A Compass for the Politics of Collapse
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While there are pressing challenges like climate change, aging populations, inequality, and more, I find that the substantial majority of people who devote large amounts of energy towards pondering and preparing for the collapse of civilization are using it as an escapist fantasy. I see lots of parallels with people preparing for Judgement Day: some unprecedented event is going to kill off the majority of the population leaving a chosen few to inherit the new world. These collapse predictions are often rooted in serious issues, but I find that this kind of escapism makes the average person more skeptical of serious activism.
I would say that most upper-middle-class+ educated westerners fit into the "partial denier" archetype, yes. It's in human nature to deny something bad is happening until its too late, and sometimes even then (see, eg. global warming, COVID-19, etc).
To be fair, something fairly similar could be said of most any internet conversation on such topics.
It's probably going to be a decrease in quality of life for many people, but certainly not a cavemen fighting with sticks situation, and the bunker survivors gloriously emerging to rule the wasteland as kings, as some preppers seem to believe.
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
Don't really care much for it.
I disagree. This may be a problem, but I think the bigger problem is one that was described in a post on HN a few weeks back. Namely, that most of the folks advocating for action and sacrifice on climate change are themselves unwilling to lead by example, e.g. stop using air travel, give up or very sharply reduce automobile usage, etc.
This leads a lot of people to either 1) Write the whole thing off as some BS cooked up by elites or; 2) conclude that no one, including those who claim to care most about the issue is actually going to do anything about the problem.
You can't have Congressmen and Senators calling climate change an "existential threat" while they're hopping on a commercial airliner every week to fly back home from DC. While these folks may be correct in their assessment of climate change, their own behavior completely destroys any credibility they may have had on the issue.
Maybe it would convince folks, maybe it wouldn't, but you'd have a chance. By contrast, any effort that involves "Do as I say, not as I do", is pretty much guaranteed to fail, and rightfully so. Trying to force others to do something that you yourself are unwilling to do voluntarily is the exact opposite of leadership.
"All of a sudden" was not claimed.
> There's just no evidence that's an effective way to have societal impact.
No evidence, or none that you are aware of? Also, evidence is not required for something to be true.
> and it doesn't mean that if they did pay more others would follow.
It could be achieved via legislation, which is to some degree influenced by public sentiment, which is to some degree influenced by the manner in which we discuss and conceptualize reality.
The post you replied to isn't talking about the science, but rather the politics. Humans tend to respond badly to authority figures saying but not doing, and this is a real problem that we need to fix (by electing/creating better leaders) in order to meet the requirements of the moment.
So yeah, the total Congress emissions are tiny scientifically, but they're rather large politically.
Also, someone I once read highlighted that political polarisation increased when Reps could fly back home every weekend. Maybe one should require that Senators maintain their primary residence in D.C.?
Oh, it's there, believe me. Just wasn't part of that particular post.
And the "another problem" is to misunderstand the way that money influences PR statements from powerful entities (politicians or otherwise). This part isn't illogical but just ignorant/mis-educated about wealth and power.
Even the historic concept of "collapse" is ill-defined. It's widely accepted today that the Western Roman Empire (probably the most written-about "collapse" event) didn't really collapse at once as much as it slowly changed from within and without. Is this "linear collapse"? I mean maybe, but it may just be the process of change itself.
I expect that, much like every other community, the loudest “collapsers” are merely an embarrassing minority, and certainly I hear that the people who stockpile food and maintain a strong relationship with their neighbours roll their eyes at those who stockpile ammunition and do nothing else.
If the same happened to New York, with the subway abandoned, whole neighbourhoods overgrown by poison ivy and the skyscrapers collapsing from lack of maintenance, "post-apocalyptic" would probably be a fitting word.
I am not sure how you can call such a massive loss of complexity and population something else than a collapse.
It’s the timescale that makes it. I’m thinking Methyr Tydfel in the UK as a point of reference for similar fractional change in the first roughly century of decline, but peaking in the Industrial Age.
If this happened in NYC, I’d expect (say) Queens to turn to rubble while (say) Manhattan is getting freshly built skyscrapers. Plucky adventurers with assault rifles and bows looting tinned food from a suddenly abandoned Whole Foods is more of what I expect during hurricanes than as a standard result everywhere all at one.
