Survival__ Structuring Prosperity for Yourself and the Nation - Charles George Smith [2]
A number of other writers have addressed preparing for the Depression that has just begun. These books are, within their limited scope, practical and useful. Other books, most notably The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization, address the positive potential for collapse.
(All books referenced in the text are listed in "Further Reading.")
This book, imperfect as it is, aims at a different, far more comprehensive goal: once we understand all the complex forces at work, then we can structure a response on all three levels: household/family, community and nation. For if there is anything we can confidently predict, it's that the nation's crumbling finances will drastically affect every individual, every family and every community.
Attempting to combine a structural/historical analysis with an abstract conceptual analysis and a practical framework of response is risky and perhaps even foolhardy; the typical approach would be to undertake only one narrow piece of such a comprehensive project. But then the opportunity for an integrated understanding would be lost, and hence my gamble to integrate not just history and the tangible world but also the political and internal/experiential realms.
Just as I will integrate the responses on three levels--individual, community and nation--I present the analysis on three levels--conceptual, tangible and internal (experiential/psychological/spiritual).
As if this wasn't enough to get me in trouble, I am also incorporating essays previously posted on www.oftwominds.com which include personal stories from readers and occasionally from my own experiences. I realize it may be jarring for you the reader to move from the highly conceptual to the personal, but I see no other way to combine the analytical and the practical in one volume.
Perhaps this anachronistic structure reflects my own anachronistic experience: while earning a degree in Comparative Philosophy (the study of both Eastern and Western traditions) I was also learning the construction trades. I became a builder for seven years and then opted out some 20 years ago for the same reasons I describe in this book.
Readers of my blog occasionally accuse me of possessing a puritanical streak, that is, a preference for sacrifice, frugality, physical skills, prudent planning and a contrarian emphasis on inner spiritual strengths rather than conspicuous wealth/personal aggrandizement. I plead guilty on all counts and turn to my family's religious roots for my defense. My grandparents forbade the reading of the Sunday newspaper comics as frivolous and served as lay missionaries in Central America.
While I personally don't find anything in Jesus' words or deeds which forbid the small honest pleasures of life, I do find plenty which condemns the lies, cheating, misrepresentation, fraud and willful obfuscation at the heart of our financial and political system's simulacrum of democracy and prosperity.
The notion that morality has anything to do with the coming collapse of the U.S. economy and political Elite has been entirely marginalized; ethics has no role or value in a system which only recognizes GDP, higher spending, bank profits, etc. and which only cheers "growth" as measured by these (easily manipulated) metrics.
To include morality and ethics in an analysis of our financial system is not just anachronistic but subversive in the sense that all such ideas have been driven out of the public sphere. That the concepts of sin and just desserts (in a Buddhistic term, karma) might have some purchase on our situation has been safely marginalized. This is indeed strange in a nation that has long welcomed freedom of worship and religious expression.
One does not even need to be a believer in any particular faith to sense the spiritual/ethical rot at the center of American finance and the politics which it controls. Nor does it require faith to recognize that this spiritual/ethical rot has consequences