Every kind of resource is being over-used, including the renewable kind...Fresh water aquifers are declining rapidly all over the worldd, with the cost of drilling wells to depths of more than 500 feet exploding...When a friend asked me about what to do, I replied that the problem would be entirely fixed by the next 100,000 year glacial period....
Green Groopies and other mentally ill inhabitants of DelusiSTAN lament our species failure to ration the Earth’s finite resources and live sustainably.
It never occurs to these morons that even the most basic level of civilization is not sustainable. EV’s are not sustainable. Solar panels are not sustainable. They are so dumb that they have convinced themselves that THIS is sustainable.
Maybe humans are no different from a yeast cell. If a resource is available we will fight for as much of it as we can get, consuming all of it not giving a fuck about the future because if we ration, another human will take our share. Perhaps it is hard coded into our DNA to demand more. Of course it is.
And Eddy and you, little Adam, are wrong about it applying to humans in the biological sense. Cultural anthropology makes absolutely clear that it only applies to humans imprisoned within civilization.
Yeah that was probably you who pointed that out, last thread and the thread before that. Which puts you in the same camp with the evangelicals that say humans are structurally Fallen and you say that all of Creation is Fallen, when in truth what it is is a cultural problem. We didn't have that cultural dysfunction for 97-99pc of our history. We expressly avoided it with our common human cultural heritage known as animism.
I haven't heard about that. Presumably "plasma energy" refers to the internal plasma environment of an advanced particle physics positron-electron annihilation (P-EA) powerplant, which is a technology that I do believe exists non-publicly but is also obviously no solution for Collapse. Even the mythical 'free-energy' device is no solution. (A P-EA powerplant is effectively 'free-energy' given its astronomical efficiency rates but its housing I believe requires alloys that cannot be mass-produced.)
And i'm not interested in wasting my time on trash tabloid video media I can't access most of the time because I mostly only use a flip phone for internet access. If you can find me some serious literature I can give you the hard answer that you're looking for.
I use a flip phone for phone calling, and a broadband PC for internet. I wouldn't want to stretch your eyes trying to read a document on a flip-phone, but thanks for the effort.
As far as I'm concerned the entire field is 'Stretching for hopium' anyway, and my personal 'solution' is greatly reduced human population and a near hunter-gatherer existence.
But with a lifelong interest in occult sciences, which this is apparently tied to.
Moving a single block of 50t stone for a monument would be a vast and highly expensive undertaking today, the prehistoric cultures how much moreso. And yet they built enormous numbers of them, everywhere on Earth.
Food for thought. We can't actually explain this. Why did they bother when wood would have been infinitely easier.
I also have my wife's smartphone I go back and forth on so I can watch video and read at length as necessary.
I believe that serious theory requires serious written, technical argumentation. Critical thinking. Video usually relies on black magic, so to speak. As does everything occult, as I expect that, down deep, you agree; I'm still open to serious presentations rather than tabloid-quality crap. We need to move beyond entertainment news.
Pyramids and parthenon-type buildings: they can be built with thousands and tens of thousands of workers/slaves with wheels, rollers, pulleys, ropes, leverage, and trial-and-error, and decades to spare. Clearly you don't believe that though. Do not underestimate the power of angular momentum; it is the immense force that makes all matter in the universe possible. Doubling and tripling pulleys.
Why did they bother? Because the whole function of large public works projects are to pull-forward economic demand in service of the Maximum Power Principle. That's the structural reason. The psychological/cultural reason is one of pure, raw dominance. Display.
Except there is no evidence for huge, slave encampments for Stonehenge, Gobekli Tepe, or the great pyramids. The reason most think that still is because of the Israelites faked history book, - and that was the behaviour of Post-Roman European society, and they wanted to make it sound normal.
But there's no evidence of it in the archaeological record.
If by "Video black magic" you mean various techniques, I tend to avoid all that level of crap. Which is why I don't reject human-induced climate change, and peak oil. Of course, as you haven't actually seen the vid, that would explain why you are calling it "Tabloid" - I take little offense, having behaved similarly myself in the past. I suppose you could call it "broadsheet", in that Randall Carlson is a step up from Rogan or Dore, and yet still in the realm of "woo".
I'm not so sure the great pyramids were entirely about dominance - although their mystique certainly later added to that when "Egypt" became ruled by egotistical psychopaths. Nor do they seem actually be burial chambers, not least because it would be near impossible to build them within one lifespan, using the "traditional" methods.
There are a lot of questions still to be answered about those buildings, and I don't have the answers - but the mainstream certainly doesn't either.
There was as enormous amount of math and astronomy that went into their building, far more than was required for mere burial chambers, no matter how egotistical the rulers.
They did use metal - asteroid metal. The Mother Religion(s) saw mining as harming the Great Mother - and perhaps they were considerably wiser than we have been.
If you keep hearing about it ... but it never happens... its fake ... it's hopium... they will do whatever it takes to ensure the barnyard animals do not understand that we are on the edge of a cliff...
B, great article. I like the general direction this is headed but you still end the article as if you've never even heard of a legitimate case made for an existing (non-public) degrowth agenda.
You bringing up perestroika, however, is encouraging. You even note that the pro-market restructuring wrought by perestroika was loudly complained about at the time by the Soviet citizenry because it worked at cross-purposes to the commie status quo, as of course it could not *but* do. Exactly the same complaints are being voiced loudly today, by mostly-conservative dissidents screaming that the Elites are purposely destroying civilization; they're not, they're just implementing an inverted, global perestroika that structurally speaking must work at cross-purposes to the collapsing status quo.
I have been referring to the DA as inverted perestroika for 6 or 7 years. The DA was called inverted perestroika before it was ever formalized as the DA.
This should go without saying but perestroika was a pro-market restructuring because the USSR was collapsing into pro-market globalization. It was a forward-looking transitional reformation. So is the DA, inverted, away from corporatist/fascist markets and towards national socialist ones of non-market rationing, public banking, and anti-trust-based market syndicalism.
But despite the supposed underlying financial stress that many people feel, I still see the roads packed with with newish 4WD vehicles, endless ugly suburban developments sprawling across the landscape, and Interstates changing over time from 2 to 3 to 4 lanes each way.
Since the Peak Oil discussions almost some 20 years now, when is the "dieback" if I may use the term, going to occur? How much more planetary destruction (and the US lifestyle is only one aspect of it) can the Earth endure?
Oh Gaia, you are too slow in your reaction to the wantonness of this clever primate - you need to act quickly!
Saying that the biosphere is too slow to react is the same thing as saying that the biosphere is too resilient...
WADR we don't need to close our unwarranted, frail skepticisms of peak oil theory with wistful ruminations. We need critical thinking. And not garden variety critical thinking. Thinking truly needs to go critical. That requires fearlessness.
The cost of living crisis clearly doesn't apply to everyone . It is sad watching nature becoming further diminished. I'd love to see degrowth and scaling back of our impact but I think we're heading towards a very ugly collapse. If people can't afford heating, will they resort to burning plastic and trees? Less fossil fuel availability could actually mean much greater air pollution and environmental destruction. Starvation could lead to us eating any animal we can get our hands on. The countryside might be more pleasant, but I imagine it will be the first to see infrastructure failure as it becomes uneconomical to keep small rural settlements connected to the power grid.
I also expect rightwing libertarianism implemented as a last hurrah. Cutting regulations that protects the environment and workers rights allows the extractive industries to continue a little longer. This is happening in Argentina, looks set to happen in The USA and may be adopted by increasingly desperate European countries.
B - Most of us being narcissists, people just LOVE validation - and one of the reasons I LOVE your posts, I suppose I have to admit, is that your point of view is more or less a complete validation of my own, although better written and footnoted. You seem more forward looking than I am, however, as I've developed my point of view by looking backward at the many examples of failed empires whose bones lie bleaching in the sun all over this planet, my academic training being in archeology. Superimposing their templates of decline and failure on our own trajectory has led me to the same conclusions you've arrived at, for the most part, which I interpret as affirmation. Please accept my admiration and kudos, even though it might be in offering them that I'm partly just patting my own back. One thing, though, as brilliant as your thinking and writing are - because they are so sharp, I'd suggest just a little more proofreading; minor errors in tense and syntax, etc come across to me as evidence of your rushing to complete work that is otherwise impeccable. I only notice because I read your posts so closely - and only read them so closely because I admire them so much. Thanks for all you have to offer - this world is obviously in desperate need of true wisdom and insight...
I'm assuming that English is not B's first language, could be wrong. I also think that the independent, home-scale true ideas originated in the blogosphere supercede formalism in importance, however much a writer's writer may notice grammatical imperfections when reading them.
Being an archeologist, do you have anything to interject upthread regarding the conversation I'm having with Gnuneo? Thanks in advance.
I looked at your argument with Gruneo. If you want to know more about plasma and fusion, your best source is the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (pppl dot gov). Fusion power and construction of tokamaks is largely a welfare program for brainiacs. After collapse, these facilities will just be stranded assets. There is a tokamak facility being built in France near Montpelier. One of the criticisms I read by a credible scientist is that it will have used more energy by the time it is built than it will ever produce. A couple of years ago the Lawrence Livermore Lab results were widely touted but were a complete lie, since the energy produced was far less than it took just to warm up the lasers. Plasma requires transformation of energy and sounds more like a storage device, like hydrogen. You cannot escape the First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics.
Thanks Walter. While it's true that the laws of thermodynamics are true, in and of themselves they do not address the immense electromagnetic embodied energy of atomic bonds nor the similarly immense embodied energy of the 'particles' (the angular momentum of immense energy) themselves. We know without a shadow of a doubt -- from real world experience -- that a positron colliding with an electron results in the two particles' annihilation which in turn produces two gamma rays and some heat, too. The difficulty with harnessing gamma rays for use as an energy source is that they are highly penetrating so difficult to contain in an engine. Thus my previous comment about alloys.
We mustn't forget about all the potentially convertible electromagnetic energy embodied in atomic and subatomic matter itself when we are thinking about available energy at the molecular level.