If that's what you legitimately think of the developing world, then no wonder you believe in collapse so strongly (almost like the inverse of the "noble savage"; a fear of letting go of the "Western enlightenment" even if it comes from critics of modern Western regimes). Please, go outside and experience the world. Life has fundamentally changed for most of humanity, except for the occasional isolated remote community, over the last 50 years. I urge you to define what "peak prosperity" is and how developing nations lack it before we discuss what "collapse" is and the loss of "peak prosperity".
I have lots of family in developing nations and their lives have absolutely, fundamentally changed. It's borderline insulting to imply that developing nations still live like they did in the past.
Prosperity is always relative to the system you're immersed in and in a globalist world, your prosperity is defined by the prosperity of how people on the other side of the world live. Americans can believe they have the best living conditions in the world and same can do northern Europeans and maybe Japanese too. Let's throw in urbanized chinese middle class too. But in developing countries they don't have the privilege to believe they are in that competition. They are always a province of the empire and living in scarcity.
This says nothing about the enormous changes that went on pretty much everywhere in the rural parts of every country with very few, isolated exceptions.
This entailed most urban centers in the Eastern mediterranean (besides Egypt and Mesopotamia) being violently destroyed, and writing completely disappearing in large regions. And all this happening over the course of maybe 50-100 years.
Arguments can be made for the declining Western Roman Empire, and collapse of some of the Chinese dynastic states. But as you point out, one can rather easily counter argue that this wasn't collapse of civilization but rather the collapse of a specific hegemonic state and its replacement by several smaller competing powers. Civilization still remained: urban center and writing didn't disappear. These were collapses of states not of civilization.
Literate secular class, including Roman state bureaucracy, disappeared as well, and with it large scale planning, monetary economy, large construction projects or most of long distance trade. Only the Church still maintained reading and writing, but that was a very small group of people.
All of this may not fulfill your definition of collapse of civilization, but I believe that a Roman citizen of 2nd century AD, suddenly transported to the 8th century, would be aghast seeing what became of his former home. Even cattle shrunk to half its former size and crop yields diminished, as agricultural best practices were forgotten.
I love to point out how the symbolism of many modern governments is the result of a sort of cargo cult of Roman Republican culture. Government buildings to this day copy the dull gray ruins of Roman buildings, just as many 18th/19th century governments declared popular authority from a Latin-imitating "Senate", filled to the brim with Roman symbolism.
With that in mind, it's not surprising that many today believe the 18th/19th century's "fall of Rome" and "barbarian invasion" myths as a sort of predictive weak-spot of modernity. If you view civilization as a linear path, a story of how the intrinsically superior empires of the Greek/Macedonians and Romans successively lifted the world out of its natural, primitive barbarian state, and the shifting power centers of the 3rd-8th century as a "turning back of time to the Dark Ages" or linear regression along the same path, then the "collapse" narrative is as plain as day. This view on history is pure fantasy, of course, which is why the collapse narratives set in modern days seem so fantastic as well.
> The West _is_ going through a lot of change/political soul searching right now
I believe that you're understating the situation a bit - at least, here in the United States, we're beginning to see markers of the kind of "cultural revolution" that happened in Russia in the 1910's and China in the 1960's - and while neither of those states have collapsed, exactly, tens of millions of innocent people were killed and rather unpleasant governments installed as a result.
While categorically different from total civilization collapse, I don't blame my fellow Americans for starting to get nervous and start prepping like a high-school senior.
While I think it's useful to think about mechanisms of collapse, the author seems to have a clear bias towards the belief that collapse will happen which feels very non-objective.
In my experience, the vast majority of people I interact with (maybe 90%+) fall into the author's categorization of "radical denier" or "partial denier".
I don't think there's anything "radical" about the belief that while things will change, society will go on. But calling the belief radical and suggesting that this is a belief only shared by Very Evil People (e.g. Koch Brothers) is a disingenuous straw man.
For the record, if I had to put myself into this unscientific taxonomy, I might be somewhere between a technological and economic optimist.
The article later refers to an ideology of "eco-fascism" which is even more problematic. That seems like a name that detractors would apply to a group, not a label that someone would self-apply. I don't know what a neutral name would be, though.
