BitCoin enthusiasts have been overjoyed in recent months to observe the rise of their favourite cryptocurrency against the US Dollar. The price of BitCoin recently touched USD40,000 earlier today, making predictions of an eventual six-figure value seem believable. But the good news for BitCoin holders might herald bad news for everyone else. This could be the collapse of the fiat currency system.
The rise in the price of BitCoin has to be understood in the wider economic context.
Ever since the Global Financial Crisis of 2007, Western governments have taken to what is known as quantitative easing. This involves the widespread printing of fiat currency, a practice that has seen the price of everything go up. New Zealand recently increased the Quantitative Easing limits to $100 billion, up from $60 billion, meaning that the Reserve Bank of New Zealand will help to fund the Government through buying bonds.
Almost 24% of all US Dollars in existence have been created over the past 12 months. This money printing has led to a much greater supply of money in circulation, which means one thing: inflation. The fiat currencies of the world are rapidly becoming worthless. This is evident when comparing their value to housing, bullion and BitCoin.
In New Zealand, the average house price has doubled since 2009, but wages have only gone up 40% since then. The average house cost ($330,000/$25) 13,200 hours of labour at the average wage in 2009. By 2020, it cost ($700,000/$34) 20,600 hours. So measured in house-buying terms, the average wage has lost 50% of its power since the Global Financial Crisis.
This is despite that fact that the value of housing stock has served as a kind of heat sink that has taken the steam out of the economy. That sink has now absorbed all the energy that it can. The extra is manifesting as inflation.
The rise in the price of silver bullion is even more striking. Silver bullion has doubled in value since April 2020. The reason for this is mostly uncertainty around fiat currency (the last time silver bullion spiked was in the immediate aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis). Silver has traditionally been seen as an alternative to fiat currency owing to its millennia of trade use.
Most striking of all is the price of BitCoin. At the time of writing this article, the price of BitCoin had gone up 30% over the previous week. It had gone up 500% over the previous nine months. BitCoin has gained fame as a digital alternative to fiat currency, owing to the fact that it is not under centralised control.
Many people have predicted that BitCoin will take over once the fiat currency system collapses completely. It will be evident when this is happening, apparently, from a sustained spike in the BitCoin price. Well, there’s a spike in the BitCoin price right now, as well as a spike in the silver price, the gold price and the house price.
All of these trends point unmistakably to one conclusion: the fiat currency system is collapsing. This isn’t surprising to those who were already aware of the life cycle of fiat currencies. Soon, fiat currencies might be worth so little that some people refuse to take them in trade. Then the shit will hit the fan.
The West is proud of its egalitarian heritage. We derive a sense of moral superiority from being a culture in which even the lowest classes can, through hard work, determination and applied will, reach the highest positions. The example of Abraham Lincoln, born into poverty in a frontier log cabin, is archetypal. But class relations in Clown World are very different to those in the 19th century.
In Clown World, we’ve effectively gone back to feudal times.
It’s so hard to buy a house today that, if you aren’t born into money, you will need to be in the top segment of income earners to do it. In both America and Britain, the house price to income ratio is at highs not seen since the aftermath of World War II. In the case of Britain, things are so extreme that you’d have to go back to the Victorian Era to find a time when it was harder for the average person to own their home.
This has led to large proportions of entire generations becoming resigned to paying rent in perpetuity. Some have even labelled the lower classes Generation Rent. Class relations in Clown World are marked by the great distance between the landowning class and the renting class. Many landowners in Clown World make more profit from capital gains on property than they could working for a wage.
This state of class separation is maintained by a concerted effort on the part of the Establishment to destroy class consciousness, the only thing that could really threaten it. The mainstream media pushes any and all alternatives to class consciousness: race consciousness, gender consciousness, age cohort consciousness, any possible corporate brand consciousness. Anything but class consciousness.
These efforts keep class relations much less antagonistic than would otherwise be the case. There are no workers’ marches in Clown World, because the working class is divided along multiple lines of fracture. These lines of fracture prevent the solidarity that would be necessary for collective action.
These divisions are maintained by the control that the ruling class has over the apparatus of propaganda. This control allows them to set the agenda in every Western country, and this agenda is inevitably fighting racism, fighting sexism, fighting ageism – and never fighting classism.
Class relations in Clown World, then, are characterised by the relentless efforts of the ruling class to keep the lower classes divided and conquered. The masses are bedazzled by the 24/7 circus of flickering images coming through the television. They are demoralised by the relentless bombardment of bigotry accusations. They are disorientated by the contradictions coming from the government.
