The Consumption of Europe

Dmitry Orlov

Until as recently as the turn of the century, Western Europe remained a symbol of progress, economic power, and successful strategic planning. Today, the EU is a system that is consuming itself. Built on excessive consumption, it lacks the necessary mechanisms to make itself stop consuming itself and start producing. But it has all the mechanisms in place for generating loans, subsidies, “green” fantasies, mass migration, gender dysphoria, broken/nonexistent families, mass psychosis and endless advertising, sales and marketing campaigns.

The consumptive state prioritizes current consumption over future production: money is readily allocated to social payments, civil servants’ salaries, the purchasing of imported goods — in short, on maintaining the way of life that has become habitual. In turn, there is insufficient investment in infrastructure maintenance (roads, factories, research centers), in technological renewal, in education (anything with the word “studies” in it does not qualify as such), or in defense (giving even more money to corrupt US defense contractors does not qualify either). This outcome is not the result of political or managerial corruption, malfeasance or incompetence: this is how the system is actually intended to work and it works well for its stated purpose, which is to keep the population pacified while going extinct due to catastrophically low birth rates among the native population while waves of migrants gnaw away at society’s innards.

Thus is created a vicious circle in which a nation consumes more and more of that which it does not produce while producing less and less:

• It postpones the inevitable by eating through its store of capital: income goes to current needs without creating future value. Short-term thinking dominates while strategic planning becomes a lost art.

• Its dependence on imported goods and resources grows perpetually. The generations that knew how to make things with their own hands age out, retire and die. Their replacements only know how to play with gadgets and waste time on social media. Most of them are too heavily drugged with prescription and recreational drugs to gain admission to factory grounds, never mind working there.

• Its economy does not modernize (heavily subsidized “green” tech does not count). Go to Moscow or Beijing and look at how banking, transportation, government services and all the rest function there; now go back to New York and ask yourself: “What century is this? The 19th?”

• Its external debts and internal deficits perpetually increase — until they no longer can. Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” just passed raises the federal debt limit by $5 trillion. Never mind that it is a betrayal of everything that Trump supposedly stood for; is it even remotely reasonable?<

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• It has lost the balance between production and consumption two or three generations ago and the last generation of Americans who knew how to make stuff is either retired or dead. The share of industry in GDP has fallen to minimal levels as production moved to Mexico, China and elsewhere.

• At the same time, the US federal budget deficit will soon exceed $2 trillion per year, and the national debt has reached almost $37 trillion. With barely 5% of the world’s population, the US public debt amounts to at least a quarter of global public debt.

• In spite of this, most of the spending goes not toward remedying this situation but on social programs, wars and a wide assortment of subsidies on consumption.

• Meanwhile, the US is losing its ability to maintain its public infrastructure. As a concrete example, take the repairs of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, which was damaged when a barge rammed into it in March of 2024, collapsing two of its spans. Repairs aren’t estimated to be complete until 2028 — an unreasonably long time by Russian or Chinese standards, where bridges of this size and greater are routinely planned, designed and built in less time than that.

• The US economy is supported not by productive labor, but by the dollar printing press and the export of the US dollar. Meanwhile, the role of the US dollar around the world is steadily being eroded as more and more countries implement alternative trading systems that use their own currencies. This pattern is not sustainable.

Until fairly recently, Germany could be proud of its industrial might, but now its industry is rapidly losing competitiveness. As the Germans refused Russian gas and other key imports, cheering EU sanctions against Russia, they were, in fact, ruining their economy. China has largely replaced Germany as the world’s major car maker. German chemical industry is shutting down due to the high cost of natural gas.

The cost of electricity — another major industrial input — has also risen, driven higher by the shutdown of coal and nuclear plants motivated by a misguided “green” ideology that erroneously considers carbon dioxide emissions as somehow harmful to the climate, whereas it is an important plant food essential to all life on Earth. Its atmospheric levels are largely a function of ocean water temperature and are currently lower than would be optimal for agriculture. As a result, Germany is consuming its past while destroying its future based on some scientific fraud.

Politically, German ruling elites have been forced to exclude from participation in forming the federal government a large part of the electorate which voted for Alternative für Deutschland. As steadily dropping living standards among the consumption-addicted population lead to increased public discontent and unrest.

Britain is a collapsed empire eating away at the remains of its past greatness

Britain was the first to industrialize and it is now the first to deindustrialize. It is the world leader in deindustrialization — whether intentionally or not. It is a process which it won’t be able to avoid following through to its bitter conclusion. It is a foregone conclusion: a parasitic service economy is not capable of feeding a country unless there is continuous territorial expansion and new colonies to strip of resources and wealth, and there are none of these anymore.

