That is interesting. Now what?

No idea. I'm still in 'mapping' mode as it were, trying to make sense of where we stand. There's alot here that needs to be filled in, corroborated, and mapped in more detail. Most of this I've only begun to put together in the last few months. Right now in my reading I'm exploring the 'life' side of things - all the literature regarding biopolitics, for instance. There's so much more I need to read/explore.

No idea. I'm still in 'mapping' mode as it were, trying to make sense of where we stand. There's alot here that needs to be filled in, corroborated, and mapped in more detail. Most of this I've only begun to put together in the last few months. Right now in my reading I'm exploring the 'life' side of things - all the literature regarding biopolitics , for instance. There's so much more I need to read/explore. — StreetlightX

I see. But that does mean that you will, at the minimum, be slow to take positions and act towards bringing them about no? I think we should always strive for a balance of action/contemplation given our limited/finite time in life.

But that does mean that you will, at the minimum, be slow to take positions and act towards bringing them about no? — Agustino

Not at all. Which is not to say I'm ruling 'slow' action out. I'm just not ruling radical action out either. One imagines it depends on the situation and strategy goals pursued.

almost permanently at risk of biological pathology — StreetlightX

Hi Streetlight X. Not exactly sure what you mean by that statement.
I think its a good insight. There's a lot of detail, and I was reading quickly so I may have missed the upshot but...

It may represent the signalling of the next barrier breach. If we think of life in the continuum from atoms to molecules blah blah to people, then society is the next manifestation beyond that. It is built by people, just like people are built by cells. This unaccounted for 'negentropy' that defines life flows from bucket to bucket to bucket getting more complex each time and taking a new reading (semiotics or explicate order) each time. Our society may be breaching its boundaries and spilling into the next realm.

Or else its just a modified re-run of feudal England and we'll await the next equivalent of industrialisation.

Some thoughts:

The rich get richer and the poor get richer. Where is the argument against economic inequality or is it just assumed to be the worst case scenario. Maybe there a nationalistic sentiment implied in the suggestion that economic inequality is some how less moral, perhaps trending towards political inequality.

The share of the global population that is poor plunged from 29% in 2001 to 15% in 2011, elevating the living standards of 669 million people, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of the most recently available data. The magnitude of this decline seems to be without precedent in the past two centuries.

Also around 90% of philanthropic organization were formed after 1950.

Thomas Piketty argues that

...that inequality is not an accident, but rather a feature of capitalism, and can only be reversed through state interventionism. The book thus argues that, unless capitalism is reformed, the very democratic order will be threatened.

Wikipedia But he does not support the thesis that economic inequality is bad in itself.

The computer, the internet, and the other advances in science will present many challenges but also many solutions. Even Donald tweets, albeit batshit.

Of importance here is that fact that these developments have been politically mandated, as it were. That is, this kind of precarcity, in distinction to, say, the precacity of the the peasant in the middle ages, isn't a function of 'the state of nature', so much as developments in the political sphere. — StreetlightX

These developments are financially mandated and a function of human nature.

Not exactly sure what you mean by that statement. — MikeL

Fair question, I was a pretty brisk there. Basically I mean that there's been a change such that health is less and less understood in terms of the binary healthy-sick, but more in terms of a continuum such that we are always, as it were, 'proto-sick' or 'presymptomatic'. This is due to a convergence of reasons, three among them being the rise of genetic discourse (according to which we are or can be predisposed to such and such diseases), the ubiquity of health insurance, which places us all in differing risk categories, etc, etc, and the proliferation of discourses about health and hygiene, such that we keep track of our blood pressure, track out fitness (think Fitbits), take supplements, etc. Basically, health is no longer, as Rene Leriche once put it, "life lived in the silence of the organs".

Or put differently, we have a continuous active realtion to our biology, instead of the relative passive relation that we once did. The point, in the larger scheme of things, is that this development tracks those which occur in the realm of the economic and the social: just as we are always at-risk from disease, we are also always at-risk of loan default, of attack by forces unseen, of losing job stability, of environmental catastrophe, all while the resources that allow us to deal with these issues are wound down. Our bio-pathological risk profiles (susceptibility to disease) are mirrored by our credit risk profiles, such that many of us become, in the words of Guy Standing, a new social class composed of the 'Precariat'.

