Preparations For The Apocalypse

From Lew Rockwell.com:

Preparations for the Pocky’ Clipse


by Thomas Luongo



Recently by Thomas Luongo: The FED’s Real Monetary Problem











I have memories of being aware that the society we were living within was unsustainable that I place between 9 and 11 years old. They may be earlier than that, but we studied Rome in either 5th or 6th grade so that seems a reasonable assumption. I grew up during the last depression of the 1970’s in safe, suburban New York. Dad was NYPD, mom was a nurse at a local psychiatric hospital and I was the youngest of four in a house full of type-A, lower-middle class pragmatics of Italian descent. The memories of note revolve around holidays; driving into "The City" to visit the Luongo family demesne in Brooklyn where my grandparents (who died nearly a generation before I was born) raised 11 children, my mother’s parents in Little Neck and seemingly everyone else in between. These trips, with the soundtrack of my parents discussing the financial woes of a bankrupt NYC, opened my eyes to the enormity of the problems facing my generation and beyond.



The West Side Highway fell down in 1976, never to be rebuilt. I distinctly remember the left lane of the East River Drive being closed as the sea wall was being reclaimed by the river. The city was broke, there was the Blackout, Son of Sam, the NYPD forking over some of their pensions to fund City operations and the infrastructure was failing. Wages were stagnant but price inflation was rampant. To a naïve 10-year-old (who was very good at math) I kept thinking to myself, "If they can’t pay for these things now, how am I going to pay for them later?" I grew up with a real fear of bridges and over-passes, expecting them to fail at any moment. I would have silent panic attacks whenever we crossed the Tappan Zee Bridge. This fear of bridges persists, but I’m much better at controlling it, mostly by avoidance.



We still had air-raid drills in school and I read a lot of Philip K. Dick, starting at age 13. I learned a lot about the insanity of our culture and bureaucracies in his books; the inherent schizophrenia of having to be different people at different times in your day in order to keep your position all the while being ground down by arbitrary and capricious authorities either mundane or supernatural. As T.S. Eliot observed, "Preparing a face to meet the faces that you meet…until human voices wake us and we drown." I see Penfield Mood Organs and Dr. Smiles everywhere. We call them Ritalin, Paxil, or Dr. Phil.



I bring these things up to provide perspective. In a way, my whole life has been leading up to these interesting times we are living through. I knew that this was the end of the American Empire; the parallels to Rome were unmistakable even to a pre-teen. So, the question is, knowing this, what do you do about it? Well, for a long time I ignored it, studying music and poetry intensely while earning a degree in chemistry perfunctorily. I may have understood the macro-problem but I didn’t understand the causes, and besides, I had a lot of growing up to do. Angry and obnoxious, I passionately misdirected my time and energy. A natural-born iconoclast, I distrusted authority and institutions but didn’t have any clue of how to successfully avoid them. I absolutely didn’t vote. But, by gods, I was willing to give anyone an earful of what I thought, no matter how idiotic or half-baked the opinion. [Ask me sometime about my disastrous first impression on my wife’s family.] Thankfully, I had the family work-ethic and met my future wife in college. A more religious man would consider her a gift from on high.



Without realizing it, I studied the law and politics through games, specifically games that broke their own rules and learned the futility of controlling complex systems. I know why chess is such a good game; it was simple and had been beta-tested for 5000 years. I’m a miserable chess player, but was one of the best Shadowfist players in the world; king of the ant pile, I suppose.



On discovering libertarianism and Austrian economics, the acceptance of the ideas came easily and without reservation. I won’t bore you with the details. Think eyes opening, falling into rabbit holes, touching the Monolith; pick whatever metaphor suits you, but it happened to me and every day I am thankful that it did. I would have gone insane or, more likely, just continued down that fatalistic path of mild self-destruction and wasted potential had it not. No longer did I feel like the protagonist in one of Phil Dick’s many books.



With this knowledge, though, comes a price. There’s always a price. It is an economic verity.



That price is clarity. Before, I had a vague feeling that the inevitable collapse was a natural, organic process, too big for me to either understand or affect the outcome of and sweeping me along with the forces of history. Now, I knew there was a causal link to specific systems, namely the monetary one (and the problems inherent in the institutions it subsidizes) and it focused my criticism. Moreover, as I devoured knowledge of just how sick, corrupt and immoral the whole thing was I also realized that what I thought was coming was a mild breeze compared to the whirlwind we were actually creating.



So much for mastering my fear.



Because at that moment you realize just how unprepared physically you are for what you see coming at you. For me, the intellectual process was easy. I’d been living with it my entire life. But fear isn’t an intellectual response, it’s a limbic one. It’s why economics is not a dry, dusty discipline, but rather a bloody and visceral one. Time preference is linked with a fear of the future and the plans you make to combat it. On 9/11, I’m not ashamed to admit that after a conversation with a friend about what would happen if "they nuked The Mouse (Disney)" that I ran out to Wal-Mart and bought a water-filter, a 5 gallon water can and two 7 gallon gas cans in case we had to pile our life into our two-seater beater and retreat to my in-law’s farm in Ohio. After that, my wife and I went car shopping; it’s what we had planned to do after work anyways. I horrified the salesman at the Nissan dealership while watching the footage for the first time by saying, "You know, I wouldn’t be surprised if our government didn’t pull this off." He swallowed hard (his salesman’s face didn’t drop) and tacitly agreed with me.



We didn’t buy a car from him, though we did buy a car.



I bought an AK-47 the following Saturday and ordered 1000 rounds of 7.62x39 when I got to work on Monday. For Christmas that year, my wife bought me my first 1/20th oz. Gold Canadian Maple Leaf (I’m a huge hockey fan). If she had not done so I may never have pulled that trigger, so to speak. Have I mentioned how unutterably fantastic she is?



The point is that during those early days of understanding a lot of my behavior was driven by fear. It didn’t help that there were plenty of people out there stoking that fear and profiting from it. I remember making completely unrealistic lists of guns that I wanted to own, where to place the defensive positions on the property I hadn’t bought yet, and whether my house should have a cupola with a 360-degree view and rifle slits. Temporary insanity? Maybe, but I didn’t act on any of them, thankfully. All of this on 35 grand a year! "Christ, what an imagination I’ve got," (with apologies to John Brunner).



Because, here’s the rub, while I imagined all of these catastrophic outcomes, preparations for them are more mundane. We are governed by the law of Diminishing Marginal Return so, as I took steps towards my goals, I satisfied my biggest anxieties. Can we defend ourselves? Yes, a few years of Tae Kwon Do took care of that. Can I defend my home? Yes, we bought his and hers 9mm pistols, a couple of cheap but functional rifles and already had a couple of dogs. Is my meager wealth protected? Yes, I was acquiring gold and silver for the future. Most importantly, for the first time in our marriage we were both gainfully employed and cash-flow positive. I had a small house in Gainesville with an even smaller mortgage (by today’s standards), and our health was improving from being early adopters of a low-carb lifestyle. I was beginning to feel good about our prospects of riding things out. It was an illusion, but, hey, baby steps.



Then, after work one evening, my wife uttered the words which, like any good story, took the stakes to a different level, "I think it’s time we had a kid."



This was just the beginning, I thought.1



The last sentence of Philip K. Dick’s novel Ubik, which, in essence, negates everything that had preceded it.

August 5, 2010



Thomas Luongo [send him email] is a professional chemist, amateur economist and obstreperous recovering Yankee residing in North Florida.



Copyright © 2010 Thomas Luongo