Showing posts with label community. Show all posts
Showing posts with label community. Show all posts

Wednesday, 22 June 2022

Time for Change, Part 4—Conclusions

Weavers Creek Falls
Harrison Park, Owen Sound, Ontario

This is the fourth of several posts that I would have preferred to publish all at once, were it not for the extreme length of such a piece. It will make more sense if you go back and read the whole series, starting with the first one, if you have not already done so. Maybe even if you have already done so, since it has been months between each of the posts. For those who don't want to re-read the whole series, and since this is the last post, I'll summarize somewhat less briefly than I did in earlier posts. If you want to skip it, click here.

Overpopulation and overconsumption (and their consequences) are the most serious problems that we face today. Overpopulation is going to take decades to solve, while overconsumption could be addressed quite quickly if certain obstacles could be gotten out of the way. By reducing our level of consumption, we could reduce our impact on the planet and give ourselves time to reduce our population.

The blame for overconsumption can be laid squarely at the feet of capitalism, with its insatiable hunger to accumulate wealth, its inescapable need for endless growth, its inability to tackle any problem that can't be solved by making a profit and its endlessly blaring marketing machine which convinces us that we must consume, consume, consume. It is important to note that the majority of that consumption is done by a minority of people, the top ten to twenty percent of the richest people in the world. Sadly, I am part of that group and I suspect that many of my readers are as well, even though we wouldn't call ourselves "rich".

Many would lay the blame at the feet of individual people who are greedy, weak and undisciplined. I would say that if you take away the influence of capitalism, you would hardly recognize those people, and they would no longer be causing consumption problems. Solving them, more likely.

In a previous post where I looked at the problems with industrialization, I promised to have a more detailed look at our financial systems and our governments.

In this new series (Time for Change) I am finally doing that.

In Part 1 we looked at our financial system and saw that money is a tool that facilitates the accumulation of wealth by capitalists, and a mechanism by which they control the rest of us. It does this by making it possible to keep score in the complex game that is our economy, and pretty much guarantees that the wealthy win. Unfortunately, our financial system creates money as debt, which must be paid back with interest. In order to do that, the economy must continually grow or it will collapse. At the same time, the inevitable consequence of continued growth on a finite planet is also collapse.

But we can do without money and more importantly without keeping score. We need to get rid of money, the financial system and capitalism, and replace them with a system where each of us contributes according to our abilities and receives according to our needs, without keeping track of who is ahead or behind.

If this sounds like some sort of communism, you are right and that is exactly what we need. But anarchistic communism, rather than the autoritarian communism of the twentieth century.

In Part 2 I discussed the problems with hierarchies, especially with capitalism co-opting governments. The point being that hierarchies and capitalism are potent, and mutually reinforcing, agents of overconsumption.

For my purposes here, a hierarchy is an organization divided into different levels, with direction and co-ordination flowing down from above and wealth flowing up from below. A hierarchy is built like a pyramid, with many people at the bottom and only a very few at the top. There are serious problems with this way of organizing a society.

Like money, hierarchy is a tool designed for the benefit of certain people (those at the top), to be used by them to secure their power, wealth and privileges, and to keep the rest of us in the position where we "belong"—lower down in the hierarchy. In the process, we are prevented from ever realizing that there is any viable alternative. Our civilization is so big and complex only because it has to support hierarchies. If we didn't have to maintain hierarchies for the benefit of those at the top of them, we could adequately take care of ourselves with much simpler organizations, in smaller groups, at less expense—in other words, with less consumption. I usually refer to this phenomenon as the "diseconomies" of scale—the opposite of economies of scale. Economies of scale do exist, of course, but beyond a certain point the organizational costs swamp out the advantages of size. And that point is surprisingly small.

In Part 3 I asked three questions:

1) Are human beings naturally hierarchical? Are we doomed to drift back into a hierarchical organization even if we successfully get rid of today's hierarchies?

In brief, while it is easy for human societies to fall into the hierarchy trap and suffer for it, we evolved living in small egalitarian groups and have many adaptations which make us good at that way of life and also make it good for us.

2) Are there viable alternatives? That is, are hierarchies necessary when we organize ourselves into large groups and take on large projects, or are there others ways?

Hierarchies exist mostly for their own benefit, justified without really being justifiable, and the size of many of our endeavours is more a result of hierarchical organization than the needs of the actual work. There are other perfectly workable ways of organizing our efforts without hierarchies.

The owners, at the top of hierarchies, contribute very little that is of any real use, and most undertakings would work much better if owned by the workers and/or the people who consume their products. On the next level(s) down from the top, people are doing "coordinating work", and I'll admit that much of it is necessary. But it could just as easily be done by the actual working people, as part of their jobs. This sort of self-management would work better, and result in a greater sense of ownership and empowerment for the workers.

I left my third question for today.

3) Given the strengths of today's hierarchies and capitalism, and their success at propaganda, is there any hope that we can get rid of them?

Now that we are aware that hierarchies and capitalism cause more trouble than they are worth and indeed are the main obstacles to solving our most serious problems, we are left with the task of getting rid of them. In other words, removing the people who are running the world today, and who are highly skilled at convincing us that this is the best possible world and that making any major changes would be a mistake. This appears, at first glance, to be a pretty tall order.

After thinking about this question for quite some time, I reminded myself that this blog is about the collapse of our global industrial civilization, or "Business as Usual" (which I will shorten to BAU in what follows). The hierarchies and capitalism I have been talking about are essential parts of BAU, and are collapsing along with it. Only in the context of that collapse is it possible to see what we should do about hierarchies and capitalism. It seems that collapse is going to take care of some of the heavy lifting for us. The devil, of course, is in the details.

The Collapse of BAU

It is critical to remember that collapse is not a singular event, but an on-going process. I have said it before, but it bears repeating—what we face is a continued slow, uneven, unsteady and unequal collapse with occasional recoveries along the way, similar to what we have experienced over the last few decades, but getting worse as we go along. This collapse has been going on since the early 1970s, and has a way to go yet.

By uneven, I mean geographically. This is a large planet and despite the interconnectedness of our current system, it is not all going to fall apart at once. Even today, we can see that some areas are suffering greatly, while others continue on as if nothing much is wrong. Of course, as time passes, more areas will suffer and fewer will be left untouched.

By unsteady, I mean chronologically. Collapse goes in fits and starts, with periods where nothing much changes and even occasional partial recoveries.

By unequal, I mean that collapse affects those of different social classes differently. For the most part this means that the lower classes will suffer more from collapse, but it is not always necessarily so. The lower classes have lots of experience in dealing with difficulties—collapse is really just more of the same old shit for them. For the upper classes, such difficulties are new and they are lacking in the skills and mental preparation to cope.

