Charles Hugh Smith – The Ultimate Long Game: Autarky and Resilience

28 comments on “Charles Hugh Smith – The Ultimate Long Game: Autarky and Resilience ”

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1. b waghorn 1

   18 August 2016 at 7:03 pm

   You’re making a good case for getting even more cosy with the US . And if the shit is going to hit the fan ,i could live with the elite of the us hunkering down in queenstown with their war ships cruising the tasman and south pacific
   • Colonial Viper 1.1

     18 August 2016 at 7:13 pm

     I’d prefer NZ not become a military colony, or a nuclear military target.
2. Garibaldi 2

   18 August 2016 at 7:34 pm

   Thanks for the blog site CV. I would suggest that the deep state are building themselves deep bunkers!
   • Colonial Viper 2.1

     18 August 2016 at 7:40 pm

     A bunch of them in Queenstown, Wanaka, certain Wellington suburbs and the Wairarapa…
3. Pat 3

   18 August 2016 at 7:46 pm

   Autarky also explains the UKs (or at least the “State”) determination to establish a fracking industry even though we can’t use the known oil reserves
4. spikeyboy 4

   18 August 2016 at 7:49 pm

   All of this is no different to what is happening now. The future is here and disaster is upon us. Your future scenarios are just Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq,… In fact any war zone you care to name. Disaster is meat and drink to US Imperialism. It allows resources to be made scarce,easily controlled and valuable.The problem will never be how to protect resources from others but how to share them equitably for this is what the empire will never allow.
   • Colonial Viper 4.1

     18 August 2016 at 7:52 pm

     All of this is no different to what is happening now.

     Perhaps in some ways, except that our politicians and political parties here in NZ don’t appear to get what the reality of “now” is. Either that or they delusionally fancy themselves as being treated as somewhat special or privileged in whatever this future brings.
     • spikeyboy 4.1.1

       18 August 2016 at 8:23 pm

       You are right there. They all give the impression of just wanting to be part of the revolving door. With the notable exception of Corbyn in the UK. The fact is a shining knight in white armour is unlikely and effort in building local capability is more likely to meet with burocratic resistance than help but local is where to make the changes
       • Colonial Viper 4.1.1.1

         18 August 2016 at 8:36 pm

         I think your ultimate conclusion is a bullseye
         • corokia 4.1.1.1.1

           19 August 2016 at 8:43 am

           “local is where to make the changes”- – is that the “bullseye” CV?
           Because, I was wondering about 2 things.
           1.How is “local” defined? Street? Suburb/village? City/Region?
           2. Exactly what sort local changes should we be getting on with now ? On the July hottest month thread, you said you probably won’t vote, so what practical, actual things should concerned people be doing?
   • Wayne 4.2

     19 August 2016 at 8:20 am

     There is actually less war than for many decades. But they are highly visible (Syria, Iraq, Libya), and generate refugees escaping to Europe.

     For instance most people were virtually oblivious of the various wars in central Africa from the 1960’s to the early 2000’s, yet millions died. These wars have now ended.

     Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia (even China with the cultural revolution) were beset with war and chaos right through to the early 1980’s.

     Asia is fundamentally at peace now, and has been for over 35 years, which explains the huge surge of prosperity throughout East Asia, and South Asia.

     Latin America is now basically democratic. The insurrections and dictatorships have basically disappeared. It is why Brazil felt confident enough to host the World Cup and the Olympics.

     The Middle East is not the whole world.

     But I would accept that the balance of power is changing, especially going toward China. And that is potentially an unsettling time to live through. However it could also be an opportunity, especially for New Zealand.
5. Gristle 5

   18 August 2016 at 8:08 pm

   Having recently got back from a project constructing rain water harvesting systems into some villages in the South Pacific I was reflecting on the stupidity of the “dairy thing.” Hundreds of thousands of water are used to produce cow flavoured water. The conversion rate is less than 5%. And then much of the remaining water is stripped out by the likes of Fonterra.

   In many markets around the world, the price of bottled water is very similar to that of milk.

