Where Conspiracy and Reality Collide

If a recession could be compared to a car crash, then the credit crunch is rapidly turning into a high speed multi-car pile-up.  We all know who’s to blame – right? The Bankers. 

 

Well, sort of… Perhaps, even in our negative blame culture, we could accept that this wreck has something to do with the way that the system itself has been set up.  Maybe it’s what happens when rich people get to make up all the rules for several decades.

But, you know, something about all of this makes me uneasy.  More uneasy than, say, just the whirlwind that we have reaped, and how it has already devastated so many livelihoods around the globe (with more to come).  I can’t help but think that, in one respect at least, this catastrophe is proving a positive outcome.  So much so, in fact, that one might argue that this pile-up may have been engineered.

 

Consider this.  Some years ago, scientists started bleating en masse about how our industrialised economic policies were sending us fast towards an impending abyss.  The environoment on this planet is not coping with the challenge humans have set for it.  Politicians were dragged kicking and screaming towards the conclusion that their own, seemingly reasonable, policies would lead to environmental disaster, at least for the next generation or so.

 

However, we live in democracies, and power lies in the hands of the people, who aren’t about to give up all the good things that modernisation has brought us.  Yes, we want to prevent global warming, but not at any cost.  Not if we had to, say, give up cars, think about how much energy we used, stop driving the economy and its material rewards on at its relentless, breakneck speed. 

 

There’s no way a sane democracy would vote for such measures.

So, maybe the credit crunch is the answer to that dilemma.  Maybe the only way to stop us, and save us from ourselves, is to just break the system in two, and start again.  Think about it.  Energy and heating have gone up in price so much that it is fashionable to cut back, insulate, preserve.  Just to save precious cash, not resources.  The global car industry is about to go over the cliff, losing not just countless jobs, but the expertise of generations of engineers and designers.  The car industry itself could just melt into oblivion. The trading conditions around the globe are retreating, slowing the movement of goods which has, itself, cause so much global warming.

 

Basicallly, we’re all going to be buying local, if we buy much at all.  We’re collectively returning to the basics.

 
Don’t get me wrong.  I’m not advocating this as a good thing.  It’s bloody dreadful in many ways.  But in this I can see the hand of someone on the tiller…someone, or a large body of someones, who needed to act, and had to think outside the box.  The bankers?  No; they’re just the patsies, led to the abyss by their own greed.  

 

It’s ironic that a global depression could save the planet – was this part of the master plan?