Apocalypse (Part 5)
The Source of Our Economic Growth
This short mini-essay is the last in a five part series focusing on the imminent collapse of our banking system. That system comes to us from the Renaissance, so the suggestion is that we are in for a transition of similar magnitude.
Science comes to us out of the Renaissance obsession with magic, and that’s been the source of 600 years of economic growth. Cosimo de’ Medici, patriarch of the most famous banking clan of them all, ordered a halt to the translation of long-lost Plato after his agents discovered an old Greek book of magic. Cosimo was an old man by then and he wanted to be sure he got a crack at that book before he died. His grandson Lorenzo kept a cabinet filled with alchemical curiosities like hairballs or narwhal horns. The Medici family ingested, in powdered form, rocks and minerals they thought had magical properties. This obsession with the occult was typical of the Renaissance, when fortunes and horoscopes were all the rage. It may seem quaint to our modern minds, but their magic gradually evolved into our modern science. Chemistry is the modern version of alchemy.
For 600 years, science supplied the economic growth that our bank-centric system requires to function. The transition from magic to science improved our understanding of the physical world and how to manipulate it. That understanding goes by the general name “technology”, and technology is money. It’s literally the application of science to industry. Tech directly expanded economies. It ushered in the Industrial Revolution by mechanizing the textile industry, rendering it much less labor-intensive and much more profitable to make clothes. All sorts of exciting loans for new equipment and new businesses had to be made. Tech also indirectly expanded economies, such as by improving navigation equipment. That led to the discovery of the Americas, where new farming, ranching, timber, and mining operations cried out for establishment. For 600 years, technology has delivered a never-ending stream of entrepreneurs needing loans to the doors of our banks.
But not even the wonders of science and technology can satisfy the insatiable, compound interest-driven demand of the banking industry forever. The following short YouTube videos feature the ideas of an actual scientist, Dr. Eric Weinstein, about how science has stopped functioning as "seedcorn" for economic expansion. He suggests that we’ve been faking economic growth since the 70s, leading to all manner of societal derangement, up to and including the rise of Donald Trump…