* http://the-knowledge.org/en-gb/bibliography/
Deep dives on particular topics of agriculture, food and clothing, substances (charcoal, lime), materials (wood, cement, furnaces, glass), medicine, etc:
* http://the-knowledge.org/en-gb/further-reading-by-chapter/
See also the more light-hearted How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler by Ryan North:
* https://www.howtoinventeverything.com
Which starts with inventing language (spoken and written), before moving to "non-sucky" numbers, the scientific method, and calorie surplus.
The Global Village Construction Set (GVCS) is a modular, DIY, low-cost, high-performance platform that allows for the easy fabrication of the 50 different Industrial Machines that it takes to build a small, sustainable civilization with modern comfort
https://blog.longnow.org/02014/02/06/manual-for-civilization...
It Could Happen Here - podcast by Robert Evans exploring a US decaying in to warring states and dissolving https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1119-it-could-happen-here-307...
Dark Mountain, a twice-yearly collection of short stories and poetry on themes of collapse and ecocide. https://dark-mountain.net/
I should caution people here though. Going down this rabbit hole is not at all good for your mental health and in parallel, much like a particular Big Short scene, glorifying any of the potential scenarios here is glorifying death and suffering on a level never seen before.
We have a lot of problems to solve over the coming years but resisting this train of thought becoming mainstream in the algorithmic feeds that define our future is one of them. This can only have strictly negative consequences of the "self fulfilling prophecy" variety.
Evans has been careful to avoid Doomerism and focus on some of the potential for hope and resiliency, such as in local mutual aid networks.
he's also been using "the crumbles" rather than "collapse", which is a terminology shift I like a lot. "collapse" seems to suggest a singular event, whereas what we are more likely to see (and are currently already experiencing, I think) is a more gradual crumbling of societal institutions.
to paraphrase William Gibson - the collapse is already here, it's just unevenly distributed
And don't forget Evan's State Department/intelligence ties: Bellingcat plus being embedded in US military units in Iraq. We don't know to what extent COINTELPRO-like programs ever ended. Evans fearmongers and overinflates groups like the Proud Boys which are really just marginal organizations without any popular support.
Note: I've been involved in the activist scene in the PNW for years and have known people who know him. Most activists here are highly skeptical of Evans for the reasons above, viewing his work as a mix of LARPing and political voyeurism.
I think, no matter how hard you try, you can't produce something like this without it being biased toward your own opinions on the topic. And those of us with different opinions would phrase things differently. I suppose I would fit in his Pessimist/Defeatist category, though I wouldn't call it that. (And I guess deniers wouldn't call themselves deniers either.) I would probably refer to my own take on collapse as depressive realism rooted in observations of climate change. As one observation, take the latest IPCC report.
U.N. Secretary-General, António Guterres described the latest IPCC report as "a code red for humanity." "The alarm bells are deafening, and the evidence is irrefutable: greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel burning and deforestation are choking our planet and putting billions of people at immediate risk," Guterres said. [1]
The more you look the worse it gets. We aren't going to be able to reduce atmospheric CO2 without some sort of drastic uncomfortable change. The lockdowns during the pandemic reduced emissions by about 17% at one point. But despite that, CO2 in the atmosphere continued to increase. Whatever we do has to be more drastic than the pandemic lockdowns, and permanent, or it will keep getting worse. I just don't see people being willing to go along with that, especially those of us in comfortable Western societies. I don't know, is that pessimism, defeatism, or realism?
That equally applies to climate change as a similar tragedy of the commons played out on a longer timescale. So there are some learnings to be applied if you're looking, as I think many people now are, to identify how things might play out and then make your own life choices accordingly.
Something I'm increasingly certain of is that the future will be boring. By which I mean trends are likely correct but will play out over longer timescales than expected. Visions of sudden collapse and apocalypse are mostly anxiety-fuelled inventions of the mind aimed at spurring action in the present day. Reality is more like economic stagnation, decreasing freedoms, and continual smaller crises that gradually bring us to the predicted future state. Nothing that can be ridden out in a bunker with a few years supply of oats.
As for the future being boring... I suppose if 2020 is a representative sample of what the future has to offer, it won't be. But I agree that a lot of things may just gradually get worse, if we don't figure out how to deal with them. And in terms of climate, the best possible outcome isn't great.