And this in turn feeds into the bigger story regarding our existential disorientation and loss of temporal markers (what Fredric Jameson called our inability to undertake cognitive mapping). But hopefully that helps answer your question.

These developments are financially mandated and a function of human nature. — Galuchat

Nope. If you study the sociology of the changes, they are most certainly not a 'function of human nature'. they are the result of very specific policy decisions, confluences of power, and historical accident, all of which can be tracked in detail. They are a matter of statecraft, in other words. for the kind of sociology I have in mind, see Melinda Cooper's Family Values, Loic Wacquant's Punishing the Poor, or Wendy Brown's Undoing the Demos.

The problem is not inequality per se, but the differences in growth. In the US case, numbers released the other day show that between 2008 and 2016, growth in real income (not wealth mind you, but income) was 10.6% for the 90% percentile of the population, but 0.4% for the bottom 10%. Or to put it in starker terms, in the seventeen years since 1999, median household income increased by exactly $384. One ought to track these numbers along along with standard of living measures to get a fuller picture of course, but on the face of it they are insane to me.

What is more terrifying as well is that many of the prevailing economic policies meant to encourage growth - 'quantitative easing' chief among them - have the effect of perpetuating and even entrenching this differential distribution of growth (see: https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2017/09/19/2193960/guest-post-central-bank-quantitative-easing-as-an-emerging-political-liability/). My own worry is less moral than it is political: these trends have knock-on depoliticizing effects; mired in astronomically increased burdens of debt, while at the same time seeing incredibly low rates of income growth (zero in the case of African-Americans across the period mentioned above), and coupled with the withering of social safety nets and the growth of social costs (health, transport, etc), is that political participation literally becomes impossible because, well, one is struggling to make ends meet. It basically ends up leading to the destruction of the civitas, and with it, democracy.

Yeah, I think I see where you're going. Compared to say the 50s, where we were in charge, in tight control of our resources, there is a lot more entropy in the system now. The pot is now bubbling away furiously and us molecules are dancing dangerously. The layers above us seem a lot thicker, a lot more intent on controlling now rather than serving. Barrier breach.

If you study the sociology of the changes, they are most certainly not a 'function of human nature'. — StreetlightX

What an absurd statement, given that social change is the statistical product of the behaviour of large numbers of individual human beings.

If we look at the evolution of life from cycles to systems etc, there was a time when each was king. It was top of the heirachical chain, and then it hit some critical threshold and a new level was born.

The molecules that had independently catalysed reactions were now constrained in the cycle and fed the reactants. The speed of their processing was now regulated. A higher order had moved in above it, first to stabilise and then to control. The molecules had breached their boundary and in poured the fire of regulation, and as the higher order developed it refined its control and maximised the potential of the system in a way that suited its own direction, until the next barrier was ready to be breached.

We have a layer above us that has gone from a passive agent of our own construction to a very active, regulatory agent that we increasingly have less control over. The new layer is not merely concerned with the macroeconomics of economic survival, but the microregulation and evaluation of you and I as part of that system.

At least that's the theme I'm running with for now.

Compared to say the 50s, where we were in charge, in tight control of our resources, there is a lot more entropy in the system now. — MikeL

The 1950s were rich for the US because oil could be extracted and delivered with an EROEI (energy returned on energy invested) of 100 to 1. The fuel creating the economy was basically free. Nowadays the ratio is down to 10 to 1. So no boom for average America.

So yes. Owning the resources is key. But there was more entropy going spare back then - as can be told by the gas guzzler 1950s cars.

There is more to modern economics than just having cheap fossil fuel to burn. But also, the correlations with GDP say it is the dominant factor. Hence fracking and its short lived sugar rush that let the US stagger on without real reform post GFC.

There are a lot of things to respond to in your post, but I can give you two immediate thoughts that I had.