Although Britain no longer has the ability to pose a plausible military threat to any of the major world powers, it retains the ability to be a nuisance, causing minor but unpleasant provocations. The Skripal-Novichok nonsense comes to mind, or the White Helmets in Syria with their fake chemical attacks, and numerous other such trivial but nasty acts of subversion. It retains its position (along with the US) as the world’s money laundry, where corrupt elites from around the world educate their children and park their stolen money.

How this retained ability to stink up the whole planet will help Britain control its increasingly restive population as its consumptive economy continues to eat itself up is a very good question. There are many brutal techniques in the British national DNA such as the slave trade, the Enclosure Acts, the workhouses, and the rounding up and shipping off of undesirables to the New World, to Australia and elsewhere, but these techniques are no longer applicable in today’s world. The Brits may instead have to expand the use of cyberwarfare against their own population, of forced deadly inoculations, or policing by lethal drones and other such technologically advanced methods of population reduction and control.

The common thread in all of this is the consumption of accumulated capital — both physical (infrastructure, factories) and social (education system, work ethic). It is accompanied by a reduction in the share of productive labor down to almost nothing and its replacement with “office plankton” and simulation of work-like activity (sales and marketing, advertising, etc.). The final phase is the replacement of office plankton with artificial intelligence and service and security functions with foreign contract labor.

It is also accompanied by a war against the naturally rebellious element — men — and a feminization of public affairs and of all discourse, resulting in displacement and abandonment of technical, industrial thinking. It is far easier for female-dominated societies to discuss gender issues, human rights and climate catastrophism than such technically challenging subjects as building new factories and industrial modernization. Women are naturally more agreeable, obedient and docile (as shown by any number of psychological studies), and so a good way to preserve the status quo and to resist all change is by sidelining men as much as possible.

This is a major disaster in the making: as men within the native population go extinct, replaced by soy-boys brought up by women, emphasizing “gender fluidity” while eschewing “toxic masculinity,” masculinity is preserved only within ethnic immigrant enclaves, where it inevitably turns vicious. Matriarchy is only functional under conditions of tight security and strict social control; when it fails, the result is genocide and sex slavery. In a society where the men can no longer be bothered to physically defend the women (because masculinity is toxic) the women become trivial to enslave.

The West is not just consumerist; it is consumptive. Personal debit cards have become an extension of state budgets and economic sustainability has fallen victim to ideological campaigns designed to produce short-term political gains. The countries of the West have been living in this consumptive paradigm for a couple of decades now — an entire generation — and have come to consider this way of life quite normal, making it impossible to turn the situation around.

Sovereignty? National priorities? National languages, traditions, cultures and religions? Scientific leadership? Energy security? Food security? None of these are even valid topics of public discussion any longer. Countries that live to consume stop being able to make sacrifices in order to produce. But their populations can still be sacrificed on the altar of national security.

To get out of the consumption trap, a country would need to implement tough, unpopular reforms:

• elimination of economically ineffective spending
• import tariffs and subsidies for domestic production
• strict budgetary discipline, cutting all spending that is not projected to preserve or to increase revenue
• social policy to cultivate a physically productive population<

But no one is carrying out anything like these reforms. Why? The answer is very simple: the West is ruled by populists — not strategists. Politicians in the US, Britain and Germany depend on public ratings and popularity with the electorate, and not on serving national interests (or even realizing what they might be). They think about the next election, not about the future generations. Any reform that will inconvenience the consumer would spell political suicide for them.

Should there, by sheer accident, appear the rare leader who might try to push through badly needed reforms, his work would be sabotaged.

• He would not be allowed to exercise political authority. Each Western country has its own set of structures designed to block the expression of public will. In the US, there is the two-party system (third parties allowed but not admitted) and winner-take-all elections. In the UK, there is the aristocracy. In other European countries, there is the permanent dysfunction of parliamentary coalition governments.
• All of his efforts would be thwarted by an intractable public bureaucracy made up of officials who benefit from the status quo and resist all change.
• He would come under pressure by powerful business lobbies which profit from imports and from debt-based public finance.
• He would be relentlessly attacked by corporate-owned media and by ideological activists accusing him of all manner of thought crimes based on the following well used ruse: “Any man we don’t like is a racist, sexist, misogynist, abusive, fascist, climate-change-denialist homophobe.”
• A group of women would be organized to accuse him of sexual harassment. He would then be tried and convicted in the typical modern Western kangaroo-court fashion: no eyewitness testimony or physical evidence required. A woman’s hurt feelings, as evidenced by her weeping in public, is considered sufficient as proof of a man’s guilt, and any effort by him to mount a defense is considered as further emotional abuse and an aggravating circumstance.

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Via https://boosty.to/cluborlov/posts/b9100c4e-4c3a-49bb-b82f-9e5fc89eb1ee