Nothing in Excess

I re-iterate what I observed in the post yesterday "Generational Memes": the so-called "meme" of a coming Great Depression and the incredibly intelligent scheme of buying gold to secure oneself against the economic fall-out dates back at least one entire generation, to 1980.
It is probable it goes back before this. In fact, it the "Image" and Symbol of a Future Destruction is commonplace throughout human history.

To take one example from millions, a comment by a reader/apparently-financial-adviser from James Kunstler's blog:

My feeling is that this is all going to shake out with some sort of market crash. And that's gonna bring down the commodities with it. Those with cash will survive the deflationary front end to buy up the cheap commodities for the inevitable hyperinflationary response which will come on its heels.
It might help most to stay out of debt just now, hold a little cash, and even less precious metal. The best thing of all would be to move to a small, emptied-out rustbelt city that's proximate to good agricultural land and help to reinvigorate and revitalize it.

It sounds like what I am always talking about, but it ain't.
Sometimes it is an individual's own disaster that occurs, not society's. Since everyone dies, there is a certain logic in having such a premonition that at some future date we will be destroyed. And surprisingly enough, that which I often talk about can be total nonsense.
We have told our own tales of doom so long that we have begun to believe them.
We have told them for generations.
Instead of "nothing in excess", we have sold our souls to the Destructor, and totally ignored the Creator, except to create an insulting pseudo-scientific nonsense called Intelligent Design.

It happens all the time: people spout The Book of Revelations - bingo! - their lives fall apart due to drugs or infidelities or mental instability or alcohol. Happens all the time: instead of Armageddon we get personal disintegration. We get our own destruction mixed up with intimations of group destruction.
At least I have lived through my personal destruction and am aware of how intertwined these images become. It was touch and go for a while. Now I think I can see a bit more clearly, standing, as it were, upon my own Job's refuse pile. I suffered: we all of us suffer. I cannot say that in suffering there is some sort of nobility or way to knowledge, but I can say it is a reality and a myth of our existence, and it is balanced by love and life.
I can say that if we live a grade-B horror movie of fear and trembling without Charity and its succor, we are each of us doomed, severally and as a group.

There is also life and creation, however. Why are the symbols of Great Life so weak compared to those of disaster? We do not even have a symbol of some future golden age any more, no symbol of progress. We have succumbed to our own depression. We have no symbol of Ascension, only a Going Down which obsesses us.
We have lost our balance.
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