What we are going to talk about today is the living and the dead. This is a subject we have discussed since we were founded in 1995. In all societies there's a question of the living and the dead. There's a choice about who gets what and there are consequences for those who don't get what they need. That consequence is frequently death. Now the death toll for society in the modern world has been kept at a level that is politically acceptable in most countries. However, this has been done at a cost of completely destroying the future, completely destroying the environmental future, laying the groundwork for death on a scale never before seen in history.
MASS DEATH, A NORM THROUGHOUT HUMAN HISTORY
Looking back in history it is important to understand that huge levels of death are hardly unique events. 1/3 of the population of China got killed off in the Mongol invasions. Other wars in China sometimes produced similar death tolls. 1/3 to 1/2 of the population of Germany in the 30 years war got killed off during a war where the followers of the Prince of Peace actually had a bit of a disagreement about who ought to be in charge of Germany. The Black death again 1/3 to 1/2 of the population of Europe killed off. The full scope of death in history is not fully known because, believe it or not, there really weren't people with clipboards or iPads or whatever you want calculating the total death toll.
THE APPROACH TOWARD MASS DEATH IN OUR TIME
EVEN BEFORE THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC
So it's important to understand that violent death is a part of history. The world was facing huge levels of death before the modern plague, which is our term for the Coronavirus disaster, so this was going to happen anyway, and if that wasn't bad enough you have the total insanity of the US government, which has repeatedly pulled out of arms control agreements, specifically nuclear arms control agreements, culminating in the completely insane decision of the Trump Administration to pull out of the Intermediate Nuclear Weapons Treaty. This brings nuclear war much closer, which with much less margin for error. The US has also pretty consistently violated treaties that it signed or promises that it may sign. The U.S. very specifically promised the Soviet Union that NATO would not be expanded if they withdrew from Eastern Europe. This was a lie. It was a lie and today NATO sits at the gates of St. Petersburg, a very threatening situation for Russia because the Baltic states historically have been an invasion route for enemies coming into Russia from Sweden to Germany and so on. So we were moving towards death under an enormous scale before the modern plague.
THE MISMANAGEMENT OF THE REACTION TO THE PANDEMIC
WILL RESULT IN MASS DEATH
Now the modern plague is a cataclysmic event which is going to lead to a huge death toll in the near term. In our view, the main part of the death toll will be produced by the mismanagement of the situation, by the ruling elites in power. It is not at all clear that these mindless lockdowns were necessary. Indeed it is highly likely that the vast part if not the majority of the coming death toll is going to come from the lockdowns, not the modern plague, not from the virus. The full scale of the storm that's coming has yet to break because that is the economic part of the storm. The US government was in disastrous shape before the storm. The US economy was in disastrous shape before the storm. So this thing is a sledgehammer hitting a system that was very very sick and very very diseased before the crisis.
ARE WE REALLY ALL IN THIS TOGETHER?
It's going to be a long time to get out of all this and the odds are that things are going to get a lot worse before they get a lot better, and it is not clear that this is going to bring people together. All signs are showing that this is going to pit people against each other, because you see the full consequence of paying for this thing has yet to kick in and that's going to lead to a ferocious fight about who's going to pay the bloody cost.
DYSFUNCTIONAL SYSTEMS POSTPONE PROBLEMS INSTEAD OF SOLVING THEM
This is very similar to France before the French Revolution or other societies before revolution, because revolutions frequently occur when political systems have been so dysfunctional that they kept postponing problems until all hell breaks loose financially, and then there's a bloody struggle about who's going to pay what, which is what's going to happen here the US. The government was a financial basketcase before this and now trillions and trillions and trillions of junk debt have been piled on top of trillions and trillions of junk debt. Obviously this is not going to come out well. Happy talk about "We're all in this together," is just that, happy talk. It's not real. If we were really all this in this together, if we were really living in wartime, as our leaders tell us, well then, we should raise the taxes on the upper incomes to 90%. Wouldn't that seem like a logical way to deal with a wartime emergency and the trillions of dollars in debt that we really can't afford to pay. So we're not in this together.
DO NOT BE FOOLED BY POLITICAL LIES
Don't be fooled by the political lies. We are not in this together and the system will not be able to sustain keeping alive the current collection of people. Now we're not going to get into a detailed debate about distributing all the world's wealth equally, or if we can support X population. Of the world's population, wealth is not going to be distributed equally. It's not. Quite the contrary, this is going to lead to an increasing struggle between world powers for wealth. So the issues posed by Plato and Malthus remain unresolved and the global environmental crisis, the whole expansion of the world population, has been based so far on agricultural systems that are basically based on borrowing from the future, such as industrial agriculture. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that if you're running an agricultural system based on pumping out underground aquifers that's a one-way trip. It's a one-way trip when you run out of water. Good things do not happen. Honestly they don't. And the situation in the Punjab between India and Pakistan is just one horrible example of that whole situation.
IN TIMES OF CRISIS, CAESARS EMERGE
So we need to get prepared for death on an enormous scale and the political turmoil that that's likely to produce in country after country. The political order is going to be shaken and the end result is going to be what it always is in a crisis, which is the emergence of Caesar's, the emergence of Caesar's who will have authoritarian power. It is important for those leaders to understand they must preserve a certain level of freedom of speech in order for decisions to be made. Ironically, the liberal establishment seems hog wild to shut down freedom of speech. So it's a case of trying to destroy democracy in order to save it. That's not going to work.
PREPARING FOR THE COMING TURMOIL
THE NEED FOR A GREEN NEW DEAL
So we need to be prepared for the coming turmoil and we need to see that the coming reforms reflect environmental realities. There is hope emerging. There is hope emerging with talk about a green new deal and, very important, the concept of a global green new deal that will emerge from the ashes, but ashes there will be and bloodshed there will be.
THE GRIM FUTURE COMING
This is coming and this is the turmoil. This is the real future that's coming. Don't be fooled by the virtual reality of the corporate overlords. Their world is coming to an end. They don't know what they're doing. The rule of the Money Lords is ending. What may be coming, what is likely to be coming, is a violent world and a grim world, but life is a struggle. It's a struggle for survival. It always has been
ETERNAL VISIONS OF LIFE
To conclude, we need to look at the great religions of the world. We could discuss this at greater length, and have in other lectures, but the issue of Dharma, of a person's role, the obligation to do what is right, and karma, which is how they are judged in terms of what they do, these are eternal visions of life, and that is something that inspires hope in an age of Apocalypse.
So these are realities. Don't be fooled by the political rhetoric of the charlatan politicians and the Money Lords at the top.
In conclusion, we are not in this together, no we are not, and a grim sorting out is coming.
Stay tuned to our website. We don't claim to have all the answers, but we do claim to have some of the answers to help provide guidance to you as our world enters a state of unprecedented crisis.