The era of empty, secular mass consumption is over

People just don't realize it yet.

This post links the last 40 years of American so-called prosperity to a declining interest rate environment and massively inflating debt levels, which have raised asset prices and peppered over a deteriorating quality of life, making it easier for people to ignore. But the days of declining interest rates are over and therefore so is the party, and much harder times are ahead.

Western society is in a very unusual situation.

When the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia in 1917 on the basis of economic equality, they inherited a country that was extremely backwards and poor. Sure, they crushed the small but burgeoning kulak class (which existed thanks to the efforts of Pyotr Stolypin) and murdered millions of middle class, small, independent farmers in what is the current Ukraine, but generally speaking the quality of life of the peasants overall did not get that much worse. Furthermore, the peasants were generally very religious and remained so in spite of the Bolshevik’s militant atheism.

America, on the other hand, is rich. Really rich. Richer than any nation in history as it gallops to a permanent Bioleninist one party state. But average wages peaked in 1971 and have been slowly crushed under the central bank’s unbacked fiat system, unlimited immigration and the forced exportation of manufacturing jobs abroad, a process of neoliberal feudalism which is intensifying. You can see a whole bunch of charts here to see the shocking changes.

America was able to hide these problems with a 40-year declining interest rate environment, from the early 1980s until 2022, which raised asset prices (for homes, education, business equipment, the stock market, etc.) and made borrowing easier for the length of this “golden” period, with some blips along the way.

There is a simple formula for this: lowering interest rates = more borrowing power = higher asset prices, and the opposite is also true (higher interest rates = decreased borrowing power = decreasing asset prices).

Here is the result in the stock market:

Globohomo bailed out the big banks in 2008, then dropped rates to 0% for many years in order to create the biggest asset and debt bubble of all time.

But the party is over: The Fed Funds rate suddenly spiked in 2022-2023 and is now over 5%, signaling the end of the 40 year falling rate/rising asset prices dynamic. Jamie Dimon recently warned that rates may likely rise further to 7% (or higher).

Black line is volume, dark blue/green line is the effective federal funds rate (EFFR)

As the 40 declining rate period occurred, people were forced to take out more and more debt to afford ever-appreciating assets. I discussed previously how the money lending process worked to steal the assets of the general population, where I wrote:

Any industry that received expansion of credit…resulted in major price appreciation, so individuals were forced to take out debt at whatever rate was demanded or get priced out of their industries.  For example, money lenders first arrived in England in 1066 in the wake of William I’s defeat of King Harold II at Hastings.  They had financed the war and, in return for their support, William I richly awarded the money lenders by allowing them to practice usury under royal protection.  By charging rates of interest of 33% per annum on lands mortgaged by nobles and 300% per annum on tools of trade or chattels pledged by workmen, within two generations 1/4 of all English lands were in the hands of usurers.  At his death in 1186, the English financier Aaron of Lincoln’s wealth exceeded that of King Henry II.  The famous economist Dr. William Cunningham compares “the activity of the money-lenders in England from the eleventh century onward to a sponge, which sucks up all the wealth of the land and thereby hinders all economic development.”

This process has played out in America now as well. People took out more and more debt in order to survive as interest rates dropped in this unusual environment. Per Wikipedia, “In 1978, the financial sector comprised 3.5% of the American economy (that is, it made up 3.5% of U.S. GDP), but by 2007 it had reached 5.9%. Profits in the American financial sector in 2009 were six times higher on average than in 1980, compared with non-financial sector profits, which on average were just over twice what they were in 1980. Financial sector profits grew by 800%, adjusted for inflation, from 1980 to 2005. In comparison with the rest of the economy, U.S. nonfinancial sector profits grew by 250% during the same period. For context, financial sector profits from the 1930s until 1980 grew at the same rate as the rest of the American economy.” The financialization of the American economy is significantly worse now compared to 2009; in 2020 the financial sector comprised 8% of the American economy; finance now makes up 25% of corporate profits while it employs only 4% of the work force. This trend is only intensifying.

Look at consumer and government/welfare debt since 1980:

Here is another visualization showing the issue is endemic and well above the level of whichever party controls the presidency:

Due to the $11 trillion+ printed during “COVID” the above charts would look much worse today.