While I trained as an archeologist and did a fair amount of field work, I actually spent most of my working years as a builder - life takes unexpected turns, in many cases. I always saw building as just a mirror-image of archeology - the same process, just in reverse. My take on the "somehow lost advanced technology" posture so many people lacking actual actual archeological training or experience adopt relative to impressive structures of the past is that they follow the same imperative that people who impute the apparent travel of the sun across the sky to a God driving a chariot - they invent a mythology which, like all mythology, lacks even a single atom of indisputable supporting evidence, and in so doing denigrate the genius and persistence of human beings. No intelligent student of our past will deny that huge holes still exist in our knowledge of it - but that's not an invitation to just make stuff up. My years in both archeology and building taught me that EVERY kind of fabrication leaves physical evidence behind - from minute stone flakes, to tool marks, to broken tools or tool fragments to fingerprints, etc. - it ALWAYS takes tools and materials to make things - even if the tools are just hands. Those who argue for "advanced technologies" or aliens have yet to produce either the aforementioned single atom of indisputable proof or a sound argument for a process that leaves none whatsoever behind - anywhere on the planet. Ever. I have a very open mind on the topic, and I'd love to be astounded by an amazing, world-changing discovery, but it hasn't happened yet - has it? - in spite of centuries searching and literally limitless resources devoted to the search. I'm not holding my breath...
I really like that insight that building is the mirror image of archaeology, thanks.
I appreciate that you have an open mind over the idea that technologies more advanced than what we publicly know of on Earth are plausible. I take it, then, that your reflection that such technologies haven't publicly been achieved doesn't mean they necessarily can't be achieved somewhere in the universe, whether or not they can be achieved here on Earth.
I'm sure you agree that statistics make obvious that we are in all likelihood not the only hyperintelligent species in the universe. Likewise, it's statistically obvious that not all habitable planets are going to be composed of exactly the same suite of minerals.
You say that there's no proof of alien visitations to Earth. On the contrary, I believe that there's an abundance of proof that is not admitted into public discourse for obvious reasons. I also believe that the concept of proof itself has been pigeonholed/boxed into only constituting that which is consistently producible in laboratory experimentation: that institutionalized Big Science power play that seeks to limit organic intelligence. I have soberly seen something in the sky that I do not believe can be explained by publicly known Earth industrialism. Millions have. Physical ecological effects of UFOs have been heavily documented in conjunction with sightings. My squarest of square father, a retired CIA agent, once, together with his co-worker, saw, after-hours, a UFO hovering over the Washington Monument from the window of their CIA station.
I have a wonderful layperson's book by Paul Hill, a pioneering former NASA rocketman, called "Unconventional Flying Objects," who sought to prove that what UFOs do, and how they do it, is entirely consistent with the established laws of physics and, through process-of-elimination, narrows down the relevant advanced technologies required for both the powerplant and the Earth atmosphere drivetrain to one each.
He narrowed the powerplant -- which is the more relevant of the two technologies -- down to being positron-electron annihilation- based: harnessing the gamma radiation that results from the annihilations by conversion of that radiation into usable electricity. This particular conversion technology is called gammavoltaic. It's exactly the same process as photovoltaic but using much shorter-wavelength photons, and the problem with that is that gamma rays are extremely difficult to contain because they are highly penetrating. Perhaps we can't make the necessary alloys. I don't think it's a design problem; I feel we're smart enough for that.
We already use positron beams in the medical industry and research fields.
I had a very potent UFO experience in the desert beyond Death Valley years ago - I know what I saw and I know that there hasn’t to this day been a public revelation of technology like what we (I was camping with my future wife) witnessed. So - either the craft we saw was and remains a super-ultra-mega classified black project of earthly origin - or an extra-terrestrial spacecraft. I could live with either determination, but frankly, my prejudice is that it wasn’t from around here. That being said, I don’t have an atom of proof of that or even that I really saw it, even though both of us know we did. Oh well - what can you do?
Me - I’m an odd mix of old tripper and ultra-rational cuss. Psychedelics expanded my consciousness exponentially, making me a FAR better, wiser and more open minded person, but the side of me that made me a better and successful builder says that and five bucks will buy me my next chai latte. So that takes me back to my reliance on indisputable proof - if every ounce of load isn’t transferred to the foundation, your building isn’t gonna be sound - no matter how much you may “believe” otherwise.
Not every inch of this planet has been scoured for artifacts proving extraterrestrial contact or “lost advanced technologies” so I’m not gonna say it’s impossible any might be found - but neither am I gonna say either that someone has done an unbelievably good job hiding them or that it’s inevitable that that they’ll come to light. Show me and I’ll believe - but until then the jury’s out…
Be well and keep your head down - the crazies are on the loose these days.
Your body is the greatest, most sound building that you ever built. Your eyes are the windows that you built. You are load transfer made sublime. In your entirety, you are so great that your mind doesn't even remember building this absolute masterpiece, because it didn't have to. Your inner, ancestral mind built those windows yet your cuss side -- and I won't call it rational because I just gave it ample reason-based opportunity to understand gammavoltaic load transfer one subatomic annihilation at a time -- remains a separate self.
Isn't it interesting that archaeologists are in the front line of collapse research and the role of declining energy production? Joseph Tainter wrote The Collapse of Complex Societies in 1988 and Ian Morris has done some good work on energy return on investment (EROI). His 2010 book, Why the West Rules - For Now, is one of my favorites. The study of EROI owes a lot to Leslie White and his theory of technology driving human advancement through capturing more energy. My own books draw heavily on my work in archaeology and biological anthropology. I am not surprised though, since anthropology "covers the waterfront" when it comes to humans.
Yep cultural anthropology, which includes your field of archaeology as its hard scientific wing, is the most important and subversive wing of academia. So subversive that it got infiltrated by the intel services at the turn of this century and was progressively hijacked over the following decade, culminating in the rise of their posterboy infiltrator, David Graeber. I consider Marvin Harris' cultural materialism theory to be the high water mark of the field, which peaked in the 70s. He was intuitively incorporating dunbar's number into his theory a couple decades before Dunbar ever formalized it. He blew up Leslie White's externalized, centralized conception of culture and technology with his internalized, decentralized conception of cultural ecology which fully crossed-over into the field of ethics. His term "intensification" also presumably owes a lot to White's work that you mentioned, on harnessing energy. I recommended Harris' book, Cannibals and Kings, here the other week,
I have been using the term hypercomplexity to describe the US for some time now. Hyper in its original Greek meaning means "over," as in an excess or exaggeration of something. Like an exponential rise in complexity rather than a linear rise. There are different meanings in math and cell biology too, where the term hypercomplex is more specific to the field. I think of it as acceleration of acceleration, like the second derivative in calculus. In this formulation for economics, anthropology, etc., France, Germany and the UK are complex socieities while the US is hypercomplex. The US has gotten so complex in its complexity it cannot be wound down. France, Germany and the UK can be wound down and actually survive collapse. The US cannot and will implode upon collapse.
I live in France and see this happening right now. The government fell and Macron had to appoint another Prime Minister this week. Germany's federal government will fall when the No-confidence vote passes in the Bundestag tomorrow (Dec. 16th). In France the distances between villages and towns are smaller, there is a functioning healthcare system, many people make their living "on the black" (the underground economy), and everyone has someone in their extended family or knows someone with memories of World War II and the deprivations of the Nazi occupation. The energy footprint per capita in France is about half the US, so there is not so far to fall upon economic collapse. This is why we moved here.
The point I am making is that there is a continuum of collapse.
Don't you mean a spectrum (of intensity) of collapse rather than a continuum? While i acknowledge that the intensity of dieoff -- which is the best metric for true collapse -- will vary both geographically and temporally, that surely will revolve around population density as a general rule and not minor industrial differences in complexity. The French energy footprint may be half the US but the population density is higher, the nuclear power industry's hypercomplexity poses a far greater risk of fallout than whole France-sized regions of the US such as the pacific northwest, and half the energy footprint is still hundreds or thousands of times the footprint of thd agrarian footprint; an 80-storey fall and a 160-storey fall are both gonna kill you if you don't see it coming.
"a divorce between the growth of monetary claims and that of the oil powered economy can mean only one thing. Inflation. Inflation of prices, together with an inflation of debt and stock market bubbles."
I think this particular phenomenon is called "stagflation", which is combination of rising prices without a corresponding rise in wages. We saw this in the oil shocks of the 1970s and 1980s.
And the inevitable result must be deflation. No one will see that coming! But the ultimate result of stagflation is that people can no longer afford things, and they stop buying.
Unfortunately, deflation is deadly to those in debt — unlike inflation, which eases debt.
"surviving extreme hardship will be the name of the game"... Is it though?
Or is finding a painless way to make a dignified exit a more realistic response?
Anyone who lives in an urban environment is essentially f*cked without external help (food, water, power, etc).
Most people living in cities have neither the space to grow food nor the skills to grow it.
Most people who live in a semi-rural environment and who *might* have enough space to eke out some type of subsistence farming lifestyle don't have the skills to do so nor the time/money to learn, because their time is spent working to put food on the table for today, not for some post-collapse future. Even the people I know who do so pride themselves in their vegetable beds etc are nowhere near self-sustaining... They still rely on external energy inputs in the form of fertilisers, pesticides, seeds etc.
And how many of them know how to prepare and store food for winter?
Again, plenty of people fool themselves that they know how to can, pickle and preserve etc, ignoring the gas or electric stove they use to heat their pressure cooker or water bath, or where the salt, sugar, vinegar, or whatever else you use depending on what you're doing, will come from.
I struggle to see a realistic response for the average person who lives in a normal home in a normal town and is utterly reliant on food in the supermarkets, mains utilities and money to pay for it.
"Or is finding a painless way to make a dignified exit a more realistic response?"
Not for me. I've been getting ready for this for decades.
I agree that it's getting pretty late for someone just becoming enlightened.
The one thing I missed in your comment was "join with others of like mind". The days of the "rugged individualist" are in the rear-view mirror already. For some 299,800 years, humans have been successful only in groups. Being expelled from your group was a death sentence.
Fossil sunlight changed all that, and gave us the illusion that we could be island-like, with a little doomstead up in the hills with rooms filled with freeze-dried food and guns. I really don't think that's going to work.
If you don't have the skills @Stephen Thair mentions, it would be best to join with a bunch of people who do have a number of these skills.
And a heartfelt thanks to those who want to "make a dignified exit". That will make things easier for those of us who want to stick around!
