The Prophets of Doom : We Are In Far More Than A Depression

I'm just watching a TV program first aired in the spring of 2011 called "The Prophets of Doom" (link to the entire show) on the History Channel. Discussing the current problems facing our world are six experts from several fields -  financial, environment, energy, computers - who are talking about the crisis we are in now as a country and drawing the parallels to past civilizations and their demise.  

It's extremely important that people do wake up before the dam has burst, so to speak. In fact, one of them used a dam bursting as an example. People who live several miles downstream from a dam about to rupture worry, fret and try to do something to rectify it. Those a little closer are not as worried, still are concerned, but don't really react in time. But those who live the closest to it don't believe that anything will happen and don't react at all. Their thinking, a protective reaction of the brain that "it can't happen to me", don't say or do anything because they trust that someone built the dam strong enough to not rupture.

Our society is in a crisis in every form -  financially, politically and environmentally. But the basic thesis of their discussion is that historically, people refuse to believe that anything can or will happen to them because we are the biggest, we are the strongest, we have everything and dominate by buying, taxation, having the biggest military, and even the best technology. 

At some point our country's system, which one of them calls a ponzi scheme, will reach a point of insolvency in which we cannot recover, and by definition, will collapse. This has been shown to be true in every civilization that has risen to the length and breadth that we have. However, due to the level of our technology, our collapse will be different in that it will not be able to recover due to the draining of our natural resources and the fact that they cannot be replaced (oil, water, etc.), the pollution of clean drinking water and food from chemicals and pesticides, the collapse of our financial system, the most obvious one of all at the present that people can relate to. One of the participants proposed an very interesting thought. Dr. Hugo DeGaris thinks that through the vast improvements in the area of Artificial Intelligence, we may be creating the society of the future, which consists of robots and machines that not only can think for themselves, but will do so at the speed of light, a thousand times faster than the fastest human brain operates. His theory postulates that if this point is reached, this new society may consider humans as being inferior and make a logical decision to eliminate us as a species. Of course this is farther down the line than the pressing issues of financial collapse we face now. 

Yet even with all this knowledge, a greater percentage of the people still refuse to believe that this can or will happen to us. 1 in 4 Americans is considered to be at Level 1 in the table of literacy. That means that there are roughly 44 million people in America that cannot read, write or express their thought well enough to communicate. A staggering number at the very least. They are among those that live closest to the dam and believe that the politicians and government know more than they do and will always take care of them.

This is a very interesting and relevant look at our forthcoming political, financial and environmental collapse and the discussion was much more than I could express here. I feel that I live way downstream and I'm worried that those who live next to the dam are not waking up fast enough to be able to get to higher ground before the dam bursts and they drown.


So, once again I say to those who live within a few miles of the dam, get up, get involved, participate, get informed, vote, complain, pursue, and let those who believe they are in charge of us that we are here and we are not going to go down with their ship.

In addition to Dr. DeGaris, here are a few names of those involved in the discussion: Michael Ruppert, Dr. Nathan Hagens, John Cronin, James Howard Kunstler.

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