Many people are in a state of denial about collapse. As the process continues, more people will have the opportunity to experience it personally or at least see it taking place nearby, and realize that it really is happening. Many will gain experience coping with temporary failures of infrastructure, supply chains and the financial sector. This will provide motivation to prepare not just by stocking up on supplies and tools, but by networking and starting to build the communities that can eventually replace the current system.

It might seem that the easiest way to get rid of hierarchies and capitalism would be to just let the present system collapse and then step in to build a better one. It's not quite that simple, though. Currently, BAU supplies us with the necessities of life, not because that is a good thing to do, but because it has been a good way to make a profit. It is certain that as the system continues to collapse, this business sector will become less profitable even as prices increase beyond what most people can afford. Capitalism will gradually abandon it, leaving more and more people to their own devices. If we just wait for BAU to collapse, we'll likely starve and freeze in the dark while we wait.

What to do about collapse

Clearly, that is to be avoided. What you want to do is to wait until the local system has collapsed far enough that it doesn't have the wherewithal to successfully oppose you, but you still have the resources to build something to replace it. Of course, you'll want to replace it with something that can function autonomously from the system that is falling apart around it, and works "better" than that system. In some cases, your local government will actually be helpful and support a smoother transition. In other cases, they will hinder you and may even have to be opposed violently.

In any case, while you are waiting you shouldn't be idle—there are many useful things you can do.

A while back I wrote a whole series of posts on preparing for/responding to collapse. Naturally, I would suggest that you read it, but there are some specific elements of such preparation that I want to look at in more detail here.

The first is to get a head start on building the community that you'll need to replace BAU. By that, I mean the organizations like solidarity networks, mutual aid societies and so forth. A large part of that will be learning how to make them work and how to function as an individual within them. We currently live in a society where toxic individualism is rampant and we have been brainwashed to think that no other way of life is possible.

Whatever they have told you, things like co-operation, mutual aid and direct democracy are all powerful ways for people to organize themselves and reduce their dependency on BAU. In groups that practice mutual aid, everyone ends up doing better than they could have individually. Even the strong and skillful, who do not perhaps need as much help as others, still end up better off than they would have without the group. Yes, they will likely end up doing more than some of the other people involved—but still less than what they would have had to do by themselves.

And yes, there will be a few who will take advantage and arrange an easy ride for themselves, but in the small groups where mutual aid works best, it is pretty obvious when someone is slacking off. Shame is an effective tool to encourage them to contribute and most will either mend their ways or leave. The cost of supporting the very few who don't is not nearly enough to outweigh the benefits of being part of the group.

To succeed, such community building efforts need to be based on clear and present needs. If you're living in an area where collapse has not yet struck, where BAU is still "working" fairly well, then trying to put a community together because you think it will be needed someday isn't going to work. Those involved (including you) simply won't have the motivation to make it work, to stay together, when there are easier alternatives all around you. Especially when that community is made up of people who haven't yet had much practice at such things. A quick look at the history of intentional communities will show how hard it is to succeed at this.

So first, take every opportunity to work, and play, with people in your community. Build a network of friends and acquaintances. Get a reputation for contributing, reciprocating and carrying your weight. Then, when the need arises, you can get together with people you already know and respond more effectively.

Many kollapsniks recommend withdrawing from our present society, but I would suggest just the opposite. You should be socially and politically active. Ideally, you want to live in a society which will collapse as gently as possible, providing a solid social safety net and encouraging and supporting your community building efforts. You need to work to ensure that the society you are living in is as much like that as possible.

In my opinion, such societies are on the left side of center politically. An example would be the contrast between Pierre Trudeau's government back in the day here in Canada encouraging and actually subsidizing housing co-ops versus the red state city in the U.S. that has recently made having roommates illegal. My point being that better governments will welcome efforts by people to be self sufficient, and will set things up to make it easier to do so.

Progressive social democracies do their best to help oppressed minorities and will do a better job of supporting all their citizens as things get worse. They will be easier places to practice mutual aid. They will also be more willing to abandon BAU to at least some extent as it malfunctions more and more. This will include reducing the burning fossil fuels, reducing carbon emissions, reducing the amount of damage we are doing to the biosphere and changing the way we use materials to conserve dwindling non-renewable resources as much as possible.

Societies on the right side of center will do everything they can to keep BAU working for as long as possible, regardless of the consequences, and to maintain capitalism's control over working class people, preventing us from gaining any degree of independence and from building our own organizations. These regressive, conservative societies are much easier to fall out the bottom of and will actively discourage groups coming together to practice mutual aid. And because they will also stick rigidly to BAU for as long as possible, they will do a good bit of damage in the process, ensuring that collapse is deeper and harder than it needs to be.

Such societies promote the traditional working class to the petit bourgeoisie, so that they come to identify with the upper classes, seeing themselves as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" who are not interested in solidarity with other working class people. This results in behaviors that are clearly against their own best interests, especially when it comes time to vote. They are willing to go as far to the right as it takes to protect their perceived entitlements. Ironically, modern business unions are also part of this regressive effort.

The result is an almost universal drift to the right politically—exactly the opposite direction from what we would prefer. A big part of our work will be to oppose that drift.

As times get worse, people look for politicians who can promise them some relief. Right wing politicians are always ready to do this, and as their promises do not involve giving up on BAU, or even any change in our lifestyles, they are popular at election time. I predict that we will go through a few more decades of rightward drift, ending up with outright fascism in many cases. Indeed this trend will be a major part of the collapse of our societies, since those right wing politicians won't be able to keep their promises, if they ever intended to do so in the first place. We need to be very suspicious of politicians offering easy solutions.

Of course, we have already tried fascism—really tried it—and it really didn't work. Read up on the history of Germany, Italy and Spain in the twentieth century. I don't expect it will work any better this time around when the underlying problems are considerably worse than they were a century ago. The right wing regimes will weaken and people will eventually rise up to get rid of them. Sadly, there will be a lot of suffering involved in this process. However, when it is over, another generation will have seen up close what's wrong with right wing politics and fascism in particular and will refuse to give such ideologies even a moment of their time. Really though, we could save ourselves a lot of trouble if we could avoid being fooled by the "rightists" in the first place.

Collapse will be less destructive in those places that started out further to the left, and managed, at least to some extent, to stay that way. Based on what I've just said about right and left wing governments, it is tempting to look ahead to a future consisting of one of two extremes:

1) People become more aware of what is happening and insist on change, leading to a soft and controlled decline, with a smaller population and a lower rate of consumption that is within the planet's carrying capacity. Not much more damage would be done to the biosphere than we have already done and not too many more non-renewable resources would be used up, leaving the world a more survivable place. Unfortunately, this seems improbable, as most of the people who are currently running things will fight it every step of the way.

2) We refuse to accept that the system isn't working and put every effort into keeping BAU going until the very last possible moment, resulting in a deep, hard collapse which will wipe out most of mankind, do far more damage to the biosphere than option 1 and use up even more of the remaining non-renewable resources. This sort of collapse would be much harder for any survivors. Sadly, it seems quite likely.