I agree that the stereotypical (American) "prepper" is a delusional onanist. The manufactured worldview of the "rugged individualist" is the original "woke meme" that only ever served the political agenda of the wealthy elites. It is, and always was, complete fiction.
Likewise, I agree that "Community Resilience", I.e. focusing on the survival of an interdependent group rather than of an individual or nuclear family is a far, far, better strategy it's still a strategy that (1) has a low probability of success and (2) could only ever support 10% of the population even if it did. Most of us live in parts of the world (eg cities or suburban areas) where the population far exceeds the carrying capacity of the local ecosystem.
It's great that you've been preparing for decades and presumably live on a smallholding farm and have sufficient land area for crops and livestock to survive at a subsistence level, or with sufficient surplus to generate trade value within your "in-group".
You, or your in-group community, know how to farm sustainably without external energy inputs (no fertiliser, no pesticides, no seeds, no semen, and so on).
You know how to preserve food to survive winter or are lucky enough to live in a mild Mediterranean climate where growing food all year round is viable.
You know how to hunt, trap, butcher, preserve, and tan local game, assuming you live in an area where game from pigeons to rabbits to pigs to deer exist in sufficient quantities. You know how to do all of this without resorting to firearms ie bow-hunting, snare trapping, etc, since ammunition won't last forever.
If firearms are part of the survival strategy, that also assumes you live in a society (like the USA) that allows the stockpiling of firearms and ammunition in a way that 90% of the Western world with gun control does not. And I'd argue that the risks of living inside a gun-fetishing society like the USA creates a whole set of risks to your community that almost certainly outweighs the benefits.
Of course, within your community you'd need someone with medical skills, in a way that excludes 99% of doctors, nurses, paramedics, dentists, veterinarian, and anyone that works in a 21st century medical system. All of their skills and knowledge are largely useless without modern diagnostics and pharmaceuticals, not to mention they are so highly specialised these days that most of them would struggle to set a bone, suture a wound, or deliver a baby, unless they were pretty fresh out of their medical school rotations. Longer term, you'd need someone with a expert level of "herbal medicine that really works and isn't pseudo-science b*llshit", so things like yew bark for herbal aspirin, honey for antiseptic poultices etc. Better add a beekeeper to the list, too, I guess.
Add to the list blacksmith, carpenter, arrowsmith, fletcher, potter, baker, mechanic/engineer, plumber, electrician (for as long as you have electricity from solar, wind, hydro), tailor, tanner, farrier (assuming you have horses for ploughing and transportation), thatcher, weaver etc. The list goes on. And all of that presupposes you all have access to low-tech equivalents of the tools you need for your trades. Little point in having someone with excellent blacksmith skills if they are reliant on a gas-driven forge. And good luck trying to find someone within 200 miles who knows how to make charcoal.
So, let's put this into perspective. Where I live in, in a 1990s housing development with a semi-rural parish of 5500 people in Hampshire, UK, my immediate neighbours are all over 50 and consist of a lawyer, a retired fighter test pilot, a car salesman, a couple of IT people, generic office workers, and a guy with 30 years of experience in designing and installing radar and autoland systems for airports. Yes, some of them have transferrable skills - the ex-test pilot is a pretty good mechanic, the radar engineer is a pretty good carpenter and his wife raises chickens, but all of their experience is predicated on power tools and supplies from the local hardware or automotive suppliers.
Are they "resilient to collapse"? No, not in the slightest.
Are they going to pivot their retirement plans from spending time with the grandkids, and their long-held dreams of travelling the world, in order to learn how to make wire and draw nails, chop down trees and plane lumber with only hand tools, and all the other skills needed to survive a collapse that may or may not happen in their lifetime? Also, no.
Even if they accepted the underlying premise that it will happen, AND it will happen in their lifetime, they are far more likely to (quite rationally) weigh the likelihood of survival, even if they did spend every waking hour focusing on skills development and preparation, versus just continuing as they are, consuming unsustainably, and choose the latter. "It's better to burn out, than to fade away".
So, whilst I 100% accept that a community-based survival strategy is far superior to a prepper "rugged individualist" one, it's still wildly unrealistic for the vast majority of people. Hence why most collapse scenarios have 90% of the population dying in the short to medium term.
I'd also probably argue that, short of making surviving collapse your entire life's work, that survival is far more likely to be based on luck than anything else. You were lucky enough to be born or live in a mild climate all year round, with access to clean, safe, drinking water, abundant solar or hydro power, fertile farmland, woodland teaming with wildlife, with Amish neighbours on one side and a Renaissance Fair or Roman re-enactment campsite on the other (LARPing nerds will inherit the earth, fact!).
A very good post, that highlights the issue perfectly. I live in a village filled with geriatrics, so I'll get a lot of space to myself once they've decided against the future! One thing I thought was interesting about your post, was this:
"Add to the list blacksmith, carpenter, arrowsmith, fletcher, potter, baker, mechanic/engineer, plumber, electrician (for as long as you have electricity from solar, wind, hydro), tailor, tanner, farrier (assuming you have horses for ploughing and transportation), thatcher, weaver etc"
I guess the above depends on the technology we/you/I choose to retain or utilise going forward. I'd suggest the above roles wouldn't be specialist individual roles, rather facets that an individual might have many of. For example, I can forge a chisel, harvest and build with wood, bake bread, and do so some of the others in basic form. However, I don't foresee having the need for many of the things on the list, and definitely not in anything other than rudimentary form. I suspect that the most important skill will be plant knowledge and gardening. Cultivating species like Hazel and Willow (UK) for fuel and basketry, and simply using existing buildings until they collapse (soon, in the case of UK new-builds!). Similarly existing hand tools, fairly plentiful in the UK, will cover many needs for some time. I say that, because we have so much material resource in our houses and communities, that forming a rudimentary survival will be predicated almost entirely on access to food. I think that perhaps your specialisation will perhaps come a generation or two down the line. All very hypothetical of course, I suspect someone will trigger a nuclear accident somewhere down the line.
"full of geriatrics"... What, you live in Hampshire, too? 👀😂
I am reminded of the old joke about the two men running away from the bear and the first says "do you think we can outrun the bear?" and the second says "I don't have to outrun the bear, I only have to outrun you...".
So, in the collapse scenario a "scavenger strategy" becomes viable you can survive the initial stages proportionally better than others and thereby you can scavenge their resources to improve your own survival once they no longer need them. I guess this is almost the exact opposite of the community-based resilience model. Bleak as f*ck though. But I wonder if this would fall under what Greer would call "catabolic collapse"? You're just postponing the inevitable by consuming (scavenging) the non-renewable local resources, you're not establishing a sustainable future.
My concern is will we have continuity of skills when we no longer have access to digital services? I'm not even sure I have a physical library within a day's walk, or if it would have books on weaving, tanning, bushcraft etc.
"My concern is will we have continuity of skills when we no longer have access to digital services?"
I wonder if Starlink will keep running? It's not like satellites require an extension cord!
I've got some 20,000 sufficiency-related books and articles on e-ink readers with a solar charger. We have 21 kWh of flooded-cell NiCd batteries that should last much longer than lithium. We have DC-to-light amateur radio gear, and know how to use it and maintain it.
I'm under no illusion that's any such technology is a long-term solution, but it might make the short-term survivable.
This, in a cool Mediterranean climate with two streams and a river, abundant wildlife, and 37 megawatts of hydropower a short walk away. That's a bit much, but the dam and pentstock is in place to tap into for smaller amounts of power. We have two electrical engineers and a mechanical engineer, and can weld up a Pelton turbine on battery power if we have to.
We're not enamoured of firearms; two of us make yew bows for a living. Even I can do a lung-shot and track it until it bleeds out.
I disagree that you, or even your intentional community has to be totally self-sufficient. We are surrounded by small farms that specialize in a number of things that we won't have to produce. We're on a "virtual island" and we all have an "island mentality".
The right mix of community and isolation is key. You aren't going to do this on your own, nor are you ever going to have enough guns and ammo to fight off a nearby-city's worth of refugees.
I started working on this twenty years ago. It's going to be difficult to start now and be ready before the excrement is applied to the ventilator!
Yes, it is bleak. However, or far off ancestors had no use for specialists in any real sense, and our use of specialisms has led us to the current situation, since around the time of agriculture. I see no reason why adopting that model wouldn't do exactly the same again, essentially buying us a couple of thousand years. I guess I'm pushing back slightly on the community model that consists of a baker, a farmer, a weaver, a shoemaker, a blacksmith and so on. I think that leads to the abstraction that exists today, where we're essentially a domesticated species, with all our basic needs met from far away. Although, I think that the model you present is far more likely, because it is what people know. Maybe there'll be a blog in 5,000 years' time discussing it!
I appreciate what David Holmgren told me buring a three-day Permaculture seminar: "Everyone needs to be a jack-of-all-trades, and a master of ONE!"
I agree that, in a declining energy environment, generalization is the key.
But that also leaves room for important specialties. Daniel is a fantastic bread maker. Sure, I could make bread if I had to, but why should I when we have access to a "bread specialist"? Like me, Daniel also fixes things, which is beyond the skills of many, including some who are very good at sewing, for instance. I can put a patch on a rip, but not tailor a shirt from nothing but salvaged fabric.
Without much research to back me up, I think that "our ancestors had no use for specialists" goes way too far. There's always the best hunter, the best leader, the medicine man, the spiritual seer, etc.
I'm also dubious that simple "agriculture" is the bogeyman that many claim.
Rather, I think it was *grain* agriculture that started us down the wrong path. In "Guns, Germs, and Steel", Jared Diamond points out that equatorial people who cultivated root crops tended to have peaceful relations with neighbours. But they were easy marks for grain-toting invaders from temperate climates.
When agriculture results in being able to store food over more than a turn of the seasons, hoarding and withholding results. Granary receipts were arguably the first form of money.
Recent evidence backs this up. In northern British Columbia, there lived a vibrant civilization over 7,000 years ago — based on organized hazelnut agriculture. Without refrigeration, hazelnuts go rancid, and they can't be hoarded and withheld. By all accounts, this civilization — which pre-dates Egyptian wheat culture — was egalitarian. https://thetyee.ca/News/2024/12/04/Hazelnuts-Reveal-Secrets-Ancient-BC-City/
"[Ishmael] There's only one way you can force people to accept an intolerable lifestyle. [Julie] Yea. You have to lock up the food." — Daniel Quinn, The Teachings That Came Before & After Ishmael p181.
