What do you expect if you start to automate and mechanize any and every activity your population employs to achieve their wealth? Do you expect people to be necessary for long in order to maintain their standard of living? It makes a lot of sense to expect that less and less people are needed.
But if your myth is that of individual productivity and achievement, because you want people to be ambitious because that makes them both buy stuff to realize those ambitions and work dead end jobs in order to achieve their dreams, what do you do if you don’t need so many hard workers anymore?
Add to that a environment of volatile fossil fuel supply, which requires strict control of liquidity, in order to avoid fossil fuel price signals and even collapse of supply when you circulate to much cash and allow to much consumption. When the oil flows you want to accelerate consumption, when it wanes you want to cut it.
If you want to keep the myth of productivity alive, and the myth of economic theory you can only do what is happening now. Money is created in tune with the fossil fuel supply and handed down from the central banks to specific groups that will use it to enable the producers to buy the means of production, mainly fossil fuels.
It matters not how big the debt gets in this situation, or any situation, because it is the banks themselves who designed this strategy so they could continue to exist in such a volatile peak oil peak order environment. There may be banks failing, but banking is not compromized, the franchise of control of the fossil fuel consumption will remain in their hands until it is sold in some currency that does not originate with banks.
What about workers? They don’t matter. They are consumers if they have money to allocate to wear out and destroy products of the industry. One could say ‘enjoy’ and see industry as a force behind our wealth and happiness, but sadly even though there is a lot of wealth and happiness, the driver of industry forces it to be amindless machine only yielding CO2 and a devestated planet. How do you know? Cut the oil, see what you are left with. If the sale or fossil fuels was not the principle requirement for the survival and control of banks, our world would have abandoned its dependence a long time ago.
So young people, old people, any people are screwed if their environemnt is dominated by economic rule. Who can make a barrel of oil? Who deserves the productivity of a barrel of oil? So how do you divide that productivity of one barrel of oil? As long as peace is possible you do it by telling people suffering yields future reward, or you create the illusion there’s no way to predict the result of your efforts. You make sure almost nobody has anything of real value, you popularize the virtual over the real and you divide the attention or groups towards their navels, not anybody elses.
In this situation, if fossil fuels become impossible to obtain, the whole system collapses, and there’s no means other than manual labour to fix things, that and war. That is the reason the game is continued as long as possible and by any means possible. To optimize the productivity so the system can run as long as possible, you ditch as much people. In order to passify those that might understand their situation you put them iin debt, they don’t earn what they spend, they get it directly from the source, the banks.
Bypassing individual qualities and skills in order to maximize and optimize the cycle of production and destruction, so as to allow those that are still lucky enough to be part of that to enjoy a portion of that productivity, with a realization it stems from personal performance (thereby stabilizing the required cruel and arrogant mentality), is the endgame of fossil fuel driven industrialization. Those forced to get by on something else (like most of our planets population right how) will not count as the machine continues to destroy and deplete every resource like an out of control lawnmower.
Only if the people managing the weapons for the fossil fuel sector start seeing their deciding influence will the game changes. Until now there has been little room as the military industrian complex has seemed to be on the front row of the direct (fossil fuel credit) line between banks and industy. Is there hope? Yes, areas without fossil fuel resources are the place where the renewable based economies will thrive first. No reason other than pure desire to dominate would motivate action against these economies. These blank spots in the patchwork are becoming more numerous, even in fracking hides it momentarily. If renewables can ever fund a lobby to drive the fossil fuel interest out, that would greatly accellerate the process. Until then more renewables is the best way to build the wealth base to drive a lobby. This lobby and the popular desire to move forward will do what is necessary to move forward and regain control : change the game.