I am always suspicious, though, when situations are framed in terms of two irreconcilable extremes. This sort of polarized thinking blinds you to many other possibilities. A great many (and more realistic) futures lay on spectrum ranging between those two extremes, and even on spectrums that run between different points altogether and in different directions.

Not all people are helpless (far from it), nor are they incapable of imagining different and better ways of living. I think it is important to allow dissensus, letting people hold different opinions and try different things. We should agree to disagree, and wish each other well along the way, even offering to help when it is to our mutual advantage. Then we can observe what does and does not work. Realistically, many people will get their timing or their organizations (or both) wrong, and will have a much harder time of it than needs be. Others will do better, and in the process, they will learn a great deal. That is, perhaps, the best we can hope for.

Some people, of course, won't be willing to go along with dissensus, and will try to force the rest of us to see things their way and do what they want. Such folks, if they take their shenanigans far enough, are worthy of our active opposition. Even so, the fast and violent collapse you read about in collapse fiction is just that, fiction. While it certainly makes for thrilling stories, it's not very realistic. We just won't have the resources available to spend on extensive conflict.

What I've been try to point out in these last few posts is there are many things that we have tried repeatedly and that just don't work—hierarchies, capitalism and money to mention just a few. We'd be best to leave them on the junk heap of the past and carry on with things that we know do work—solidarity, co-operation, mutual aid, direct democracy, self management and community ownership of resources.

Some people would suggest taking action to help speed up collapse. I do NOT think this is a good idea. It would mean doing actual harm, and that harm will be felt most acutely by those at the bottom of the heap, who are already suffering more than the rest of us.

There is always more to say, but I think this would be a good place to wrap up this set of posts. At one point I promised to talk about the third item in the I=PAT equation—technology. When I finally get inspired to write about that, it can go in a standalone post and doesn't need to be tacked onto the end of this series.

The other thing I have been thinking about is writing some fiction. I have not written any fiction since I was in high school (50 plus years ago), so it would be nice to give it a go again. Story telling is a big part of human communication, and might serve as a better way of getting across some of the ideas that I'd like to share.  

During the last couple of years I've been reading a number of very interesting books and websites, which bear upon what we are discussing. Here is a list of these, along with a few that I've read previously, but that also have been a help.

Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next), by Dean Spade

Mutual aid is the radical act of caring for each other while working to change the world.

Fascism Today: What It Is and How To End It, by Shane Burley

A detailed map of the far right and a game plan for building the mass movement that will stop it.

We can no longer ignore the fact that fascism is on the rise in the United States. What was once a fringe movement has been gaining cultural acceptance and political power for years. Rebranding itself as "alt-right" and riding the waves of both Donald Trump's hate-fueled populism and the anxiety of an abandoned working class, they have created a social force that has the ability to win elections and inspire racist street violence in equal measure.

Fascism Today looks at the changing world of the far right in Donald Trump's America. Examining the modern fascist movement's various strains, Shane Burley has written an accessible primer about what its adherents believe, how they organize, and what future they have in the United States. The ascension of Trump has introduced a whole new vocabulary into our political lexicon—white nationalism, race realism, Identitarianism, and a slew of others. Burley breaks it all down. From the tech-savvy trolls of the alt-right to esoteric Aryan mystics, from full-fledged Nazis to well-groomed neofascists like Richard Spencer, he shows how these racists and authoritarians have reinvented themselves in order to recruit new members and grow.

Just as importantly, Fascism Today shows how they can be fought and beaten. It highlights groups that have successfully opposed these twisted forces and outlines the elements needed to build powerful mass movements to confront the institutionalization of fascist ideas, protect marginalized communities, and ultimately stop the fascist threat.

Debt, The First 5000 Years, by David Graeber

Hierarchy in the Forest: the evolution of egalitarian behavior, by Christopher Boehm

The Art of Not Being Governed, by James C. Scott

Against the Grain, a deep history of the earliest states, by James C. Scott

Living at the Edges of Capitalism: Adventures in Exile and Mutual Aid, by Andrej Grubacic

The Dawn of Everything, by David Graeber and David Wengrow

No Bosses: A New Economy for a Better World, by Michael Albert

Balancing Two Worlds: Jean-Baptiste Assiginack and the Odawa Nation, 1768-1866, by Cecil King

Websites


Links to the rest of this series of posts:
Collapse, you say? / Time for Change

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Saturday, 5 February 2022

What I've Been Reading, December 2021

Links

Above the Fold

  • Solidarity Networks, by Gods & Radicals
  • Seattle Solidarity Network
    • "Seattle Solidarity (“SeaSol”) is a volunteer network of working people who believe in standing up for our rights. Our goal is to support our fellow workers’ strikes and struggles, build solidarity, and organize to deal with specific job, housing, and other problems caused by the greed of the rich and powerful. Join us! Let’s fight to win."
  • Microsolidarity, by Richard D. Bartlett, Microsolidarity
    "In late 2018, Richard D. Bartlett published a proposal to start a "microsolidarity" group — a small mutual aid community for people to do a kind of personal development, in good company, for social benefit."
  • Courage Before Hope: A Proposal to Weave Emotional and Economic Microsolidarity
  • Microsolidarity: Update 2020
    "How To Weave Social Fabric-- 3 Essential Pillars For a New Mutual Aid Community"

Miscellaneous

Reactions to "The Dawn of Everything"

  • Everything we “know” about the rise of Man is wrong, by David Wineberg, Medium--The Straight Dope
    "For 350 years, it has been common knowledge that Man went from bands of hunter-gatherers, to pastoralists, to farming, to industry. In parallel, Man lived in families, in tribes, in villages and then in cities, as technology improved. Technology, the third parallel, took us from the stone age through the bronze age and the iron age to the industrial revolution. All neat, tidy and clearly separable. David Graeber and David Wengrow claim there is no evidence for this. In The Dawn of Everything, they show proof of an unbelievable variety of living styles, governance and intellectual activity all over the world and throughout time. It was never a straight line progression. It was never the result of technology. And possibly most stunning, the larger the population was did not also mean more restrictions, more crime, more laws, or more inequality. This is an important book."
  • All things being equal, by Nancy Lindisfarne Jonathan Neale, Ecologist
    Based on it's harsh criticism of the antropological establishment it was inevitable that someone would write a negative review of The Dawn of Everything. This review reads like the authors only read parts of the book and didn't understand most of those. The only point I agree with is that Graeber and Wengrow are largely blind to the ecological and resource limits faced by human societies on this planet.

The Other News

News that is being ignored by North American mass media

Coronavirus

Capitalism, Communism, Anarchy

Food

Genetic Engineering

Before jumping to the erroneous conclusion that this section was paid for by Monsanto, stop for a moment and understand that organic agriculture/food is a multi-billion dollar per year industry that relies on fear to get people to buy its product. Millions of dollars are spent to convince you that non-organic food is dangerous. In fact both conventionally grown and organic foods are equally safe. Sadly neither method of agriculture is even remotely sustainable.

