I had the opportunity on Thursday to meet and listen to Deflationary Angel of Mass Economic Destruction Stoneleigh, who authors substantial and credible primers along with her associate Ilargi over @ The Automatic Earth.

Stoneleigh is the least Cassandra- like of the current crop of social- economic Cassandras: Roubini, Taleb, Greer, Kunstler, Faber, Prechter, Grant, along with the horde of gold- bugs who always crawl out of the woodwork like cockroaches when order falters and some group’s misery stands to produce a safe profit for someone else.

Her talk was unlike most finance product sales events, which clutter ‘conference centers’ in anonymous freeway- side motels drawing the delerious and gullible anxious to be fleeced so that they may avoid being fleeced elsewhere. This event was much like the clandestine meetings of the French Resistance during the Second World War, shuttled to the rear of the anonymous house in a distant and mazelike suburb, far away from the prying eyes of Gestapo informants, well fortified by massive and endless traffic jams in all the surrounding roads.

The traffic jams that are the fundamental basis of the crisis that we are submerged within, both to the praise and benefit of goldbugs everywhere.

“Not so fast on the gold!” sez Stoneleigh, who makes it the most tertiary of necessities in the lifeboats she suggests for those wishing to ride out the coming storm, behind cash and community development. Stoneleigh herseif is a very charming, witty and energetic young Canadian woman who has taken the greatest number of different career paths to come the conclusions that have so far been able to evade the highly paid professionals in government, academia and finance.

Maybe they are being paid to evade the conclusions. Where do I sign on? I can evade conclusions as well as the next dude or dudette and am willing to evade for cheap! I’ll even take ‘worthless’ paper money!

Her thesis is the massive and increasing overhead supply of uncollectible debt will be reduced rapidly and dramatically by its very uncollectibility; she disputes that Peak Oil (theory) is the proximate cause placing most blame on the debt- creating establishment that crashes past bounds and restraints driven by redemption requirements inherent to what she describes as Ponzi economics. In short words, there isn’t much between Stoneleigh’s concepts and those found here @ the Undertow, the differences being quibbling.

Outside of the presentation itself, perhaps the greatest emphasis of the evening was toward matters of self- sufficiency and smallish farming. Stoneleigh herself is a farmer, a nascent one acknowledging the tariff in time required to be paid in full to be able to succeed at it. Farming does embed practicality, and making the proper connections in the economic world at large is something that farmer Stoneleigh has no problem making.

The absence of any form of political or social activist motivation was noticeable which is far too mild a term to describe a group of people about to perish for lack of water not preparing to storm the water supply and commandeer the necessary water for themselves. Instead, there is a group of very nice if quizzical middle class people generally at a loss as to what to do effectively … next. There is no sign of politics, no Sarah Palin, no ‘Drill, Baby, drill’ no cheap answers or no great social passion, either. I don’t know if polite applause is appropriate for the end of the world as we know it. Something about the crisis – excess deficit fatigue or uncertainty as to effect – has sapped the desire to rock the boat, now that the boat desperately needs rocking.

This is the implication of the Stoneleigh Deflation Grand Tour; it’s speaking to the already converted and perhaps being far ahead of the curve although the vibrations within the convulsing finance engine suggest that the curve has already shot unreachably far down the road. Perhaps being too late to manage events is problematic, there don’t seem to be any manageable approaches now that the barriers to social and political entry have become unbreechably high.

Maybe this is what a meeting of one- eyed men is like … ?

Contrast this to the great revolutionary fervor of the dawning age of industrialism, which allowed those most responsible for the prosperity derived from the factory to make some claim upon that prosperity for themselves. History recalls the names beginning arbitrarily with Robespierre; Marx, Engels, the Abolitionists and anarchists, Lenin, Trotsky, the social reformers Susan Anthony, Frederick Douglass, Gandhi, M. L. King, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Castro, Nelson Mandela; the ‘revolutionary movements’ of the 1960’s: the Weathermen and Black Panther Party. Where have they all gone?

It really is different this time; post industrialism has no room for those who would demand ‘More!’ while events have not produced the charismatic revolutionary that demands ‘Less!’ and hopes to re- balance the natural environment. One can only push ‘winner take all’ Darwinism only so far. The outcome is a more or less amorphous construct in place of ‘organization’; leaderless and some would accuse, rudderless.

Without irony, the general thrust of the construct is a world increasingly made by hand along with no small amount of (shared) privation. “Ten Dollar- a- Gallon Gas Tax’ is not the rallying cry for any politician in any country, so the great and burgeoning mass of gas- hungry humans and their toys races ever faster toward the edge of the energy cliff. Falling off is not so bad.

It’s the landing that’s a bitch.