The net result of these efforts to keep poor people down is greater inequality, and less social mobility, than ever.
Inequality is now at historic levels. The American Gini Index sits at 41.4, meaning that America is even less equal than kleptocracies like Haiti, Iran and Turkmenistan. Even China and Russia – bywords in some circles for autocratic shitholes – have lower Gini Indexes than America.
It’s similar with homeownership. The homeownership rates in supposed poverty-stricken dumps like India and Mexico is higher than in supposed lands of opportunity like America, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Yet the Western mainstream media bleats incessantly about how wonderful everything is and how we’ve never had it so good.
In Clown World, wealth equals the ability to suck productivity out of other people by controlling their labour. The commodification of some people means fat profits for others. The poorer a population is, the more readily they can be extorted out of rents. The class system in Clown World, then, is much like a food chain: energy is passed upwards.
Inequality has reached such levels that a person can be significantly wealthier than average and still be a long way from the upper economic strata. The result of this is a widespread absence of sympathy for those in the lower strata. They are so far below that they might as well be animals. In Clown World, your opinion only matters if you’re wealthy enough to buy media time.
The 2020 American Presidential Election was fought between the billionaire Donald Trump and Joe Biden, a man who had already spent 47 years in the upper levels of American governance. The previous election was fought between Trump and Hillary Clinton, who had also spent decades in the upper levels of American governance. The one before that involved Mitt Romney, whose net worth was $250 million, and Barack Obama, the descendant of slave owners.
An Abraham Lincoln is unthinkable today. Someone born into poverty in today’s America is born so far behind that even becoming a homeowner would be a herculean effort. That they might become President is just laughable. Today, the ownership class has a complete lock on positions of power.
Naturally, a situation like this is ripe for revolution.
Democracy is about the easy satisfaction of desires. When those desires can no longer easily be satisfied, dissatisfaction quickly turns into a will to cause chaos. The widespread rioting of 2020 is a foretaste of the inevitable suffering of the next decade. As it becomes harder and harder to meet desires for decent housing and decent pay, people’s willingness to riot will increase.
The real risk of Clown World is that class relations become so bad that a majority of people want to overthrow the system. That could lead to them putting all their energies in behind a tyrannical demagogue. A leader who promised to get revenge on those hoarding property could summon a hurricane of rage behind them.
For class relations to improve, the masses have to have hope again. This doesn’t mean hope of becoming multibillionaires, just hope of meaningfully improving the station into which they were born. It means that they suffer less drudgery and poverty as they get older, and not more. If economic forces or policies push the masses away from hope, they push them into the clutches of fear and hate.
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This article is an excerpt from Clown World Chronicles, a book about the insanity of life in the post-Industrial West. This is being compiled by Vince McLeod for an expected release in January 2021.
All kinds of relations are bad in Clown World, but generational relations are at their lowest point ever. Instead of the difficulty that marked generational relations in the past, today there is hate. This hate is based on the fact that one generation in particular – the Baby Boomers – are chiefly responsible for Clown World and for its perpetuation.
The social contract, ever since the start of human civilisation, was that each generation prizes and nurtures its young so that, when those young are adults, they can take care of the elderly. This contract worked successfully for hundreds of generations. Each cohort of elderly people, upon observing their children, could take pride at the quality of life they left for those following.
The Boomers were the first generation to break this contract. Thanks to their unprecedented levels of godlessness, the Boomers decided that they had to indulge every possible desire during this life. And so they spent up large, whether by cash or on credit. Even their descendants’ credit was spent.
Instead of acting to preserve the wealth they inherited, so that their offspring could enjoy it, the Boomers squandered it on material possessions and crude pleasures. They became the first generation in history to leave less wealth to their descendants than they inherited from their predecessors. This is the main reason why generational relations are so bad in Clown World today.
In Normal World, elderly people put aside wealth they don’t need so that their children and grandchildren can escape poverty. In Clown World, Boomers vote themselves luxurious pensions that their children and grandchildren have to labour to pay for. Generational relations in Clown World are analogous to a war that the Boomers won 20 years ago. Since then, they have been enforcing their terms.
Boomers are happy to cut funding to any sector of society if it means more for them. Young people who, because of growing up in Clown World, have developed a mental illness that prevents them from working, are given less to live off than Boomers who already own their own homes. Other young people, struggling to start families, are given less assistance than Boomers give to refugees.
