Survival__ Structuring Prosperity for Yourself and the Nation - Charles George Smith [99]
Thus the State and Plutocracy prefer stagnation to any present-day reduction in their income and power. This is the stagnation trap: in resisting structural change, the State and Plutocracy guarantee a stagnation which inevitably leads to collapse of the very system of privileges they seek to maintain.
17. Minimal Effort/Pain Trap. The ever-increasing reliance on short-term fixes and a "just-squeak-by" mentality can be summarized as the Minimal Effort/Pain Trap. This concept was introduced to me by oftwominds.com reader Eric Hoyle who termed it the "shortcut/temporary fix trap:"
"I see it regularly in my tutoring work: students develop a shortcut-riddled cursory knowledge that suffices to complete worksheets where all the problems follow the same format, or where you simply regurgitate facts. This is encouraged by the common methods of teaching and testing, especially in math. They don't cultivate understanding, they train for an animal response. But at some point this fails, or at least becomes much more laborious in comparison to the thinking and understanding method. For example, it's impossible to remember enough shortcuts and key words to get through Algebra 2 without understanding it, not to mention that it's drudgery. But the shortcut-dependent student is trapped, because it's too painful and time-consuming to go back and actually learn math, starting with division or fractions."
The attractor in this trap is compelling: rather than face the potentially sharp pain and sustained effort required by true understanding or meaningful structural changes, we expend the minimal possible effort to pass the test and keep the status quo functioning.
Like the stagnation trap, this is fundamentally a resistance-to-change trap that increases the brittleness and instability of the system until collapse/failure is inevitable.
If we combine the long wave cycles described in previous chapters with the multitude of traps outlined above, the difficulty of extracting ourselves from our overlapping complex crises without major disruption or collapse becomes abundantly visible.
Key concepts in this chapter:
Structural stagnation
Chapter Sixteen: The Crisis of Neoliberal Capitalism
It is both tempting and instructive to compare the current crisis of global Neoliberal capitalism with past crises such as the Great Depression of the 1930s or the long period of turmoil from the Panic of 1873 to 1894.
To the degree the current crisis is financial, then seeking echoes in past crises makes perfect sense. But to the degree we also face unprecedented energy and environmental crises, then these past periods of financial distress cannot be accurate models.
Several other factors make the current global crisis unique. Globalization has expanded to an unprecedented degree, and governments have responded to the collapse of credit by transferring unimaginable levels of risky debt onto the backs of taxpayers, all in the vain hope of reviving a model of "permanent growth" which has run its course: the Neoliberal iteration of advanced capitalism which depends on stupendous credit expansion and government intervention to ward off implosion.
We should also be mindful that the level of deception, obfuscation, fraud, securitization, misrepresentation and State collusion with private looting, debauchery of credit and excessive systemic risk-taking are beyond the reach of any previous private speculative frenzies. With truth debased, public faith in a self-serving State-Plutocracy media campaign to mask their overreach will collapse along with Neoliberal capitalism's promise of endless permanent prosperity.
This implosion of public trust might well find an echo or analog in the great transformations of the 1960s and early 1970s, when faith in the economy and State foundered