for fine operations. Couldn’t someone make something which could do a decent job with both tasks?

The other problem with these knives is the steel. In the olden days, knives were made with carbon steel that could be sharpened with a stone to a long lasting edge you could shave with. Today everything has to be rust proof. That means the steel is so hard that you need specialized tools to restore the fancy factory edge, like with the Gerber blades, or the steel is so soft that it won’t hold an edge for any cutting serious purpose.

Anyway the multipurpose tool that came in the mail on Saturday is a KA-Bar Johnson Potbelly, which according to the reviews seems to fit all my survival knife criteria; a genuine multitasker. The Potbelly is made in the USA, by a manufacturer who has made knives for the US Military since long before my time. The knife comes with an interesting sheath made in China, of which the jury is still out, and arrived with a small separate Piggyback blade that should accomplish any detail work quite well.

Before we move on and while we are in the survivor mode, you need to think about a way to prepare safe drinking water. You can only live three days without water. In an obese world a lot of us could go a month without food. A good filter is probably the best all around solution, but iodine will do the job and kill anything so minute that it might pass through the filter (viruses).

The military uses iodine tablets for water treatment, those you can buy also, but even iodine tincture you buy in the drug store for treating cuts will do the job and will be a good wound treatment if necessary. I have a bottle in each of my vehicles. Then there is a really neat bottle called Polar Pure that you can take with you on your foreign travels, which will give you safe water long after psychological survival demons begin to take their toll.

If none of this works for you, you can always boil the water and cook your food. For this there are a couple of wood gas options that can greatly enhance your ability to cook your food without store bought energy replacements. The small model is next on my procrastination items checklist and all models are also available on eBay and Amazon.

So are you a procrastinator, especially when it comes to any type of stupendous change?

This could come either as a natural catastrophe or civil unrest. Japan is probably the only nation in the world where this historic earthquake will not be followed by civil unrest, even if there is no successful fix to the nuclear reactors.

While I have no real figures to back it up, but from discussions I have had with urban dwellers around the world, probably 99 percent have no plans, nor provisions, to deal with a problem beyond what would best be described as a limited inconvenience. Those who have at least thought about the unthinkable, hope the stuff that they have accumulated over the years of outdoor adventures will fill the gap until all is back to normal. Rural people are generally more self-sufficient, but their depth of preparedness is no more organized.

A couple of weeks ago we began the discussion of the slow demise of the Industrial Age and the rise of an Individual Age of human opportunity. For the present time, we enter into a Shadowlands, where the past is best described as trivial pursuits, and the future best described by the procrastinators as unthinkable. But is that really true?

Last week we outlined two mutually exclusive worldview paradigms, which are centered on the individual good or the collective good. In our current emphasis to pursue the trivial, we hope that things can be worked out without causing any serious strain on the world generally, and we can have cake, because the collective will give it to us, because we deserve a free lunch; including the dessert. These worldview tensions are as old has human civilization and will remain so until the end of this current age.

Drawing from last week’s Humpty Dumpty lament, the materialism of the Industrial Age, all the goodies that have a tendency to make us feel secure in our vanity, we decided to incorporate into the infrastructure of a Humpty Dumpty wall, as our best hope for securing our future goals. So depending upon where we were in the world and our own peculiar interests and worldviews, we decided to build our own section of Humpty Dumpty’s wall using the plans that seemed right in our own eyes.

Together with our friends, we developed market principles to provide the resources for construction. One group called their markets free, the other called theirs’ progressive. In the effort to build as much wall as possible in the shortest amount of time, nobody seemed to care that both were off shoots of the Russian Revolution in the early part of the twentieth century. As such, these principles were based upon the upward march of evolving atheistic materialism.

With the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 both the Collective Elitists and the Laissez Faire Scoundrels of the Soviet Revolution, to use the poker gambling term, doubled down on their wall building efforts.

As Chairman of the Federal Reserve beginning in 1987, The Wizard, Alan Greenspan, an enthusiastic disciple of the philosophy of Libertarian Ayn Rand, was truly in the position to reverse the prophesy of Nikita Khrushchev, in that, “We buried them, those commie autocrats!”

For their part, the Collective Elitist progressives decided to work within the system, biding their time until laissez faire free markets began to unravel during the later half of the last decade. This should not have been an unforeseen conclusion, simply because by definition free markets find both mortal and venial sins to be positive personality traits, to achieve ones’ goals.

With the rise of Barack Obama, the long dormant Collective Elitists have surfaced to attempt to bring the world a more progressive vision of Humpty Dumpty wall building and administration. But since the same free market making morality exists, in harmony and in place from George W. Bush’s Player-Institutional leadership, there are really no new market design criteria available to bring about needed advances in either wealth creation or monetary management. In other words old Russian style autocracies and oligarchies have run out of gas.

