The Wonder Springs Chronicle

The Waterloo of Surplus — The Dawn of Dearth

2 March 2011

Volume 13, Issue 9

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The major problem with attempting to create heaven on earth is that it isn’t. In the context of our modern world, we have attempted to treat Mother Earth either as a harlot or the goddess of our desires. The problem with these illusions is the reality, that just like a real woman, Mother Earth is much deeper and more complex than our superficial expectations, because she was created by God.

As a result of our ignorance of this truth, humans around the world are now immersed in an affair, which can now be best described as the “Waterloo of Surplus — The Dawn of Dearth.”

Napoleon met his Waterloo at Waterloo. Humans are seeing a similar Waterloo of Surplus morph into the existence of their daily lives. This is taking place in the developing world and in the current turmoil in North Africa and the Middle East. Repressive governmental regimes attempt to ignore the desire for personal expression and economic realities of inflationary pressures from food and energy parch any previous leftovers.

In the developed world a similar angst has developed. The ever increasing insecurity of faux prosperity has become a plain where collective leadership, that promised a dream that a union leader, or even a Duke from Wellington, cannot supply.

Put in simple terms the Dawn of Dearth is a failure of leadership. That failure comes from the reluctance to look at a limited world and propose real world solutions consistent with that reality. That prolongs the days of reckoning and also the depths of the demise.

Some would say that our world has become too complex for human governance. That is a partial truth. In reality the world has become too complex for COLLECTIVE human governance and enterprise. We have given it a real college try for a century or two. It is just all the college and universities have been looking for solutions in all the wrong places. Over that period they have believed that if we humans can become enlightened enough, we will truly solve all the world’s problems.

In contrast, the natural world functions and adjusts through diverse interrelationships in which species diversity is ordered by synergistic communities that outwardly passively work in harmony in a limited world.

We in the United States however, would like to believe, that a very intelligent man, raised in a totally urban environment, educated in the finest progressive institutions of higher learning, and cutting his political teeth in the most politically progressive city in the nation, can truly be the leader of the free world.

Of course we can take that analogy back, with only minor changes in personality and locations for at least a century.

God and Mother Nature understand the constitution of natural laws that order and maintain the universe. We however think we can create a universe in this world where the code of natural laws do not apply. We then wonder why we stagger into Waterloo and lose the battle before the enemy is even revealed. The truth is, we are the biggest enemy to our own success, and that will continue until such time that we not only realize, but also acknowledge, that we are neither God, nor does Mother Nature allow us to become spoiled narcissistic hellions.

I’d like to teach the world to sing,

That we have become spoiled irreverent brats,

And now we are due for a spanking,

It hurts so bad, I want to cry.

Refrain: Wah-wah, wah-wah, me!

Thankfully I will never be a music composer, but you get the riff.

Let’s look at some specifics.

The economic collapse, that led to the Great Recession and the bank bailouts, and the government economic stimulus that didn’t, that massive federal deficit spending continues, and Quantitative Easing will cause no inflationary pressure — we surely hope we know what we are doing.

In that universe seventy percent of the United States GDP was based upon debt driven consumer spending. Most of these funds were invested in what might be most positively defined as kitsch. That universe created a varied continuum from expensive individual transportation devices all the way to cheap China junk.

Through that debt process we also created a medical services cartel that was somehow interlaced with the kitsch movement, which has been quantified by outside sources as running at sixteen percent of GDP, rapidly on its way to twenty percent, even without ObamaCare.

When we add in defense spending at over four percent, this brings us to roughly ninety percent of GDP, in someway driven by a whole lot of junk we don’t need, attempting to medicate our gluttonous eating habits, and protecting our rights to continue this great scourge of human history.

Thankfully it is only those radical Islamists that consider us the plague of humanity. The rest of the world says, “Buy more, buy more, but don’t mess with our junk!”

Our point however is not to condemn the past, but rather attempt to look forward, to the Dawn of Dearth that broke open the American security door in 2008.

Thus far, the American public is in complete harmony with the rest of the world, “We want to buy more, buy more, but don’t mess with our junk!”

With the election last fall, we brought back into power across all levels of governance, a Republicans with the desire to cut the deficits and replace them with tax cuts. In the context of this article, they wish to overcome The Waterloo of Dearth, with The Birth of Surplus. After all, way back when, it worked for Ronald Reagan — or so goes the myth.

The Democrat Party, and especially the liberal wing thereof, still doesn’t understand the concept of either — The Waterloo of Surplus, nor The Birth of Dearth. After all they have been working towards this progressive, socialist, communist, union driven, social justice, collective democracy for over a century. Big dreams die hard!

