I can easily argue that if we were a rational species, we would be capable of addressing each of these problems. Let that sink in for a moment.

We must conclude humanity is not nearly rational enough to acknowledge complex problems, let alone deal with them without making someone else suffer the misery. These complex interwoven problems I allude to are explained in considerable detail by Jared Diamond, Dmitry Orlov, Chris Martenson, Max Kaiser, Marshall Brain, “Archdruid“, Noam Chomsky, Kyle Bass, Dennis Meadows, Mike Ruppert, Peter Joseph, Gerald Celente, Jacque Fresco, that guy from Stormcloudgathering, Chris Hedges and numerous other people a lot smarter than myself, and in large part I am just repeating what they say, shuffling the emphasis around a little.

1. The monetary system trap

Current geo-political order in 2013 is a construct purposefully created by bankers, to facilitate rapid turnover investment and financialization. The current global financial system is quite close to a permanent amphetamine rush. Politicians tend to not understand what the implications of their policies are. The system is based on the pillars of – (i) the politically very one sided dollar reserve currency order we have had since WW2, (ii) all currencies world wide being fiat currencies generated by literally out of thin air on debt and (iii) pure force exerted by the US military. There is next to no way to opt out of this system – no country or population in the world can effectively “secede” from this geofinancial order, not even North Korea.

If you try not to trade in dollars, if you try base your currency on something tangible (such as gold) or if you as a country try to challenge the monetary order that is forcefully imposed by the US (“pax plutonica“, especially since the collapse of the soviet union) you end up in trouble. The problem with this financial order is that it needs growth. There is no way to exist in the current system without steady expansion in the money base, or some kind of means to massively generate profits. If you don’t play along, someone somewhere isn’t paying interest on outstanding debts and investors experience they investments becoming worth less rather than becoming worth more, and that is unacceptable to these investors.

This conspires to generate economic ‘bubbles’ at an ever faster pace, and this process has deteriorated as to create widespread civil unrest even now in 2013. Examples of negative consequences are starvation, mass migration, massive welfare programs, military-supported resource wars, collapsing pensions, overextended home owners, student debts, widespread racist nationalism, xenophobia etcetera. The system we are locked in to can only respond to these stretch marks by throwing more artificially generated money at the problem, thereby exacerbating the problem as well as worsening the eventual collapse.

Note that the US is ground zero for this pathological financial system. Once it hits, the consequences will be the US can import pretty much nothing.

 

 

2. The petrochemical trap

We have “a few thousand billion” barrels of oil infused in porous sediments on the planet. This oil in effect an inheritance. It is a free gift nature left humanity. We have used up a trillion barrels by now. The oil we consumed has been the oil that was easy to recover. Humanity has maneuvered itself into a nightmarish escalation of using ever more of these petrochemical resources (oil, gas, coal) every year, finding additional deposits ever more expensive and problematic to find, retrieve, purify, process and transport. The problem is that by now we need a substantial amount of these petrochemical products just to have 7+ billion humans merely survive. If all the oil would magically be stolen tomorrow, the consequence would be that in a year half of humanity would be dead.

Oil depletion is a horrible political mess. There is literally no solution, despite what many pundits claim. Alternative energies might work, but even if we started implementing these this very moment people in the third world still literally starve by the hundreds of millions before long (probably somewhere between 2020 and 2040) and nearly anyone on the planet would suffer a dramatic degrade in accumulate affluence. Again – without oil (with substantially more expensive sources of easily transported high density fuels) we as a species are screwed much as a few hundred of people shipwrecked on a desert island would be screwed. The strong tend up eating the weak in such scenarios and that is what we are already starting to see.

Note that the US is extremely dependant on oil imports. Once the US might become unable to import sufficient oil the US would no longer function.

 

 

3. Atmospherical

There is man made climate change. It is real. Many don’t agree (or don’t want to agree) but this thing a real phenomenon, as much as it has become irreversible. The phenomenon is bad by itself, but it is also triggering runaway effects. Global society can not deal with these consequences. The main escalation problems will be permafrost melt, ice cap melt and clathrate release. Right now we are at around 400 ppb CO2 in the atmosphere, and the guesstimate suggests we will experience at the very least 2 average degrees temperature increase globally. That is substantially more temperature increase over land. And that’s before runaway effects – with runaway effects we may experience the full 6+ degrees average increase. Note that by the educated analysis of most climate experts the vast majority of humans are dead or dying long before 2150 with a 6 degrees rise, and the planet loses more animal and plant species than it did at the cretaceous extinction event 65 million years ago. I no longer seek to argue these widely accepted views.



