THE CYCLE OF DISCONNECTION

Almost everyone I know is depressed these days. Friends who are renowned as especially intelligent or informed seem to be the most vulnerable to this malaise, so perhaps ignorance is bliss. The brilliant cartoonist at Hyperbole and a Half has just returned after an eighteen-month bout of depression that completely debilitated her — and her latest post explains exactly how this feels. My filmmaker friend Tim Bennett wonders why the insightful writer David Foster Wallace, whose astonishing commencement address in 2005 told us exactly what we need to do to be really alive in this mad, deadening world, was so oppressed by his life he felt compelled to end it at age 46.

Of course, everyone’s experience with depression, and the kind of chronic grief, anger, sadness, and anxiety that afflicts so many of us, is different. Any attempt to “blame civilization” for our modern epidemic of chronic physical and mental disease is fraught with danger. Yet when the advertisers and politicians and media keep telling us life has never been better, the cognitive dissonance with the misery all around us is hard to ignore, and hard not to ascribe to something larger.

The faces on the people I know often carry the looks I see on caged animals, endlessly pacing (if these animals have room even to do that), as if they know something is terribly wrong but they’re not quite sure what it is. Call this what you wish — confinement, disconnection, domestication, oppression — the incapacity to be our true wild selves seems to be at the root of our disease. The problem is, seven billion people cannot be their true wild selves or, like a horrifically overcrowded cage of rats, the result would be large-scale violence and murder. Some would say that’s exactly what we have already.

When human population increased to the point our natural (for two million years) gatherer-hunter way of life was no longer viable, something had to change, and what successfully evolved to deal with that situation is we call “civilization”. There are different speculations about what caused this to occur — climate change, the extinction of large mammals due to our invention of the arrowhead, the reduction in habitat caused by the ice ages — but whatever the cause, we decided we had to leave the leisurely life of rainforest tree-living animals, spread out across the planet, and find some way to avoid mass starvation in lands we are not naturally adapted to living in.

Civilization was an ingenious invention, and it appears to have evolved independently at different times in different places on our planet. A key component was agriculture, which we apparently discovered by observing how monocultures flourished in the aftermath of disasters like forest fires and floods. By artificially replicating such disasters (burning, irrigation, poisoning) we were able to produce compact ‘farms’ of single-crop human foods capable of feeding many humans — far more than the land would naturally support. But these dense monoculture crops required huge amounts of labour and were extremely vulnerable to droughts and diseases, so instead of the wild, leisurely independent gatherer-hunter human cultures that had predominated for 2 million years, we needed to create a culture where most humans would stay put, accept the need for lifelong constant, hard, boring work, and tolerate the horrors of recurring famine. There is evidence that the Great Wall of China was built, not to keep the Mongolian invaders out, but to keep the peasants from fleeing the back-breaking toil and chronic disease of the rice paddies.

It is not easy to domesticate wild humans, but it can be done. Just as rats in overcrowded cages start to form oppressive hierarchies so that at least the alphas will survive (while the rest perish from starvation, suicide, and eating their own young), human civilizations needed hierarchy, class differentiation, specialization, and a power structure to work. They require constant coercion and propaganda (hence the invention of modern languages, principally to allow instructions, lies and threats to be passed down from the overseers). They require disconnection from the natural world (no more longing for a wild life), confinement (and incarceration for the disobedient, so they are made an example of), constant surveillance, and creation of a state of dependence on the society’s systems and their masters.

When successfully implemented (and they’ve been so successful that they’ve quickly merged into a single, ubiquitous, global civilization culture), these civilizations both support and require a large population of workers, creating a vicious cycle. But there are many unintended consequences of this cycle. One is that, as Quinn and others have explained, the more food that is produced, the faster the population grows to consume it, so civilizations quickly experience population explosions. Another is that domesticated living, though ‘successful’ from an evolutionary standpoint, is extremely stressful and extremely vulnerable to failures (crops, diseases, insurrections, and the natural diseconomies of scale, among others).

Once it reaches a certain point in its cycle (and all civilizations eventually collapse), civilization cultures enter a state of dysfunction and dis-ease. There’s some evidence we reached this point about 10,000 years ago, at the beginning of what we have chosen to call “history” (perhaps because we don’t want to compare modern ‘progress’ against the impossibly high standard of prehistory, so we pretend life before modern civilization was always nasty, short and brutish, when evidence suggests it only became so under civilization culture).