The result: in Clown World, generational relations are marked by hate and accusations of neglect and ingratitude.
The archetypal Boomer invention is the reverse mortgage. Thanks to the invention of this financial device, the descendants of many Boomers will inherit next to nothing. The bank gets the property, and the Boomers spend the rest. Like the grandmother in Dostoevsky’s Gambler, they just piss the money up the wall and let their kids go begging.
Nowhere is this more obvious than with national debts. The Boomers started getting their fingers on the national pursestrings around the turn of the century. At this time, the American national debt was less than $6 trillion. After two decades of Boomer stewardship, the American national debt is now over $26 trillion. The Boomers just ticked up luxury on the national credit card and left it for the younger generations to pay off.
Boomer mismanagement of the economy has led to Millennials having much less wealth than the generations before them. The average Boomer in 1989 had four times as much wealth as people of the same age today. By 2020, most of them have inherited from their WWII-era parents and are living it large. They don’t care if any of this largesse is left for the coming generations.
This has led to the Boomers becoming known as the Parasite Generation. They have purposefully set out to take as much from the following generations as they possibly could, and to give back as little as they possibly could.
The younger generations resent this immensely, but are so far too timid to do anything about it. Few speak of revolution, at least not seriously. The plan seems to be to wait 20-25 years for the Boomers to die off en masse. By then, hopefully, normal relations will restore themselves between Generation X, the Millennials and following generations.
The Boomers seem to have become as selfish as they are for two major reasons.
The first reason is because they, themselves, are heavily damaged. The Boomers were the first generation whose parents and grandparents were both World War veterans. This means that they were the first to be raised entirely by severely traumatised people who, quite naturally on account of the suffering they endured, put themselves first.
The prewar generations were too busy dealing with the psychological damage caused by the World Wars to raise the Boomers properly. The Boomers were, consequently, emotionally neglected. Most of them internalised this example and decided it was natural. So they neglected their own children in turn.
The second reason is spiritual. The Baby Boomers are a cohort of spiritually undeveloped beings. Very few believe in God; very few care about the possibility of incarnating in a place of torment after the death of one’s body in this world. The vast majority of them believe this world is all there is, so gimme gimme gimme now now now.
This widespread spiritual ignorance has convinced the Boomer that there is no punishment for misdeeds in this life. The Earth is a free-for-all, where one is permitted to indulge any desire one wishes at anyone else’s expense, and when the physical body dies the moral ledger is wiped clean. So selling the future of the younger generations, for the sake of comfort now, is not morally unconscionable for those born before 1964.
That generational relations are terrible can, given all this, be predicted.
When the Boomers start dying off, it will be a great relief to the younger generations. Quality relations between young and old will return when Clown World ends, and this is extremely unlikely while the Boomers still call the shots. Barring sudden support for a Day of the Pillow-style move, it’s probably at least 20-25 years away.
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This article is an excerpt from Clown World Chronicles, a book about the insanity of life in the post-Industrial West. This is being compiled by Vince McLeod for an expected release in January 2021.
Nightmares are similar enough to normal life to trick you into thinking they are real, which is why they’re so horrifying. Clown World is also very similar to normal life, which is why it’s so horrifying. Unfortunately for us, Clown World is everyday life now.
In Clown World, everyday life revolves around work.
Even though it was easy for pre-Clown World adults to own a home and raise a family on their wages, it’s extremely difficult today. The price of housing has spiked in recent years, but wages have lagged far behind. Much of everyday life in Clown World is taken up with working extra hours to make up for the poverty that now exists.
In Clown World, working 40 hours a week is considered a part time job.
If you want a luxury such as owning a house, you’d better get used to working longer hours than that. Part of everyday life in Clown World is accepting that we don’t have the same standard of living that our parents had. Although trinkets and gadgets are cheaper than ever, the life essentials that take up most of one’s income – food and housing – are more expensive than ever.
Many are asking themselves how it’s possible that, if our parents could buy houses on their wages, and if we’ve had a few decades of relentless economic growth since then, it’s harder to buy a house on the average wage now? Shouldn’t it be easier than ever to buy a house, if we’re all much richer than 40 years ago?
The reality is that the masses have been conditioned into consenting to our production getting stolen from us by the ruling class. This happens in a number of ways.
