Welcome to the Age of Austerity

"Harmony and understanding
Sympathy and trust abounding
No more falsehoods or derisions
Golden living dreams of visions
Mystic crystal revelation
And the mind's true liberation
Aquarius! Aquarius!

This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius
The Age of Aquarius
Aquarius! Aquarius!"

-The Age of Aquarius (The Fifth Dimension)

"It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards."

-Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

"We must assume every event has significance and contains a message that pertains to our questions."

-James Redfield, The Celestine Prophecy

"A sane person to an insane society must appear insane."

 -Kurt Vonnegut (Welcome to the Monkey House)

And so it begins. The age of plenty and the age of accord have given way to the wreckage of systems that allocate, whether it be allocating wealth, labor, materiel, all of them seem to be veering off course. And the only response that seems to be wafting from those who pretend to understand is that you must cut back, conserve, preserve, save and deny.

It has pervaded everything, from sales and marketing to the service professions.  Governments everywhere have been forced to guarantee the banks after the banks went on a spending spree for a decade or so.  Unregulated financial frauds in which the financial markets now swim were traded up and up and up, and then, at the last minute, dumped for the government to save.  Privatized profits and socialized losses.  Where there is enough for one to have all, there is somehow never enough for all to have enough.

So the question for you is whether there really is not enough?  Or whether a system that misallocates or misdistributes is actually desigend to create the falsehood that there is not enough.  Is there not enough for all, or just not enough for you?  A system can withhold something in order to increase its value, and use that false scarcity to achieve political ends.  This is an economic axiom.

When there is a contrived situation of not enough, there is a false competition created amongst those who need it.  There is a fight amongst them that diverts them and distracts them from the realization that there really is enough.  And in the fight and in the competition, there is disunity, lack of community, lack of organization and the ability to make change through mass movement.  This is the socioeconomic and sociopolitical result of a system designed to make sure that for some, if not most, there will never be enough.

Welcome to the Age of Austerity, Hope you Survive the Experience.