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.)

But don’t spend too much time blaming these NPC foot-soldiers, who somehow believe that spraying paint on things gives them meaning and purpose.

After all, they are just breathing in the spirit of Greta Thunberg, who bravely told an entirely sympathetic audience that they had betrayed her generation, by emitting CO2, by being white, and by being capitalist.

In this spirit, they imagine themselves to be counter-cultural, stunning and brave revolutionaries, when really they are mere acolytes of the religion of the global state, adherents of modern ideological sludge like ‘stakeholder capitalism’ or ‘doughnut economics’.

Is it not fitting that the doughnut is today’s symbol of planetary health, in much the same way that plastic masks and toxic Big Pharma products allowed us all to ‘stay safe’?

The doughnut rhetoric is masterful in way. The premise is that too little economic growth and we remain in the hole. Too much growth, and we overshoot into another bigger hole, in which we deplete the earth’s resources.

Nobody wants to destroy the planet, and thus we imbibe such rhetoric all too easily. Of course, we must rein in our instinct to build and to grow! And so we miss the fallacy at the heart of the anti-growth, anti-life environmental movement.

This fallacy is that birth, growth and energy must always equal degradation and must therefore be reduced until we can restore ‘balance’.

But this is a lie.

It was western growth and drive which used to build libraries like this:

It was western drive and growth, and love, which used to build hospitals that looked like this (in 1443):

Does any ‘activist’ aim to restore and return? No, this is not what their doughnut hole is about. It is about hatred and resentment, about replacing the children of the people who built such things as above.

Growth has always been the growth in efficient use of energy. We see this today still in the fact that developed nations are cleaner, that energy sources have become denser. Yet today we are returning to scanty and sparse energy sources in which we cut down trees to build dirty wind farms, where we cover mountainsides with solar panels made of strip-mined minerals.

We hate life and wonder why we are dying.

This spirit of death is seen in the US by liberal women actively celebrating abortion as a sacred rite.

It is seen in China-infiltrated Canada by horrors like this:

Why not kill your own people, when you can replace them with cheap workers who will help in the final solution to dissolve history?

Of course, we see the same phenomenon throughout the West.

Abortion-loving, LGBTQ radicals, the British Conservative Party have placed the Blair project to unravel British identity on hyper-drive.

From The Spectator:

In 1991, Britain’s foreign-born residents made up 6.7 per cent of the population. In 2021, one in six people (16.8 per cent) living in England and Wales were born outside the UK, according to Census data released yesterday by the Office for National Statistics. The pace of change is both staggering and accelerating. Some four in ten of that foreign-born population arrived over the last decade. To put this into context, from 1981 to 1990, total net migration of non-UK citizens totalled 445,000. The ONS says that 680,000 foreign-born residents arrived in 2020-21 alone (although this will include those who left the UK, then returned).

Brexit was all about taking back control of British borders. Well, the Tories just lied and lied.

This same self-hatred is seen in modern tolerance of crime.

In New York, a figure like Rudy Giuliani managed to peg back crime by simply arresting people and maintaining police presence in crime-ridden areas. Yes, crime has roots and social context. But you can spend your time whining about it, or you can tackle the problem in front of you.

In the west, that kind of policing is now racist, because arresting people of colour proportionate to their crimes can only be racist. And Giuliani is hated and an outcast because he supported Trump.

Take a look at the FBI’s most recent crime statistics concerning murder.

From Steve Sailer:

Overall, America in the Current Year has a gigantic black gun murder problem.

Since 1980, the year with the lowest fraction of known murder offenders who were black was 1984, the peak year of the Reagan Era, the year of The Cosby Show, Beverly Hills Cop, and Purple Rain.

Contra Orwell, 1984 was a good year.

You are not allowed to speak of the fact that 60% of all murders is conducted by 13% of the population. Even if solving that would help black people, you should rather allow the black victims of black crime to die instead.