The ultimate effect of all this is a massive disorientation of what I might call existential intelligibility. Permanently poised to fall off the wagon - socially, economically, biologically - the categories we use to make sense of things are themselves permanently rendered precarious and thus not very useful. At any point, we are prone to the threat of catastrophe (even if it doesn't eventuate), along all the various axes outlined above, and their convergence into an locus of indistinction. This indistinciton, this loss of existential intelligibility, functions as a licence for the worst possible atrocities and our inability to deal with them. Hence the devastation wrought upon the poor, migrants, the environment, the climate, and more. — SLX

The disorientation you describe I think is present, but not 'new', Rick Roderick noticed in the 1990's:

How [does a way of life] break down? Well, here there is an analogy – for me – between the social and the self under siege, in many ways. In many ways, not in a few, and some of the symptoms we see around us that our own lives are breaking down and the lives of our society is a generalised cynicism and scepticism about everything. I don’t know how to characterise this situation, I find no parallel to it in human history. The scepticism and cynicism about everything is so general, and I think it’s partly due to this thing I call banalisation, and it’s partly due to the refusal and the fear of dealing with complexity. Much easier to be a cynic than to deal with complexity. Better to say everything is bullshit than to try to look into enough things to know where you are. Better to say everything is just… silly, or pointless, than to try to look into systems of this kind of complexity and into situations of the kind of complexity and ambiguity that we have to deal with now. — Rick Roderick, Self Under Seige

And on banalisation:

Anyway, that’s rationalisation, and then the third – and this is sort of one of my own if you will forgive me – is what I’ll call banalization. And it’s always a danger when you do lectures like the ones I am doing now, and that’s to take these fundamentally important things like what does my life mean, and surely there must be a better way to organise the world than the way it is organised now, surely my life could have more meaning in a different situation. Maybe my life’s meaning might be to change it or whatever, but to take any one of these criticisms and treat them as banalities. This is the great – to me – ideological function of television and the movies. However extreme the situation, TV can find a way to turn it into a banality. — Rick Roderick, Self Under Seige

Blaming TV is a bit out dated. We should probably blame the internet in its place at this point. Regardless, the thrust of the comments implicate a generalised breakdown of people's engagement with life-planning or 'bigger than ourselves' ideals. The collapse of this mythopoetic structure can probably partly explain the rise of public intellectual Jordan Peterson, whose main goal is to 'shove the meaning back into life' at the level of myths (even if he blames postmodernism, whatever that is, for the collapse of these mythopoetic structures rather than diagnosing in the wake of their collapse).

Perhaps we should tolerate a thematic reliance on the death of God, in a generalised form. The generalisation would be that not only is the divine no longer an organising principle of life, neither is an individual's commitment to their own goals and self narrative (the smallest form of a mythopoetic structure). Perhaps we are dead and we have killed us.

Though, I don't think prescribing any agency to people at large for the death of our mythopoetic structures is particularly appropriate, given the [in my view commonplace] self reports of reducing control over our day to day lives [precarity]. I believe precarity and the collapse of our mythopoetic structures are two sides of the same coin. The observed incredible complexity and ever-present tragedy, the 9-5 sword of Damocles, we are embroiled in leaves us only one response. Believe nothing, hope for nothing, nothing is right.

This ravaging of our goal orientation temporalises humans in strange way - we no longer have hopes for the future on the large scale. Occupy Wall Street was an excellent example of this, a movement without long term plans, a quiet 'No' to whatever annoyed them, and a [predictably] unceremonious dissipation. This was summarized in 2012 by Marxist blogger Ross Wolfe:

Gone are the days when humanity dreamt of a different tomorrow. All that remains of that hope is a distant memory. Indeed, most of what is hoped for these days is no more than some slightly modified version of the present, if not simply the return to a status quo ante — i.e., to a present that only recently became deceased. This is the utopia of normality, evinced by the drive to “get everything running back to normal” (back to the prosperity of the Clinton years, etc.). In this heroically banal vision of the world, all the upheaval and instability of the last few years must necessarily appear as just a fluke or bizarre aberration. A minor hiccup, that’s all. Once society gets itself back on track, the argument goes, it’ll be safe to resume the usual routine. — Ross Wolfe, The Charnel House, Memories of the Future

It's a small leap to relate this to the state of exception, which can perhaps be identified as a generating mechanism of precarity.