   Dairy is yesterday’s product. Straight water, without all the pollution and environmental vandalism, is tomorrow’s product.
   • Colonial Viper 5.1

     18 August 2016 at 8:13 pm

     Thanks for your perpective. NZ’s dairy industry needs to be shrunk by 80%, and that prime farm land + water + diesel repurposed for serious food production.
   • Phil 5.2

     18 August 2016 at 8:48 pm

     We would be wise to choose an udder path I think if the synthetic alternatives, dairy and meat, take off (e.g. http://labiotech.eu/muufri-vegan-milk-synbio-startup/). A product which is safe, taste/texture the same, but which uses considerably less natural resources (esp. water) with none of the downstream waste could prove compelling to many thinking consumers (and the 75% of the world which is lactose intolerant).
     • b waghorn 5.2.1

       19 August 2016 at 6:23 am

       It’ll be interesting to see if every one can digest the frankin milk. Some can’t even take soy milk.
6. Ad 6

   18 August 2016 at 8:42 pm

   I find it very hard to believe we in faster entropic decline than in much of the previous century. The dystopias that have occurred over 100 years have more often than not had agents that had exceedingly strong financing, networks and ideologies, but had nothing to do with the standard US or UK elites. In fact most often they opposed them.

   I’m not saying it’s a picnic at the moment.

   “In addition to the FEW resources, autarky requires a culture of innovation, flexible social structures and multiple ladders of social mobility.”
   If that’s the case, autarky is incredibly unlikely. I see democracy and class mobility retreating fairly quickly across the world including here in New Zealand.

   It’s certainly not the ‘Deep State’ that is inflexible and hierarchical. What’s confounding them is not globalization – which is here to stay as a way to communicate, find labour opportunity, and to spread risk appropriately – but the simultaneous stalling and retreat of both economic neoliberalism and social liberalism at the same time.

   That doesn’t stop their flexibility and fluidity. I already see plenty of commentaries on the global limits of Reserve Banks and central interest rate changes, and finance houses are altering course to suit. That’s new. I see plenty of changes in the attitude of the US military, generally for the better. We see instead an era of economic stagnation in the developed world, in the BRICS, and in China that is confounding all kinds of old elites.

   I also see the great commodity burn-off of the last decade humbling many who could not have been imaged to be humbled: even the eschatological horizon of Big Oil is approaching. Big Mining is simply merging and merging because there is simply nothing else for them to do.

   Even that monolith Insurance is not immune from being reined in. Obamacare is a really good deep shockwave to them. And it’s a great proving ground for an even larger version across Europe.

   Tech giants are feeling their actual lack of purchase upon the world; they have ushered in nothing as transformative as mechanization, cars, or even the telephone.

   Sorry for the ramble, but I’m pessimistic for different reasons. I think the big elites that can change are showing real agility, but most of those are in the public and government sectors. The corporate giants (with exception of real estate) are their own worst enemy and getting stupider or getting immaterial.

   We’re not in an era of rapid crisis. We’re in an era of stasis and indecision. There’s no movement towards autarchy (don’t be fooled by Trump, Brexit, etc), but nor is there any coherence elsewhere either.
   • Colonial Viper 6.1

     18 August 2016 at 8:52 pm

     You’re great at listing symptoms Ad, but possibly not so good at understanding how close the fundamental underpinnings of globalisation are to failing. Indeed, you seem to believe that globalisation is “here to stay” and that nationalism and regionalism are permanent irrelevancies, despite BREXIT, the end of Schengen, TPP on life support and multipolar geopolitics on the rise.

     By the way I agree with you that Autarky is unlikely. But moving swiftly towards it is the only way NZ is going to have a reasonable future beyond the 10 to 20 year time frame.
     • Ad 6.1.1

       18 August 2016 at 9:07 pm

       I really would like the next great crisis to be the one in which the weight of the world is overturned. Go the full Hardt and Negri on it all.

       But then …… I look at the patterns of the world currently in relation to those events that have caused major upheavals in the past. Which is why I tend to list a bunch of symptoms. I’m trying to find something as big as them that would cause such an overturning.

