There's a scene in Apollo 13, where one of the more photogenic NASA nerds walks in and basically says (paraphrasing) "I've looked at the data. This is all a waste of time. Power is everything. Without power to run the ship, nothing else matters. We gotta turn everything off. Now."
That scene always stuck with me. The sentiment runs deep through my personality. It's how I try to conduct my life -- get the essentials right first, then worry about everything else. No, I don't get a whole lot of time for the "everything else", but that's the life I chose. Things could be worse. I do suspect that part of not having any gray hair at 63 is keeping stress levels generally low, trying to get the essentials right, and keeping things fairly simple. Eat right. Exercise moderately. Be happy with what you have. Reach out when you can. Etc.
I have stayed out of the post-election banter for the most part, except to offer a comment of support or two, where I think rational people get it right. Those people can be difficult to find, but they exist. But I don't have much time or interest in most of what people are saying, and I don't waste my time reading it. Not that I don't care that friends are either huddled in fear or bouncing for joy. I do. But when people miss all the essentials, it is difficult to engage. It's best for everyone that I don't.
There are reasons why the country re-elected Trump. People who can't see those reasons tend to be either brainwashed by whatever media they ingest, or out of touch elites whose lives depend on maintaining the current economic and cultural regime that is causing the stratification of our civilization. But it's a large and diverse group. Some people just hate the guy for personal reasons, which is understandable. He has earned those attitudes. But the people who love him or hate him tend to share a common misunderstanding -- they don't see that, without significant course changes, this ship is going to run out of power and likely burn up in the atmosphere, regardless of who is at the controls.
The way of life that we all have come to view as normal was built around a peculiar post-WWII economic and monetary order. We committed to rebuilding the countries we necessarily destroyed, in exchange for the world allowing us to print all the meaningful money. Sure, it's more complicated than that, but that's the basic idea. It was a great deal for us, certainly. We further committed to acting responsibly -- to be the world's lone fiduciary, more or less. And so, for the past 80 years or so, give or take, the world has wanted U.S. dollars. U.S. dollars talk. You need them to do any real business in the world. That's why you have running water, indoor plumbing, supermarkets with dozens of breakfast cereal options, and decent health care. You get dollars in your pay check. And the rest of the world wants them badly. It is easy to take all this for granted when it is the only system you know.
Over the past few decades, this cozy situation began to fray at the edges, and then worsened, until now the fabric itself threatens collapse. We have become irresponsible in a few different ways, as we slowly renege on our end of the original bargain. The financial meltdown of 2008 was one major symptom (and is what made Trump possible, in a way). We allow smart rich people to create financial instruments that nobody understands, whose purpose is mainly to make those same people wealthier. We have given up on worrying about deficits. We've printed a bunch of money to fund dubious wars. Lately we just make ridiculous financial promises to preferred constituencies, without apology to the people paying the bills.
A few decades back, the elite leadership that was rubber stamping all that financial "flexibility" made a strategic decision to assist China in a program that would make that enigmatic and mysterious country both wealthier and the manufacturing center of the world. The theory was that a more affluent, modern China would come around to western values, and the country would gradually adopt the principles of western liberalism. This was an explicit strategy. And we did succeed in the first part -- we made China a lot wealthier. The second part was a fantasy that was never going to happen -- and it did not, unless you buy into the illusion of powerful Chinese guys wearing nice, western suits.
It turns out that if you give the Chinese all your technology, and free access to your markets, they get big ideas that don't involve the post-war liberal world order. Fast forward to today, and a greatly empowered China is forming a new economic and military axis that involves Russia, Iran and North Korea as junior partners, and significant portions of the southern hemisphere as effectively vassal states. China wants to replace the United States as both the world's fiduciary and supplier of infrastructure. It isn't quite there yet, but it is inevitable if we don't change course. Because, in the end, real money talks. People will trade anything for it, including their liberty.