  • Panic-free GMOs, A Grist Special Series by Nathanael Johnson
    "It’s easy to get information about genetically modified food. There are the dubious anti-GM horror stories that recirculate through social networks. On the other side, there’s the dismissive sighing, eye-rolling, and hand patting of pro-GM partisans. But if you just want a level-headed assessment of the evidence in plain English, that’s in pretty short supply. Fortunately, you’ve found the trove."
    A series of articles that does a pretty good job of presenting the facts about GMOs. I plan to include one article from this series here each month.
  • Rat retraction reaction: Journal pulls its GMOs-cause-rat-tumors study, by Nathanael Johnson, Grist
    "Retractions are typically the result of big goofs and frauds -- but in this case, the problem was inordinate attention paid to inconclusive results."

Practical Skills

Debunking Resources

These are of such importance that I've decide to leave them here on an ongoing basis.

Pseudoscience, Quacks and Charlatans

There is No God, and Thou Shall Have No Other Gods

I don't think I've made any secret of the fact that I am an atheist, but I may not have made it clear that I think any sort of worship is a bad thing and that believing in things is to be avoided whenever possible. Indeed, I do not believe in belief itself. That's what the "Thou shall have no other gods" is about—it's not enough to quit believing in whatever God or Gods you were raised to believe in, but also we must avoid other gods, including material wealth, power and fame.

Further, many people today (including most atheists) follow the religion of "progress", which is based on the belief that mankind is destined to follow a road that leads from the caves ever upward to the stars, and that however bad things seem today, they are bound to be better tomorrow due to technological advancement and economic growth. This is very convenient for those who benefit most from economic growth, but it is hardly based on any sort of science and leads to a great deal of confused thinking.

  • Surprises within latest data on decline of US Religion, by David Gamble, Medium-- Science and Critical Thinking
    " On 14th December 2021, Pew issued their latest update on the religious landscape in the US. For the non-religious, it appears to be very good news. The decline of religion in the US continues unabated."

Poverty, Homeless People, Minimum Wage, UBI, Health Care, Affordable Housing

  • Let There Be Money, Joe Manchin, by Sharon Woodhouse, Medium
    "Bathtubs, Modern Monetary Theory, and UBI"
    Not sure how valid Modern Monetary theory is--I'd rather do away with money altogether.

Books

Fiction

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Tuesday, 30 June 2020

Collapse, you say?

New Bamboo
2020

Most of the writing I have done for this blog assumes that my readers are at the very least open to thinking about the collapse of our civilization, and more likely that they have already accepted it as probable and are interested in discussing the details of how it might happen and how to cope with it. But it is pretty clear to me that the general public, even in the midst of a global pandemic, are not ready to entertain the idea that civilization could collapse. If I bring up the idea, the response is most likely to be, "Collapse, you say? Surely not."

There are a number of reasons for that attitude, the simplest being a cognitive bias against change—the feeling that tomorrow is likely to be pretty much like today. This is aided and abetted by a lot of propaganda about how great BAU (Business as Usual) really is and the progress it promises for the future. Indeed, we are told that there simply isn't any better way of running the world than neo-liberal capitalism, no real alternatives at all. We've been told this for so long (at least the 30 years or so since the USSR fell) and so forcefully that most of the world's population is experiencing an almost complete failure of imagination. And that is both a failure to imagine any better way of running things, and a failure to conceive what the consequences might be if we continue as we are.

Along with this, when the subject of collapse does come up, it is almost always discussed in terms of a hard and fast collapse—more of an apocalypse, really—which understandably stirs up such feelings of fear that people retreat into denial. But even minor suggestions of things like "degrowth" are not well received—we've been promised on-going progress, and any suggestion that a reduction in our consumption level, a little less comfort and convenience, might be in order, is met with consternation. You hear people saying that, if that's what's ahead of us, they'd rather be dead.

On the other hand, there are people like me who are convinced that the collapse of our civilization is either already happening or soon will be. Why do we think that?

It might be wise at this point to dig a little deeper into what I mean by "the collapse of our civilization". Well, one characteristic of all civilizations is that their individual members are not entirely self sufficient—they rely at least to some extent on the mechanisms of production and distribution built into their civilization for the necessities of life. What those necessities might be varies with who you ask. My list includes air, water, food, housing, health care, education and meaningful work, all provided in a context where people feel that they belong, where help is available when you need it and where you have a role to play in helping others when they need it. Of course, there are many approaches to how these necessities are to be acquired, and various ideas about what constitutes enough.

In our "industrial" society, since the invention of heat engines powered by fossil fuels, the production and distribution of what is needed has largely been mechanized. Our population is hardly self sufficient at all—only very rarely do we make anything we need with our own hands. And only a very few people, living in the remotest locations are independent of this system. We have filled up essentially the whole world, and converted it to our uses, so that a return to subsistence agriculture or hunting and gathering would not be possible for most of us even if we wanted it, and most of us don't.

When a civilization starts to collapse, its mechanisms of production and distribution begin to work less and less well. A decline in both population and complexity ensues. In our industrial society, where human and animal muscles have been largely replaced by machines powered by various forms of energy, there will also be a significant reduction in energy use and consumption of manufactured goods.

All this continues until the collapsing civilization either falls apart completely or overcomes its difficulties and recovers in a different form. In the past it often took hundreds of years for a civilization to collapse. My opinion is that our society started to collapse about 50 years ago and has a few decades, or at least years, left to go. But however long it may take to get to the end of the process, it is important to realize that, nowadays, collapse is going on around us all the time.

A scholarly expert on collapse might now offer some numerical measures to help us judge when a society has actually collapsed. I like to look at that a little differently, to turn it on its head, so to speak. I would say that if you, as an individual, are no longer being supplied with the necessities of life then for you collapse has already occurred, even though everything is going along quite normally for the people driving over the bridge that you are living under.

I seems to me that collapsing civilizations share some characteristics, and I can see those characteristics in events today:

  • One, collapse progresses slowly, so that if you're viewing it from inside and it hasn't hit you with any great force as yet, you may be hard pressed to recognize what is happening.
  • Two, collapse progresses uneven geographically—some places continue to do just fine while others fall apart disastrously. If you live in an area that is not yet affected, you may wonder what all the fuss is about, or at least think that while it's tough for those other folks, it can't happen to you.
  • Three, collapse progresses unsteadily in the chronological sense, with long periods where nothing much changes, separated by sudden steps downward. During those long quiet periods, you could be excused for thinking that everything is just fine because, at least on the surface, it is.
  • And four, collapse progresses unequally across social classes. The upper, ruling classes are in control (as much as anyone is) and have the wherewithal to direct resources to their own benefit, and away from the lower classes. And because they can get by just fine without knowing much at all about how things are going in the rest of society, they are often unaware that there is any sort of problem. Of course, when collapse finally does hit them, it is felt all the harder because they have never experienced hard times. For those at the bottom of the social ladder, collapse is just more of the same shit they've been putting up with all along.