Hi Stephen, I'm pretty sure that everyone here knows that average ain't gonna cut it. Evolution never selects for average. Being average -- mediocre -- is almost always a choice. There are people out there who have and are dedicating their lives to improving their position come hell or high water. A dozen years ago my marriage almost didn't survive our completely overhauling our lives for collapse. I'm grateful it did survive. Other marriages haven't, no doubt. A divorcee can take responsibility for both a broken family and a resilient way of life that looks to provide a lifeboat for that broken family. We live in all or nothing times IMO.
Agape before eros, and before industrial conceptions of loyalty, too. I say drag em kicking and screaming if you have to. This one's for all the marbles. Anything less is capture bondage.
While managing renewable energy research in the federal government, I saw first-hand the hypernormalisation of refusing to see, let alone acknowledge, the oncoming cliff. It's absolute mass psychosis.
Your link-fu is excellent. Thank you for weaving these threads together. I encourage you to persist with this useful work.
You made many interesting comments, but I'll focus here on the idea of money. Money is a promise of future value, a debt. We live in a system which continually borrows from the future, which only makes sense in a situation of exponentially increasing value. For the situation we are facing, energy reduction and shrinking production, we will need to create a way of life which does not steal from the future but rather invests in it. That is to say, we need to put aside some substantial portion of our energy, while we are still on the plateau, to create value for future generations in a form which will be useful to them in the reality in which they'll be living. As you point out, the oligarchs are certainly not going to decide to do this. I think the future culture will need to be built from the ground up, from local seeds.
Let me give a practical example. If I build a chicken coop, buy chickens and invest the time and effort to learn how to keep them alive and productive, then (factoring in the value of my labour) I will probably end up spending far more for a dozen eggs than I would pay at the supermarket. But when eggs are ten times their current price, my children will thank me. And when the supermarket shelves are all empty, my grandchildren will thank me.
I feel no desire to "make money". I just want to begin the building of a better culture than the one I was born into. This will not be easy, and I may well fail, but I will still try.
"f I build a chicken coop, buy chickens and invest the time and effort to learn how to keep them alive and productive… my children will thank me."
Egg production, as practised by perhaps 99% of all producers — even the homestead ones — is fairly dependent on industrial grain production.
It's possible to have _some_ eggs without 50 pound sacks of industrial layer mash, but it will be a small fraction of what people might be expecting. And you'll need more land than just a city lot to have "pasture-raised" eggs.
Heh, it's funny, nearly every time I mention raising chooks on the net, someone pops up to tell me that energy out <= energy in.
As I was simply giving an example of something we could invest resources in while we have them, to benefit us when we don't, I didn't think it necessary to mention the surrounding garden ecosystem that would need to be in place to support the chickens, nor the community that would need to exist around that household garden. Humans did keep chickens prior to industrial grain production, though, and still found them useful.
While we might not be able to replace the amount of eggs we can currently afford to buy from the supermarket, when the shelves are empty, even if the amount of land we have under cultivation is only enough to support three chooks giving us one egg a day, then that will still be more protein than zero eggs a day. We'd just save them for the very young or pregnant. In addition, chickens eat pest insects, pull weeds and produce manure.
In a few words, you have summed things up brilliantly. From my reading over the decades, I have encountered many people who understand the problems with The Great Game and a few who have some reasonable, workable ideas about how to extricate ourselves from this pathological culture and build something more just and sustainable. With all the great ideas we've had over the past two centuries after the advent of modern techno-industrial civilization, we find ourselves here, now, accelerating toward decades of pain followed by oblivion. "What ideas will fill that vacuum left behind by oligarchic capitalism, however, will depend on how well informed we are about our predicament and how we plan to adapt to its many outcomes." What we're missing in your piece here are the hyperlinks to your work and others that articulate alternatives and what those willing to sacrifice might do now to achieve them. So, I'm guessing the masses will enjoy "having the conversation" before panic ensues. I do appreciate your work here.
Hum... E. Todd's distinction between illiberal democracies and liberal oligarchies makes a lot of sense to me. The big difference being that people in liberal oligarchies can use much more free speech and say (almost) whatever they want. But they are supposed to show their gratitude by voting for whoever they are told to...
In the mean time, I sometime wonder if there was really an other way out of our predicament.
Of course, many people would say there were many options if only the people in charge have been less greedy and so on.
And still, I wonder if it wasn't all written in advance. If, as the energy was bound to become scarcer anyway, there really was an other way that would have prevented common people's standard of living in Western country to collapse even faster. At least, they were kept happy as long as possible so they didn't break the whole system appart and, for herding them successfully, the ruling class got their profits as a reward. Everybody was quite happy. So far....
But I do believe that "cultural materialism" is a very important factor, and the leading one in many cases, in the way civilization evolve, strongly restricting possibilities whatever the ideological or political will might be.
I found Ian Morris' "Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels" very convincing for exemple. Much more than David Graeber's "Dawn of Everything".
Thanks Tris. Glad to hear that you didn't like Dawn of Everything. It made the remaining classical cultural anthropologists in the field furious because his thesis, as I understand it -- and I didn't read the book myself -- is that civilization CAN be egalitarian, which is just trash thinking to classicists like myself. Graeber was an intelligence operative in my opinion. Highly dubious and unqualified career which he finished out in an honorary position at the LSE of all places. I believe he was their first anthropology post. LOL.
Anyway, I read some reviews of Morris' book on Amazon to get the gist of it and he's definitely not a classicist. The field is not what it was. Highly recommend Cannibals and Kings for a look at the field in its heyday. I think you'll find his insights unassailable and possibly worldview-changing. That was my experience.
Hey again, Tris. My comment to Bob earlier this morning,
about ancestral mind, caused me to realize that I didn't do justice to my last reply to you.
What I mean by classical in classical cultural anthropology is ancestral mind. Looking at humans through a 99pc-weighted ancestral mind because that is what we objectively are.
The classical, peak phase of any field arrives when technical maturity is reached, and reaching maturity takes time. For anthropology it took a couple hundred years of formalism - of building a systems theory. For a human it takes about three decades of adulthood to mature holistically, and that prime, peak phase lasts about a decade, from approximately the age of 45 to the age of approximately 55. Almost all of the greatest masterpieces of literature, for example, were written by people who were in their prime. Marvin Harris -- the Michael Jordan of cultural anthropology -- had just entered his prime with Cannibals and Kings and he happened to do so just as the field itself was ready to be completed as a holistic systems theory on human culture. Cannibals and Kings is an accurate, objectivist theory of everything framework. It did nothing less than lay out Natural Law as it applies to mankind so that future ancestral minds like ourselves can continue to refine it.
His cultural materialism was not the garden variety anthropological materialist theory of resource availability. It was instead a lived, ecological experience of ancestral mind, and so deeply so that he was able to divine the inner life of those five pristine, most fateful moments in human history when Big Man animism tipped over into chieftain ways due to the only Natural Law reason that it ever does so which is the chronic human compaction of the local (bioregional) ecology finally breaking the collective animist spirit of a society. From the gnawing intergenerational malnutrition that devolves any species.
Ian Morris doesn't know the first thing about ancestral mind. He's just a 21st century 'anthropologist' in name only. Frankly he doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground. He's all fiat relativism and no objectivistic structuralism. For but one example, he claims that industrial culture is less violent and more egalitarian than agrarian culture yet that relative peace among the general population -- if it even exists at all and I have my serious doubts that it does -- is only made possible by a much, much more powerful monopoly on violence by the industrial Police State, and the supposed increase in egalitarianism is a bad joke when gauging the relative spectrums of inequality of an industrial world with third world slums at one end and plutocrats at the other, compared to the worst divide that any farming culture has to offer.
Hum... I will give a try to Cannibals and Kings then. See if I find it convincing. More or less than Morris' work. Or maybe just different.
Beside, I'm not convinced so much about your argument regarding compared divide between rich and poor in agrarian and modern society. Modern societies are far from perfect. That's for sure. But, at least, there no god-kings and legal slaves anymore...
So I've read the first few chapters of the book. It's quite interesting. I think I will buy it.
And still, each chapter could be discussed.
For exemple, I don't buy the population control by infanticide as the main factor in hunters-gatherers population stability.
It might play a role in some occasions or some cultures. But there are others explanations. A catastrophic event (be it a very cold winter that prevent prey migration, a very dry summer, a cyclone, a forest fire, whatever… or even a raid from other people) happening on average 2 or 3 time per century and halving the population might do it too. While allowing an healthy diet most of the time and a doubling of the population in 3 or 4 decades, thus making the event all the more deadly for people lacking the mean to store food from one year to the next.
And this way, long term population stability has nothing to do with culture. People just keep reproducing as much as they can. Like all other life forms in the area.
Grow meat first. Mammals are by far the greatest dynamic accumulators (of nutrients) on the planet. Without those nutrients we could never have evolved from hominids into humans in the first place. Ever since religion was first implemented by Elites as a cultural technology for circumventing the dunbar number, human brain volume has been shrinking from its peak volume about 10,000 years ago.
Want to start reversing that and optimize your potential in the meantime? Grow your own grass fed mammals and eat them every day, including the bone broth and all of the organs and glands. I butcher a sheep or goat about every 10 days on average, and my 43 acres gets better and better every year.
Very much on the money. Thank you for the link to Dave's work
Every kind of resource is being over-used, including the renewable kind...Fresh water aquifers are declining rapidly all over the worldd, with the cost of drilling wells to depths of more than 500 feet exploding...When a friend asked me about what to do, I replied that the problem would be entirely fixed by the next 100,000 year glacial period....
Green Groopies and other mentally ill inhabitants of DelusiSTAN lament our species failure to ration the Earth’s finite resources and live sustainably.
It never occurs to these morons that even the most basic level of civilization is not sustainable. EV’s are not sustainable. Solar panels are not sustainable. They are so dumb that they have convinced themselves that THIS is sustainable.
Maybe humans are no different from a yeast cell. If a resource is available we will fight for as much of it as we can get, consuming all of it not giving a fuck about the future because if we ration, another human will take our share. Perhaps it is hard coded into our DNA to demand more. Of course it is.
https://fasteddynz.substack.com/p/humans-are-no-smarter-than-yeast
This is called the Maximum Power Principle.