If something like that does happen, the structure of our world will change almost overnight. We won't be able to print money anymore, at least not without the dire consequences that other countries face when they do the same thing. Store shelves will be empty. There will be no Amazon guy to deliver whatever you want in a couple days. Goods will flow to holders of other, stronger currencies, living elsewhere in the world. We will only be able to build defense systems that we can actually afford, leaving us vulnerable. The roads will begin to disintegrate, along with other infrastructure. Spare parts will be harder to find and in higher demand. The supermarket shelves will be sparse. All pension systems will fail. All the Ozempic will go elsewhere. Eventually, if you don't own your house outright, you might lose it. Etc. Your once-great country will begin to look and feel like a beat up K car from the 1980's. And it will eventually get crushed and recycled.
We're not close to falling off this cliff just yet, but we're getting there. One reason is that few countries trust Chinese leadership any more than we do, and for good reason -- their culture is not based on the values that formed the foundation of western economies. They're more than happy to commit real genocide, if people get in the way. If this all sounds racist and xenophobic, it’s not — it’s just a description of how they behave. Ask any Uyghur. Or, for that matter, ask any Han Chinese person who is lucky enough to be part of the upper/ruling class. They speak almost stoically about the inevitability of the extreme stratification of their civilization. Some people have a lot of stuff — and everyone else exists to ensure that they do. It’s pretty simple. Oh, sure capitalism can also feel like that a little bit sometimes. But western values have ensured that most boats rise in rising tides. In China, the tides exist for the ruling class.
We're printing so much money because we think we can fund the world we want rather than the world that is. For example, we've made demographically unsustainable promises to care for the aging boomer generation, without any changes to the programs. And the numbers don't add up. But that's just one of a number of large commitments that we can only hope to fund if the world continues to tolerate our largess. The debt and deficits that we now face make the old fiscal arguments of the 80's and 90's look pretty silly. We can't grow our way out of the current situation, as we did then. No amount of "irrational exuberance" will pay for what we've been doing and promising for 20+ years. And the more we put off the great unwinding of commitments that needs to occur, the smaller the odds become of surviving what we did.
Meanwhile, if you haven't noticed, the New Axis is becoming aggressive, seeking to take and own things the old-fashioned way while they await the final collapse of the dollar. Three members of their club are nuclear states, two with the ability to vaporize our existing Navy in a few hours, let alone major cities. It's a brave new world.
Whether you're MAGA or woke or some other flavor of politically dysfunctional, the pet concerns that you mainline from Colbert or Fox News or Bannon or Maddow or whomever don't even begin to rise to this level of importance. If we continue to argue about those things, and continue to "own" each other every four years, alternately forcing our views and ideologies down each others' throats as if they are Absolute Truth, preferably via unlawful executive order, we are all going to be owned before we know it. And you ain't gonna like that, if you're still alive to experience it. Every convenience and necessity that you experience every day, and the ability of our military to defend us, depends on the fact that the Federal Reserve can still print money and still impose its influence around the world, as it has done for many decades. When that power ends, so does your lifestyle, along with everything you've worked for. That day isn't too too far off. And when it arrives, there is no going back. If that's what you want, keep doing what you're doing.
We have become a deeply trivial and unserious people (and if that sentence conjured images of only the tribe you despise, that's exactly the problem). There's still time to change that. But it happens at the grassroots. It happens at the individual level, with a personal commitment to reject the lies and the garbage and the sea of trivia and childish priorities and grievances. You have to demand better, You have to commit to educating yourself about how the world works, and how it is that the United States ended up in such a unique place for the past century. It wasn't an accident. And it isn't guaranteed in perpetuity.
You have to commit to testing ideas with a very hot intellectual flame. You have to commit to letting go of people in your life, politically speaking, who refuse to do the same. Our civilization and leadership in the world can be salvaged. But it can't and won't happen until we all learn how to be adults again. If the people around you refuse to grow up, you have to turn them off on that channel until they do. If enough people become serious, and demand serious leadership that addresses the important issues first -- just like they did on Apollo 13 -- we can land this ship safely. Otherwise, the best I can say is eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die.