Because the total amount of debt is so massive, increases in rates will have a much greater and negative impact than in prior periods. Raising rates further will crash the real economy because of extremely high valuations and unprecedented debt levels — simply put, if the interest expense of running one’s business doubles or triples from lower rate environments, then the profits drops and hence the value of the business declines. This process is playing out slowly over a multi-year process, not weekly or monthly; it’s a slow grind and bleed-out. One can assume globohomo will then gobble up the shrinking middle class’s assets for pennies on the dollar to help bring about the Great Reset. They have used this yo-yo high/low interest rate strategy many times historically.

Let’s look at housing as an example. People are already either priced out of home ownership or otherwise locked into their existing homes, unable to sell and buy another because their mortgage expense (acquired when rates were low, for many - but not all - on a 30 year fixed term) would triple. If you can’t move because of your living situation, how are you different from a serf?¹

Housing affordability in the US is near all-time-lows, per Goldman Sachs

Compounding this issue, the resilience of the average American via their skillsets and health has collapsed. Here is a chart showing the changes in American jobs per sector over time, gutting us from a productive manufacturing to a useless service based economy, from Grundvilk :

Agriculture and manufacturing, traditionally understood “real” jobs that led to self-sufficiency and a middle class lifestyle, have been replaced with “education”, “health care”, and “trade (retail and wholesale)”, which are useless paper shuffling, indoctrination and “service economy” slave jobs. That’s if there are any jobs to be had - John Carter explains in his latest post that whites, and especially white men, are basically banned from corporate jobs today. Wonderful.

So let’s sum this up. The 40 years of secular materialist “good times” are over, brought to an end by the beginning of a rising interest rate environment after the accumulation of unprecedented amounts of personal and governmental debt. The “good times” were declining for a long time before that but were peppered over with increasing debt which made it easy to ignore. Now it will be declining faster and more intensely. This isn’t a prediction that will play out over a day or a week or a month or a year or multiple years, but more long-term. And it has nothing to do with stock market performance, which globohomo can keep inflated by printing infinite Federal Reserve loldollars and shoving it into the market at their discretion (or crash it by withholding future funds). This is a magic trick, by the way, as people will look at a stock market chart going constantly up which short-circuits their brains into somehow believing the collapse isn’t already here - but it is here, now, and it’s to your quality of life.

This prescient 4chan post from 2013 accurately sums up the state of affairs, previously discussed here:

---

America has no social capital remaining to weather the intensifying storm

All that America has anymore is consumerism. Worship at the idol of eating, Tinder, drinking, travel-shrewing, fancy cars and big houses. Due to the death of God as foretold by Nietzsche, we live in a world that is unsustainably materialist and nihilist, regardless of one’s religious beliefs. We exist to consume on a giant ball in space in a hostile, unforgiving universe and with a God that, if he exists, does not interfere in human affairs, and therefore we need to be managed by caring technocratic experts (this isn’t my argument, this is just a description of the baseline understanding for current Western society).

Because of this process social capital — community trust, community vitality and spirit — has been obliterated. Everyone is atomized both on a friend, family and dating level, gatherings of like minded people are forbidden by government, there is mass censorship, a stifling political correctness, zero ability to petition government for redress, feminization and digitization of society and there is a rapidly declining quality of life. See here for the grim details.

Suicides in America are at an all-time high, per 2nd Smartest Guy in the World here:

Additionally, it’s not just raising interest rates and the end of social capital that mean the party is over. Here are twenty common functions of American life the government wants to regulate or ban. The below is globohomo’s gameplan for the upcoming restrictions on basic living as explained by UKFires, which has a lot of establishment credibility, even attracting a full debate in the House of Lords in February 2020:

Net Zero disobedience is already being criminalized, per David Turver. Turver also states:

The Net Zero zealots have forced the closure of [Britain’s] last remaining fertiliser plant and they also want to close the available routes to import ammonia. Not only that, but no shipping and no aviation will also impede our ability to import food.

The “experts” on the Climate Change Committee want to “release” 11% of our agricultural land by 2035 and up to a quarter by 2050.  By “release” they mean turn over to tree-planting or energy crops. One has to ask, without fertiliser or imported food and much less agricultural land, how are we going to feed ourselves?

It is plain to see that we are heading towards economic disaster, social catastrophe and potentially famine.

Grim stuff.

---

Work toward self sufficiency, decreased spending and find God or suffer

Regardless of what globohomo has planned for us down the road, because of the prevalence of nihilism, without a spiritual foundation to provide meaning to man’s actions in this world the environment already currently feels choking, oppressive, stifling; like the whole country has become an open air prison.