The worship of Floyd is ultimately the worship of death. The murder rate soared for black Americans after the psy-op in 2020, in which covid was suspended for BLM - but not for elections so as to facilitate mail fraud:

What is behind all this self-hatred, this willingness to die?

Fundamentally, we have shorn ourselves of the will to live, the will to grow, the will to power.

Nietzsche was right. Our age is the age of the last men, willing to live in nihilism in order to maintain a vengeful and hideous equality.

We have no energeia. Thus we have no energy. Thus we welcome a cold and bland future.

But I do not want to black-pill you too much.

We are already seeing the return of a will to live and a will to live.

Note first of all who donates to Trump’s movement as opposed to Biden, you may need to zoom in:

Homemakers and disabled support disproportionately to Trump. Those who WANT life.

As do truckers, electricians, mechanics, welders, business owners etc.

Who support Biden?

Social workers, teachers, professors, lawyers, marketing people, HR, doctors, and scientists.

This says a lot.

And leads to the great hope for western politics, men who oppose soy, plastic and the bugmen.

The Testosterone Revolutionaries

We are told the future is female by the woke.

They are not lying.

I have written before on the deceit of feminism.

But allow me a telling example, again from that bastion of liberalism, Canada. This is an excerpt of an interview with acclaimed economist, Steven Lehrer:

I got interested in universal child care when Michael Baker came to Queen’s and presented his joint work with Kevin Milligan and Jon Gruber, which found that the Quebec childcare program, the access to universal, subsidized child care there, led to declines in a host of child developmental outcomes as well as family outcomes.

I’ll be quite honest: I didn’t believe the results. I thought they would come out the other way.

That is the piece forthcoming in the next issue of the Canadian Journal of Economics, probably next month. It was something that surprised us. Before we started to look at the distributional effects, we tried to look at differences across child characteristics such as child age as well as child gender. What we found was that the lion’s share of the negative effects in the program were actually coming from the boys. The negative effects were larger for boys. Exactly why this is so is really hard to pinpoint. But these gender differences are important to know.

Who would have thought that government-funded daycare would be harmful for little boys?

The same is true of the entire world of education!

But do not think women are not harmed by this decline. They are too.

As Bronze Age Mindset recounts about the modern woman:

Women are, in their natural state, close to this condition [unencumbered by thoughts of the past or worries about the future, none of which actually exist] as well, or closer on the whole, which is where they get much of their charm and power from (the modern education, that teaches women to be hyper-aware, anxious for the future, abstract neurotics, etc., actually takes away their power to a great degree, while tricking them into thinking they are being tough or sassy; but a hyper-conscious woman is made powerless and charmless).

Added to their constant worry about politics etc, is the collision between their biology and email jobs and social media pressures. Women are mothers (St Paul: ‘Women will be saved through childbearing’) but you cannot be a mother to the universe.

In this matriarchal, gynocratic world, we all come to share in this constant state of agitation, this low-level anxiety, washing ourselves in cortisol which makes us sick. Added to the inflammation caused by seed oil and sun cream and corn sugar. We are in constant captivity stress, exacerbated now by mommies like Bill Gates locking us up for years.

And for men, such a world starts to leak testosterone. Man boobs and hairless men proliferate.

And such men sustain the very system that emasculates them.

It is, after all, possible to predict what political party a man votes for by his testosterone levels:

When you lack testosterone, you delve deeper into a constant state of worry and vigilance, longing for a nanny state to take care of everything.

Whereas testosterone creates happiness, clear thinking, higher libido, but also increased empathy and generosity, which, contrary to popular belief, are conservative or right-wing traits, because in a small-government world, those impulses are made local, and also lead to a lowering of class resentments.

How to do this?

The Trump donors show us the way!

Build things. Get outdoors. Eat well.

Sleep a lot.

In short, re-gather energeia, and then we can re-energize our world.

[Tucker Carlson knows this…]