Essential Insanity

Wow. Just go live at the Agonist today – Ian AND Stirling are on!

Just, wow.

Essential Insanity | The Agonist

At the end of World War II the US had about half the world’s economy. Admittedly that’s because Europe had been bombed into oblivion, but even when Europe rebuilt the US was still far, far ahead. The US was insanely rich and powerful. See, when you’re rich you can do stupid and unproductive things for a long time. There are plenty of examples of this but the two most obvious ones are the US military and the War on Drugs.

The War on Drugs hasn’t reduced the number of junkies or drugs on the street in any noticeable way. It has increased the US’s prison population to the highest per capita level in the world, however. It has cost hundreds of billions of dollars. It has gutted civil liberties (the war on terror is just the war on drugs on crack, after all). And after 30 years does anyone seriously say, “Wait, this doesn’t work, it costs billions of dollars and it makes us a society of prisons”? Of course not. If anything, people compete to be “tough on crime.” What’s the definition of insanity, again?—Doing the same thing, over and over again, and expecting different results.

Then there’s the US military. It costs, oh, about as much as everyone else in the world’s military combined. It seems to be at best in a stalemate and probably losing two wars against a bunch of rabble whose total budgets probably wouldn’t equal a tenth of one percent of a single US appropriations bill. And it is justified as “defending” America even though there is no nation in the entire world which could invade the US even if the US had one tenth the military.

But the US could afford to have a big shiny military and lots of prisons, so it does. (Note that the US no longer can afford these things, but they still persist.) Lots of people get rich off of both the prison and the military industries, lots of rural whites get to lock up uban blacks, and lots of communities that wouldn’t exist otherwise get to survive courtesy of the unneeded military bases and prisons which should never have been built.

Insane: believing things that aren’t true.

Insane: decision-makers cut off from the consequences of their decisions. In fact, they receive reverse feedback: as things get worse for most Americans and as America gets weaker and poorer, the elites are the richest they’ve ever been.

Insane: no one will stop doing things that clearly don’t work and are harmful, because people are making money off the insanity.

All of these particular insanities combine to make predicting the US so surreal. It’s not just about knowing what the facts are and then thinking, “Ok, how would people respond to that?” You have to know what the facts are, what the population thinks the facts are, what the elites think the facts are, who’s exploiting the situation for profit, and then ask yourself if these facts are having any real effect on the elites and if that effect is enough to outweigh the money they’re making off of failure. (For example, how many of them have children serving in Iraq?—Right, so Iraq is not urgent to fix.)

And then you have to go back to the facts and ask yourself, “What effect will these facts have even if they’re being ignored.” Facts are ugly things: they tend not to go away.

All of which makes the US damn near impenetrable, often enough even to Americans.

But here’s what I do know: you can get away with being nuts as long as enough people benefit from you being insane. When the credit cards are all maxed out, when the relatives have stolen even the furniture, when suddenly all the enablers go away then the knee-breakers or the men in white pay you a visit. At that point you can live in the real world, or you can go to the asylum.

I wonder which way the US will go?