Have you watched any of Varoufaki's stuff? I chose this one at random, I haven't see it, but he tends to repeat his message over and over.

He talks about the loss of control of sovereignty. How the nation was forced to bow to the dictates of the European Union. How the nation, against the explicit mandate from the people were forced to impose harsh economic terms.

The fall of nations in submission to a larger entity. The loss of power of the people in the system. The rise of positive feedback loops in the system that keep the rich, rich. The gutting of the welfare state to streamline the efficiency of the system.

I think we are witnessing the birth of new order, and I think we all know it. We've breached the barrier and control is reigning down us. It is the system now, not the molecules.

Will reply in full in a bit - I'm on a bus - but yes, this entire line of thought is massively influenced by the state of exception arguments. The spectre of Agamben basically haunts the entire OP from top to bottom - I'm super glad you brought it up. It's only recently I've been able to link those arguments with economic considerations - especially those of debt and financialization and the differential socital effects they entail - that have brought together a whole bunch of ideas for me. The temporal, political, and intelligibility crises in particular.

I can't say I see anything particularly biologicised or indistinct about the neoliberalised world. The dominant frame of analysis would still be that good old mix of the mechanical and the romantic.

The precariousness in regard to health or the body is tied to the increasingly impossible notions of physical, intellectual, and emotional perfection that folk are taught to aspire to. I only wish that there was more evidence of a biological motif to be seen in the current world system.

I can see people might be worried about disease and ill health. But that seems more due to modern life at least being pretty disease free due to medicine. It is when you have a lot to lose that a sense of precariousness sets in. It is when you expect perfectibility that imperfections get magnified.

So I would diagnose the central ill as the romantic notion of the self-made individual. Community has been eroded so as to make life a solitary contest. We have a politics of de-socialisation rather than any biological existential crisis. It is mental ill health rather than bodily failings that are the generalised issue.

To understand the modern situation, I instead always stress the thermodynamic level of analysis that underlies the biological. And from this point of view, our behaviour then seems perfectly natural and not at all indistinct in its origins.

Politics and economics are self organising dissipative structures. As Adrian Bejan argues with his constructal theory, everything we see is a system predicated on fossil fuels. It is just a great heat producing organism rearranging its parts to maximise its entropy flows.

Us individual humans are caught up in forces beyond our control and simply have to hang on for the ride as best we can. Society is being organised to maximise dissipative activity. Biology and culture are stretched to their limits to allow that to happen. And that pretty well covers everything you mention.

I think we are witnessing the birth of new order, and I think we all know it — MikeL

I would say rather that neoliberalism has been running things for 40 years and we are all waiting to discover exactly what form its collapse takes. But it is proving a remarkably resilient beast. So far it has avoided an actual energy crisis and so revolution in the streets.

I'm outside of American politics, but we may be looking at this similarly. What's your take on the boundary breach idea?

In regard to New Economic Serfdom: this is a direct result of a combination of central bank policies (private corporations controlled by the ultra-rich) that provides unlimited free money to large corporations, coupled with free trade policies that allowed corporations to break unions and utilize ultra-cheap labor anywhere in the world and supported by national governments. Personal financial policies as well as consequences of student loans are contributing factors to the New Serf Economies.

In regard to health: there is no problem if people eat healthy foods without chemicals, drink clean water, move frequently, and about creating unnecessary stress in their lives. Good advice for health is not easy to come by, but it is available. The body is very resilient, because it is intelligent and continuously adapting, but it cannot overcome and overabundance of junk foods or harmful drugs/chemicals. It will break if oversaturated with toxins.

It's much more difficult to create a middle class living nowadays than when I was growing up. I don't think it will get better much soon since historically this kind of wealth concentration we are experiencing everywhere in the world does not end comfortably.

