LF420 James Howard Kunstler – 2024: Sickness in the Zeitgeist

James Howard Kunstler and Greg Moffitt in conversation.

Listen to the full show on Legalise Freedom Dot Com.

To quote the opening lines from the 1979 science fiction series The Quatermass Conclusion, “In the last quarter of the 20th century, the whole world seemed to sicken. Civilised institutions, whether old or new, fell, as if some primal disorder was reasserting itself. And men asked themselves: Why should this be?”

Fast-forward to the first quarter of the 21st century, and we find ourselves in much the same quandary, living in what seems like an increasingly absurd dystopian movie. To quote my guest, “Everything organized at the gigantic scale is steaming toward failure: big governments, giant companies, the huge capital investment firms, global shipping, energy production, chain retailing, mass motoring, big electricity, big medicine, big education, big anything.”

But there’s more to our predicament than mere systems failure. Consumerist culture tells us that life has no meaning or purpose beyond material concerns, and led to a crisis in our collective consciousness manifesting nihilism and insanity on a hitherto unimaginable scale. Can we unmake this inhuman deathwish before it’s too late?

James’ latest book is CrazyLand: Dispatches on the Great American Derangement of Our Time

Previous interviews with James Howard Kunstler

Bumper music: Cliff Martinez ‘Traffic OST’