Note that the US lies squarely in the impact zone for land loss, severe storms and the formation of dust bowls. In effect the US will be the one suffering the most severe economic damage from climate change of the developed world.

 

 

4. Complexity

The more stuff humans construct, the more this stuff interacts, the more the stuff needs maintenance, repair, cleaning up and modernization. We aren’t, and the consequence is that this stuff is starting the break down or do things we didn’t expect it would do. Bridges constructed in the 1950s are starting to collapse, and topsoil worldwide is washing in to the sea. This is an escalating problem and it transcends any management system we care envision. The problem seems to be caused by a mixture of declining (and incompetent) government spending. A few decades ago everyone seemed to be in total agreement that human society needed strong government to act as protector and investor of shared resources. As that conviction has evaporated we clearly see telltale results. Yet whatever way we propose to “manage” collectives of millions of human animals, there is a point where the combination of increasingly self-interested human actions, the increasingly conflicting claims from these authoritative humans, squared against countries full of decaying infrastructure, education, natural variants and (again) technological advances constantly changing the operational rules, and all this in a climate of corrosive economical cycles, and the end result is that things break more often, and the consequences of stuff breaking gets more catastrophic. Twenty years ago a telecommunications failure would have been an annoyance. Right now a significant disruption in internet services alone would probably signify a major economic crisis – if not considerable loss on human lives.



Note that the US has rather dismal and outdated infrastructures (energy grid, bridges, internet, water) at this time and has become extremely vulnerable to decrease maintenance budgets.

 

 

5. Political

The global order needed something to make sure poor people didn’t get too desperate, and somewhere 2-3 centuries ago humanity came up with democracy. Democracy is the best system for making sure people have an electoral defense mechanism against rich people getting consistently richer (and the majority getting poorer), however democracy is a really lousy organizational system for dealing with unwelcome or painful choices. I’d personally rather die in a democracy than die in a tyranny every day of the week, but pretty soon we may no longer have much of a choice in the matter. The inability of any political system worldwide to generate solutions is a massive spectacular crisis, especially since many problems are so easily solved.

The problem is that deciding how to act and then acting is painful for voters and voters want to outsource or export that pain elsewhere. The nett result for democracies is that we end up with nations that suffer all the pain (mostly the developing world where people don’t have much of a vote), or the democracies find people to predate upon – the elites of this planet find means to bribe politicians so they don’t suffer minimal pain of unpopular measures.

Note that the US is in a severe political crisis, with polarization so severe it seems to have become a precursor to civil war.

 

 

6. Employment

It has become somewhat easier to argue the simple fact – automation destroys jobs. That has been happening for over a century, and for many years people have been changing educations and careers for as far as anyone can remember. The problem is that automation, robotization and information-technology organizational changes on society have been accelerating. The impact is getting steadily worse world wide. The trend is towards a lot of people losing their jobs, because producers of goods and services will be able to make considerably more money if they don’t have to pay wages. Yes – by any metric you care to apply, collective productivity of society has been increasing for a long time, and the end result is people that become dependant on other ways to generate an income. That is bad news, because the alternatives tend come down to taking rich people’s money – either through criminal activity – or through collecting taxes. Those “more affluent” people are having none of that.

While “technological unemployment” will hit every developed nation globally very hard in some 5-15 years from now, the US economy has become highly dependant on service jobs to keeps its population working.

 

 

7. Population

All earlier problems are in effect exacerbations, causes or contributing to the main challenge human society on the planet faces. The big problem is such a big problem largely because there exists right now no democratic solution, no consensus and no failsafe peaceful (or humane) means to address overpopulation. There isn’t even a workable solution to constrain currently expanding population growth trends, and in many cases people can’t even find themselves in agreement that this is an actual problem. Even worse, some regions are decreasing in population over time and suffering very negative consequences of doing so (europe, japan), while other regions on the planet are experiencing rapid growth in very lowly educated populations. In case you were wondering, estimates are currently being revised upwards (2).

Right now the odds of people in developed nations retaining anywhere near the same standard of living look slim indeed, so the chances for anyone being born right now (in any overpopulated, underdeveloped, chronically unstable and completely unsustainable regions) having a fair shot at a dignified affluence existence look fairly slim indeed. All this can only mean one thing – a lot of desperate people in unstable regions, many of which actively looking to migrate to places where they might be better off. Literally by the tens of millions.