Someplace along the line we need to understand the reality that human history repeats itself, because of not fully understanding the unintended consequences of present actions. So in terms of our oft used elitist illustration, American voters last fall replaced, “all the king’s horses, with all the king’s men.”

We all know that real men, king’s men are real Republicans, Democrats are just so wussy.

The problem is the American Dream model of Humpty Dumpty still lies a broken mess of a raw scrambled egg at the base of the wall. That is except in the visions of the White House, Congress, Wall Street, bailed out financial institutions, and the Federal Reserve. They all still live in a fantasy world that existed before The Waterloo of Surplus.

What the United States, and the rest of the world for that matter, need to do is create a new frontier of opportunity in a limited world. The real frontier of North America and the wilds of colonial exploitation no longer exist in the way they did in the nineteenth century. That frontier was really driven by the immergence and maturation of the Industrial Age.

During the late twentieth century there was a lot of press about moving into the Information Age. The problem with that age was information quickly became random and noisy. The Information Age, by definition, lacked a method for organizing that information into products with any value added. In simple terms it is a wilderness that needs to be colonized or homesteaded.

In contrast the Industrial Age used industry to drive the creation of value added commodities. That turned out to be a universe of material things that totally eclipsed the vision of the visionaries in years, rather than decades or centuries. In a finite world however, there is a limit to materialism. Hence the Waterloo of Surplus.

What was heralded as the Information Age however was a precursor, needed to create the random chaos required to become the Individual Age. This Individual Age is not driven by selfish narcissism, because there really is no possible value added to such rantings, even if the bellowing comes from “The Rock Star from Mars, Charlie Sheen.”

These Individual Age opportunities, really can’t be considered products in the Industrial Age sense. They however are based upon information that builds coherent human communities, that are not necessarily bound by limitations of local time and space.

Those new communities, would be the same natural law living stones that Moses created through the children of Israel and built the nation; as they wandered for forty years in the Sinai wilderness. Those communities are grouped in tens, fifties, hundreds, and thousands. Those grouping served also as the basis for the underlying self evident inalienable human rights that served as the foundation of the formation of the American Republic.

Probably the greatest lie promulgated during the twentieth century was the idea that the United States was a democracy. True democracies do not work, never have, never will. They only serve as stepping stones for tyrants, dictators, and other elitist factions to attempt to gain power.

In that illumination, the term “representative democracy” is even more repulsive because it attempts to create an illusion of inclusion rather than proclaim truth. This is much the same way that Christian leaders make converts rather than attempt the hard job of creating true disciples of Jesus Christ.

Chaos is being created by forces at work in North Africa, the Middle East, Europe and even in the United States. Much of the funding for these exploits come from those who want to reorder what is left after a national collapse, to form a twentieth century elitist society. Put bluntly those factions are communists, socialists, national socialists, fascists, unions, or just random anarchists.

Apparent victories of any of these groups maintaining power will be short lived. Even the twentieth century’s most powerful repressive communist nation, the Soviet Union only lasted seventy years. The now globalist admired emulation of China stateism is also now closing in on that longevity reality. In the Individual Age, any collective attempts to gain power will rapidly fail because they simply repress individualist opportunities.

Furthermore the Individual Age does not require urban centers in which to flourish. In the United States it doesn’t require or desire a twentieth century view of federalism. In reality the rise of the Tea Party was really one of the first visual movements of this Individual Age reality.

The protests now taking place across the nation attempting to maintain pre-Waterloo surpluses are violent because of the underlying reality that the Industrial Age and its institutions are not just unsustainable, but are also about to become extinct, just like the dinosaurs in the age between the Genesis flood and the Ice Age.

We will have more to say about this Individual Age next week. Truthfully this article has moved so far beyond this week’s background research, I need to do some homework. That will focus on how to create both jobs and wealth through individual initiative and harnessing that wealth to provide the leadership to reproduce these opportunities throughout the nation.

The birth of the Individual Age in our future and that societal transformation, can now be seen on our Industrial Age remnant of hi-def TV screens, unfolding in totally unique ways around the world. This metamorphosis is beginning with the most vulnerable repressive regimes and moving rapidly through the social democracies all the way to and through the true republics.

Some people will be unwilling, unable, or just too pertinacious to accept the Individual Age and will remain anchored in the last century. That is not an evangelical Christian view of being left behind by the Rapture. Christianity no matter your personal location always has the open door of redemption through grace. This free choice however is more dismal because it offers nothing either in the present or in the future.

Next week our focus will probably come from natural law realities found in wildness and nature. As transcendentalist icon Henry David Thoreau said, “In Wildness is the Preservation of the World.” That is quite of leap of enlightenment from an Industrial Age, at its end totally focused on material consumption, into an Individual Age in which your wealth and prosperity is based upon the uniqueness of your human personality and your desire to help others achieve a secure independence.