The circumstances of the Long Emergency will be the opposite of what we currently experience. There will be hunger instead of plenty, cold where ther… - James Howard Kunstler
" "The circumstances of the Long Emergency will be the opposite of what we currently experience. There will be hunger instead of plenty, cold where there was once warmth, effort where there was once leisure, sickness where there was health, and violence where there was peace. We will have to adjust our attitudes, values, and ideas to accommodate these new circumstances and we may not recognize the people will soon become or the people we once were. In a world where sheer survival dominates all other concerns, a tragic view of life is apt to reassert itself. This is another way of saying that we will become keenly aware of the limitations of human nature in general and its relation to ubiquitous mortality in particular. Life will get much more real. The dilettantish luxury of relativism will be forgotten in the boneyards of the future. [The] irony, hipness, and cutting-edge coolness will seem either quaint or utterly inexplicable to people struggling to produce enough food to get through the winter. In the Long Emergency, nobody will get anything for nothing.
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About James Howard Kunstler
James Howard Kunstler (born October 19, 1948, New York City, New York) is an American author, social critic, public speaker, and blogger.
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Additional quotes by James Howard Kunstler
We surely will have to reform our land-use habits and the oil-based transportation system that has allowed us to run our car-crazy suburban environments. We'll have to drastically change the way we grow our food and where we grow it. [The] social organization may be quite different in the decades ahead. Features of contemporary life that we have taken for granted… may fade into history. Politics that evolved to suit the… [industrial age] may morph beyond recognition [...].
American life, with its twin engines of suburbanization and factory production of consumer goods for the […] world, became so quickly and obviously successful that a new consensus formed supporting the value of the dollar and its paper accessories in capital markets, chiefly stocks, and bonds. This is not to say that the securities markets boomed in the 1950s and 1960s—it took until then just to recover the value levels of the pre-1929 crash—but stocks and bonds did regain respectability, [and] legitimacy. Those who had lived through the Great Depression, meaning virtually all the men who had served in the wartime army, had very modest expectations about the role of finance in the postwar economy. In the 1950s and 1960s, Americans bought stocks for the annual dividends they paid, not to flip them for a quick profit. In fact, share prices remained […] very flat during this period. The whole notion of investment was different than it would become later in the twentieth century. In the 1950s and 1960s, stock and bond values were linked much more directly with the successful production of real goods. General Motors derived its profits and paid its dividends on the basis of auto sales, not as today, primarily from leveraging interest rates and other abstract numbers' games removed from the actual making of products. In sum, the public attitude about the role of finance was extremely conservative. Finance was not an “industry” per se, but a set of institutions designed to keep the idea of money and its accessories credible, […] to allow real industries to function.
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