And Eddy and you, little Adam, are wrong about it applying to humans in the biological sense. Cultural anthropology makes absolutely clear that it only applies to humans imprisoned within civilization.
Listen up.
As someone pointed out elsewhere... humans are nothing more than apes who can talk
Yeah that was probably you who pointed that out, last thread and the thread before that. Which puts you in the same camp with the evangelicals that say humans are structurally Fallen and you say that all of Creation is Fallen, when in truth what it is is a cultural problem. We didn't have that cultural dysfunction for 97-99pc of our history. We expressly avoided it with our common human cultural heritage known as animism.
Which is the kind of thing that someone who is genuinely nothing more than an ape that can talk would say.
At the end of the day we are apes
I keep hearing about "Plasma energy", but lack the technical competence to begin to understand it. Any ideas on that, HS?
I haven't heard about that. Presumably "plasma energy" refers to the internal plasma environment of an advanced particle physics positron-electron annihilation (P-EA) powerplant, which is a technology that I do believe exists non-publicly but is also obviously no solution for Collapse. Even the mythical 'free-energy' device is no solution. (A P-EA powerplant is effectively 'free-energy' given its astronomical efficiency rates but its housing I believe requires alloys that cannot be mass-produced.)
Where are you hearing about plasma energy?
Here's one example.
I'm not interested in knee-jerk denialism, I want hard answers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wINNhAML9uc
And i'm not interested in wasting my time on trash tabloid video media I can't access most of the time because I mostly only use a flip phone for internet access. If you can find me some serious literature I can give you the hard answer that you're looking for.
I use a flip phone for phone calling, and a broadband PC for internet. I wouldn't want to stretch your eyes trying to read a document on a flip-phone, but thanks for the effort.
As far as I'm concerned the entire field is 'Stretching for hopium' anyway, and my personal 'solution' is greatly reduced human population and a near hunter-gatherer existence.
But with a lifelong interest in occult sciences, which this is apparently tied to.
Moving a single block of 50t stone for a monument would be a vast and highly expensive undertaking today, the prehistoric cultures how much moreso. And yet they built enormous numbers of them, everywhere on Earth.
Food for thought. We can't actually explain this. Why did they bother when wood would have been infinitely easier.
But anyway, thanks for the effort.
I also have my wife's smartphone I go back and forth on so I can watch video and read at length as necessary.
I believe that serious theory requires serious written, technical argumentation. Critical thinking. Video usually relies on black magic, so to speak. As does everything occult, as I expect that, down deep, you agree; I'm still open to serious presentations rather than tabloid-quality crap. We need to move beyond entertainment news.
Pyramids and parthenon-type buildings: they can be built with thousands and tens of thousands of workers/slaves with wheels, rollers, pulleys, ropes, leverage, and trial-and-error, and decades to spare. Clearly you don't believe that though. Do not underestimate the power of angular momentum; it is the immense force that makes all matter in the universe possible. Doubling and tripling pulleys.
Why did they bother? Because the whole function of large public works projects are to pull-forward economic demand in service of the Maximum Power Principle. That's the structural reason. The psychological/cultural reason is one of pure, raw dominance. Display.
Except there is no evidence for huge, slave encampments for Stonehenge, Gobekli Tepe, or the great pyramids. The reason most think that still is because of the Israelites faked history book, - and that was the behaviour of Post-Roman European society, and they wanted to make it sound normal.
But there's no evidence of it in the archaeological record.
If by "Video black magic" you mean various techniques, I tend to avoid all that level of crap. Which is why I don't reject human-induced climate change, and peak oil. Of course, as you haven't actually seen the vid, that would explain why you are calling it "Tabloid" - I take little offense, having behaved similarly myself in the past. I suppose you could call it "broadsheet", in that Randall Carlson is a step up from Rogan or Dore, and yet still in the realm of "woo".
I'm not so sure the great pyramids were entirely about dominance - although their mystique certainly later added to that when "Egypt" became ruled by egotistical psychopaths. Nor do they seem actually be burial chambers, not least because it would be near impossible to build them within one lifespan, using the "traditional" methods.
There are a lot of questions still to be answered about those buildings, and I don't have the answers - but the mainstream certainly doesn't either.
There was as enormous amount of math and astronomy that went into their building, far more than was required for mere burial chambers, no matter how egotistical the rulers.
A question I would have for you is that if technologically advanced past civilizations existed then why were they still working in stone?
They did use metal - asteroid metal. The Mother Religion(s) saw mining as harming the Great Mother - and perhaps they were considerably wiser than we have been.
Technologically advanced =/= Intellectually advanced.
If our far-descendants (If we have any) get any warnings from our current suicidal course, they may well avoid metallurgy too.
If you keep hearing about it ... but it never happens... its fake ... it's hopium... they will do whatever it takes to ensure the barnyard animals do not understand that we are on the edge of a cliff...
e.g. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20181119-why-flammable-ice-could-be-the-future-of-energy
B, great article. I like the general direction this is headed but you still end the article as if you've never even heard of a legitimate case made for an existing (non-public) degrowth agenda.
You bringing up perestroika, however, is encouraging. You even note that the pro-market restructuring wrought by perestroika was loudly complained about at the time by the Soviet citizenry because it worked at cross-purposes to the commie status quo, as of course it could not *but* do. Exactly the same complaints are being voiced loudly today, by mostly-conservative dissidents screaming that the Elites are purposely destroying civilization; they're not, they're just implementing an inverted, global perestroika that structurally speaking must work at cross-purposes to the collapsing status quo.
I have been referring to the DA as inverted perestroika for 6 or 7 years. The DA was called inverted perestroika before it was ever formalized as the DA.
This should go without saying but perestroika was a pro-market restructuring because the USSR was collapsing into pro-market globalization. It was a forward-looking transitional reformation. So is the DA, inverted, away from corporatist/fascist markets and towards national socialist ones of non-market rationing, public banking, and anti-trust-based market syndicalism.
I like your blog and agree with what you say.
But despite the supposed underlying financial stress that many people feel, I still see the roads packed with with newish 4WD vehicles, endless ugly suburban developments sprawling across the landscape, and Interstates changing over time from 2 to 3 to 4 lanes each way.
Since the Peak Oil discussions almost some 20 years now, when is the "dieback" if I may use the term, going to occur? How much more planetary destruction (and the US lifestyle is only one aspect of it) can the Earth endure?
Oh Gaia, you are too slow in your reaction to the wantonness of this clever primate - you need to act quickly!
Quercus
Saying that the biosphere is too slow to react is the same thing as saying that the biosphere is too resilient...
WADR we don't need to close our unwarranted, frail skepticisms of peak oil theory with wistful ruminations. We need critical thinking. And not garden variety critical thinking. Thinking truly needs to go critical. That requires fearlessness.
The cost of living crisis clearly doesn't apply to everyone . It is sad watching nature becoming further diminished. I'd love to see degrowth and scaling back of our impact but I think we're heading towards a very ugly collapse. If people can't afford heating, will they resort to burning plastic and trees? Less fossil fuel availability could actually mean much greater air pollution and environmental destruction. Starvation could lead to us eating any animal we can get our hands on. The countryside might be more pleasant, but I imagine it will be the first to see infrastructure failure as it becomes uneconomical to keep small rural settlements connected to the power grid.
I also expect rightwing libertarianism implemented as a last hurrah. Cutting regulations that protects the environment and workers rights allows the extractive industries to continue a little longer. This is happening in Argentina, looks set to happen in The USA and may be adopted by increasingly desperate European countries.
B - Most of us being narcissists, people just LOVE validation - and one of the reasons I LOVE your posts, I suppose I have to admit, is that your point of view is more or less a complete validation of my own, although better written and footnoted. You seem more forward looking than I am, however, as I've developed my point of view by looking backward at the many examples of failed empires whose bones lie bleaching in the sun all over this planet, my academic training being in archeology. Superimposing their templates of decline and failure on our own trajectory has led me to the same conclusions you've arrived at, for the most part, which I interpret as affirmation. Please accept my admiration and kudos, even though it might be in offering them that I'm partly just patting my own back. One thing, though, as brilliant as your thinking and writing are - because they are so sharp, I'd suggest just a little more proofreading; minor errors in tense and syntax, etc come across to me as evidence of your rushing to complete work that is otherwise impeccable. I only notice because I read your posts so closely - and only read them so closely because I admire them so much. Thanks for all you have to offer - this world is obviously in desperate need of true wisdom and insight...
I'm assuming that English is not B's first language, could be wrong. I also think that the independent, home-scale true ideas originated in the blogosphere supercede formalism in importance, however much a writer's writer may notice grammatical imperfections when reading them.
Being an archeologist, do you have anything to interject upthread regarding the conversation I'm having with Gnuneo? Thanks in advance.
I looked at your argument with Gruneo. If you want to know more about plasma and fusion, your best source is the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (pppl dot gov). Fusion power and construction of tokamaks is largely a welfare program for brainiacs. After collapse, these facilities will just be stranded assets. There is a tokamak facility being built in France near Montpelier. One of the criticisms I read by a credible scientist is that it will have used more energy by the time it is built than it will ever produce. A couple of years ago the Lawrence Livermore Lab results were widely touted but were a complete lie, since the energy produced was far less than it took just to warm up the lasers. Plasma requires transformation of energy and sounds more like a storage device, like hydrogen. You cannot escape the First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics.
Thanks Walter. While it's true that the laws of thermodynamics are true, in and of themselves they do not address the immense electromagnetic embodied energy of atomic bonds nor the similarly immense embodied energy of the 'particles' (the angular momentum of immense energy) themselves. We know without a shadow of a doubt -- from real world experience -- that a positron colliding with an electron results in the two particles' annihilation which in turn produces two gamma rays and some heat, too. The difficulty with harnessing gamma rays for use as an energy source is that they are highly penetrating so difficult to contain in an engine. Thus my previous comment about alloys.
We mustn't forget about all the potentially convertible electromagnetic energy embodied in atomic and subatomic matter itself when we are thinking about available energy at the molecular level.
