Kunstler: The Time of Our Time
By James Howard Kunstler
June 27, 2022
Let’s face it: most people will not read Justice Alito’s carefully crafted arguments about what the constitution says or doesn’t say about abortion, or the meaning of “ordered liberty” through our history. We do not live in history. We live in the time of our time. And, until just recently, this has been a time that discarded former modes of conduct between men, women, and children as inconvenient to the presumably greater project of self-actualization.
To be-all-that-you-can-be is a stirring notion, and it seemed to work nicely within the colossal techno-industrial armature of the past century, with all its inducements to thrive personally, at least for the comfortable elites who pulled the levers of that system — though not so much for those below caught in the gears, who produced children despite all the novel means for avoiding it. For the fortunate, motherhood became just another “no” box to check off, while fatherhood merged into the odious mists of obsolete patriarchy. History is made up of things that seem like good ideas at the time. The hard part now is moving out of a familiar time into the undiscovered country of a new time.
The support system for all that is going, going, gone and in the ensuing flux all that rousing self-actualization starts to look more like Thomas Hobbes’s war of all against all, a savage and pre-human state of nature. As this occurs, all human beings have to fall back on are modes of conduct that include a moral and ethical dimension, which is to say, what is right and what is wrong, not just what is allowed at a given moment.
Which is also to say: maybe the time of smashing boundaries is over. As that scaffold of techno-industrial comfort and safety disintegrates, and all the dazzling promises of becoming transhuman dissolve — sorry, Klaus Schwab — we will likely have to settle for being human again, and in the best way, not the worst way. That includes a certain reverence for our nature and for each other. That suggests not killing children.
These days, this place on the planet that used to be a nation groans under a tribulation of bad ideas, bad choices, bad conduct, bad management, and bad faith. We have not been so ripe for regime change since 1776. A ruling Party of Chaos is doing absolutely everything to disorder our lives and there really is no generous interpretation for its motives. Everything it touches breaks, wilts, withers, splinters, rots, poisons, and infects the body politic, driving it deeper into derangement. It doesn’t even pretend to make sense because that would require making distinctions between what is true and what’s not true. We follow-the-science into pure evil.
What awaits is the abandond scaffold of the family and the community as opposed to the brute hierarchies of mere lonely, forsaken persons under the leviathan state and the behemoth corporation, which have produced mainly new kinds of cruelties, such as: the deadly “vaccine” mandates, the no-knock FBI visitations, the surveillance cameras, the robotic phone trees with their interminable holds, the obtuse insults of the HR departments, the drag queens twerking in your childrens’ faces, and much more. You might not know it from the news — what is the news now, anyway, except mercenary shuck-and-jive — but these giant governments and corporations are thrashing in their death throes. Get out of their way if you possibly can. Form the bonds you can with people and cherish them. For many, they will be all you’ll have for a while.
You can’t overstate the havoc that we’ll have to live with in the months ahead, short of blowing up the whole joint, one can hope. And it will happen just as a gigantic set of pretenses to a New Order of things rolls out to thumping failure. Forget about central bank digital currencies. Don’t believe that the very people who have severed the relationship between actual capital and money can just magically conjure a new order of money that they propose to control and you don’t. Meanwhile, the old-school money they created too much of is headed for biggest gaping black hole imaginable because that’s what happens when money based on debt is not paid back. So, for a while, there will be too much money and then there will be not enough, and then nobody will have money.
All that happens as the supply of every kind of stuff in the world stops moving from Point A to Point B, including replacement parts for every sort of machine, distribution of petroleum and its products, and food. And at the same time, it finally becomes too obvious to ignore the fact that many millions are dying or becoming disabled from the effects of the mRNA vaccines foisted on the public, especially in the USA and Europe.
Out of all that suffering will eventually come a new respect for human life and reconstructed relations between men and women, with all the abstruse ambiguities, pretensions, and nebulosities about sex put aside for some future age of decadence. It won’t require further agonizing reappraisals by any high courts to figure it out. Children are the consequence of sex. Children are required to carry on the human project.
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