The below is a direct excerpt from Marty’s Bent Issue #1256: “Most people are unprepared.” Subscribe to the newsletter here.
The freight train hurtles down the tracks with failing brakes, the driver leans on the horn, but very few people standing on the tracks and in imminent danger seem to hear it. Deaf ears are caused by the fact that most people are quite comfortable. It’s not until the train has knocked them over that they begin to hear the roar of the wheels on the track and the steam horn blaring.
It seems that each passing day brings with it another victim of the runaway train. People are forced to open their ears and eyes and realize that life is not what it used to be. The Roaring Twenties are not a decade of prosperity and cultural expressiveness this time around. Instead, it is a decade of economic deterioration and cultural rot that marks the end of the industrial age and the chaotic transition to the digital age. This transition is going to be tumultuous for many people around the world and some are only just beginning to realize it.
The second half of the 20th century brought with it a consolidation of power that led to an obsession with central planning. Slowly but surely, decision after decision, cut after cut, the insatiable desire of central authorities to meddle in every aspect of your life led to the brute force of free market encroachments that gave control to a very select few. people about money, energy, food, health care and your “civil liberties”. During their quest they have managed to take control of these facets of your life and we all find out pretty quickly that they may have their hands on the levers but they just don’t know how to do them. function.
People all over the world are waking up to find they simply cannot afford to operate their business in the wake of soaring nuclear power prices over the past few months. Small businesses, many of whom are lucky enough to be there and are still trying to pick up the pieces after being forced to close by unproductive central planners, are facing energy bills that are more than five times what they were accustomed to paying only a few. months ago. A few more months of that and towns and villages will become ghost towns. There will be nowhere to go because small business owners and big box stores will be driven out of the market by costs that are just too high. Here’s an example from the UK today that was doing the rounds on Twitter.
Callum’s mom may try to avoid closing her doors by raising her prices more than 5 times, but that will result in $13 chocolate crossiants and $20 iced lattes. The average bloak will only be able to afford these prices if their salary increases significantly in the coming weeks and that is unlikely to happen. So it seems that unless the world’s psychotic rulers decide to end their dick-measurement contest and decide to move forward with diplomacy and sound energy policy, industry at both ends of the spectrum will stop. People are going to be thrown to the wolves of unemployment. And things will go downhill pretty quickly.
We’ve been saying this for weeks, but something we haven’t really addressed is how woefully unprepared most people are. This crisis is starting in Europe, but due to the hyper-interconnected nature of the global economy, it will also reach our shores. That thought made me think of that TikTok “day in the life of a LinkedIn employee” that was doing the rounds on Twitter the other week.
How many of these types of people are there? Enjoying jobs that pay you to do nothing but eat, socialize, and do restorative tasks every two hours. Riding the central bank-induced wave of liquidity that has created an easy money mirage of relative comfort and stability, unaware of the train hurtling straight at them, as they have their AirPods™ flat out in search of the latest beat viral on TikTok. This rag may seem a bit disjointed so far, but what I’m trying to understand is that there are a ton of people who don’t understand that their state of comfort and stability – even in its shape reduced post-COVID lockdowns – is about to take a big hit. And when this happens to tens or hundreds of millions of people around the world in a relatively short time, what kind of chaos will ensue? What happens when so many people are unable to collect a paycheck for months at a time? What type of animal caveman shit are we about to see unleashed upon the world?
Try to prepare as best you can.
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