Ideally, as an individual, family, or community in a collapsing civilization, you would like to be aware of what's coming, prepare for it and eventually succeed in adapting to it. But as you can see from the four points I've just listed, this is difficult because it's hard to tell what's going on until it's too late.

This started out as a simple, "one post topic", but now it looks like it is going to take about five posts to clearly get across why I think collapse is happening and to have a look at what options we have and where this process is likely to take us:

  • This post, in which I've introduced the subject.
  • Two, in which I'll look at the inputs and output of our civilization and what is wrong with the way they are being handled.
  • Three, in which I'll look further into the inputs to our civilization.
  • Four, in which I'll look at growth, overshoot and dioeoff.
  • Five, in which I'll look at over population.
  • Six, in which I'll look inside our civilization at its fundamental, structural weaknesses.
  • Seven, in which we'll look at how all this has been and continues to contribute to collapse.
  • And Eight, in which, we'll look at several possibilities for our future—what the rest of this collapse may look like.


Links to the rest of this series of posts, Collapse, you say?

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Tuesday, 26 March 2019

Responding to Collapse, Part 8: Pitfalls and Practicalities of that Team Sport

Sunset over Lake Huron, March 26, 2019

The "responding" to collapse that I've been talking about in this series of posts, is largely a matter of adapting to the new conditions that come with collapse. We can't stop collapse from happening, so the question is, "how to cope?" I've spent a lot of time talking about how adapting is likely to be easier in small and fairly remote towns, how to pick a town in a good location and then encouraging people to make their move to such a location while there is still time.

But making that move is only the first step. The point of moving to a small town, rather than a more isolated location, is the relationships you'll be forming with the people in your new community.

In my last post I started talking about the idea that being human is a "team sport". That is, it's in the nature of human beings, and very much to our benefit, to live and work together in groups. Such groups can act as a force multiplier, achieving more than what you would expect from simply adding up the number of people involved. And that's more both in the sense of 1) achieving the group's common goals and 2) enhancing the individual well being of its members. For most of the time that people have existed, we've lived together in small groups (less than Dunbar's number), made decisions largely by consensus, and allocated resources in a sort of "primitive communism"—from each according to their abilities and to each according to their needs.

During the difficult times that lie ahead of us, I think we will need to fall back on this way of living, in order to successfully meet the challenges we face.

In that post I went on, at some length, about the benefits of group efforts and why we have abandoned the idea in 21st century society in favour of individualism and isolation. Largely because increasing affluence has made it possible and because it has been encouraged by those who are in power who find it easier to control and exploit lone individuals than groups acting in solidarity.

What I want to talk about in this post are the pitfalls and practicalities of actually becoming part of your new community and laying the ground work for the groups you will come to rely on as BAU declines. I wish I could offer a complete and detailed manual on how to do this, but I'm just not to that point myself yet, and I'm not sure anyone else is either. I've added links at the end of this post to a couple of books that I think might be helpful

I should make it clear that I don't expect you to rush out and create your own commune and kiss BAU (Business as Usual) good-bye right away. This is unlikely to be a success. I don't think collapse is going to happen all at once, nor I do think adapting to it is something that can (or should) be done all at once.

As long as BAU is detectably alive and even slightly well, propaganda for the consumer lifestyle and the virtues of individualism will be a distraction blaring away in the background. Most of us have never had the opportunity to learn the interpersonal the skills that make primitive communism work so well. And as long as our economic situation inside BAU is reasonably comfortable, it will be altogether too easy too stalk off in a huff when the going gets tough rather than doing the work it takes to make a group effort succeed.

I'd be the last person to tell you that any of this is going to be easy. Indeed there have been many times when I have pretty much given up on the idea. I am sure we've all been involved in some co-operative effort or other that failed because of the disruptive efforts of grandstanders, glory hounds, control freaks and the power hungry. Or even just people who couldn't get along, didn't want to pull their weight or abused common resources like tools and equipment. These sorts of problems can be overcome, but only, I suspect, when there is an overpowering need to do so, and no easier alternative.

Of course, there is one sure way to foster group cohesiveness and that is to encourage group members to focus their displeasure and dissatisfaction on easily identifiable people outside the group. People who group members are encouraged to hate. But the long run consequences are pretty ugly. You just have to look at the last century or so of our history to see what I mean. Unfortunately, this kind of thing does have a strong appeal, and I would advise constant vigilance to avoid getting sucked in. Just ask yourself, if the finger of hate is being pointed at "those people" today, how long before it is pointed at people like you.

Currently right wing, white supremacy hate groups seems to be enjoying a good deal of success and causing a lot of harm. Clearly something to be avoided and opposed.

Another way to bring people together is activism. There are certainly many problems in the world today that need to be solved. When people join groups to tackle these problems they often find a real sense of community and an external problem to focus their energies on. And groups of other people to oppose.

I'd say that before joining an activist group you need to keep in mind that our current world order, what I call BAU, is fundamentally flawed and is itself the cause of the problems we are facing. Trying to fix BAU so we can go on living as we are is not going to work—our way of life is the problem.

Of course, there are causes that even I can't see anything wrong with. Such as forming community groups to adapt to collapse or to work on any of the things that need to be done to prepare for collapse.

Anyway, these are just some of the pitfalls of trying to make a co-operative effort to adapt to collapse. But adapt we must, and we have a much better chance of doing so in a group than as lone individuals or nuclear families. So we have to try, even though we'll be learning the skills as we go along, and all the while our current society will be doing its best to distract and discourage us.

Realizing this, we need to look at the practicalities of living and working together in groups. It would be a really good idea, I think, to start with some baby steps in your new community, to do some gradual adapting before the need gets urgent. Start learning to work together ahead of time, probably first in social groups, then maybe doing some volunteer efforts together, and finally as times get harder, acting together in what I would call mutual support groups. It is one heck of a lot easier, in times of need, to get together with people who you already know and with whom you've accustomed to working.

How people behave during disasters turns out to be very different than we have been led to believe. Rather than triggering social breakdown, the removal of the usual social constraints allows people to stop playing their customary roles as individuals and competitors in the formal economy (the roles society has forced on them), and come together co-operatively and generously as a community to cope with the challenges the disaster has presented.

The fact that responding to the disaster provides a clear common goal, and that the people involved are often family, friends and neighbours, is a big help. But such communities are in fact the default human behavior, rather than the rioting, looting and general social breakdown that the disaster mythology would have us suspect. Our preparations for disaster and collapse should reflect this—that we can expect co-operation rather than conflict. Any organization that we plan in advance should be such that it encourages this behaviour and helps people to rise to the occasion. A little study into what actually happens in such situations shows that people's response can be amazingly positive.

