It’s ironic really, how civilization starts with the desire to control one’s environment, first through agriculture which creates predictability over food supply, then through empires that control not just food supply, but also population, labor and beliefs, then through religions that control people’s relationship with Reality, and then finally with the techno-capital system which controls essentially everything that can be named, even space, time, and human relationships. (social media, dating apps)
And yet, we now have created problems which are at such a large scale and level of complexity that we couldn’t possibly understand them, let alone fix them by doing more of the same, which is to say increase the complexity of our society. It seems that the best way to find order in Life is actually to embrace the chaos. Quite poetic isn’t it.
Reality is like an ocean, which you need to love not just in its breadth, but in its depth, and which takes a lifetime to appreciate. In the modern world however we are surrounded by puddles, which people tend to prefer because they can fit within their narrow horizons, and because they can see their own reflection in them.
The phrase 'inflation is under control' is what we could call 'reassurance propaganda', the opposite of agitation propaganda. 1 Modern economic theories claim that a small amount of inflation is good because it incentivizes a healthy amount of spending and investing, as opposed to people hoarding up money and paralyzing the economy. The problem is that for the past decade (or more), the cost of living for the average person has undeniably increased compared to their income, far more than the target 2% per year, and I haven't run the numbers to know for sure, but it seems to quite significantly more than what the reported inflation numbers might indicdate.
And yet we are told by professional economists that the economy is doing better than ever, because the stocks and real estate owned by the wealthiest people are going up. This is really what the point of economics is: giving a justification as to why the madness of the technological system, the outrageous inequality, the treatment of workers (human beings treated as assets!) and the environmental destruction, are all justified, because there is maths in the background that tell us it is.
'Inflation is under control' because it doesn't track the important things. In the USA, the core CPI (consumer price index) doesn't even track food or energy, which, conveniently, are the things which are about to become (even more) expensive this year due to the fallout from the Hormuz debacle. It also doesn't track the cost of housing, i.e. buying a house, though it does track the price of rent from what I understand, which confirms my thesis here that it's a way to reassure the average person, who has been slowly but surely pushed from being a house owner to a house renter over the past decades, and that everything is under control, when it clearly isn't, as anyone who looks at the prices of housing can attest.
In Belgium, the country I live in, the basket of goods which is used to track inflation can change from year to year, meaning that they can track things which don't reflect the actual spending of the average person if they so wish (or exclude the part that is inconvenient, building a basket on which no one could live on). How could you make any significant claim about a goal post that keeps changing? It's not even Goodhart's Law at this point, because the metric doesn't even stay consistent across the years, it's a racket of metrics and narratives that tells you whatever the government wants to communicate.
Inflation has also had many more subtle manifestations in our economy. Manufacturers by and large have to look for ways to cut corners and reduce prices in our declining society, (due to energy getting more expensive) but without making it too obvious for the consumers. They might reduce the weight and size of their products by a tiny margin, or they might switch to inferior products, very slowly over time, such that the average person cannot tell. And even if they could tell what was going on, what would they do about it? We live in a world that is reliant on a massive supply of cheap energy, fossil fuels, which can only run out due to its non-renewable nature, which means that everything that depends on it, which is to say everything in our economy, also gets more expensive, because nothing can bypass the demand for energy.
The statistical gimmicks related to inflation, the ways to hide how high it really is, merely constitute a sophisticated form of the denial response to death at a collective scale. The modern world cannot sustain itself, which is why economic 'solutions', or even political or societal ones, are ultimately futile if they do not embrace the inevitability of collapse. Calling out the bullshit that economists spew out is important of course, but ultimately no amount of debating and debunking can prevent or make us accept societal collapse, just like no one else can help you face your own death.
I'm not sure if this was a dream I had, or a scenery that just flashed into my mind, but I remember sitting on a pew in Church, and during a moment of silence, I looked at the other attendants, and it hit me that none of them were actual human beings, but just props! Mannequins made out of wood, without any face, much less life to them, which were standing around to give the illusion that people were listening to the sermon. Then I looked at the priest, and he too was a prop, more fancifully dressed, and the sermon was coming from an audio recording.
There is a counter-narrative that frequently circulates on the internet, that wealthy and powerful people are actually nice, often much nicer than regular, and especially poor, people, and that we should dismiss this black-and-white dichotomy that privileged people are necessarily awful.
I have no doubts that many of them are nice, but good is another thing altogether. Everyone can be nice when they have everything that they're used to having, and for privileged people, that is a lot, and when they don't need anything from those around them, but what about when things don't go their way? When the people who serve them go against their ideas and decisions? When there is a real possibility that they might lose a significant part of their wealth or influence on others? In such a situation is when you see who is really virtuous from who is merely privileged.
