The Energy Crisis is a Spiritual Crisis
The cost of energy is soaring around the world. Nuclear power is being shuttered. Gas pipelines have been blown up by western intelligence agencies. Capital investment in power supply has flatlined.
In countries like South Africa, state utilities are failing because of incompetence, theft, and a flawed ideology which promotes wind turbines and solar panels as realistic alternatives to power plants. We also suffer from a kind of colonisation by the German Green Party (a former pro-pedophile lobby party)
Since 2008, the US and other nations have been printing money in order to keep the financial system greased. This only escalated during the bizarre cult of lockdowns. Whilst this kept financial institutions and stocks in the green, the benefits have been less obvious for the middle and working classes.
Together with the energy crisis, the above monetary theory economics has caused painful inflation for the poor and middle class around the world. The media has not covered it, but around the world protests are underway against both the cost of food and fuel.
The willingness to destroy power supply and print money hints at something more primal than economic mismanagement.
Our modern age no longer wants to live.
Energy is, after all, life. And we now disdain it.
From our first moments in the womb, life is about energy. In our life together in families and society, energy is at the centre of all we do.
Wood fire for cooking and warmth. Wind to pump water and fill sails. Rivers for milling grain. And then coal, oil, and gas to work engines and turn turbines. Finally, nuclear fission to unlock the strongest forces at the heart of matter.
Energy is neither created nor destroyed in any system. This means it always costs us something to unlock it. But as our energy sources have become denser, we have paid these costs more efficiently, none surpassing the use of nuclear and gas energy to create cheap electricity for billions of people.
This journey toward efficiency and prosperity in the physical realm had at its heart a spiritual energy - a desire to live, a desire to grow, a desire not simply to speculate or count, but to build and make.
Aristotle believed all of life existed either in a state of potential or actuality.
The Greek word he used for potential was ‘dunamis’. The word he used for actuality was ‘energeia’.
A thing’s dunamis is its potential to change, to realise its potential for growth.
A thing’s energeia is its achievement of being-at-work according to its form, according to what it is.
Energeia is superior to dunamis because, to use Aristotle’s examples, animals have sight only in order to see, men possess the art of building so that they may build, and all matter exists so it can reach towards forms.
One can also find the word energeia in the Greek New Testament, where it is used to describe the working of God to raise Jesus from the dead to a cosmic kingship.
Philippians 3:
But our citizenship is in heaven. And we eagerly await a Savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, who, by the power [energeia] that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body.
This only seems abstract and theoretical because of how alienated we have become from the spiritual roots of our civilization, in which life was a collaboration with God to build, and thus we constructed cathedrals, hospitals, engines, ships, and rockets.
And as we have sunk in the mire of modernity and no longer even believe in making babies, so too has our willingness to make anything else of value and durability.
I was struck by the hidden spiritual nature of the economic crisis when I recently read a newsletter from the well-known investment strategist, Lyn Alden. (Interestingly, Alden began her career as an electrical engineer working in aviation.)
In June this year, she wrote this analysis of the current inflationary crisis for her subscribers, in which she laid out the case for why the historic precedent of our times is the inflationary 1940s, following a decade of anemic post-1929 financial recovery:
The 1930s and 2010s decades were both periods of economic stagnation, disinflation, and bank recapitalization in the aftermath of those financial crises [of 1929 and 2008]. In fact, these were the only two periods in a dataset stretching all the way back to 1890 where US nationwide average home prices fell significantly in nominal terms. The banking system was recapitalized in both of these decades, but consumers for the most part were not bailed out, and so base money grew substantially while broad money did not. Populism began to increase around the world as people had great discontent about their economies.
After the banking sector gets bailed out, there is a recovery for finance, but not for citizens, with houses and mortgages. And the easy money creates inflation…
At that point, the ability to get out of inflation depends on private markets’ and policymakers’ ability to create new industrial capacity for goods and services and commodities. In other words, high levels of productivity must be re-established, or the pain continues in one form or another.
The money that has been created needs to be absorbed by actual value to match it, to give it some kind of truth. But the problem, economically, is that there are significant differences between how we create wealth now and how it was created nearly a century ago, particularly for the world’s superpower.
In the 1940s, the US had a trade surplus and was busy overshadowing its predecessor power, Britain, which had almost deliberately chosen decline in the form of disastrous intervention in World War I, trade deficits, and high debt. Today, the US itself has spent vast resources in bizarre foreign adventures, is in serious debt, and no longer even attempts at running a trade surplus. Why bother, when China can make your things with sweatshop workers?
