I have a British friend in his nineties whom I’ll call Jim.
Last night I finally got around to reading his self-published memoir.
A stack of loose-leaf sheets, more accurately.
He was born in the mid-1930s.
His parents ran a convenience store.
At age sixteen, he cycled 700 miles to Land’s End for fun.
The next year, his school took a class trip to the Black Forest in Germany.
The next year, he hitch-hiked through France and Spain.
After university came two years of National Service, some of it spent in Sweden (drinking copious beer at the Carlsberg brewery as it then offered unlimited free samples to visitors, and unlimited Nordic rail travel for a whole summer for the modern equivalent of just $250, allowing him to visit Finland and Norway).
Next came a job (easily had) that paid well and had loads of time off to keep doing military shenanigans on the side.
Lots of fancy balls and cocktail parties in the fall and winter, with trips to the Netherlands, France, and Spain in the summer to run with the bulls.
He lived near Hyde Park Corner in London, something that could then be done by the middle-class without multi-millions in bank debt or lifelong slavery to a feudal landlord.
His evening-and-weekend military reservist gig took him to Greece, Scotland, Germany.
He became a member of the National Film Theatre and regularly visited the Royal Albert Hall.
He got married and did a honeymoon road trip through Belgium, Germany, Austria, Yugoslavia, Serbia, Montenegro, Croatia, and Italy.
Jim and his wife had kids and bought a house in a small new development… with a clubhouse, cricket pitch, and tennis courts… for a mere £6,600—that same house now sells for well over $1 million.
In their forties, they ditched city life and bought a rural pub.
And joined a spa club.
In his sixties, he took up paragliding off mountains.
He went skydiving at seventy.
They retired, sold the pub, and built their dream home.
Holidays were spent in Kenya, Tanzania, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Crete, Zante, Rhodes, Venezuela, Cuba, a cruise up the Nile, Turkey, Morocco, Tunisia, Sri Lanka, Mauritius, China, South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Singapore, Granada, St Vincent, St Lucia, Barbados, and a cruise up the Amazon River.
The really crazy thing?
Basically everyone I know in their seventies and eighties has a similar story.
What happened to the world?
In the aftermath of WWII, the middle class was formed and the economy took off like a rocket.
For thirty glorious years — the trente gloriouese — human development flourished on a scale never seen before in human history.
Then along came the banker-backed capital-worshipers and their puppet politicians, the actor Ronald Reagan and the corporatocracy’s Margaret Thatcher.
They and their ilk sold the public’s assets to their corporate sponsors for pennies on the dollar, who then leased them back to the people at sky-high rents.
They and their ilk loaded up the country with national debt while slashing taxes for their rich sponsors.
They and their ilk found the money to pay interest to their banker buddies by slashing public services and borrowing from those same bankers, who they let print debt-based interest-bearing credit-money out of thin air via fractional reserve banking.
In just thirty years, they destroyed the world that Jim and his generation enjoyed.
Unlike Jim and his cohort, who owned their homes outright on a single salary, regularly traveled abroad, and generally lived a decent human life, a Gen Alpha kid can expect:
a lifetime of student debt
a lifetime of mortgage debt or slavery to a landlord
crushing and ever-increasing taxation and stealth taxation
continually degraded public (and private) services
falling quality and quantity of goods
ever-rising prices
the compounding devaluation of their pay
No wonder the majority of young people hate capitalism, think democracy sucks, and want to burn it all to the ground.
They know that the “cost of living crisis” is a scam.
That it’s engineered theft-by-currency-debasement.
That it’s intentional systematic impoverishment.
That it’s shareholder monopolization to wring wealth out of workers.
Immoral seizure.
Malevolent usurpation.
They’ve seen what economic freedom looks like, and instead of willfully submitting themselves to a lifetime of neofeudalism, they’re mentally checking out — diving into screen addiction and social media, living in the fantasy world of porn and video games, even pretending to be different sexes (or animals). They are totally divorced from reality because their reality is garbage.
Here’s what’s going to happen if the masses don’t find a way to wake up and fight back:
Silicon Valley AI techbros take over a third of the world.
China takes control of a third of the world (including Russia,
Islam takes over a third of the world. (By population and country count, they already have, but they’re rapidly colonizing a dozen European nations and sinking harpoons into American cities as we speak.)
Gen Z and particularly Gen Alpha are either mentally checked out or so easily propagandized by algorithms that they will be worse than useless in the fight against these three enemies of freedom — millions are already useful idiots for one of the three entities that will happily enslave them in the long run.
So what are we to do?
Fight for another trente gloriouese.
Give our kids a fighting chance to check back in.
But why settle for just thirty short years of slightly less corruption and exploitation?
We should go full-bore biblical:
Jubilee all $330 trillion in global debt.
Ban interest and for-profit land-lording.
Reinstitute land rights for all.
Give workers meaningful rights.
Guarantee liberty from lifelong bondage to creditors.
Abolish fractional reserve banking and bring back honest money that doesn’t lose its purchasing power.
If we set our sights and acts in the direction of heaven, earth will look a little less like hell.
Then maybe our kids can have lives that look more like Jim’s, and less like the impoverishment that existed before and after that very special time.
We can't kill them all
A little bit of the work hard get rich motivation of the capitalist world might be worth preserving.
The bankers control the western world. China makes business deals with the world that enriches both China and the dealing country. Saying China is going to take over a bunch of the world is ludicrous. The world WANTS to work with China. Africa wants to work with China because China builds SCHOOLS as they set up deals to extract resources. The Western countries just steal. China has made no move to take over the world. They have plenty of territory as it is.
Saying Islam is going to take over the world is just dumb and total Western propaganda. The Western bankers love to use religion to keep humanity divided. As long as you think Muslims are bad people you are helping the bankers spread fear.