While I trained as an archeologist and did a fair amount of field work, I actually spent most of my working years as a builder - life takes unexpected turns, in many cases. I always saw building as just a mirror-image of archeology - the same process, just in reverse. My take on the "somehow lost advanced technology" posture so many people lacking actual actual archeological training or experience adopt relative to impressive structures of the past is that they follow the same imperative that people who impute the apparent travel of the sun across the sky to a God driving a chariot - they invent a mythology which, like all mythology, lacks even a single atom of indisputable supporting evidence, and in so doing denigrate the genius and persistence of human beings. No intelligent student of our past will deny that huge holes still exist in our knowledge of it - but that's not an invitation to just make stuff up. My years in both archeology and building taught me that EVERY kind of fabrication leaves physical evidence behind - from minute stone flakes, to tool marks, to broken tools or tool fragments to fingerprints, etc. - it ALWAYS takes tools and materials to make things - even if the tools are just hands. Those who argue for "advanced technologies" or aliens have yet to produce either the aforementioned single atom of indisputable proof or a sound argument for a process that leaves none whatsoever behind - anywhere on the planet. Ever. I have a very open mind on the topic, and I'd love to be astounded by an amazing, world-changing discovery, but it hasn't happened yet - has it? - in spite of centuries searching and literally limitless resources devoted to the search. I'm not holding my breath...
Great comment, Bob, thanks. I'll have to get back to you later on.
I really like that insight that building is the mirror image of archaeology, thanks.
I appreciate that you have an open mind over the idea that technologies more advanced than what we publicly know of on Earth are plausible. I take it, then, that your reflection that such technologies haven't publicly been achieved doesn't mean they necessarily can't be achieved somewhere in the universe, whether or not they can be achieved here on Earth.
I'm sure you agree that statistics make obvious that we are in all likelihood not the only hyperintelligent species in the universe. Likewise, it's statistically obvious that not all habitable planets are going to be composed of exactly the same suite of minerals.
You say that there's no proof of alien visitations to Earth. On the contrary, I believe that there's an abundance of proof that is not admitted into public discourse for obvious reasons. I also believe that the concept of proof itself has been pigeonholed/boxed into only constituting that which is consistently producible in laboratory experimentation: that institutionalized Big Science power play that seeks to limit organic intelligence. I have soberly seen something in the sky that I do not believe can be explained by publicly known Earth industrialism. Millions have. Physical ecological effects of UFOs have been heavily documented in conjunction with sightings. My squarest of square father, a retired CIA agent, once, together with his co-worker, saw, after-hours, a UFO hovering over the Washington Monument from the window of their CIA station.
I have a wonderful layperson's book by Paul Hill, a pioneering former NASA rocketman, called "Unconventional Flying Objects," who sought to prove that what UFOs do, and how they do it, is entirely consistent with the established laws of physics and, through process-of-elimination, narrows down the relevant advanced technologies required for both the powerplant and the Earth atmosphere drivetrain to one each.
He narrowed the powerplant -- which is the more relevant of the two technologies -- down to being positron-electron annihilation- based: harnessing the gamma radiation that results from the annihilations by conversion of that radiation into usable electricity. This particular conversion technology is called gammavoltaic. It's exactly the same process as photovoltaic but using much shorter-wavelength photons, and the problem with that is that gamma rays are extremely difficult to contain because they are highly penetrating. Perhaps we can't make the necessary alloys. I don't think it's a design problem; I feel we're smart enough for that.
We already use positron beams in the medical industry and research fields.
I had a very potent UFO experience in the desert beyond Death Valley years ago - I know what I saw and I know that there hasn’t to this day been a public revelation of technology like what we (I was camping with my future wife) witnessed. So - either the craft we saw was and remains a super-ultra-mega classified black project of earthly origin - or an extra-terrestrial spacecraft. I could live with either determination, but frankly, my prejudice is that it wasn’t from around here. That being said, I don’t have an atom of proof of that or even that I really saw it, even though both of us know we did. Oh well - what can you do?
Me - I’m an odd mix of old tripper and ultra-rational cuss. Psychedelics expanded my consciousness exponentially, making me a FAR better, wiser and more open minded person, but the side of me that made me a better and successful builder says that and five bucks will buy me my next chai latte. So that takes me back to my reliance on indisputable proof - if every ounce of load isn’t transferred to the foundation, your building isn’t gonna be sound - no matter how much you may “believe” otherwise.
Not every inch of this planet has been scoured for artifacts proving extraterrestrial contact or “lost advanced technologies” so I’m not gonna say it’s impossible any might be found - but neither am I gonna say either that someone has done an unbelievably good job hiding them or that it’s inevitable that that they’ll come to light. Show me and I’ll believe - but until then the jury’s out…
Be well and keep your head down - the crazies are on the loose these days.
Cool, Bob, thanks.
Your body is the greatest, most sound building that you ever built. Your eyes are the windows that you built. You are load transfer made sublime. In your entirety, you are so great that your mind doesn't even remember building this absolute masterpiece, because it didn't have to. Your inner, ancestral mind built those windows yet your cuss side -- and I won't call it rational because I just gave it ample reason-based opportunity to understand gammavoltaic load transfer one subatomic annihilation at a time -- remains a separate self.
Isn't it interesting that archaeologists are in the front line of collapse research and the role of declining energy production? Joseph Tainter wrote The Collapse of Complex Societies in 1988 and Ian Morris has done some good work on energy return on investment (EROI). His 2010 book, Why the West Rules - For Now, is one of my favorites. The study of EROI owes a lot to Leslie White and his theory of technology driving human advancement through capturing more energy. My own books draw heavily on my work in archaeology and biological anthropology. I am not surprised though, since anthropology "covers the waterfront" when it comes to humans.
Yep cultural anthropology, which includes your field of archaeology as its hard scientific wing, is the most important and subversive wing of academia. So subversive that it got infiltrated by the intel services at the turn of this century and was progressively hijacked over the following decade, culminating in the rise of their posterboy infiltrator, David Graeber. I consider Marvin Harris' cultural materialism theory to be the high water mark of the field, which peaked in the 70s. He was intuitively incorporating dunbar's number into his theory a couple decades before Dunbar ever formalized it. He blew up Leslie White's externalized, centralized conception of culture and technology with his internalized, decentralized conception of cultural ecology which fully crossed-over into the field of ethics. His term "intensification" also presumably owes a lot to White's work that you mentioned, on harnessing energy. I recommended Harris' book, Cannibals and Kings, here the other week,
A great read.
I have been using the term hypercomplexity to describe the US for some time now. Hyper in its original Greek meaning means "over," as in an excess or exaggeration of something. Like an exponential rise in complexity rather than a linear rise. There are different meanings in math and cell biology too, where the term hypercomplex is more specific to the field. I think of it as acceleration of acceleration, like the second derivative in calculus. In this formulation for economics, anthropology, etc., France, Germany and the UK are complex socieities while the US is hypercomplex. The US has gotten so complex in its complexity it cannot be wound down. France, Germany and the UK can be wound down and actually survive collapse. The US cannot and will implode upon collapse.
I live in France and see this happening right now. The government fell and Macron had to appoint another Prime Minister this week. Germany's federal government will fall when the No-confidence vote passes in the Bundestag tomorrow (Dec. 16th). In France the distances between villages and towns are smaller, there is a functioning healthcare system, many people make their living "on the black" (the underground economy), and everyone has someone in their extended family or knows someone with memories of World War II and the deprivations of the Nazi occupation. The energy footprint per capita in France is about half the US, so there is not so far to fall upon economic collapse. This is why we moved here.
The point I am making is that there is a continuum of collapse.
Don't you mean a spectrum (of intensity) of collapse rather than a continuum? While i acknowledge that the intensity of dieoff -- which is the best metric for true collapse -- will vary both geographically and temporally, that surely will revolve around population density as a general rule and not minor industrial differences in complexity. The French energy footprint may be half the US but the population density is higher, the nuclear power industry's hypercomplexity poses a far greater risk of fallout than whole France-sized regions of the US such as the pacific northwest, and half the energy footprint is still hundreds or thousands of times the footprint of thd agrarian footprint; an 80-storey fall and a 160-storey fall are both gonna kill you if you don't see it coming.
"a divorce between the growth of monetary claims and that of the oil powered economy can mean only one thing. Inflation. Inflation of prices, together with an inflation of debt and stock market bubbles."
I think this particular phenomenon is called "stagflation", which is combination of rising prices without a corresponding rise in wages. We saw this in the oil shocks of the 1970s and 1980s.
And the inevitable result must be deflation. No one will see that coming! But the ultimate result of stagflation is that people can no longer afford things, and they stop buying.
Unfortunately, deflation is deadly to those in debt — unlike inflation, which eases debt.
Interesting times ahead!
"surviving extreme hardship will be the name of the game"... Is it though?
Or is finding a painless way to make a dignified exit a more realistic response?
Anyone who lives in an urban environment is essentially f*cked without external help (food, water, power, etc).
Most people living in cities have neither the space to grow food nor the skills to grow it.
Most people who live in a semi-rural environment and who *might* have enough space to eke out some type of subsistence farming lifestyle don't have the skills to do so nor the time/money to learn, because their time is spent working to put food on the table for today, not for some post-collapse future. Even the people I know who do so pride themselves in their vegetable beds etc are nowhere near self-sustaining... They still rely on external energy inputs in the form of fertilisers, pesticides, seeds etc.
And how many of them know how to prepare and store food for winter?
Again, plenty of people fool themselves that they know how to can, pickle and preserve etc, ignoring the gas or electric stove they use to heat their pressure cooker or water bath, or where the salt, sugar, vinegar, or whatever else you use depending on what you're doing, will come from.
I struggle to see a realistic response for the average person who lives in a normal home in a normal town and is utterly reliant on food in the supermarkets, mains utilities and money to pay for it.
"Or is finding a painless way to make a dignified exit a more realistic response?"
Not for me. I've been getting ready for this for decades.
I agree that it's getting pretty late for someone just becoming enlightened.
The one thing I missed in your comment was "join with others of like mind". The days of the "rugged individualist" are in the rear-view mirror already. For some 299,800 years, humans have been successful only in groups. Being expelled from your group was a death sentence.
Fossil sunlight changed all that, and gave us the illusion that we could be island-like, with a little doomstead up in the hills with rooms filled with freeze-dried food and guns. I really don't think that's going to work.
If you don't have the skills @Stephen Thair mentions, it would be best to join with a bunch of people who do have a number of these skills.