So, your first priority after you've moved into a small town is to get to know your neighbours and make an effort to take part in the things they are doing together.

Here are just few suggestions about how to become part of the community you've moved into and develop a network of friends and acquaintances who will be of help as collapse intensifies.

  • if you're religious, join a church and get involved
  • if you're not religious, join a secular volunteer organization that interests you:
    • a club, lodge or service group
    • a choir or orchestra
    • a community garden
    • a sports team, a gym, a hiking or nature club
  • if you have children...
    • put them into activities that interest them and volunteer to help in the organizations that offer those activities
    • volunteer at their school
  • work hard to network, talk to your neighbors, ask questions
  • invite people to dinner or out for a coffee

Be modest and don't act like you think you're better than the locals, or know more than them, or that where you came from is better than where you are now. Express an interest in their families, interests, and what they do for recreation and entertainment (FIRE is the mnemonic for this aid to small talk). Be eager to listen to what they have to say and patient while they are saying it.

You want to get to know and be known (in a positive way) by as many people as possible, but also to develop a core group of friends who you're quite close to and on whom you can rely in a pinch. That core group should be people you see eye to eye with on most things. At the same time, don't be too particular about finding people who think exactly as you do—cut them some slack and they will do the same for you. Be quick to offer your help when they need it and don't hesitate to ask for their help when you need it. And of course, watch that this doesn't become too one sided (in either direction).

As a kollapnik, a committed enough of a one to leave the city and settle in a small town, you are probably at least a bit of a fanatic about the subject and would love to find some people who you can talk collapse with. This will put a certain spin on your relationships, one that you need to get control of. You don't want to be a pest and develop a reputation as a crackpot, driving people away in the process. On the other hand, you don't want to be secretive and give people the impression you've got something to hide. If they see you making preparations, storing food, gardening, whatever, be open about what you are doing and why.

Among all my friends and acquaintances, there are two (perhaps three) who I would say are fellow kollapsniks, and a small handful of others who are willing to talk about collapse as long as I don't push too hard. I consider myself lucky.

One of those kollapsnik friends is Don Hayward, and I'd like to share with you his wisdom on classifying the people you'll meet in your new community. He says there are four kinds:

  • those who will eventually turn out to be pure poison and should be avoided at all costs (which can be awkward in a small town). If you can figure out how to identify these people quickly and painlessly, let me know.
  • those few gems who you can talk to about collapse and perhaps even start right away working with on adaptations.
  • those who don't want to talk about collapse, but who will make good friends anyway. This is no doubt the largest group of people and where you will concentrate your efforts.
  • and lastly, people from the first three classifications who will change as circumstances change and may well turn out to be great adapters.

Please understand that it is possible to make connections, often close connections, with people who are not yet ready to talk about collapse. It is probably a good idea to make that connection first, before bringing up collapse. There will be times when the world seems to be falling apart, when the news is full of that sort of thing, and then people will be much more receptive.

But people are strange animals and coping with them can be challenging, especially since you are one yourself. You should maintain a realistic expectation that not everyone will react positively to everything or even anything you say or do, that some people won't even want to give you the time of day. Respond politely to such rejection and move on. Don't get discouraged.

You may also frequently find people doing things that seem to be specifically intended to get under your skin, and not in a humourous way. I personally have had much more success in difficult inter-personal situations since I learned the importance of being calm, patient, kind and understanding. And after I finally gained a "strong-ish" grasp of the fact that it's not always (or even usually) all about me. But even at age 65, this is an on-going effort.

Much good advice about this sort of thing can be found on the internet (along with some bad advice, unfortunately). Here are links to several articles that I'd say fit in the "good advice" category.


Hidden variables of Human Behaviour

In brief here is what you should remember:

  • Everyone has a reason for what they do.
  • If we knew that reason, we would be more understanding and sympathetic.
  • If we don’t know the reason, we may as well assume the best.
  • It’s unlikely their reasons have much — if anything — to do with us, so there is no need to take their actions personally.

Three Important Life Skills Nobody Ever Taught You

Again in brief, they are:

  • how to stop taking things personally
  • how to be persuaded and change your mind
  • how to act without knowing the result

It’s harder to be kind than clever

Or as my dear old dad used to say, "It's nice to be important, but it's more important to be nice." As the article says:

...the central conceit of a dangerous assumption we seem to have made as a culture these days: that being right is a license to be a total, unrepentant asshole. After all, why would you need to repent if you haven’t committed the ultimate sin of being wrong? Some say there’s no reason to care about other people’s feelings if the facts are on your side.

Getting along with people in groups is a learned skill and challenging for those who didn't grow up doing it. Many people have decided it is not worth the effort, but that is something of a self fulfilling prophecy. It can be done, given motivation and sufficient practice.

So far I've been talking about getting together socially, helping out your friends, and taking part in volunteer projects. But as collapse progresses further and we come to rely on our friends and neighbours more, we'll get deeper into living and working together. To wrap up today, I'd like to discuss three aspects of this: working together, living together and organizing those efforts. I was actually surprised, after spending a few moments with Google, to find numerous resources on each of these topics and in each of the sections below I've include a few links to relevant articles.


Organizing Together

Even if we're mainly considering groups of people less than Dunbar's number, say a maximum of 150 to 200, some sort of organization will be required. There are many ways of doing this, all with their pros and cons. I'm suspicious of hierarchical and especially patriarchal organizations because much of what's wrong with BAU seems to be centered on those organizational styles. They seem to be based on a fundamental split within the group between those who are in control and enjoy a lot of benefits they haven't earned, and those who are being controlled and exploited, and whose potential is largely ignored.

So I would recommend trying consensus decision making. It's main disadvantage is that very few of us in the developed world have much experience with it. But like any other skill it can be learned, and promises some real rewards for those who make the effort.


Working Together

Working together is likely the easy part—even big business is aware of the advantages of having people work in teams, so many people have some prior experience with teamwork.

I thought this would be the easiest of these three areas to find information about, but what's out there is mostly about teams working at the bottom of a hierarchy in businesses or educational settings, so it's not exactly what I was hoping for. I haven't included much that material here. You can Google for teamwork, team building, working in groups, etc. if you want to see more of it.