Collapse is a very subtle process that needs to be understood as a set of dynamic interacting forces not a dialectical materialism like process that proceeds inevitably from an invented mythology of historical forces.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/12/can-his...
It worries me to see so many people accept Collapse as inevitable. I think such pessimistic attitudes will lead more people towards radicalization as they see revolutionary change as the only means to preventing collapse.
There must be some part of the human psyche which is attracted to the idea of world ending disasters. Ideas of apocalypse are found in many religions throughout the world.
Perhaps the Collapse movement is the new eschatology for a post-religion world.
My dad was born in ‘39; the first fission bomb was ‘45; first transistor was demonstrated in ‘47; first fusion bomb ‘51; NTSC TV color standard was ‘53; first artificial satellite was ‘58; the laser and the pill in ‘60; measles vaccine in ‘63; the 60s was civil rights, anti-war, free love, gay rights and second-wave feminism in the west, decolonisation in Africa, the green revolution, and the majority of the space race; 8-track, compact cassette, PDP-8, BASIC were all ‘64; first ATM and first human-to-human heart transplant was ‘67; the Mother of All Demos was ‘68.
Then the 70s happened and made the 60s seem languid — the mainframes became home computers, the women became national leaders, space became more relevant, DNA sequencing first invented and then used to fully sequence a virus, first test tube baby and first genetically modified human insulin from E. coli, X-ray tomography and MRIs invented, smallpox eliminated first from the Americas and then worldwide, public key encryption, cochlear implants successfully implanted, first demo of an audio CD, polio eliminated in the USA, …
And the 80s surpassed the 70s like the 70s surpassed the 60s.
So much has changed so fast; these days you can only even keep track of how much has changed because of the crowdsourced efforts of other people.
One of the other patterns I see is justification of apathy. People rationalize lack of desire to work or apply themselves with the justification that the world is going to end relatively soon, so why bother.
Mainly agree. As I was watching the Taliban take over region by region I wondered how many people were watching it in their comfortable home with nice things and climate control and couldn't help but feel envy in that these people (Taliban fighters) are doing something impactful and meaningful in their lives; creating the change they wanted. That while living in poverty relative to the person watching at home, they have real purpose.
Would the unfulfilled and bored person ever be able to put it all on the line for something they are certain is theirs and do their part in a collective of idealists with the same courage of their convictions? That the work to get there doesn't happen in a day or a month or a year but over decades, much like building a meaningful career and family that gives you fulfillment.
I really wish there was a good way of tracking actual sentiment about collapse, and indicators of societal upheaval, to better understand how things really are, or what people really feel in general. There's many such things but they're all imperfect and point in different directions for different groups. Maybe this says something about the complexity of society -- if we could predict collapse, we'd probably be able to avoid it -- but it seems like it deserves more attention. I feel like it's a topic of increasing salience, but I'm not sure I have much to base that on other than people say it is. It is a pandemic, so there's that, but there's been similar things in my lifetime that didn't lead to quite so much collapse narrative.
Maybe things were so good or stable-seeming before that returning to some kind of historical norm with regard to instability factors is bringing things back to a baseline with collapse narrative? End-of-world beliefs are a classic thing; maybe they just disappeared (relatively speaking) for awhile.
Yet despite all of the rhetoric around the pandemic throughout the entire world, very little has functionally changed politically. While the pandemic most certainly exposed many problems throughout world governments, the fact that no major change (e.g. revolution, energy collapse, etc) has actually happened is a testament to the world's current status quo.
> Maybe things were so good or stable-seeming before that returning to some kind of historical norm with regard to instability factors is bringing things back to a baseline with collapse narrative?
The world was a lot less connected before. Now we see the pain around us instantly through shared photos, Twitter, and the 24 hour news cycle. In the past you could go months without realizing that a major conflict was occurring, especially in less connected parts of the world.
One can also imagine cleaner technologies and carbon capture rapidly replacing fossil fuels in the next two decades, reducing the riskier scenarios. At any rate, there's no certainty since none of us has a time machine, and climate models are models of the climate, not human civilization or future technologies.
This implies at a certain point we descend to a less energy-rich lifestyle because we have no alternatives. What that descent looks like, graceful or painful, is an open question. As is exactly when it would happen - Folks were convinced peak oil was just around the corner but reality is a bit less simple.