We should probably blame the internet in its place at this point. Regardless, the thrust of the comments implicate a generalised breakdown of people's engagement with life-planning or 'bigger than ourselves' ideals. — fdrake

Part of what's at stake in my post is the attempt to move away from 'psycologizing' explanations: things like saying 'ah, if only people would change their attitudes, think differently, engage with the world in a more productive way', etc. To pin the blame on these sorts of things - 'skepticism', 'cynicism', etc mistakes a symptom for a cause. In this regard, I'm an old school historical materialist: look at the conditions - the political economy and beyond - which give rise to such attitudes, and direct change at that level. The modern obsession with self-help, motivational and inspirational books and speakers and so on are basically signs of resignation, another emblem of depoliticization which aims to change individual to fit structure, rather than structure to fit individual, as it were.

This is why I'm so keen to focus on institutions and policy; in a word - look at where the money is going. This is why I think the debt relation is so fascinating: it provides a concrete mechanism by which to explain the shortened temporal horizon of contemporary life - exactly how can one act politically when when one has to pay off a lifetime of debt? And again, this can be traced to concrete policy decisions: 'asset based welfare' - i.e. the deliberate depression of interest rates and the expansion of credit markets - in the US was occasioned by specific policy initiatives under the Clinton administration with Greenspan alongside, in response, no less, to the destruction of the welfare state carried out by Reagan (coupled with the absolutely bonkers idea, again taken up Reagan and formulated by the Chicago school, that lower taxes for the rich benefits society on the whole).

And things take off when debt, in turn, is securitized (turned into a secondary market which incentivises the creation of even more bad debt - basically the root of the GFC), which in turns fucks over the already poor/the vulnerable and ensnares even more into vortex of poverty. I mean, if you actaully follow the history, the frikkin cynicism of everyday life is anything but a kind of causa sui. It has real roots. And this is to say nothing of the differential ethical and gender effects of all these policies. And this also doesn't yet begin to touch on the geopolitical dimensions of the debt relation, where the IMF and World Bank, and the Eurozone (in the case of Greece), can essentially override sovereignty and democratic will in order to impose what amounts to debt imperialism on already-shattered economies.

So it's true that we can't dream of a 'different tomorrow', but a big reason for this is that we are quite literally institutionally bound to the past in the form of debt, which has the effect of massive depressing any futural orientation that we might want to make. And that's not even the end of the story: the debt relation doesn't just obviate the future, but basically appropriates it in the form of aspiration under the veil of credit: the widespread availability of credit essentially places the asset-poor on the side of the asset-rich by allowing them to reconceive themselves as the potential rich. This translates to support for causes which more or less are entirely against their own current interests for the sake of a promissory future, which of course is largely illusory for most (writes Melinda Cooper of the GFC: "Once the mitigating effects of credit expansion were removed, it was inevitable that the actual polarization of American wages and wealth would reassert itself in the crudest of forms" - which she goes on to document).

Part of what's at stake in my post is the attempt to move away from 'psycologizing' explanations: things like saying 'ah, if only people would change their attitudes, think differently, engage with the world in a more productive way', etc. To pin the blame on these sorts of things - 'skepticism', 'cynicism', etc mistakes a symptom for a cause. — StreetlightX

Human nature is not a variable, it's a constant. It is also not a cause or symptom of "these developments"; it is a necessary condition for them.

Part of what's at stake in my post is the attempt to move away from 'psycologizing' explanations: things like saying 'ah, if only people would change their attitudes, think differently, engage with the world in a more productive way', etc. — SLX

I didn't mean to suggest that this surface level observation of a current cultural malaise sufficed for an analysis. You're right in suggesting that there are causal or mechanism of enabling questions for any cultural observation. The purpose I had in mind in mentioning the degradation of mythopoesis on the societal and individual level was to provide a category or summary of the phenomenon - a generalisation on the same level of abstraction (so to speak) as what was generalised. This was purely descriptive, the purpose being to enable questions such as: 'What historico-economic conditions have enabled the widespread degradation of mythopoetic structures?': and also locate a temporalising element (denying futurity) which is fundamental to this degradation. Methodologically, this was meant to instantiate these questions in terms of their effect in a generalised human; the kind of human that reacts in the predictable way to zero hours contracts, wages lagging inflation, the destruction of career choices and the widespread privatisation of common goods.

