How The West Is Consuming Itself

TapNewsWire.com | Pete Fairhurst

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?

• The final act is an act of autophagy, in which the public organism consumes itself. You can figuratively imagine this as carving up, roasting and eating your own buttocks.

Imagine, if you will, a high-income family that spends its high income on restaurants, fancy clothes, shiny new gadgets, spa treatments, beauty salons and tourism while neglecting necessary home repairs, children’s education or saving for a rainy day, all while going deeper and deeper into debt. This family can be said to be “mired in consumption.” In the past, this was the fate of some singularly unwise families. But in the 21st century, entire countries have fallen into this trap.

The USA is the flagship of the consumptive West with Europe steaming along in its wake

• 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.

Germany — a sickly industrial giant

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, Germany is likely to follow its already well-worn path to single party domination and then war — with Russia, of course, because Drang nach Osten is so deeply embedded in the German national psyche. Meanwhile, Russia is not interested in any further involvement with Europe, whether military, economic or cultural, and so the challenge is to provoke it into conflict but to control its scale to prevent Russia from utterly destroying Germany and, this time around, making sure that it never comes back together enough to pose a threat to Russia again.

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.

What unites Western countries?

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 limits on public debt and on foreign financing

• 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.

As a result, there is guaranteed to be constant sabotage of all attempts at constructive change, resulting in economic stagnation and the steady loss of any residual industrial capacity. The leadership of the West does not simply “not want” reforms; it cannot carry them out, because it would gain nothing from trying, while any attempt at reform would put at risk their precious popularity ratings and the loyalty of their electorate, which must be kept comfortably sedated for as long as possible.

A sudden collapse of the social model built on endless consumption would be a relatively merciful outcome, since there would be a chance that it would open a path to a new beginning, but what we are seeing now and should expect to continue instead is gradual degradation and decay. Instead of a sudden leap into the unknown, we are seeing a protracted slide toward a place well visited by failed civilizations of the past.

The consumptive status quo will be preserved at all cost and any attempt to effect meaningful change will be labeled as extremist and opposed by force. In a consumptive society, failing to consume — for whatever reason — is a revolutionary act: subversive, disruptive, extremist. Therefore, consume you will, although whatever it is you consume will be of ever lower quality and quantity. You will eat soy instead of meat, then bugs instead of soy. How soon until cannibalism will be on the menu? “If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu” is an oft-repeated quote. How sure are you that you will be at the table? The last, final item to be consumed will perhaps be you.

But perhaps you won’t be consumed as a food item. There is another way to get rid of excess population: the Ukrainian model. A military conflict in Europe is one of the ways for a part of the European elites to go through the stage of declining living standards without raising suspicions among the consumptively pacified masses. Given the conditions of relentless economic decline, a part of the European ruling elite has no better options to unite the people than to talk up the Russian threat that is relentlessly depicted in the media.

At some point, mere public noisemaking, war games and squandering money on military toys may prove insufficient and European elites will turn to provocations against Russia in order to produce a certain sustainable level of chronic armed conflict. As they had done in the former Ukraine, their provocations of choice involve acts of repression and ethnonocide against Russian populations in countries currently ruled from Brussels: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Moldavia (Transnistria included). And then it will become possible to feed surplus European populations into the trenches Ukraine-style, to be disposed of in their millions by the efficient use of Russian artillery, drones and glide bombs, of which Russia can manufacture enough to kill every European several times over.

Then the European elites will be able to use the military action as an excuse to impose a permanent state of emergency, suspend all civil liberties and elections and enact reforms to establish a wartime economy. The Ukrainization of the West will then be complete.

Source: https://boosty.to/cluborlov/

Original Article: https://tapnewswire.com/2025/07/07/how-the-west-is-consuming-itself-orlov-the-consumption-of-europe/