And a heartfelt thanks to those who want to "make a dignified exit". That will make things easier for those of us who want to stick around!
I agree that the stereotypical (American) "prepper" is a delusional onanist. The manufactured worldview of the "rugged individualist" is the original "woke meme" that only ever served the political agenda of the wealthy elites. It is, and always was, complete fiction.
Likewise, I agree that "Community Resilience", I.e. focusing on the survival of an interdependent group rather than of an individual or nuclear family is a far, far, better strategy it's still a strategy that (1) has a low probability of success and (2) could only ever support 10% of the population even if it did. Most of us live in parts of the world (eg cities or suburban areas) where the population far exceeds the carrying capacity of the local ecosystem.
It's great that you've been preparing for decades and presumably live on a smallholding farm and have sufficient land area for crops and livestock to survive at a subsistence level, or with sufficient surplus to generate trade value within your "in-group".
You, or your in-group community, know how to farm sustainably without external energy inputs (no fertiliser, no pesticides, no seeds, no semen, and so on).
You know how to preserve food to survive winter or are lucky enough to live in a mild Mediterranean climate where growing food all year round is viable.
You know how to hunt, trap, butcher, preserve, and tan local game, assuming you live in an area where game from pigeons to rabbits to pigs to deer exist in sufficient quantities. You know how to do all of this without resorting to firearms ie bow-hunting, snare trapping, etc, since ammunition won't last forever.
If firearms are part of the survival strategy, that also assumes you live in a society (like the USA) that allows the stockpiling of firearms and ammunition in a way that 90% of the Western world with gun control does not. And I'd argue that the risks of living inside a gun-fetishing society like the USA creates a whole set of risks to your community that almost certainly outweighs the benefits.
Of course, within your community you'd need someone with medical skills, in a way that excludes 99% of doctors, nurses, paramedics, dentists, veterinarian, and anyone that works in a 21st century medical system. All of their skills and knowledge are largely useless without modern diagnostics and pharmaceuticals, not to mention they are so highly specialised these days that most of them would struggle to set a bone, suture a wound, or deliver a baby, unless they were pretty fresh out of their medical school rotations. Longer term, you'd need someone with a expert level of "herbal medicine that really works and isn't pseudo-science b*llshit", so things like yew bark for herbal aspirin, honey for antiseptic poultices etc. Better add a beekeeper to the list, too, I guess.
Add to the list blacksmith, carpenter, arrowsmith, fletcher, potter, baker, mechanic/engineer, plumber, electrician (for as long as you have electricity from solar, wind, hydro), tailor, tanner, farrier (assuming you have horses for ploughing and transportation), thatcher, weaver etc. The list goes on. And all of that presupposes you all have access to low-tech equivalents of the tools you need for your trades. Little point in having someone with excellent blacksmith skills if they are reliant on a gas-driven forge. And good luck trying to find someone within 200 miles who knows how to make charcoal.
So, let's put this into perspective. Where I live in, in a 1990s housing development with a semi-rural parish of 5500 people in Hampshire, UK, my immediate neighbours are all over 50 and consist of a lawyer, a retired fighter test pilot, a car salesman, a couple of IT people, generic office workers, and a guy with 30 years of experience in designing and installing radar and autoland systems for airports. Yes, some of them have transferrable skills - the ex-test pilot is a pretty good mechanic, the radar engineer is a pretty good carpenter and his wife raises chickens, but all of their experience is predicated on power tools and supplies from the local hardware or automotive suppliers.
Are they "resilient to collapse"? No, not in the slightest.
Are they going to pivot their retirement plans from spending time with the grandkids, and their long-held dreams of travelling the world, in order to learn how to make wire and draw nails, chop down trees and plane lumber with only hand tools, and all the other skills needed to survive a collapse that may or may not happen in their lifetime? Also, no.
Even if they accepted the underlying premise that it will happen, AND it will happen in their lifetime, they are far more likely to (quite rationally) weigh the likelihood of survival, even if they did spend every waking hour focusing on skills development and preparation, versus just continuing as they are, consuming unsustainably, and choose the latter. "It's better to burn out, than to fade away".
So, whilst I 100% accept that a community-based survival strategy is far superior to a prepper "rugged individualist" one, it's still wildly unrealistic for the vast majority of people. Hence why most collapse scenarios have 90% of the population dying in the short to medium term.
I'd also probably argue that, short of making surviving collapse your entire life's work, that survival is far more likely to be based on luck than anything else. You were lucky enough to be born or live in a mild climate all year round, with access to clean, safe, drinking water, abundant solar or hydro power, fertile farmland, woodland teaming with wildlife, with Amish neighbours on one side and a Renaissance Fair or Roman re-enactment campsite on the other (LARPing nerds will inherit the earth, fact!).
A very good post, that highlights the issue perfectly. I live in a village filled with geriatrics, so I'll get a lot of space to myself once they've decided against the future! One thing I thought was interesting about your post, was this:
"Add to the list blacksmith, carpenter, arrowsmith, fletcher, potter, baker, mechanic/engineer, plumber, electrician (for as long as you have electricity from solar, wind, hydro), tailor, tanner, farrier (assuming you have horses for ploughing and transportation), thatcher, weaver etc"
I guess the above depends on the technology we/you/I choose to retain or utilise going forward. I'd suggest the above roles wouldn't be specialist individual roles, rather facets that an individual might have many of. For example, I can forge a chisel, harvest and build with wood, bake bread, and do so some of the others in basic form. However, I don't foresee having the need for many of the things on the list, and definitely not in anything other than rudimentary form. I suspect that the most important skill will be plant knowledge and gardening. Cultivating species like Hazel and Willow (UK) for fuel and basketry, and simply using existing buildings until they collapse (soon, in the case of UK new-builds!). Similarly existing hand tools, fairly plentiful in the UK, will cover many needs for some time. I say that, because we have so much material resource in our houses and communities, that forming a rudimentary survival will be predicated almost entirely on access to food. I think that perhaps your specialisation will perhaps come a generation or two down the line. All very hypothetical of course, I suspect someone will trigger a nuclear accident somewhere down the line.
"full of geriatrics"... What, you live in Hampshire, too? 👀😂
I am reminded of the old joke about the two men running away from the bear and the first says "do you think we can outrun the bear?" and the second says "I don't have to outrun the bear, I only have to outrun you...".
So, in the collapse scenario a "scavenger strategy" becomes viable you can survive the initial stages proportionally better than others and thereby you can scavenge their resources to improve your own survival once they no longer need them. I guess this is almost the exact opposite of the community-based resilience model. Bleak as f*ck though. But I wonder if this would fall under what Greer would call "catabolic collapse"? You're just postponing the inevitable by consuming (scavenging) the non-renewable local resources, you're not establishing a sustainable future.
My concern is will we have continuity of skills when we no longer have access to digital services? I'm not even sure I have a physical library within a day's walk, or if it would have books on weaving, tanning, bushcraft etc.
"My concern is will we have continuity of skills when we no longer have access to digital services?"
I wonder if Starlink will keep running? It's not like satellites require an extension cord!
I've got some 20,000 sufficiency-related books and articles on e-ink readers with a solar charger. We have 21 kWh of flooded-cell NiCd batteries that should last much longer than lithium. We have DC-to-light amateur radio gear, and know how to use it and maintain it.
I'm under no illusion that's any such technology is a long-term solution, but it might make the short-term survivable.
This, in a cool Mediterranean climate with two streams and a river, abundant wildlife, and 37 megawatts of hydropower a short walk away. That's a bit much, but the dam and pentstock is in place to tap into for smaller amounts of power. We have two electrical engineers and a mechanical engineer, and can weld up a Pelton turbine on battery power if we have to.
We're not enamoured of firearms; two of us make yew bows for a living. Even I can do a lung-shot and track it until it bleeds out.
I disagree that you, or even your intentional community has to be totally self-sufficient. We are surrounded by small farms that specialize in a number of things that we won't have to produce. We're on a "virtual island" and we all have an "island mentality".
The right mix of community and isolation is key. You aren't going to do this on your own, nor are you ever going to have enough guns and ammo to fight off a nearby-city's worth of refugees.
I started working on this twenty years ago. It's going to be difficult to start now and be ready before the excrement is applied to the ventilator!
Yes, it is bleak. However, or far off ancestors had no use for specialists in any real sense, and our use of specialisms has led us to the current situation, since around the time of agriculture. I see no reason why adopting that model wouldn't do exactly the same again, essentially buying us a couple of thousand years. I guess I'm pushing back slightly on the community model that consists of a baker, a farmer, a weaver, a shoemaker, a blacksmith and so on. I think that leads to the abstraction that exists today, where we're essentially a domesticated species, with all our basic needs met from far away. Although, I think that the model you present is far more likely, because it is what people know. Maybe there'll be a blog in 5,000 years' time discussing it!
I appreciate what David Holmgren told me buring a three-day Permaculture seminar: "Everyone needs to be a jack-of-all-trades, and a master of ONE!"
I agree that, in a declining energy environment, generalization is the key.
But that also leaves room for important specialties. Daniel is a fantastic bread maker. Sure, I could make bread if I had to, but why should I when we have access to a "bread specialist"? Like me, Daniel also fixes things, which is beyond the skills of many, including some who are very good at sewing, for instance. I can put a patch on a rip, but not tailor a shirt from nothing but salvaged fabric.
Without much research to back me up, I think that "our ancestors had no use for specialists" goes way too far. There's always the best hunter, the best leader, the medicine man, the spiritual seer, etc.
I'm also dubious that simple "agriculture" is the bogeyman that many claim.
Rather, I think it was *grain* agriculture that started us down the wrong path. In "Guns, Germs, and Steel", Jared Diamond points out that equatorial people who cultivated root crops tended to have peaceful relations with neighbours. But they were easy marks for grain-toting invaders from temperate climates.
When agriculture results in being able to store food over more than a turn of the seasons, hoarding and withholding results. Granary receipts were arguably the first form of money.
