There’s an interesting thing about money.

Money isn’t wealth. It’s debt.

I think I’ve covered this before, but it bears mentioning again. I won’t go through the whole exercise of explaining how fractional reserve banking loans money into existence. But the simple form is this: every dollar bill is ultimately backed by the Federal Reserve, which has loaned money into existence in the form of Treasury Bonds, and that gets expanded by approximately a factor of ten by the fractional reserve banking system. Treasury Bonds have to be paid back to the buyers with interest, and that obligation is backed by the “full faith and credit of the United States.”

That dollar bill you hold in your hand is a piece of paper that obligates you to do some kind of work to make that dollar bill worth $1.03, because in the end, the Federal Reserve has to pay back its bondholders everything they paid for the bond, plus about three percent in interest. Everyone in the US has that obligation: “full faith and credit,” and all that.

The ironic thing is that the rich — the people who have the most money — actually hold the most debt. Because money is debt.

The fundamentally unjust thing is that the rich — who hold the most debt, in the form of money — can compel the rest of us to pay off that debt, so that they can accumulate more debt, in the form of more money. They do this by forcing us to work to increase the size of “the economy” — to spur “economic growth.”

Our peculiar form of currency-creation, combined with the capitalism that allows private individuals to accumulate and control this massive debt-obligation and pass the support of it off to others, was an interesting short-term exercise in exploiting the New World. Capitalism is older than fractional reserve banking — the former dates back to the 14th century (or earlier) in Europe, while reserve banking didn’t develop until the 17th century. They didn’t get the huge instabilities worked out of the banking system until the 20th century: arguably, they still haven’t.

But the process worked very well to get the trees cut down, and the gold mined, and the oil pumped, and the desert farms watered, and the railroads built, and the indigenous people exterminated. That’s pretty much what it was intended to do. It succeeded brilliantly.

The problem now is that banking and capitalism are one trick dogs, and they’ll keep doing that same trick, over and over, until they die of the effort.

We are rapidly approaching that point.

In looking at the state of the US and the world, it’s important to realize where the “wonders of our modern civilization” actually come from. They’ve come from mortgaging our future.

We are all indentured servants — slaves — to this mortgage.

The problem with the conservative mindset — and I do mean true conservatives, not this political sideshow that calls itself “conservatism” — is that it’s stuck with trying to conserve a system that can no longer continue doing what it has been doing.

We need a complete overhaul of our entire economic system. As in complete.

The way this usually happens, of course, is through failure. As in complete failure. Societal collapse. Because people are stubborn, and cannot move through major changes gracefully.

I would like to see a more graceful shift to some future that must and will come, and I don’t think such a graceful shift is entirely impossible. But my money is on failure, followed by building from the rubble, over the course of many centuries. That’s the normal historical model. People are simply that stubborn.

I wrote some time ago about four major tsunamis that are going to hit the US within the next century: first, political, then economic, then energy, then climate change.

We’re living through the first wave of the political tsunami, embodied in that person masquerading as President in the White House right now, and the enormous damage he is doing to the structure and resilience of our system of government. There’s been an enormous backlash in the mid-term election, and I’m hopeful that it will spur much deeper change than anyone anticipates. Whether it will be enough is an open question. If it isn’t enough to break through into a new vision for the country, then we’re likely to see increasingly violent thrashing between Left and Right, Blue and Red, until the thing breaks apart entirely.

The remaining three Ghosts of Christmas to inevitably visit in the dark night of this century are economic failures (note the use of the plural), peak oil, and climate change, I think in that order. We’ll stop burning oil before 2100 — it will simply be too expensive for common people to burn. We won’t start seeing catastrophic climate change before the end of this century.

Like it or not, things will change.

Through all this, people will survive — of that, I’m reasonably certain, though I should note that our species does have a finite lifetime, as (indeed) does the entire taxonomic class of mammals. Modern humans are about 200,000 years old, give or take. We might have another few hundred thousand years left. Though there are runaway climate scenarios that could result in an entirely mammal-toxic atmosphere.

But people a century from now will certainly be living with very different cultural norms than we have now, because what we are currently doing has already stopped working.

And the debt slaves are growing restless. Can you not hear the drums?