It been a funny old year, first the housing market starts to collapse, then talk of recession, then oil prices start heading into the stratosphere while the dollar falls into a bottomless pit. Bear Stearns collapses, then Fannie and Freddie the largest mortgage providers in the US gets nationalized to prevent collapse, effectively making America the largest council estate in the world. Then Lehman Bros a bank which survived the Great Depression goes under closely followed by AIG which gets nationalized as well, meaning the US government now provides insurance to itself for all the houses it tookover by nationalising the mortgage industry, making it apparent that US now has a de facto policy of taking the bad bits from free market capitalism and state capitalism (aka soviet style communism) and melding them into a new system where the profits are privatized but the losses are socialized.
This activity of course is mirrored across the globe with Northern Rock and HBOS in the UK, and house prices just about everywhere going south while fuel and and food continues to climb skyward (the current downward blip in oil prices is just that a blip).
Now I know many will put this down as your standard periodic depression our economic system is prone too, but something makes feel me that this one is going to be a bit special, a bit more epic if you will. The words that have been springing into my dreams this week are: Systemic Collapse! I think we are finally seeing what happens when our philosophy of continuous growth and rampant individualism hits up against the harsh realities of a finite resource base.
Now I’m not going to try and back up my feeling on this as I’m not an economic analyst, these are just my personal musings, based perhaps erroneously on my teenage marxist reading list and what I see happening around me, and I have have to admit I have adopted from years of reading science fiction a predilection towards scenarios featuring the end of the world and social upheaval.
Its this predilection though which has lead me to follow with skeptical interest a lot of the work published concerning the Mayan calendar. Wait! don’t stop reading yet, I’m not a total loo-laa (just a partial one 
). Now it so happens that one of the most recent interpretations of the Mayan Calendar by Carl Johan Calleman published in the late nineties I think, views the calendar as a system of delineating the evolution of consciousness starting way back at the big bang right up to 2012 (or 2011 technically according to Calleman) with the rate of acceleration increasing as we approach the end of the calendar.
Now there’s lots of other complexities of the interpretation but the one I want to highlight is the system of breaking up each increasingly smaller segment of time into days and nights each with specific qualities and attributes. Now it turns out that the period of time from November 18th 2007 to November 12th 2008 is the Fifth night of the current time period and as such is associated with Tezcatlipoca, the god of darkness. It is said to be a period of destruction where the dominant energy of the time period comes tumbling down making way in the sixth day for the seeds of the next time periods dominant energy to sprout. Now it was posited by many (prior to the last year) that in the context of the current time period this dominant energy refers to our economic/social system.
So I find it more than interesting that all the economic events I outlined above have occurred in this very time period. Perhaps the Mayans (or Calleman) were right? Okay so I was lying, I am a total loo-laa and perhaps so were the Mayans. But the thing I like to remind myself of is that its most likely that Mayans did not have the viewpoint of material realism that comes so easily to us. Perhaps they were more monistic idealists who believed that consciousness not matter was the primary stuff of existence and that this physical world was merely a collective hallucination, a conjuration of the collective and individual consciousness. Perhaps from this viewpoint the ideas of prophecy and of our physical world being a constructed acceleration chamber for the growth of our consciousness might seem a bit more tenable.
Anyway that’s my crazy wacko thought for the day and who knows, maybe if a few more key banks collapse and the US government continues to panic and attempt to “undertake the direction of production” and systemic collapse becomes a reality I might start to believe it myself