It feels like a pressure cooker, and I’m seeing people become more frayed, more stressed, acting out in strange and unusual ways, turning to drugs and other reckless behaviors or worse. And this trend is markedly increasing. As I argue here, those who are going to best be able to manage the shift are going to have to consciously choose a path away from materialism and back toward idealism/God because materialism and spirituality have a direct inverse correlation. In an environment where one’s materialist consumption is going to become more and more limited, one is going to have to rediscover a firm belief in God in order to manage their stresses and outlooks properly. Those that fail to make this difficult transition will see their stressors continue to increase until they suffer breakdown.

American Psycho, both the movie and the book, were very rare classics of the modern era, because they demonstrated the principal that materialism and spirituality are direct opposites

The Orthodox Russians under the Soviets managed to bear their hardship well - even though they faced massive discrimination and brutalization - in no small part because they lived in poverty to begin with. I suspect the western transition to dramatically lower standards of living and quality of life is going to be much harder, much more chaotic and much worse overall, because the consumption patterns, mental outlooks, personal health and most importantly the baseline expectations are so much worse. Americans expect to consume a tremendous amount, and not being able to do so anymore — oh boy, it’s going to be a very rocky road…

For those secular materialists (and this to an extent is all of us) who make the transition to an element of belief, because this involves changes to our core views, it is likely to have an extremely jarring ripple effect on every area of our lives. As Brett Andersen explained before his recent schizophrenic breakdown, our beliefs are structured in a hierarchical pyramid structure with core beliefs at the top (comprising the Big Questions; religious/metaphysical beliefs, beliefs about the self, self-narratives, etc.), mid-level goals/beliefs (e.g. career goals, political beliefs), low level goals/beliefs (e.g. the goal of passing a test, belief in a scientific hypothesis), and sub-routines (e.g. solving an equation, brushing your teeth). It is easy to change lower-level beliefs which do not impact higher layers, but changes to the higher layers have a rippling effect on the layers below, so such fundamental changes will likely be very painful and disruptive.

The above images are clickable to the relevant Youtube moment.

Per Andersen here:

The mind is arranged in this kind of hierarchy of abstraction and the worldview questions are at the top. And so all of our subsidiary goals and beliefs are nested inside of our answers to the big questions. Now for most people the answers to the big questions are not really explicit, right? For most people, most people are not philosophers, right? And that’s totally fine. Most people don’t have an elaborated philosophy of epistemology. They have implicit assumptions about how they know what is true and they don’t have an elaborated ontology. They have implicit assumptions about what is real and unreal. But nevertheless, those implicit assumptions are still of vital importance because your assumptions about what is real and unreal constrains what you can possibly believe in because something that presents itself to your sensory experience that you have a priori deemed as being impossible, it’s very likely that you’ll deny that or find some explanation for it that deems it unreal in some important sense. So disruptions to our answers to the big questions, if we allow those to be disrupted, that will generate a lot more psychological entropy than other kinds of disruptions because everything that was nested inside of them also becomes disrupted.

As an aside, Andersen believes (as does Ma Mu) that it becomes more easier to disrupt one’s highest order beliefs with psychedelic therapies. These therapies have been demonstrated in clinical trials to have strong and prolonged impacts on those with PTSD and other difficult-to-cure disorders.

Anyway, lower your debt levels, lower your consumption patterns to live well below your means, try to develop an element of self-sufficiency, and try to find a relationship with God. Upcoming years and decades will be a “batten down the hatches” situation - I suspect we will not see such easy, “good times” again for the rest of our lives, and probably not for a long time thereafter. There are simply too few natural resources left and the world population is too large, and there is way too much debt and decadence, necessitating some future extreme population die-off on a globohomo pretext because our overlords were too evil or stupid to set population levels at or below a neo-Malthusian sustainable level generations ago.

Hopefully this post provides some perspective to navigate the trials and tribulations ahead.

1. Additionally, I expect air travel to be curtailed for the peasants down the road. The perks that belonged to the masses in prior generations will be increasingly phased out but be retained by the globalist class. People will be increasingly landlocked, chained in place. Massive cost of living increases will eat away what meager savings proles have and the travel-shrew phenomenon will no longer be necessary to help suppress birthrates.

Furthermore, the societal decline of IQ and the rise of generalized incompetence makes air travel tenuous longterm on its own. We have incompetents (labeled as “clowns” in internal emails) designing new planes that can't fly, and white men engineers who keep the whole thing together with regular maintenance are generally reaching retirement age. Remember just a generation ago we had supersonic commercial aircraft. What will happen to air travel when planes start crashing on a regular basis?