  • Effective Groups—Starting them up and keeping them going, more from Seeds of Change
    This article recommends you first find the right people and then talks about using publicity to attract them. For the kind of core group I've been talking about in this post, I would say definitely you need to find the right people, but I would caution against sending out a public appeal. This would attract lots of people, but most of them wouldn't likely be suitable and rejecting them becomes awkward. Instead meet people in social situations and take your time to size them up before forming a closer relationship.
  • 6 Ways to Empower Others, by Starhawk
    Sometimes you really do need someone to step forward and lead. The important thing is to be able to step back when the need has passed.
  • Teamwork, Wikipedia


Living Together

Living together is something that's going to be forced on many of us in the years ahead, as the economy contracts and affluence decreases. And as we move to small towns and find there is limited housing stock that's suitable for living in when infrastructure starts to fail regularly. So many people will find themselves having to share apartments or houses. Most of us have grown up in small nuclear families and many have had their own room since birth. More crowded and less convenient living circumstances will be challenging to adapt to. But it's being done by the majority of people alive in the world today and has been done by almost everyone who lived in the past. So it seems likely to me that we can learn to cope just fine.

I'll just wrap this up by saying that I think it is important to let other groups try anything they want to, in the hope that someone, somewhere, will come up with one or more approaches that work. I call this "disssensus"—letting other folks go their own way and wishing them well, even offering to help when we can, rather than raising a fuss and trying to force them to do it our way.

So far, I've been talking about what you need to do when you first arrive in your new town and during the following years as collapse intensifies. The gradual and uneven failure of BAU will provide numerous opportunities for you and your new friends to work together and support each other. I'll definitely be doing a post in the near future about how I see that playing out, but first I think I need to talk about the practical, material preparations that you need to be making during that same time period.

If you've chosen your small town well then it will have the resources you need to get by when BAU lets you down. But some advance set up is needed if you are to put them to work effectively. This will be the topic of my next post.

Books


Links to the rest of this series of posts, Preparing for (Responding to) Collapse:

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Monday, 18 March 2019

Responding to Collapse, Part 7: A Team Sport

Late Winter (Early Spring?) on Lake Huron

At the end of my first "Preparing for/Responding to Collapse" post , I said that we'd be considering the following subjects in this series:

  • where you want to be—where bad things are less likely to happen
  • who you want to be with—people you know, trust and can work with
  • what you are doing—something that can support you, and allow you to develop the skills and accumulate the resources you will need

I think I've given the first one adequate treatment in the last 5 posts (2 to 6 in this series) so now I'm moving on to the second item—who you want to be with.

So, who do you want to be with? The main thing, I think, is that you want to be with people, rather than being alone—to borrow a phrase from Douglas Rushkoff, being human is a team sport. (Here's a podcast with Rushkoff and Naomi Klein that I found interesting. Of course Rushkoff isn't talking about exactly the same thing as me, but it's still good stuff.)

What I am talking about is this: it is in the nature of human beings, and very much to our benefit, to work together in groups. Such groups act as a force multiplier, achieving more than what you would expect from simply adding up the number of people involved. And that's more both in the sense of 1) achieving the group's common goals and 2) enhancing the individual well being of its members. For most of the time that people have existed, we've lived together in small groups (less than Dunbar's number), made decisions largely by consensus, and allocated resources in a sort of "primitive communism"—from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs, if I can be forgiven for quoting Karl Marx.

During the difficult times that lie ahead of us, I think we will need to fall back on this way of living, in order to successfully meet the challenges we face.

But over the last few centuries this sort of thing has gotten a bad name. People have gone from living in small, close knit communities made up of large, extended families to living in isolated nuclear families or as lone individuals, and relating to other people mainly via the formal, money based economy. During the time when this change was happening, the level of affluence in our society continually increased, allowing us to get by just fine more or less on our own. It seems that many people have come to believe that individualism is at least partly responsible for the progress we have experienced, and that our former way of living probably had to be abandoned in order to reap the benefits of that progress.

I would say that such ideas are a long way from reality. So much so that I think we'd better stop here for a closer look at the advantages of living and working together in groups, and follow that up by considering why we have given up on this way of life. Best to be clear on this before going on to the practicalities and pitfalls of forming and working together in groups within your new community.

It's interesting that while today's corporations are intensely capitalistic and competetive, within them people are often organized in teams or crews whose members relate to each other in a very "communistic" way. I'd say that this is a tacit acknowledgement of what actually works best. For much of my career with Hydro One (Ontario's electric transmission and distribution utility) I worked as part of a crew of maintenance electricians. While it is true that there are some jobs that can be done by one person, most of the work we did went much better when done by a small group of people. Once such a crew gets to know each other and the work they are doing, they can organize themselves to do that work more productively and enjoyably than the same number of individuals could do working separately.

Within a crew there is usually a diversity of skills that complement each other, and allow people to focus their efforts on the parts of the job best suited to them. And of course the nature of most work (be it physical or mental) is such that it can be done quicker and more easily if the people doing it help each other.

Teams like this are an excellent learning environment, where you can pick up a great deal from people with more experience or different experience than you. Not just job related learning, but also contributing to your growth as a human being.

Beyond productivity and training, there are many benefits to the members of the crew which are not an intentional part of the situation or necessarily supported by management, but which certainly make for a better work environment— camaraderie, companionship, support (both in times of difficulty, and in growth and accomplishment), and the ability to make the boring parts of the job go quicker with humour, story telling, singing, etc.

As it happened we were also members of a labour union, which did its best to shield us from the worst predations of management. Unions are a pretty clear case of the use of group solidarity in dealing with a situation where the power dynamics would otherwise be completely one sided.

Co-operative efforts of groups of people in organizations like food co-ops and housing co-ops enjoy the benefits of enhanced bargaining power and economies of scale that are not available to nuclear families or single individuals. A group can also provide a safety net for its members in a way that conventional insurance, provided by a company whose main responsibility is to its share holders, can never do.

People working and living together also get to know each other quite well. Because of this the group can effectively discourage its members from shirking their responsibilities and provide them with a strong incentive to contribute to the full extent of their abilities.

And lastly I'll just note that compared to an isolated existence, living in groups with people that care about you and will help when you need it, has considerable psychological benefits.

So, given all these advantages, why have we largely abandoned our extended families and close knit communities?

Certainly, there is some overhead involved in living and working in close knit groups, and you can see why people who have attained a sufficient level of affluence might choose to exercise their independence and strike out on their own.

But the idea that group life is not worth the effort is somewhat of a self fulfilling prophecy. Living as we do these days, with a big emphasis on individualism and little opportunity to practice working in groups or learn it from experience people, we have forgotten many of the interpersonal the skills that make primitive communism work so well. And as long as things are going well there is little incentive to really try to make co-operative efforts succeed. We can do just fine on our own, without the trouble of getting along with others. Those whose lives are the most precarious, for whom individualism really isn't working, have come to simply not trust other people, and would never think of working together for their mutual advantage.

But even allowing for all that, I think we also need to keep in mind that isolated people are a lot easier to control and exploit, and this is very much to the advantage of the people who are running things in our society.

Whenever I see people making choices that clearly run counter to their own best interests, I've found that I only have to look a little further to uncover a great deal of effort that is being expended to make them do so. Effort that is being made by those who do stand to benefit from those poor choices. This is certainly the case practically everywhere in the world today, with most countries ruled by oligarchies who at best give only lip service to democracy, and are not of the people, by the people or for the people.