The most obvious way is getting us to accept a smaller share of production. The wage share – the part of national income that is allocated to wage earners – has been steadily declining since the 1980s. Things are now so bad that workers see as little as ten cents of extra wages for every extra dollar their work produces.
It’s hard for an individual worker to notice this decline in the wage share, because they experience it as a balance of power that gradually shifts ever further towards the employer. What they would notice is employers bargaining from ever stronger positions, as the presence of gigantic pools of imported cheap labour give those employers highly profitable alternatives to hiring locals.
Everyday life in Clown World might revolve around working all the time for fuck all, but it’s not possible to win simply by avoiding work. The ruling class has a variety of methods to steal our saved wealth too.
There are more subtle ways to steal a person’s production than taking it all off them and giving them a fraction of it back. Some ways are so subtle that you can do it right in front of their face and they won’t even notice, much less complain.
Half a century later, the USD is trading at over 1,800 to an ounce of gold, while the average wage has only increased to $25 an hour. So now it takes roughly 72 hours of labour to buy what an ounce of gold would get you. Anyone holding dollars, or receiving a fixed income in dollars, has lost over 85% of their wealth over the last 50 years relative to someone holding gold.
Those who are holding the gold are the same ones printing the dollars, and they’re laughing their arses off. Everyday life, for the masses, involves running faster and faster on an employment treadmill to earn credits that the ruling class creates out of thin air.
A second subtle way to steal the wealth of the masses is through runaway house prices.
The ruling class already own most of the land. So every time house prices increase in value relative to wages, the ruling class gets wealthier and the masses get poorer. The problem is that house prices are dictated by actions of the ruling class. If they want house prices to go up, they simply import more immigrants and refuse to build new housing. Increasing demand while holding supply steady inevitably increases the price.
So the ruling class have got the workers leaping higher and higher to reach a benchmark that gets further and further away. What this had led to is an everyday life which isn’t much different to the everyday life of a medieval serf. You get worked to death and have bugger-all to show for it.
People are induced into accepting this by repeated, frequent humiliations. These humiliations sap the will of their victims and make them compliant to threats and mistreatment.
In Clown World, the plebs are humiliated everyday by a relentless mass media bombardment calling them racists. Anyone who turns on a television sees talking heads droning on about how racist white people are, or they see sportspeople kneeling to protest racism. The net result is a deep sense of shame and low self-esteem.
This shame and low self-esteem prevent the masses from asking for a fair wage, or for accessible housing, worthwhile healthcare or education etc. People will accept any shit deal if you can humiliate them into thinking they don’t deserve better.
Another major humiliation comes from laws such as those prohibiting cannabis or other spiritual sacraments. In most of the West, people get put in prison for producing or distributing cannabis, LSD, psilocybin, mescaline and DMT, even though there are stacks of evidence demonstrating that these substances can engender spiritual or mystic experiences.
In Clown World, you’re not allowed to seek out the divine. Our everyday lives are taken up with entirely material concerns, in particular accumulating resources (whether physical or social). If we express any yearning to reconnect with the divine, we are labelled mentally ill.
Such cruel and arbitrary laws serve a very deliberate and calculated purpose: to induce submission. Much like the hectoring about supposedly being racist, the enduring presence of injustice causes people to lose their will and become submissive. They feel so bad about themselves that they give up, and no longer feel that they deserve better.
In Clown World, drugs are limited to those that our corporate owners think make us more productive. Cannabis and the psychedelics are out, because they decondition people and serve to break down the effects of brainwashing. Caffeine and Adderall are in, because they induce people towards hyperfocus, which is the ideal mindstate for performing repetitive office tasks. If you’re lucky you can afford some tobacco or alcohol to numb the pain.
Everyday life in Clown World is marked by the fact that corporate interests can now lay claim to almost every waking moment of those they employ (and of many who they don’t). The presence of reliable Internet has made it standard for people to still work answering emails after they get home for the evening. You’re not even allowed to smoke weed on the weekends in case you fail a drug test.
For many in the Clown World of 2020, everyday life now resembles that of the humans who wake up in the pods in The Matrix. Our essential life energies are not put to use for our own betterment, but are instead drawn off by exploiters that most of us are barely aware of. The story of everyday life in Clown World is that we have gone from free people enjoying their lives to human livestock farmed by corporate interests for profit.
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This article is an excerpt from Clown World Chronicles, a book about the insanity of life in the post-Industrial West. This is being compiled by Vince McLeod for an expected release in January 2021.