The greatest test of virtue is how you behave when things don't go your way, and the whole point of privilege is that it shields you from real difficulty to begin with, which is why, by and large, I stand by the usual wisdom that wealthy and powerful people are indeed worse than the average person when you really get to know them. Poor people are often full of vices, and are sometimes outright monsters, but that is because they do not have anything to hide behind, and regardless, do not benefit from social posturing. Only the middle and upper class benefit from putting on a nice mask, because their privilege comes from their social network, but poor people, what do they get from pretending to care about you? Hardly anything.
Perhaps more boringly in our times, instead of being ruled and managed by monsters, what we have are simply mediocre people, empty on the inside, because this is what the technological system requires: automatons who bend to reasonable demands, such as the reasonable demand to accommodate for mass immigration in order to keep wages low and real estate high, or the reasonable demand to expand our usage of energy despite the increasing scarcity of fossil fuels, which still represent the overwhelming majority of our energy mix even in 2026 (more than 75% in 2024), and the reasonable demand to lock down the entire globe for a virus that only really kills old people. Evil in modern times is nice and reasonable, which is why in many ways it's so much more problematic than the tyrannies that came before it, because it is so much easier to justify and defend.
This post on the 'watermelon economy' summarizes my thoughts about the economy very well: 2 every time there is a major financial shock (and there will be more, and they will come quicker), things are “resolved” through band-aid solutions that create even more problems, even more interdependence and fragility of the system, which will ultimately lead to problems that simply cannot be resolved, both in financial markets, but more importantly, in the real economy of goods, services and energy. Every ‘solution’ consists in distributing the risk more and more globally (banks becoming coordinated through central banks, insurance companies coordinating with one another, etc.) but distributing the risk doesn’t make it go away, it just delays the collapse and makes it much worse.
Some notable quotes from the article:
The White Empire hasn’t learned anything from all its crashes before, hence the big one, inshallah. As John Tuld (not a real person) said, "1637, [1720], 1797, 1819, ‘37, ‘57, ‘84, 1901, ‘07, 1929, ‘37, ‘73, 1987, 92, 97, 2000, and whatever we want to call this [2008]. It’s all just the same thing, over and over. We just can’t help ourselves." Of course, they do help themselves, and the crashes fall on someone else. They’ve gotten away with it so many times before. What’s one more?
And then:
Speaking of, the decadent West has tried to cover up the death of its real economy in 2008 with various artificial scams, first crypto, then VR, before AI finally stuck. Now their whole economy depends on a multi-level marketing scheme, NVIDIA selling chips to Microsoft which rents them to OpenAI which sells compute to Microsoft with funding from NVIDIA. Does this make sense? No. But it makes dollars, so the scam goes on. But for how long?
What’s at the bottom of this multi-level marketing scheme? Energy. All of these data centers delivering nil or negative productivity use hideous amounts of energy, and where does that come from? Oh, Hormuz, which is banned to the Empire now. It doesn’t matter if ‘America’ has its own energy supplies, its oil companies are ‘American’ in name only and will sell to the highest buyer. And when energy prices rise, inflating the energy at the bottom of the AI bubble, what happens to the artificial pyramid they built on top? What happens to all the fake-ass pharoahs, building castles in the cloud? They’ll be entombed with their billions in bunkers while everything around them turns to dust.
I have to admit, I have fallen for a common trap of the consumer economy more times than I would like to, which is where you are keen on buying things, such as novels to read, or books to learn certain aspects of drawing, but you aren't as enthusiastic about spending the time to actually do those things.
It's what you could call the gym membership fallacy: thinking that buying the membership will magically make you go to the gym and become stronger and leaner, when the hard part has yet to be done. It's easy to buy the thing, but doing and committing to the training is what is obviously difficult. No excuse though, I am in full control of my time and energy, I can do better than that.
One of the main defenses for the system, with regards to those people who are silently (or not so silently) quitting the system is that the best things in life require effort, and they are turning their back on that.
The claim that the best things in life require effort is undeniable. Things like art, love, beauty, community, family, freedom, health and meaning all require a form of striving to develop towards them, consistent effort to be maintained, and sensitivity for those qualities to be appreciated. People who uncritically reject all kinds of effort are simply lazy, and have learned how to rationalize their vices to themselves and others around them.
But. Effort is different from working against your own nature. The system is alienating, not just effortful. Human beings are supposed to serve a collective that they can participate in, over which they have a certain control over, which provides them with work that leads to tangible consequences, and with people they love and spend their time with. The system on the other hand makes people work at alienating, repetitive tasks, over which they have no control over, at a pace and output dictated by other people (coercive work in other words) all to serve wealthy people they don’t know, in order to make those even wealthier.
The people who reject that insanity are not necessarily lazy, though they certainly can be, as they might have more ability for critical thinking. One of the biggest regrets of the dying is how much they spent their time focusing on their career, instead of the things that genuinely mattered to them, such as their relationships, their family, their own well-being, their own dreams and interests, etc.
