absolutely tarrific: what happens when your leaders are frozen in time

Our world is changing rapidly. Our culture, leaders, systems, and worldviews? Not so much. And this is becoming a downright apocalyptic problem.

We live in a 21st century world ran by leaders who were born in the 20th century and use 19th century ideas with an 18th century legal framework, clinging to 17th century traditions to solve 22nd century problems and wondering why it’s not working and we are all now on the struggle bus careening down a hill as the wheels are coming off.

Take the new sky high tariffs imposed by the Trump administration on every country from which we buy more things than they buy from us. Last time that was tried, it was an economic disaster now known as the Great Depression and ended in a world war, a war in which fascist and Nazi movements decided that they were superior humans so they needed to conquer and ethnically cleanse other nations for the glory of… hold on just a minute, why does all of that sound so familiar?

Superpowers former and current are eyeing conquests right out of the 1800s. Russia is trying once again to conquer Ukraine, China is making all the moves to at least give invading Taiwan a shot in the next year or two, and the United States’ new regime has suddenly developed an insatiable urge to acquire Canada, Greenland, and for starters, at least parts of Panama, straight out of a techno-feudalist proposal from — oh, would you look at that, the throes of the Great Depression.

Yes folks, everything old is new again and it seems like those in power learned exactly zero lessons not just from their history classes, but any class whatsoever. As existing systems are faltering under the strain of rapidly advancing technology, modern ideas, and byproducts of past mistakes, their reaction is to retreat into that simple past they remember as children and drag us back with them by force.

Now, true, they’re also being advised by charlatans trying to create a world-spanning cyberpunk dystopia loosely based on the aforementioned techno-feudalist proposal, but neither these advisers nor the politicians with whom they’re working actually have an understanding of what they’re doing, and none of their ideas are original. They’re a rehash of the greatest hits of a sci-fi genre from 1968 to 1992 dumped into a blender, with a dash of sci-fi cultism around the future of AI.

In the meantime, the retrograde reprobates are trying to dismantle our civilization with disaster economics through a global trade war, regressing medicine and public health by almost two centuries, reinstating blacklists for wrongthink popular in the middle of the last century, and behaving as if infinite consumerism and industrialization aren’t a path to something new, or tools to create things we need and don’t have, but a goal in and of itself despite countless voices shouting from the rooftops that after a certain point, industrial production will have to slow and transition to something else.

The opposition to all this? It’s also busy trying to replay as many of the greatest hits of the New Deal as possible, back-benching and sidelining its rising stars as leadership roles are reserved for septuagenarians with cancer and octogenarians for whom a trip and fall in the kitchen could be their last. Because you see, they paid their dues and it was their turn, so no matter how quickly the new generations are gaining momentum towards political escape velocity into leading new movements, they’ll just have to wait until the old guard expires in office, still gripping their desks as rigor mortis sets in.

Make no bones about it, we’re being very much dragged backwards even in areas like building walkable cities. Just not wanting to drive your car as much today is now seen as “terminally, civilization-ending levels of wokeness” and any city trying to build bike lanes and walking paths is being targeted for funding cuts. Surely, you see, walkable neighborhoods are just the first step towards open air prisons ran by the Marxist New World Chinese Reptoid Jewish Illuminati cabal.

Here’s my nuclear powered hot take. A country can go into decline by choice when it decides to obsess about its idealized past instead of working on its future. It doesn’t innovate, adapt, and evolve. It simply sulks and rots in the hole it digs for itself while throwing temper tantrums. And with its sneering pundits shouting down new ideas as utopian fever dreams, spineless politicians who refuse to lead, and feckless, flippant, selfish voters resigned to corruption and mediocrity, America has chosen decline for the past nine years.

Those celebrating the idea of reversing globalization in reverse and returning to small and isolated worlds of each nation state behaving like its own planet, making all of its own goods and those simpler times when factories could employ entire small towns, a high school diploma could buy a house and raise a family on one income, are 40 or 50 years too late to that party. None of the necessary geopolitical conditions, economic regulations, or market incentives are there to make it happen again.

It’s the equivalent of wanting to re-establish a quiet fishing village in the woods after building a massive cannery and two generations of commercial trawlers prowling the waters with nets that extend all the way to the sea floor. All the trees have long been chopped down, the quaint dockside homes are now Airbnbs and private villas, it will take at least a decade for the fish populations to even remotely recover, and most of the youth left for places with actual job prospects.

The best case, and I mean the absolute, by far best case scenario for the New Great ‘Murican Re-Industrialization are factories leaking and belching pollution into the air, water, and soil, staffed by a few thousand people, and filled with robots — which are the main reason why nine in ten manufacturing jobs went away — producing cheap crap no one really needs to fill homes people can’t afford, and if the amount of crap doesn’t grow every quarter, the factory gets shut down anyway.

