Today’s guest is Charles Hughes Smith, who’s been writing about socioeconomic and technology trends since 2005 on his blog, “Of Two Minds.” His blog hosts over 4,000 pieces of original content. His work is also on Patreon and ZeroHedge.
Charles seeks to understand why our sociopolitical and economic systems are failing and lays out alternative ways to find a sustainable way of living. His work doesn’t fit into an ideological box and he believes that ideologies are obsolete and misleading.
Charles has written 16 books, the most recent entitled “Self-Reliance in the 21st Century.” His blog, “Of two minds” means that he is open to changing his views when presented with new knowledge. Secondly, the blog itself is the result of two minds—his and his global readership.
Charles wrote this article to cover two concepts: the mainstream idea that we will see a small recession and the small outlier camp that believes this will be something bigger. Charles points out that humanity sees great periods of socioeconomic and political change. In the 20th century, there was the Russian and Chinese revolution, World War II, The Civil Rights Movement, The Women’s Movement, and so much more.
Charles believes that we need a transformation because the system we have isn’t sustainable. We’ve had a long trend of everything stabilizing back to a bull market. In the last 20 years, we’ve seen hyper-globalization and hyper-financialization which accelerated trends, destabilizing the system. The tides are turning.
What we are seeing and feeling isn’t aligning. We might see decay and renewal. We might have periods of flux that launch a renaissance. How can we deal with the unsustainability of the current system?
Problem #1: Energy is not forever. Energy is a limited resource and there are constraints and costs associated with every form. We’ve indulged in “easy” energy with hydrocarbons. That industry is so large it’s beyond comprehension. It’s an incredible system that we take for granted. Green energy systems have their own constraints. It’s not an easy problem to replace hydrocarbons and people are ignoring that.
With degrowth, a new model of growth and prosperity, we use less energy, materials, capital, labor, etc. When we use “more,” we contribute to what Charles calls the “landfill economy.” GDP is essentially measured by waste. Globalization has led to everything becoming disposable.
Problem #2: The quality of life, goods, and services is enormous and consequential. The decline in the quality of goods and services is a decline in well-being and a waste of irreplaceable resources that people take for granted.
Problem #3: The collapse of morality where anything goes as long as you make money. In a technocratic mindset, morality doesn’t count. The corruption that’s become pandemic has a consequence that people don’t measure.
The average person realizes the system is unfair. Humans are wired to be attuned to fairness. When things are systematically unfair, people get upset. They may not know why. A lot of the