With all the chaos happening in the world today, the president is taking some heat for basically voting present, instead of being engaged in world affairs. This criticism has taken place across the political spectrum. Could it be that all the Bush holdover laissez faire free market business types have changed president Obama’s progressive market worldview, and he now believes that all will work out in the end, no matter what he does? Ayn Rand and Alan Greenspan would be happy with their new disciple.

There is another parable that states, “Lead, follow, or get out of the way.” So if the president has decided to get out of the way, the leadership of “All the King’s horses and all the King’s men,” seems to speak volumes about their carping style, and there-to, a dearth of silence in their leadership abilities.

More seriously, when Humpty Dumpty and his wall fell down, all the King’s Horses and all the King’s men are still hoping the Industrial Age solutions will work, when we have entered a time where longer term enterprise absolutes, based upon natural law and externally regulated human moral behavior will again be able to create what we have defined as “natural markets” based upon other human personality traits rather than just the accumulation of money and power.

For the Individual Age we really don’t need the specialization of the Industrial Age with all their specific specialists. Rather we need well-rounded generalists with an understanding of the whole. That whole requires human behavior with moral, or God centered absolutes.

Last week we listed six Player-Institutions, which are this week’s wall buildings teams. What we want to stress it that none of these six are by their nature evil. Rather because of their Industrial Age focus upon their area of specialization, they lack the vision of the totality of the Humpty Dumpty nation state. As a consequence, what we have done is essentially create a fusion of unintended consequences.

What we really need to do, is work towards truly positive solutions to the many problems present in this mega-age transformation, by reducing the scale of everything, so that unintended consequences do little harm, and true successes can be adapted to diverse situations, thereby producing true economic growth and wealth production.

Our six Player-Institutions current positions, as specialized Industrial Age wall building teams are in a left to right continuum: Central Finance, Unions, Government, Religious Institutions, Corporations, and Individual Diversity.

There is increasing concern about the stability of the world’s monetary supply. A collapse of the world’s Central Finance bond markets will dwarf the pain of all the natural catastrophes and political tensions combined. What we are beginning to see is that the debt tsunami might just wash away all of human progress of a century. This is not just the entertainment fusion of Glenn Beck, but also a growing consensus of conservative financial market analysts and one weird natural law dude.

We wrote about a debt tsunami in March 2008. The truly scary thing about the tsunami pictures coming out of Japan, is if you were unfortunate enough to be caught in that natural tidal wave — only a very few have now been rescued to watch the pictures on television.

I suppose, if there is any good news in all of this, in those places where the tsunami warnings went off and you were able to get above the water surge, you were able to escape and now you must survive the aftermath. This analogy will also hold true with the collapse of the world’s financial networks.

This monetary collapse however, can be averted by simply supplying a little true liquidity, in the form of financial equity, across the Player-Institution spectrum. If you do a decent job of managing a little equity, you qualify for more. That puts every Player-Institution with a stake in the global wealth producing game and you share those individual rewards with those who are your equity partners. If your idea doesn’t work out you use that new knowledge to help someone else. If your Ponzi play fails, you go to jail. We will more fully develop these concepts in subsequent postings.

This is really an application that I introduced last week called “natural markets.” It really isn’t all that different that what brought about the settling of the American frontier with the homesteading laws. Of course governmental regulations were such that in many areas 160 acres were not enough land to even subsist. However when combined with all the land grants given to transcontinental railroad speculators, the frontier was closed and a true powerful Humpty Dumpty nation was created.

The difference in natural markets and either progressive or free markets is something called regulations or moral absolutes, which seek to truly provide equal opportunity for all, rather than special breaks for your crony Player-Institutional friends.

To bring this about will probably take a natural market tsunami that sweeps away the world’s current debt structure, but also the remnants of the Industrial Age and its emphasis on things — rather than the unique potential of all human personalities, not just those of us who have been blessed with gifts beyond what the grace of God provides.

We are all in this together and in the Individual Age this is the first rule of survival and prosperity for the future. In our context the fitting Latin inscription on the back of the dollar bill is “Novus Ordo Seclorum” that translates and applies directly to a “New Order of the Ages” that we will learn as grossly individually diverse — compared with the current collective “New World Order.”

Could it be a simple sound American dollar, with the true value of George Washington on the front, and on the back a slogan for a new order for a new age, with become the currency of our future?

Tags: Individual Age, Industrial Age, Japan, survival, Humpty Dumpty, Laissez Faire Scoundrels, Collectivist Elitists, Barack Obama, natural markets, debt tsunami