Making Sense of An Increasingly Insensible World

Making Sense of An Increasingly Insensible World

The comments below are an edited and abridged synopsis of an article by Chris Martenson

Inexplicable things are happening. Each is difficult to understand on its own, but together they reveal great uncertainty and upheaval.

The shock to the world’s economic system is significant. The loss of economic activity is disruptive to the economy and our way of life. Supply chains will run short of critical items, and blocked money conduits in the financial system imply a cascade of defaults yet to come.

We should become more resilient: save money; make a garden; stock a pantry; trim expenses and fire up alternative income streams. Build up a pantry and start a garden. Buy gold, invest in your home and develop a buy list to execute if/when they dial up the deficits, debt levels and money printing to even more ludicrous levels.

Nobody knows what will happen next. The economy, the machinery of state, and the global supply chains are all interconnected complex systems. They are completely unpredictable.

The economy and its key derivatives (technology/production/distribution) have emerged from the combined actions of billions of people using immense amounts of fossil fuel energy.

The new reality is that millions of people are unemployed. Oil consumption is down 20%. Nobody knows what that means in terms of changed behaviour and goods produced. We can only observe what happens/ceases to happen next.

In economic terms, a reduction in energy throughput might manifest as a simpler arrangement of fewer people working at fewer types of jobs. It might mean fewer sorts of goods being produced and reduced services. We don’t know the future details, but ‘simpler’ is a broad stroke that comes along with a 20% drop in oil consumption.

The outcome cannot be predicted, so we should prepare.