Executive Summary

• Understanding the broken narratives we are telling ourselves about:
  • Energy
  • The Economy
  • Our Education system
  • Financial markets
  • Western exceptionalism
• And why we will continue to hurdle farther off course until we decide to look at our situation truthfully

If you have not yet read Part 1: Reality-Optional Economics available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.

It is in the interest of healthy adults to remain sane, even when the powerful matrix of society is going crazy around them. I don’t think you can overstate the capacity of societies to go crazy. We still marvel at the murderous cruelty of Germany and Russia in the mid-20^th century, the sickening slide into industrial barbarism, and the technical proficiency they achieved in pursuit of their lunatic ends. And what provoked those terrible journeys into collective madness? Isn’t it part of the horror that no explanation seems to suffice. They were both losers in the First World War. Boo hoo. Many societies sober up when they lose a war. Both opted for organized mass murder instead. Joseph Stalin summed up Russia’s collective psyche in that period when he said, “One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.” The regime that promoted that particular view of the human condition lasted seventy years and then dissipated like a mere bad dream, an extremely fortunate outcome for Russia, and not so easy to account for, either.

And so what of us in this new century, faced with the gravely serious problems of resource scarcity, ecocide, climate uncertainty, demographic stress, cultural breakdown, and financial bedlam? How do we process the distractions, false narratives, delusions, and deliberate lies that infect every endeavor in American society, and overcome them personally and in our communities?

American Culture

First recognize that we have, alas, become a culture of rackets, both literally in the sense of dishonest schemes for obtaining money and in the broader psychological sense of people mindlessly following programmed behavior because its easier than being uncomfortably present with what’s really happening.