I'm an old school historical materialist: look at the conditions - the political economy and beyond - which give rise to such attitudes, and direct change at that level. The modern obsession with self-help, motivational and inspirational books and speakers and so on are basically signs of resignation, another emblem of depoliticization which aims to change individual to fit structure, rather than structure to fit individual, as it were. — SLX

While I think it's true that advocating a solution in terms of re-training individuals to have mythopoetic structures is a band-aid on a gangrenous limb, I think you've elided the question: what would motivate such a depoliticised and fragmented individual to collectively organise with other depoliticised and fragmented individuals? Especially when a thorough analysis of economic power structures (such as the enabling conditions for the TTIP) renders action on the level of the country too small to effect change in any predictable manner? Perhaps this is unfair, a deeper and more appropriate question would be: what are the enabling conditions for collective organisation to address the historico-political structures that are screwing us over?

I think that it's increasingly clear that one of the chief political issues of our time is debt and precarity: the collapse of interest rates and the correlative expansion of credit markets has driven the rise of asset ownership among the aspiring classes, and has put people - along with states - into massive debt (which has the related effect of massive de-politicization - no money, no control, no politics). — StreetlightX

I don't understand, though, whether this is an actual increase in indebtedness per capita, or a change in attitude towards indebtedness. What does the data say? One reaction to the crisis of 2008, for example, has been (in my opinion) for right-wing public discourse to problematise levels of public debt that are not at all dangerous. This is a neo-liberal attack on the State, procaliming the need for 'austerity', not an increasing problem of debt.

If you look at countries across the world, the two sorts of countries that have low indebtedness are petro-chemical-rich countries, and poor countries. Globally the poor would be better off with more access to debt on reasonable terms, wouldn't they? And one socialist response to low interest rates would be to invest more heavily at the cost of more debt.

I don't disagree at all about precariousness or precarity, but that's a separate though parallel issue for me: medium-term attrition at labour laws and union rights and a policy of 'flexible workforces' is how much of that operates at the national level, before we look at the international situation a\nd the way capital moves its resources around.

This is why I'm so keen to focus on institutions and policy; in a word - look at where the money is going. — StreetlightX

The money is going to buy things (as always).
First, to buy things that control people. So, forget about trying to pin blame on politicians, social institutions, public policy, etc. They have been bought. Your narrative is naïve in most respects.

I can't say I see anything particularly biologicised or indistinct about the neoliberalised world. .... I can see people might be worried about disease and ill health. But that seems more due to modern life at least being pretty disease free due to medicine. It is when you have a lot to lose that a sense of precariousness sets in. It is when you expect perfectibility that imperfections get magnified. — apokrisis

But this is exactly where indistinction matters: because health is no longer conceived in a purely negative sense - the absence of disease, or as "the silence of the organs" as René Leriche put it - health becomes an active, positive relation of oneself to one's body such that it is continually 'in focus', as it were. One is always a potential sick-person, a possible epidemiological vector, someone always on the edge of obesity if not for exercise, predisposed due to family history, etc. In essence, the default variable is swapped: one is not a healthy person who is currently not-sick: one is a always-potentially-sick person, who, at this point time, happens to be healthy (were it not for the continual self-intervention into the state of one's salubrity). One is essentially ones' biological risk profile.

And neoliberalism basically does the same thing in terms of one's credit risk profile. Again, the terms are swapped: one isn't a 'person' who may or may not take risk upon oneself in the course of living; one is a walking walking risk profile who just so happens to have not yet encountered the danger that will, inevitably, befall him or her. One enters into a risk relation not as one action in life among others, but by virtue of being alive at all. And in parallel, health is seen as a kind of 'vital' credit itself, which one has to actively managed least one go into 'default' -i.e. die.

