Clarifications on Collapse
This stems from a comment thread on Doug Lain's Facebook page:
The bold items are Doug's first attempt to summarize my position on collapse.
___________________________________________________________
One: Social Collapse is very likely because of our reliance on fossil fuels.
I think society can and probably will survive the decline of industrial civilization. To get away from a strawman presentation of the set of ideas that I'm hoping to communicate it will be necessary to differentiate between different sorts of collapse. I think Dmitry Orlov's Five Stages of Collapse provides a pretty workable set of distinctions. I'm willing to work with more distinctions than Dmitry presents, but not fewer.
This morning I was listening to an excerpt of my first interview with Dmitry which took place in early 2007, and I noticed that, at that time, I was talking about the collapse of society as a result of petroleum shortfall, and it wasn't until later that I started to use more precise language and differentiate between the collapse of banking and financial markets, the collapse of global distribution systems, the collapse of nation states, the collapse of local commercial economies and the collapse of the basic structure of civil society. That last one, the collapse of the basic structure of civil society is the penultimate worst case scenario. That's stage 4 in Dmitry Orlov's stages of collapse, and the only thing worse is cultural collapse, which is what Cormac McCarthy depicted in The Road. I do think it will take considerably more than the disappearance of cheap fossil fuel energy to make that happen.
Two: That the way society is structured now relies on complex, abstracted, relationships that work on a level beyond the human scale. That these systems must have cheap oil to function. Cheap oil is leaving the scene.
Some of this is on target, but you're conflating the collapse of the sprawling, hypertrophied infrastructure of global corporate capitalism with the collapse of society.
Three: That this society cannot be changed through direct efforts. That efforts to reform the system are useless in so much as radical measures are required, and that efforts toward radical measures to get at the root causes are doomed from the start.
I'm not sure I know what you mean by direct efforts and radical measures. Given that you want to castigate people you regard as being apolitical, I take both of these phrases to refer to some sort of class-centric, mass movement meant to wrest control of the apparatus of state power so that it can be re-aligned to promote the common good rather than to concentrate wealth and preserve the priviledge of an elite few. I think these sorts of movements certainly can change society, as numerous Marxist revolutions have demonstrated. I just think that the changes these sorts of actions are likely to effect are undesirable and would likely produce a worse outcome than a process in which human-scale communities adapt organically and spontaneously according to local needs and conditions.
But this is a tangential consideration. I only make statements like those in my previous paragraph when I'm responding to criticisms from you. They are not something that I make a point of articulating and reiterating on the C-Realm Podcast. Given what you have left out of your attempted summary, your third item seems intended more as a necessary component in an argument you intend to make later than in a concise formulation of the core C-Realm message on collapse. If you are really trying to demonstrate that you grok what I'm saying, this item does not merit inclusion in so brief a summary as you have presented.
Four: 4. That we must work in small ways to build lifeboats, small permaculture efforts, in our communities.
I want people in different places and situations to explore a wide variety of responses to our predicament and to share the results of their efforts with other, far-flung communities. For example, if we are to avoid a dramatic dieback, we will need to find ways to make city living sustainable and/or ways to redistribute the population, hopefully without violence or overt coercion. I think if everyone were to attempt to implement the same response, no matter how sensible it might seem from a particular perspective, that it would end badly. I think the outcome would be even worse if everyone were coerced into implementing a uniform response to the challenges we face.
I do think that it would be helpful if more people noticed their dependence on sprawling, impersonal networks of abstracted relationships to meet needs that their great-grandparents either met for themselves or satisfied via local networks of mutual interdependence. I think that the more people who become aware of their dependence on these systems and take steps to increase the autonomy and resilience of their local communities the better society will fare as the growth-dependent modus of global corporate capitalism falters. I'm counting on the creativity of people to conceive of approaches that are appropriate to their local situation; things that would never occur to me based on my own experience.
Five: Some small part of you would like to see economic collapse speed up or intensify so that more people will build lifeboats.
The longer we forestall an adaptive response to energy descent and attempt to continue on a growth trajectory, the more pronounced and traumatic the correction will be when it comes. To borrow Jim Kunstler's vocabulary, “The longer we attempt to sustain the unsustainable the less say we will have in the creation of whatever new arrangements replace our current arrangements.” The sooner awareness of the implications of energy descent penetrates what Joe Bagaent calls the Hologram the better. To the extent that a shock would disrupt our cultivated torpor I think it could be salutary.
That said, I'd rather see people get hip to the workings of the corporate media than have circumstances overwhelm its capacity to saturate our waking lives with the message that more growth is the answer to all of our troubles. The C in C-Realm stands for consciousness, and collective trauma is not my preferred means of consciousness expansion. I do not want to see starvation, civil (or 'normal') war, or slavery; much less cannibalism. I think that the longer we attempt to prolong the growth phase of industrial civilization the more likely these possibilities become. We have options open to us now that will not be available later, but our conditioned expectations, more than anything else, prevent us from acting on them. I would rather transcend my own conditioned expectations now than have my circumstances render them moot later.
I notice that you made no mention of the distinction between 'quality of life' and 'standard of living.' This is a central tenet of the memeplex I hope to propagate. You also made no mention of economic or population growth, nor of debt. I would encourage you to work these conceptions into your summation.
Finally, I have recently completed extracting audio excerpts from the 11 interviews that make up Conversations on Collapse for use in an audio CD that I will send out as a Kickstarter backer reward. I think this collection stands as a workable primer of the C-Realm memeplex essentials on the topic of collapse. I will send you a download link and ask that you not attempt to reformulate your presentation until you have listened to and reflected upon it.