Community is vital, and dilligence is a great quality to have, especially in our times of low attention spans and chronic laziness. No one should live just for themselves, in the pursuit of low-grade selfish pleasure, that is undeniably an insane way to live. But the system is not a community, and the work it provides is not meaningful. The ones who benefit from your work are not people you love and care about, they are incredibly wealthy people, more often than not sociopaths, who would replace you in a heartbeat if a cheaper and more convenient option were presented to them. Hard work is only good if it’s working for the right things, which is why the most ambitious and dilligent amongst us need to recognize the extent to which their time and energy go towards meaningful endeavors, or simply propping up an alienating system which is doomed to collapse in the coming decades.
One consequence of a world where the individual and collective attention span is so short is that if people stop talking about something, it creates the illusion that it has stopped being a problem, which is incredibly problematic because people might have stopped talking about it precisely because it is such a big problem that they feel like nothing can realistically improve it!
Because of the way that short attention spans work, it might actually be bad, as strange as it seems, for a problem to be talked about during its early phase, which is precisely the best time for intervention. This is because people might look at the state of the problem as it is, see that it's not that big of a deal, and conclude that everything is fine, when it is everything but that, as the problems haven't had time to create big visible symptoms yet. Then, people make up their mind based on the early signs of warning which are deemed "alarmists", and never update their beliefs as the years go by, such that the problems only resurface when they're so bad that they can hardly be solved, only mitigated.
In other words, short attention spans only respond to catastrophic problems, they don't have the long term vision, and the continuity of intentions, to pursue long projects, and to address problems which are only in their early phases.
All of this is happening right now with (anthropogenic) climate change. (ACG) People talk about it less on a collective level because it's obvious that nothing will change with the way that the system is operating, as can be seen by the proliferation of data centers across the globe. This prompts the side that doesn't care about ACG to say that it was never a real problem to begin with because the conversations around it have died down.
With the warning signs of a super El Nino in the second half of 2026, I think that denial will be sorely mistaken, but unfortunately I know full well that there are hundreds of causes you can attribute to the same phenomenon in a complex system (of which the atmosphere is one), which means that the capacity for denial has no bounds. But alas, Mother Nature doesn't care about our explanations, or even who is to blame, she prefers to simply wipe away civilization if it repeatedly crosses the line, which it will, until it can't anymore.
The Hormuz debacle caused an initial fear in the Western world, with a notable spike in the price of fuel where I lived for instance, but everything seems to have stabilized as of the morning of June 20, with the memorandum between the USA and Iran, so things seem to be heading back to normal.
Or are they? Prices are still pretty high where I live, and as early as the evening of the same day, Iran says that it's closing the strait, so ... let's just say that talks and negotiations about peace are just that: words. What actually happens in the real physical world of weapons and energy is an entirely different thing.
Regardless of the incredibly volatile state of 'diplomacy' between Iran and the USA, it seems that I have underestimated the buffers that the world possesses in terms oil, because indeed there hasn't been any crazy spike in prices yet, but according to the writers I keep in touch with, it is just a matter of time before these buffers run out, because it will take some time for the effects of the blockage to wear away, and all of the consequences will rear their ugly head somewhere in the second half of 2026, possibly as late as winter of this year.
The agricultural problems that result from the decreased access to fertilizers will take even longer to manifest, possibly only being a problem in the next year, but still, the consequences will be there, they will simply take a longer time to manifest, and will therefore be much harder to track. When food starts to be a real issue for more and more people is when the word 'collapse' will go from mere speculation and apocalyptic prophecies, to a reality that people will have to contend with in their life, and which might involve some brutal scenarios that few are prepared for.
As mentioned above, the collective attention span is incredibly, incredibly short, meaning that if there is a 4 months delay between a decision and its consequences in the real economy, the people in charge of the narratives can blame whatever factor they want.
Also, I don't want to start a conspiracy theory from baseless suppositions, but I wonder if the U.S. midterms arriving in early November will be related to all of this. Something such as a terrible financial and economic shock that makes everyone unhappy, and conveniently, a charismatic populist leader who is there to make everything right, as long as people do as he says of course. Maybe. Perhaps. We will see. But I wouldn't have my hopes up for society to get better materially speaking. Better collapse now and avoid the rush.
There is an interesting analogy to be drawn from one of my taps: when it's fully open, it produces a nice and clear laminar flow that doesn't produce any noise as the water is poured, but when it is half-open, the flow becomes turbulent and hits the receiving water in a way that produces a lot more noise.
Something like: the loudest people are the ones who are currently blocked in their life, whereas people who are living well don't feel the need to say much? Or in the context of creativity: flow looks effortless and unassuming, whereas blockage is effortful and boastful.
1 Opposite in how they make you feel, but actually complementary in that they keep people reactive, afraid, and in need of reassurance. In other words, there is an incentive for the news to propagate outrage and fear about the state of the world, because those spread better than good news, and then a second incentive to propagate false hope and reassurance to compensate for the agit-prop. It's the same with the individual life of most people, living on a pendulum between fear and temporary happiness.
2 Having scanned at the writing of the author, they seem to be a rather extremist anti-white writer, so I don't endorse the rest of their writing, but this piece on its own is good.
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2026-06-20