In both cases what is at stake is a kind of massive intensification of individuation: there's nothing about you, even right down to your biosusbtance itself, that escapes the circuits of potential risk (sickness, debt). The precacity is built-in, as it were, right from the beginning of life itself. And again, this has the profound effect of basically completely altering the temporal order: because risk is the default orientation, the mitigation of risk no longer becomes the management of the possible but the management of the inevitable. Here is Cooper describing this change: "What it provokes is not so much fear (of an identifiable threat) as a state of alertness, without foreseeable end. It exhorts us to respond to what we suspect without being able to discern; to prepare for the emergent, long before we can predict how and when it will be actualized; to counter the unknowable, before it is even realized. In short ... [it] suggest that our only possible response to the emergent crisis (of whatever kind—biomedical, environmental, economic) is one of speculative preemption."

This kind of massive temporal disorientation - in which the future becomes both incalculable and certain, collapsed into each ohter - basically scrambles every category of intelligibility we have. This in turn licences all and any kinds of 'preventative' measures, from the massive 'preemptive strikes' against other countries in the American case - as if the future were taking place in the present - as well as the insane excesses of speculative finance, which began, as you might remember, as simple attempts to hedge against future changes in price, but which have now mutated into making bets on incalculable futures based on literal borrowed time. Present and future collapse in on each other - paralying calculated action in the present, or, what amounts to the same thing, enabling any action whatsoever - while the weight of past pins them both down together. Again Cooper captures this strange temporality in the best way I know:

"The promise of capital in its present form—which after all is still irresistibly tied to oil—now so far outweighs the earth's geological reserves that we are already living on borrowed time, beyond the limits. U.S. debt imperialism is currently reproducing itself with an utter obliviousness to the imminent depletion of oil reserves. Fueling this apparently precarious situation is the delirium of the debt form, which in effect enables capital to reproduce itself in a realm of pure promise, in excess of the earth's actual limits, at least for a while. This is a delirium that operates between the poles of utter exhaustion and manic overproduction, premature obsolescence and the promise of surplus. In the sense that the debt can never be redeemed once and for all and must be perpetually renewed, it reduces the inhabitable present to a bare minimum, a point of bifurcation, strung out between a future that is about to be and a past that will have been. It thus confronts the present as the ultimate limit, to be deflected at all costs." (Cooper, Life as Surplus)

What would motivate such a depoliticised and fragmented individual to collectively organise with other depoliticised and fragmented individuals? Especially when a thorough analysis of economic power structures (such as the enabling conditions for the TTIP) renders action on the level of the country too small to effect change in any predictable manner? Perhaps this is unfair, a deeper and more appropriate question would be: what are the enabling conditions for collective organisation to address the historico-political structures that are screwing us over? — fdrake

Man, if we could answer this...; in truth I have no idea. Again, I'm very much in 'diagnosis' mode right now, trying to tease out the effects these developments have on our modes of temporarily, intelligibility and the type(s) of practicable politics in today's day and age. I need to sleep now, but lemmie get back to you later : )

You did an admirable job of rounding up and corralling a herd of connected phenomena (aka, problems) in your OP.

Solutions? Well, sure -- we could have a revolution of just the right kind, perfectly targeted, splendidly executed, and then eased to an end before it ran amok. Fat chance. Fat chance of gradualist solutions too. Are we at an End Game--not where the world comes to an end, but where the world order can not be extended further; gradually decays; power systems (of all sorts) fall apart, and then... we can start over (and maybe end up where we are now, only 500 - 1500 years hence)?

I thought your OP also elicited some very thoughtful responses too.

From my personal perspective, 1973 (the year of the Arab oil boycott) was the year the economic season turned from summer to autumn. For most of the 1970s and early 1980s I, single and frugal, was able to afford a modest standard of living, and save money. Over the years since, it has taken more income to produce the same, or somewhat reduced, effect. Thirty years of two incomes helped us a great deal. Without pooling resources in a relationship, neither of us would have been able to prevent a steeper decline in what were modest expectations.