Alden points out also that government spending in the 1940s was productive, as opposed to the ‘stimulus’ spending of the last few decades:
In the 1940s, [fiscal spending] went primarily towards building industrial manufacturing facilities, sourcing commodities, hiring soldiers, and then sending those returning soldiers to technical school or universities on the government’s dime when they returned, to get them educated and ready for the domestic workforce. While this was all inflationary at first, it at least came with a lot of productivity growth attached to it (which causes the good type of disinflation) in the decades that followed. New technologies and a ton of new industrial capacity, as well as a more educated population, were some of the positive outcomes for what was otherwise an utterly terrible decade for most people.
In contrast, most of the stimulus during 2020 and 2021 went to keeping consumers and businesses solvent despite the reduction in productivity that came with the pandemic and lockdowns. While it was helpful for people in many ways, especially stimulus checks and child tax credits towards the working and middle classes, a lot of it also went towards unnecessary consumption and malinvestment.
At the heart of this ‘malinvestment’, is “an undersupply of oil and gas, raw materials, refined products, and various infrastructure relative to what the economy currently needs to grow.”
Because there is a lack of energy in the system to build and thus soak up the new money, which instead floats in malinvestment, we have high inflation instead.
At the moment, the US Federal Reserve is trying to bring inflation down from the other direction, via hiking interest rates:
They wouldn’t phrase it quite that bluntly, but creating some more unemployment is basically the plan here. The US Federal Reserve can’t print more oil, refineries, pipelines, copper, fertilizer, ships, or manufacturing facilities, but they can reduce consumer demand for periods of time for some of those things, through very uncomfortable methods.
By reducing consumer spending and demand, by stifling markets, by ultimately reducing employment, you avoid having to increase supply, having to build and grow, in order to bring inflation down.
But as Alden notes, this time is different compared with the 1970s. The reason interest rates were kept so low for so long is the massive amount of debt in the US and around the world. When rates go up, interest payments do too. And governments themselves require a lot of debt.
Alden thus foresees a checkmate moment.
“Checkmate” in this context happens when a central bank encounters inflation that is above its target level, but still can’t stop printing money, due to lack of buyers of their country’s government debt…
The global financial regime operating since World War II would then be toppled, to be replaced by something as yet unknown.
And why?
Because you cannot have wealth without energy; you cannot have life without energy.
Pushing debt around is just nihilism.
This is perhaps most obvious in my own country, South Africa, which is choosing deindustrialization as the corollary to its regime’s commitment to socialism and racial grievance.
I can think of no other word to describe best the state of our national electricity utility, Eskom, as explained by global energy expert KW Miller to Alec Hogg:
And I will tell you this for your viewers; I’ve been doing this for over 30 years. I’ve seen as ugly of an energy complex problem as you can see. I’ve seen bad power plants, I’ve seen bad companies. I’ve seen overleveraged companies. I’ve seen everything you can imagine from debt problems to operational problems and everything in between. South Africa’s Eskom is as bad as I’ve seen in my entire career, because it has every single problem you could imagine in a restructuring – financially and operationally. And these are the facts that the South African taxpayers have started to understand…
You put all those together and then you look at the massive debt bubble and you say, “Okay, you know, the wheels have pretty much come off of South Africa, because when you take out the power generation out of the industry, you can’t run your plants, you can’t run your smelters, you can’t run your mines, you can’t run your light industrial manufacturing. And so your economy starts to collapse. So, when Eskom goes down, for all practical purposes, the economy goes down in South Africa. And I want people to understand this is not something that’s going to be solved by renewable energy.
Bear in mind that a few years after the ANC took over, Eskom was considered one of the best power utilities in the world. But now it is the engine not of growth but of destruction, whilst the government continues to talk of renewables, of black empowerment, white guilt, and the grand revolutionary ideals of their left-wing, social-democratic movement.
The West should get shivers when they read this. It sounds familiar, doesn’t it, almost like the stakeholder capitalism espoused by the WEF.
While Alden’s economic and financial analysis is compelling, to understand the why of the crisis, you need to look deeper than economics. Instead, you need to face the deep anti-life spirit of the age.
Some Generations Just Want to Watch the World Burn
It is deeply ironic that modern leftists speak constantly about saving the world for our children.
These are the same people who denounce childbearing, who demand open borders and the conversion of their home countries into giant welfare camps for the third world, who draw all attention to ‘emissions’ whilst plastics pour into rivers and oceans in the third world, and who question the entire heritage our forefathers passed on to us as irredeemably racist or sexist.
Consider the youth and Boomers who participate in the theatre of Just Stop Oil, by vandalizing works of art and business.
Below is the attack of the mutants on Van Gogh.
And here is the ‘attack’ on Rolex’s headquarters on London.
I am yet to see any footage of such people being beaten up by shock troops, of them being stun-grenaded by police, or trampled by horses. Like BLM rioters, they get amnesty. Such violence is saved for animals who question masking kids and shutting down businesses… or who question election results.
(Sign up to read the rest, in which I explore the links between immigration, energy, crime, testosterone, government childcare, euthanasia, physical inflammation and anxiety, and the roots of our decline.)
