John Shuttleworth, Founder of Mother Earth News, Interview Part II

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PLOWBOY: Wait a minute. All these people you've named take a pessimistic view of the future. They're doomsayers. They predict virtually nothing but trouble.

SHUTTLEWORTH: You're damned right. And that's not because they're pessimistic ... it's because they're realists. Just as realistic as Walter Prescott Webb was. As Lewis Mumford said last. summer, "The new Dark Age is already here. We just don't know it."

The thing that impresses me about the kind of people I've just named is that they're thoughtful, they've done their homework, they don't particularly like their own predictions and they haven't been wrong yet. Every single one of the economists and the politicians and the other Pollyannas who've been frantically forecasting a new plateau of Good Times for the past 10 years haven't been right once. Not once. And the scientists and the ecologists and the environmentalists who've been warning us that the whole planet is rapidly slipping right down the tubes haven't yet been wrong. So which group are you gonna believe?

By the way, as long as we're talking about predictions, I think we could do worse than listen to some of those made by a few of the older cultures on this planet. The interview MOTHER carried with traditional Hopi spokesman Tom Bauyacya makes that point quite clearly.

Tom, as you may remember, said that tribal elders long ago forecast that "if we ever bring something down from the moon it will disturb Nature very strongly and many things will happen from there." Well, we did start bringing rocks back from the moon five or six yeats ago and many strange things economically, socially, politically — have begun to happen. Politicians and economists all over the world, in fact, now suddenly complain that "the old rules just don't seem to apply anymore." This may be nothing but coincidence ... but, then again, it may not.

PLOWBOY: Several times during this interview you've hinted that you don't put a great deal of faith in the actions of politicians and economists. Would you like to elaborate on your feelings for such people?

SHUTTLEWORTH: Well I'd love to think good thoughts about those guys, but they make that awfully damn difficult. So I've finally and reluctantly come to the conclusion that today's politicians and economists are exact parallels of the Dark Ages' monarchs and alchemists ... the addled simpletons who used to try to transform base metals into gold. If anything, though, the modern gang of scoundrels are even worse. They think they can transform paper into gold.

PLOWBOY: You don't seem to have much faith in modern economics.

SHUTTLEWORTH: Nobody will in a few more years. It's nothing but a gigantic con game taken to the most dangerous of all possible extremes: The con artists now believe their own scam. They actually believe they can create "prosperity" and "full employment" and "controlled inflation" by manipulating ideas and creating theories and putting symbols on pieces of paper. Or at least they did believe they had that power until the last couple of years when, in their words, "The old rules just don't seem to apply anymore."

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