Neither optimistic nor pessimistic, there will be a lot of issues in many countries, a lot of people will have to live with worse life quality (as they already do since 1970s in many places), but the life will generally go on as usual. Expect a rebound in 2nd half of XXI century.
Collapse will not likely happen, but even if it did, there's the experience of collapse of USSR which offers a lot of insights. The chief of which, humans can take a lot of beating before they actually start to die.
He also explains a lot of macroeconomic material in a way that isn’t very jargon heavy (which can sometimes be hard to find, at least for the schools of thought popular among people who do it professionally).
[1] https://www.principles.com/the-changing-world-order/
[2] https://economicprinciples.org/downloads/bw-populism-the-phe...
[3] generally anything at his site economicprinciples.org, or his book on historical debt crises at https://www.principles.com/big-debt-crises/
From the article perspective they are in the pessimist section. As they are pessimist avoid improving the current state.
Ultimately this perspective doesn't neatly fit into any of the pidgeonholes the author has created. This is a problem with trying to categorize large numbers of humans into sequential, unrelated categories.
Before worrying about a collapse, we should check if we are in a revolutionary situation. And perhaps we are not yet there.
https://peterturchin.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/MPF2019....
I doubt there is one global model or form of a collapse scenario which would happen everywhere. It's likely that some places, already hanging on the edge of chaos, would enter this state in a very short time whereas some would persist over a longer time, and some would perhaps even adapt to the changing circumstances.
“”” Cyberpunk/Sci-fi: The social and ecological collapse is not accompanied by a reduction in material well-being or technological competence, but by a disproportionate growth of the gap between social classes. Often a collapse of the established order is not followed by a chaotic and violent conflict, but by corporations that replace the state and implement dystopian societies. Examples: Autonomous, The Peripheral, Elysium. “””
Humans are very adaptable and scenarios that sound awful to present day people, might be tolerable once they manifest.
We got a million times better at creating vaccines. AIDS vaccine is on the way. Clean technologies are growing exponentially and a future of clean-air cities is approaching fast. Working from home thru video conferences, I saw that in sci-fi when I was a kid, is a day to day reality.
We should be building a better future instead of focusing on extremist views of the world. It was fun to read, it would make no sense to give it too much weight.
The important thing though is not how much we're focused on the problems, but what we're doing about it. Individually we don't have much influence, but we can participate in elections, we can donate to worthy organizations, we can (to some small degree) minimize our climate impact, we can constructively influence discussions about these problems.
Regarding the tendency of people in general to want to believe in the end of the world, I once had an idea for a new randomly-moving holiday called "arbitrary apocalypse day", where you roll 3 D-10s to pick a number of days until the next arbitrary apocalypse day, and roll another die to decide what's going to destroy civilization this time (nuclear war, nanobots, a big meteor, etc..). You treat that day like the end of the world. If everything goes on as normal, then you roll the dice again the next day and select the next arbitrary apocalypse day.
The little squares that you gaze into are just one massive distortion field. If you see whizbang video conferencing and techno hopium, then that's your lens.
If you want to build a better future, please take a stark look at what's actually going down on this planet, and it's not just better Zoom calls.
I don't think we'll get that, though; I expect something more like William Gibson's "Jackpot" (from "The Peripheral" and "Agency"). There's no single collapse, just ongoing failures to solve coordination problems from hundreds of climate-change-spawned disasters, shortages, wars, pandemics, crises, and a century-long excess death toll around 6 billion. When the global kleptocrats pick up the pieces, it ultimately shakes out to cyberpunk ecofascism.
The political question of the early 21st century is what can we salvage? And are we able to work together to do so? The tea leaves aren't looking good.
So, what was the purpose of these categories?
Edit: why downvote?
https://howtosavetheworld.ca/2013/02/04/preparing-for-collap...
The "Reformist" category, if following the same logic as the "Right Wing Accelerationist" category, should have identified this group as being "Left Wing Reformist", because literally every single group listed as an example is a radical leftist/collectivist political movement.
I'm a center-left liberal, so my own biases (and dislike of radical leftists who have hijacked my political party) are likely influencing my judgement of this.
Good bye, and thanks for all the fish!
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/feb/15/why-silicon-val...
Supplemental reading:
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/11/donald-trump...