       I look at the causes and conditions of the really massive crises we’ve had in the last while, such as:
       – WW1
       – WW2
       – African wars
       – Islamic terror
       – The GFC
       … and I see events leading up to them that were far bigger than the little piffles of complaint we see now about globalization.

       I’m not making light of the biological destruction of the world, btw. But I’ve got a history of studying the 1970s, which also begged for an eschatology of The Man and The City and The Bomb etc that would herald a great series of utopias rolling in. And they had really big fears to deal with, and far more structured theories to engage with them on. But they didn’t eventuate. None of them.

       I can guarantee I’ll be wrong, but not that wrong.
       • Colonial Viper 6.1.1.1

         18 August 2016 at 9:11 pm

         The hippy types in the late 60s and early 70s were right. That was the last chance our civilisation had of turning things around.

         What you’ve done is understandably mistaken the fact that the corpse is still warm and lithe, for evidence of ongoing viability.
         • Ad 6.1.1.1.1

           18 August 2016 at 9:38 pm

           That would make us all Undead.
           And fair enough, I’ve had Mondays like that.

           I do think we’re into something we haven’t seen before. I’m not prepared to call it the end of Long Wave cycles because that’s been done too many times before. But we are in view of a very, very slow ideological cooling. Nothing, absolutely nothing, works anymore. It’s a curious limit to get to.

           If I were prepared to name it, I’d say it started not with the Hippies, but with the Iran-Iraq war. The decline of the idea of Islamic state detente towards reformable Islam started to die right there. From there’s it’s a pretty quick slide into the first US+UN invasion of Iraq, after which there’s a really fast shearing-away of petro-states from willful and heavy US codependence, into a state of perpetual war.

           With that went out the window a presumption that internationalist juridical frameworks will continue to strengthen, trade will inevitably be liberalized across the world, the need for militaries will decline, atomic bombs will retreat into history, and there will be trade regulatory frameworks that are globally agreed, and of course the UN will grow up and reform.

           We had that Fukuyama promise after the fall of Communism that exactly all of that would come to pass, and none of it did.

           So we are in the season of stasis. The season where nothing that tried and worked before is now working. And on the whole, we don’t care about that stasis either.
           • Colonial Viper 6.1.1.1.1.1

             18 August 2016 at 9:41 pm

             Islam went off the cliff with the US supporting Saudi Arabian wahhabism and assassinating every secular/moderate leader in the Arab world that they could find.

             That dates well before the Iran Iraq war of the 80s.

             And what you call “stasis” is nothing of the sort. There are massive dynamic forces in play.
             • Ad …

               18 August 2016 at 9:45 pm

               Oh I’m sure there’s endless history to it all.
               But nope, that’s not where I see the undoing of the modernist impulse. I do think it’s nameable to Iran-Iraq. Even moreso than 1989 etc.
               • Colonial Viper …

                 18 August 2016 at 9:47 pm

                 Why Iran Iraq? Why not the fall of the Shah? Or the assassination of Sadat?
7. esoteric pineapples 7

   18 August 2016 at 9:15 pm

   Put simply – as the world fries, New Zealand will be left as one of the few inhabitable places on the planet. Hope it doesn’t happen for a few years yet. I’m enjoying myself.
   • Colonial Viper 7.1

     18 August 2016 at 9:20 pm

     you have 5-10 decent years left. But by then the public concern will become a rising tide.
8. b waghorn 8

   19 August 2016 at 6:32 am

   Wouldn’t NZ need another 10 million citizens to be able to maintain our lifestyle while becoming self sufficient ?
   • Colonial Viper 8.1

     19 August 2016 at 6:46 am

     We’re not going to “maintain our lifestyle.” And I propose we limit our population to 5.5m.
     • b waghorn 8.1.1

       19 August 2016 at 6:56 am

       ”We’re not going to “maintain our lifestyle.” ”
       And the fact that not maintaining our lifestyle would make any party unelectable means we’re most likely going wobble along to whatever the future has coming our way.
       Pesky bloody democracy,

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