Recent evidence backs this up. In northern British Columbia, there lived a vibrant civilization over 7,000 years ago — based on organized hazelnut agriculture. Without refrigeration, hazelnuts go rancid, and they can't be hoarded and withheld. By all accounts, this civilization — which pre-dates Egyptian wheat culture — was egalitarian. https://thetyee.ca/News/2024/12/04/Hazelnuts-Reveal-Secrets-Ancient-BC-City/
"[Ishmael] There's only one way you can force people to accept an intolerable lifestyle. [Julie] Yea. You have to lock up the food." — Daniel Quinn, The Teachings That Came Before & After Ishmael p181.
Hi Stephen, I'm pretty sure that everyone here knows that average ain't gonna cut it. Evolution never selects for average. Being average -- mediocre -- is almost always a choice. There are people out there who have and are dedicating their lives to improving their position come hell or high water. A dozen years ago my marriage almost didn't survive our completely overhauling our lives for collapse. I'm grateful it did survive. Other marriages haven't, no doubt. A divorcee can take responsibility for both a broken family and a resilient way of life that looks to provide a lifeboat for that broken family. We live in all or nothing times IMO.
Agape before eros, and before industrial conceptions of loyalty, too. I say drag em kicking and screaming if you have to. This one's for all the marbles. Anything less is capture bondage.
While managing renewable energy research in the federal government, I saw first-hand the hypernormalisation of refusing to see, let alone acknowledge, the oncoming cliff. It's absolute mass psychosis.
Hypercompartmentalization hypernormalizes everything within the compartment, by definition. :)
Your link-fu is excellent. Thank you for weaving these threads together. I encourage you to persist with this useful work.
You made many interesting comments, but I'll focus here on the idea of money. Money is a promise of future value, a debt. We live in a system which continually borrows from the future, which only makes sense in a situation of exponentially increasing value. For the situation we are facing, energy reduction and shrinking production, we will need to create a way of life which does not steal from the future but rather invests in it. That is to say, we need to put aside some substantial portion of our energy, while we are still on the plateau, to create value for future generations in a form which will be useful to them in the reality in which they'll be living. As you point out, the oligarchs are certainly not going to decide to do this. I think the future culture will need to be built from the ground up, from local seeds.
Let me give a practical example. If I build a chicken coop, buy chickens and invest the time and effort to learn how to keep them alive and productive, then (factoring in the value of my labour) I will probably end up spending far more for a dozen eggs than I would pay at the supermarket. But when eggs are ten times their current price, my children will thank me. And when the supermarket shelves are all empty, my grandchildren will thank me.
I feel no desire to "make money". I just want to begin the building of a better culture than the one I was born into. This will not be easy, and I may well fail, but I will still try.
"f I build a chicken coop, buy chickens and invest the time and effort to learn how to keep them alive and productive… my children will thank me."
Egg production, as practised by perhaps 99% of all producers — even the homestead ones — is fairly dependent on industrial grain production.
It's possible to have _some_ eggs without 50 pound sacks of industrial layer mash, but it will be a small fraction of what people might be expecting. And you'll need more land than just a city lot to have "pasture-raised" eggs.
Heh, it's funny, nearly every time I mention raising chooks on the net, someone pops up to tell me that energy out <= energy in.
As I was simply giving an example of something we could invest resources in while we have them, to benefit us when we don't, I didn't think it necessary to mention the surrounding garden ecosystem that would need to be in place to support the chickens, nor the community that would need to exist around that household garden. Humans did keep chickens prior to industrial grain production, though, and still found them useful.
While we might not be able to replace the amount of eggs we can currently afford to buy from the supermarket, when the shelves are empty, even if the amount of land we have under cultivation is only enough to support three chooks giving us one egg a day, then that will still be more protein than zero eggs a day. We'd just save them for the very young or pregnant. In addition, chickens eat pest insects, pull weeds and produce manure.
You're right, however Jan's point is definitely worth making. It is a fallacy that many/most commit, even though you've clearly thought about it.
Yes, I will accept Jan's point - that we will have to lower our expectations, in general, is true.
Right on, brother.
In a few words, you have summed things up brilliantly. From my reading over the decades, I have encountered many people who understand the problems with The Great Game and a few who have some reasonable, workable ideas about how to extricate ourselves from this pathological culture and build something more just and sustainable. With all the great ideas we've had over the past two centuries after the advent of modern techno-industrial civilization, we find ourselves here, now, accelerating toward decades of pain followed by oblivion. "What ideas will fill that vacuum left behind by oligarchic capitalism, however, will depend on how well informed we are about our predicament and how we plan to adapt to its many outcomes." What we're missing in your piece here are the hyperlinks to your work and others that articulate alternatives and what those willing to sacrifice might do now to achieve them. So, I'm guessing the masses will enjoy "having the conversation" before panic ensues. I do appreciate your work here.
Have to address population growth. However that’s not very economical is it?
Hum... E. Todd's distinction between illiberal democracies and liberal oligarchies makes a lot of sense to me. The big difference being that people in liberal oligarchies can use much more free speech and say (almost) whatever they want. But they are supposed to show their gratitude by voting for whoever they are told to...
In the mean time, I sometime wonder if there was really an other way out of our predicament.
Of course, many people would say there were many options if only the people in charge have been less greedy and so on.
And still, I wonder if it wasn't all written in advance. If, as the energy was bound to become scarcer anyway, there really was an other way that would have prevented common people's standard of living in Western country to collapse even faster. At least, they were kept happy as long as possible so they didn't break the whole system appart and, for herding them successfully, the ruling class got their profits as a reward. Everybody was quite happy. So far....
No, there was no alternative. Marvin Harris's "cultural materialism" theory presents as a soft determinism. Highly recommend you check it out.
Thanks. I didn't know about Marvin Harris.
But I do believe that "cultural materialism" is a very important factor, and the leading one in many cases, in the way civilization evolve, strongly restricting possibilities whatever the ideological or political will might be.
I found Ian Morris' "Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels" very convincing for exemple. Much more than David Graeber's "Dawn of Everything".
Thanks Tris. Glad to hear that you didn't like Dawn of Everything. It made the remaining classical cultural anthropologists in the field furious because his thesis, as I understand it -- and I didn't read the book myself -- is that civilization CAN be egalitarian, which is just trash thinking to classicists like myself. Graeber was an intelligence operative in my opinion. Highly dubious and unqualified career which he finished out in an honorary position at the LSE of all places. I believe he was their first anthropology post. LOL.
Anyway, I read some reviews of Morris' book on Amazon to get the gist of it and he's definitely not a classicist. The field is not what it was. Highly recommend Cannibals and Kings for a look at the field in its heyday. I think you'll find his insights unassailable and possibly worldview-changing. That was my experience.
Hey again, Tris. My comment to Bob earlier this morning,
about ancestral mind, caused me to realize that I didn't do justice to my last reply to you.
What I mean by classical in classical cultural anthropology is ancestral mind. Looking at humans through a 99pc-weighted ancestral mind because that is what we objectively are.
The classical, peak phase of any field arrives when technical maturity is reached, and reaching maturity takes time. For anthropology it took a couple hundred years of formalism - of building a systems theory. For a human it takes about three decades of adulthood to mature holistically, and that prime, peak phase lasts about a decade, from approximately the age of 45 to the age of approximately 55. Almost all of the greatest masterpieces of literature, for example, were written by people who were in their prime. Marvin Harris -- the Michael Jordan of cultural anthropology -- had just entered his prime with Cannibals and Kings and he happened to do so just as the field itself was ready to be completed as a holistic systems theory on human culture. Cannibals and Kings is an accurate, objectivist theory of everything framework. It did nothing less than lay out Natural Law as it applies to mankind so that future ancestral minds like ourselves can continue to refine it.
His cultural materialism was not the garden variety anthropological materialist theory of resource availability. It was instead a lived, ecological experience of ancestral mind, and so deeply so that he was able to divine the inner life of those five pristine, most fateful moments in human history when Big Man animism tipped over into chieftain ways due to the only Natural Law reason that it ever does so which is the chronic human compaction of the local (bioregional) ecology finally breaking the collective animist spirit of a society. From the gnawing intergenerational malnutrition that devolves any species.
Ian Morris doesn't know the first thing about ancestral mind. He's just a 21st century 'anthropologist' in name only. Frankly he doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground. He's all fiat relativism and no objectivistic structuralism. For but one example, he claims that industrial culture is less violent and more egalitarian than agrarian culture yet that relative peace among the general population -- if it even exists at all and I have my serious doubts that it does -- is only made possible by a much, much more powerful monopoly on violence by the industrial Police State, and the supposed increase in egalitarianism is a bad joke when gauging the relative spectrums of inequality of an industrial world with third world slums at one end and plutocrats at the other, compared to the worst divide that any farming culture has to offer.
It's like Morris is still in high school.
Hum... I will give a try to Cannibals and Kings then. See if I find it convincing. More or less than Morris' work. Or maybe just different.
Beside, I'm not convinced so much about your argument regarding compared divide between rich and poor in agrarian and modern society. Modern societies are far from perfect. That's for sure. But, at least, there no god-kings and legal slaves anymore...
So I've read the first few chapters of the book. It's quite interesting. I think I will buy it.
And still, each chapter could be discussed.
For exemple, I don't buy the population control by infanticide as the main factor in hunters-gatherers population stability.
It might play a role in some occasions or some cultures. But there are others explanations. A catastrophic event (be it a very cold winter that prevent prey migration, a very dry summer, a cyclone, a forest fire, whatever… or even a raid from other people) happening on average 2 or 3 time per century and halving the population might do it too. While allowing an healthy diet most of the time and a doubling of the population in 3 or 4 decades, thus making the event all the more deadly for people lacking the mean to store food from one year to the next.
And this way, long term population stability has nothing to do with culture. People just keep reproducing as much as they can. Like all other life forms in the area.
Let's see what's next :)
Awesome Tris. Thanks for sharing your reflections so far. If you don't mind I'm going to continue this conversation in the current thread.
Grow vegetables, comrade B!
Grow meat first. Mammals are by far the greatest dynamic accumulators (of nutrients) on the planet. Without those nutrients we could never have evolved from hominids into humans in the first place. Ever since religion was first implemented by Elites as a cultural technology for circumventing the dunbar number, human brain volume has been shrinking from its peak volume about 10,000 years ago.
Want to start reversing that and optimize your potential in the meantime? Grow your own grass fed mammals and eat them every day, including the bone broth and all of the organs and glands. I butcher a sheep or goat about every 10 days on average, and my 43 acres gets better and better every year.