I see the same situation in many, many other working class people. They have worked steadily; they raised families; they led sober lives. As they now reach their 60s, they find themselves in a quite worrisome situation where retirement is in sight (say, in a decade) but they do not have sufficient resources to quit working. They didn't gamble, drink, drug, or piss away their security. They simply never made enough income.

Their parents were luckier. They were able to save, pay off their mortgages, and as they die off, can leave some resources for their children, but not enough to grant them security in their old age. The grandchildren of the lucky generation are probably going to be in debt for the rest of their lives.

Granted, there are working class people who are better off, will get a pension -- especially if they worked for government agencies at everything from teaching to road maintenance -- but they are nothing close to a majority.

What's your take on the boundary breach idea? — MikeL

If you mean breaching a variety of planetary ecosystem boundaries - not just global temperature, but biodiversity - then yes, that is an important point. But then the fact we are remaking nature can be understood two ways. It could be disaster. It could be the dawn of the new nature.

To honestly assess the situation, one would have to accept the possibility that it may all be "all right". It could be for instance that we are merely being sentimental about the virgin forest of the world, the tigers and elephants, all the evidence of the biosphere as it was. It is natural all that is being replaced by this new thing of the anthropocene.

I still vote for disaster - now on the grounds that our lifestyle doesn't look sustainable. And then in a secondary judgement, it doesn't even make us that happy.

However the counter to that is we may still be in the transition phase and we will come out the other side with a green sustainable economy within a now anthropomorphised biosphere.

So the general story is that we are transforming the planetary conditions of life at breakneck speed. This requires us to judge the future outcome and tell whether it is desirable. And the honest answer is that it is really hard to call.

I mean I grew up with the Cold War and the Limits to Growth. I've followed Peak Oil and the Anthropocene very closely. Logic always predicts disaster. And yet here we all still are.

The situation isn't terribly healthy. Zero interest rates, low oil prices and climate denial are all symptoms of free market failure. It feels exactly like the pregnant pause ahead of social collapse.

But I do remember it feeling much the same in the 1970s when the symptoms were rocketing interest rates, galloping inflation, soaring oil prices, the inevitability of WW3. :)

That is why I say step back and consider the larger picture, the thermodynamic view - the hidden hand of nature's imperative to entropify. You can't understand what we are doing unless you can see what is really driving us.

Here is how I summed it up a few years back, noting the numbers that tell the story.

1) It takes 98 tons of ancient planktonic biomass, cooked and stewed for millions of years by geology, to produce a single gallon of the petrol we are going to burn in our car.

2) In a day, we burn the hydrocarbon that it would take the full biological resources of the Earth to produce in a year.

3) It takes about a gallon of petrol to produce a modern cheeseburger. The average Western family now "eats" about 900 gallons a year, along with the 900 they burn in their cars.

4) A population of 7 billion humans now harvests about a quarter of all the terrestrial plant growth to support itself, a third of the earth's ice-free surface having been taken over by agriculture.

5) The planet is now mostly constituted of domesticated anthropomass - people, cows, sheep, goats and pigs. The balance on land has gone from 0.1% 10,000 years ago, to 10% at the start of the industrial revolution, to 97% today.

6) The total weight of human flesh is now 10 times that of all wild mammals - that's everything from wombats to wildebeest. Our domestic livestock, our mobile meals, then outweighs that true wildlife by 24:1.

So it seems that our present cultural, political and economic settings are perfectly aligned with the laws of thermodynamics. We exist to entropify. Consciously or not, it is our moral choice. There has never been an organism with anything like our thermodynamic prolifigacy.

Is there evidence we are doing anything else with such single-minded vigour? Surely the numbers speak for themselves.

If the gap between what humans do, and what many moral theorists believe they ought to be doing, were even a modest one, then this level of entropification might be thought an inadvertent mistake, a deviation off the proper course that can be corrected with better moral instruction.

But when the numbers are so wildly off the scale, isn't it time for moral philosophy to face up to life's entropic imperative?