James Howard Kunstler
The interesting sociological phenomenon of the cargo cult is best illustrated by the encounters between the tribal peoples of the South Pacific and European explorers, soldiers, and traders. The Europeans first arrived on the scene in the 1500s in sailing ships so big and strange they might as well have been UFOs. They brought with them wonders that had never been seen before, even on bountiful and idyllic South Pacific islands: guns, mirrors, iron cooking pots, bolts of cloth, crosscut saws, you name it. They left a lot of these goodies behind in exchange for food and other fresh necessities. The Europeans would then sail away and their ships would not return to a particular island for a long time—years, decades, even generations. Their visits, therefore, entered into the mythology of the island peoples. … Today the cargo cult is exemplified by the American economy as a whole. The UFOs now land here in the form of Wal-Marts and Target Stores, but the underlying theme is the same: The magical appearance of goodies. They aren’t exactly free, but they come at supernatural discount prices that are the next best thing to free. The prices are so low because of an anomalous conjunction of circumstances. Cheap energy and surplus labor have allowed Asian nations, China in particular, to ramp up the last industrial manufacturing economies of the oil age. The decay of banking and lending standards has allowed Americans bearing credit cards to hallucinate unearned wealth, and to buy goods manufactured cheaply elsewhere. For Americans, every day can be like Christmas, an orgy of consumer cargo; and the Chinese get to enjoy the illusion that they are building an economy with a future. In this hugely entropic racket, the diminishing returns in the form of punishing debt and eventual bankruptcy are immense. The ecology of the planet suffers the most from the side effects of burning ever more oil—namely climate change. And when the global oil production peak is achieved, the racket will have to come to an end, because the primary implication of the oil peak is that industrial economies predicated on an ever-expanding oil supply will not grow anymore. The supply of fuel needed to feed the beast, so to speak, will never increase again, and there is no credible evidence that a hydrogen economy or any combination of alternative fuels will take its place. When industrial economies can no longer expand, Americans will have to stop pretending that Master Card is money, and the Chinese will lose the prime customers for their cut-rate products. They may well find themselves in a desperate economic vortex, with unemployment soaring at orders of magnitude we here can barely imagine, and violent social upheaval in the offing—and this in the most environmentally degraded territory the world has ever seen. Americans will find themselves foreclosed, repossessed, impoverished, up a suburban cul-de-sac, in a cement SUV without a fill-up. When that happens, there will still be a lot of oil left in the Middle East and both the U.S. and China will still have large and formidable militaries. Duck and cover.
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