So, I would like to suggest that what going on here is rather different from the way we are encouraged to perceive it. Maybe, for most people, the growth of individualism was anything but progress. And while it is true that this happened while a lot of progress was happening, you don't want to confuse cause and effect. If you look closely, you can see that much of that progress was basically economic growth, or very closely tied to economic growth, which was largely driven by our switch over to using fossil fuels as our primary source of energy. So I'd say economic growth and the rise of modern capitalism drove the growth of individualism, rather than the other way around.

A excerpt from David Graeber's Debt: the first 5000 years may help clarify:

By the end of World War II, the specter of an imminent working-class uprising that had so haunted the ruling classes of Europe and North America had largely disappeared. This was because class war was suspended by a tacit settlement. To put it crudely: the white working class of North Atlantic countries, from the United States to West Germany were offered a deal. If they agreed to set aside fantasies of fundamentally changing the nature of the system, then they would be allowed to keep their unions, enjoy a wide variety of social benefits (pensions, vacations, health care...), and, perhaps most important through generously funded and ever-expanding public educational institutions, know that their children had a reasonable chance of leaving the working class entirely. One key element in all this was a tacit guarantee that increases in workers' productivity would be met by increases in wages: a guarantee that held good until the late 1970s. Largely as a result, the period saw both rapidly rising productivity and rapidly increasing incomes, laying the basis for the consumer economy of today.

This was the world into which I was born and grew up. Essentially, "setting aside fantasies of fundamentally changing the nature of the system" amounted to abandoning our communities and extended families, in exchange for individual affluence and economic security. Unfortunately, because of 1) a financial system based on interest bearing debt and 2) a growing population, this world required endless economic growth in order to continue fulfilling its promise. In another reality, where planets have infinite resources, this might have been possible, but not here.

After a few paragraphs about how this relates to Keynsian economics, Graeber goes on to say:

When the Keynsian settlement was finally put into effect, after World War II, it was offered to only a relatively small slice of the world's population. As time went on, more and more people wanted in on the deal. Almost all of the popular movements of the period from 1945 to 1975, even perhaps revolutionary movements, could be seen as demands for political equality that assumed equality was meaningless without some level of economic security. This was true not only of movements by minority groups in North Atlantic countries who had first been left out of the deal... but what were then called "national liberation" movements from Algeria to Chile, which represented certain class fragments in what we now call the Global South, or, finally, and perhaps most dramatically, in the late 1960s and 1970s, feminism. At some point in the '70s, things reached a breaking point. It would appear that capitalism, as a system, simply cannot extend such a deal to everyone. Quite possibly it wouldn't even remain viable if all its workers were free wage laborers; certainly it was never be able to provide everyone in the world the sort of life lived by, say, a 1960s auto worker in Michigan or Turin, with his own house, garage, and children in college—and this was true even before so many of those children began demanding less stultifying lives. The result might be termed a crisis of inclusion. But the late 1970s, the existing order was clearly in a state of collapse, plagued simultaneously by financial chaos, food riots, oil shocks, wide spread doomsday prophecies of the end of growth and ecological crisis—all of which, it turned out, proved to be ways of putting the populace on notice that all deals were off.

I would say that the underlying problem causing this failure of capitalism is economic contraction caused by the reduction in the surplus energy available as we've been forced to tap into ever poorer quality and/or less easily accessible fossil fuels. And sadly this is a problem for all economic and political systems. Indeed, it is a problem without a solution, which is bringing about changes that we will just have to adapt to.

I am not certain if Graber agrees with me that the crises we've faced since the 1970s are quite real, but I do agree with him that those in power have certainly used those crises to "put the populace on notice that all deals are off." He is also quite right that this is a "crisis of inclusion"—as the economy contracts the rich and powerful are not about to be excluded, so a great many other people have had to be, in order for the rich to keep a relatively larger slice of a shrinking pie.

But how, you may ask, does this relate to the problem of diminishing community in our modern society? Well, it seems that all the fixes that are available to the excluded majority involve us being separated from our former support systems (family and community in an informal economy) and striving to perform better as competing individuals in the formal economy.

We are told that to secure a good job we need an education, at least a bachelor's degree. This means (in many countries) taking on a significant amount of debt, so that after you graduate, you'll be desperate to get a job and pay off your student loans. This leaves you very little choice in the job you take and little choice about leaving it if it doesn't suit you.

To get that job it is very likely that you'll have to move a long way from where your family currently lives and set up as a lone individual, in a place where you, at least initially, have no support network.

If you meet the love of your life and decide to live together or actually marry, you will both have to go on working to pay off those student loans and make a start on building a family together.

This is a stressful situation, especially since you don't have any sort of support network and I suspect it contributes to marriage breakup. If you do break up you'll be left as a single mother or a lone individual.

Or perhaps instead of seeking higher education, you could go for a job in the trades. As I said earlier, crews of tradesmen are among the best examples of communistic relationships found in today's world. But in most companies there is a strong push to have people working by themselves whenever possible and to have as little contact with their co-workers as possible, lest they organize a union. Unions are in a desperate situation today, with no effort being spared to break them and leave working people completely at the mercy of management.

All this is very convenient for those who are in power. It is easier to exploit people who are not organized, who see each other as competitors rather than comrades. And in the process you can monetize much work that used to be part of the informal economy and make some additional profit out of it, while keeping people conveniently isolated from each other. I'm not saying this is a conspiracy of any sort, just rich people supporting the kind of politicians who will benefit them the most in the short term, and rest of us taking the path of least resistance through our lives.

Even if you are fortunate enough to have a good, secure job, it is pretty easy to look around and see that many other people find themselves with no support from family or community and working for minimum wage with no benefits in a job where their schedule can be adjusted and their hours reduced arbitrarily and they can be fired for any reason or no reason at all. And if they end up jobless and homeless, there is a definite tendency to put the blame for this onto them, rather than a system which sees workers as liabilities rather than assets.

No wonder many people are starting to express doubts about the current world order. As BAU continues to collapse it will become more and more clear that there must be a better way to live. Many would tell you that things are more likely to break down into chaos and violence but a closer study human behaviour in disasters shows that when there is trouble, people feel a strong urge to work together to help each other pull through.

Well, that was a lot of words expended in support of a proposition that I originally thought was obvious. I do think it was worth it, but now this post is just about as long as it should be. So I'll wrap things up here and continue next time with a look at the pitfalls and practicalities of forming and working together in groups within your new community.

The Disaster Mythology is a subject that keeps coming up on this blog, and to save explaining it again and again in various posts, I've finally created a page about the subject: The Disaster Mythology. Check it out.


Links to the rest of this series of posts, Preparing for (Responding to) Collapse:

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