So, not only are we not getting the glory days of one income households and easy, convenient lives back, that wasn’t even the reality for many. As many as a third of all women were working, the average home was less than half the size it is today, and legalized discrimination based on skin color and gender would concentrate most of those economic gains to white or white-passing men. Who are now being replaced with robots, AI, and offshore centers.

And that’s not going to be reversed because all legal and economic guardrails meant to prevent a return of the corrupt oligarchy of the Gilded Age, which was followed by tariffs, the Great Depression, and a world war — oh hey, here’s that history repeating itself thing again — have been ripped out. Investors and tycoons are used to steady double digit returns every quarter no matter how many mass layoffs and white collar crimes it takes, blinded by greed that is now a full blown pathology.

In fact, the oligarchy in waiting is now busy biting its elbows and howling as they see the stock market doing its best impression of a skydiver in response to weaponized mass nostalgia being unleashed on a global order based on trillions of dollars, euros, and so on constantly moving across the world daily, and complex, multinational trade agreements. Sure, they’ll get their tax cuts and even further deregulation, as well as lower interest rates again, but who will want to make deals with them now?

But all that said, the current economic, social, and political model is not working for just about anyone. Unless you have a net worth in the tens of millions or higher, and making seven figures anually, odds are that you’re falling further and further behind every year and you honestly don’t know when, or if, you’re ever going to be able to stop “hustling” while having orders barked at you by wealthy failsons trying to build trendy startups as a hobby and laying off employees left and right at the first sign of trouble. No wonder so many want not just a change but a radical one.

All right, so if we can’t go back and the current way forward is about as pleasant as a naked swim through a cactus patch for anyone who has generational trauma instead of generational wealth, what do we do? Obviously there’s no way out but through, but to where exactly? Earth has finite resources, a finite population with a finite number of hours in the day, and occupies finite spaces.

To assume infinite growth through the mechanism of either consumerism or parasitic rent-seeking of middlemen backed by oodles of money from investors desperate for wildly unrealistic returns is every bit as asinine as pretending we’re back in 1980 and acting accordingly for all the reasons that we already covered in great detail. But we did have alternative solutions going as far back as the early 1900s from people who saw industrialization as a means to an end, not the end in and of itself as the powers that be today seem to believe it is.

Both the already twice mentioned proposal for a united North American technocracy and pre-USSR Cosmism planned for the future of global industrialization to be much like we see agriculture today. Until the 1970s, the majority of humanity’s primary jobs were farming in some capacity. Today, it’s about a quarter and falling worldwide, with the majority in low to middle income nations. In the U.S., it’s just 1.2% of all jobs. With a tradition of family farms in Europe, the number is closer to 4.2% there.

Between industry consolidation and mechanization, we need fewer people than ever to produce more than enough food for the entire planet. It was considered a massive disaster during the dawn of industrialization that people were leaving the farms and agricultural employment began to plummet as people moved into cities to work in the dense forest of new factories. And the same transformation is now happening with manufacturing. We needed to be able to make stuff quickly, efficiently, and at scale.

Now, we’re drowning in stuff, a lot of it poorly and cheaply made, usually thanks to a variety of human rights violations, but we can quickly, efficiently, and reliably take an idea from sketch to actual, tangible working product and make a billion copies. With mostly robots and humans in primarily supervisory roles so that humans could focus on what humans do best: research, invent, experiment, and innovate with assistance from robots, AI, and factories that crank out whatever we need on demand.

Freed from having to make sure there was enough to eat from day to day, or having to manually hand-build every tool, decoration, or piece of furniture that we need or want, we were supposed to transcend modern jobs that the vast majority of the world feels have become little more than busywork and people storage, workhouses on a global scale because the powers that be believe that we have to prove our right to exist with shift-based labor. It doesn’t matter if it’s really needed in the grand scheme of things, or if this is a good use of a human’s time.

Adventure? Exploration? Seeing the world? Having dreams? Autonomy? That’s for the rich and their children. You? You get to explore the wonderful world of spreadsheets, paperwork, and software which does little more than CRUD and relaying messages to process said spreadsheets and paperwork. People are bored out of their minds. They have to make their own adventures with conspiracy theories, social media drama, and political cultism. In response to their anger and boredom they are simply offered more of the same and either a pat on the head or a condescending lecture.

People want a future in which they don’t feel like passive observers of their own lives, a future where they don’t feel they need to spend the majority of their days worrying about meeting their basic needs while a dozen bored people who could buy an entire country imagine conquering space.

Obviously, this future will take very different forms for different people and there will always be conflict and disagreement. But they don’t want more of the same spiraling mess we have now, and the core reason that we just can’t seem to get back to those boring, precedented times is because we’re trapped in having the exact wrong people to deliver something new and transformative in charge of politics, discourse, and the economy. And until we get them out, we’ll stay in this angry downward spiral.