Civilization disease is a complex phenomenon, but it’s easy to see the symptoms all around us: people living in a constant state of stress, fear, anxiety, grief, anger and sadness; endemic boredom, escapism and addiction; endless and escalating wars and intertribal and internal violence; large parts of the population traumatized and dissociative as a result of early childhood exposure to domestic violence, abandonment and rage; epidemics of chronic physical and emotional illnesses; systems collapsing from diseconomies of scale (more about this in my next article); large segments of the population debilitated and socially dysfunctional; and the kind of constant, numbing grief for the massive loss of biodiversity, the ghastly desolation of our planet and exhaustion of its resources, the endless and horrific suffering of creatures, human and non, in our increasingly brutal civilization cutlure, and our dread and insecurity about the crises we see looming before us.

We are all suffering from civilization disease, though of course it manifests itself differently in each of us, and we are brainwashed into believing it’s our own (or some other immoral or criminal individual’s) fault, rather than the inevitable result of exposure to civilization in the declining state of its cycle. It’s a complex system phenomenon, so we search in vain for a ‘cure’ for this disease: new leadership, redistribution of wealth and power, better innovation and technology, reinvention, salvation, a transcendence of human consciousness.

No one cedes power voluntarily, and we’re now seeing the evidence of a desperate, understandable (and totally uncoordinated) attempt by the currently powerful (and their lackeys and the dumbed-down masses) to ratchet up the collapsing systems to new levels of ‘efficiency’ and global reach and hence prolong the status quo just a little longer. This will only make the ultimate collapse worse, but there’s no telling them that.

So now we see massive incarceration, perpetual wars, ghastly and massive factory farms, genocides, the militarization and bulking up of the police and surveillance state (allegedly in the interests of ‘homeland security’), the pathologization of everything, the total corporatization of the media, ‘health’, and ‘education’ systems, large-scale pharmaceutical sedation of the population, the consumerization and ‘ownership’ of everything (as a kind of new, distracting religion), rampant social escapism and inurement rituals (porn, ultraviolent films, hazing, gang rituals, drug and alcohol abuse), and the intensification of the distracting blame-everyone-else game (terrorists, bad parents, laziness, government, conspirators, evil deranged elites).

Not surprising, then, that anyone who has the time, energy and opportunity to study what’s going on in our world is depressed. Einstein, in talking about the development of the nuclear bomb, confided that the more he and others learned about the state of the world, the more pessimistic they became about society’s capacity to deal with it effectively. Metaphorically at least, the alpha humans in civilization’s global cage are hoarding and exhibiting increasing violence towards the rest, and the rest are showing increasing signs of eating their young.

Look around, and you’ll see the evidence everywhere. The way David Foster Wallace saw it, before he was swamped by his illness:

In this traffic, all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way, it’s not impossible that some of these people in SUV’s have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive. Or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he’s trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he’s in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way… If you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she’s not usually like this. Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness… None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death. The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death. It … has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves [about it] over and over… It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out.

 Tim Bennett asks the obvious question:

I write today mostly because I don’t know what else to do. And I write, in the end, with the faint hope and utter certainty that Wallace is right, that love and connection and the sacred can be snatched out of this cold, hard Universe by a simple human choice, even in the face of our Near Term Extinction. Can I choose to find my own life now, and then live it before I die?

What can we do in the face of all this, to realize Life Before Death? When our whole civilization culture is dying a horrible death, and taking with it much of the rest of life on earth in its ghastly, desperate grasp for a few more days of existence, where do we find meaning, or purpose, or direction, or motivation, to go on, to decide what to do?

I wouldn’t presume to answer this question for anyone else (I’ve learned that much from ten years of introspective blogging). I can only tell you my own ‘personal disease management’ strategy, in case that’s of use to you, either with some of its ideas or the implicit process by which I came up with it.

This strategy has six components:

1. Self-knowledge and self-awareness: Practices and study that show me who I really am and make me aware of what’s happening in me in the moment and how I’m presenting myself to others. I can’t help how I react or how I feel, but it’s useful to be aware of what I’m doing and feeling and thinking, and why. It’s grounding, and helps me pull out of the tyranny of negative emotions.
2. Self-acceptance and self-appreciation: So many people I know are dependent on others for their feelings of self-worth, and are always trying to ‘improve’ themselves. So I practice little appreciations of myself, and learning (as hard as it is with the influence of our culture) to accept and love myself for who I am. I’m getting much better at being good to myself.
3. Knowing the cause of our disease (and that it’s complex and hopeless): In the process of chronicling the collapse of our civilization on this blog, I’ve done a huge amount of study and thinking about how the world really works, and why. Understanding complexity has been a huge breakthrough for me, liberating me from the foolish belief that we can reform civilization if we try hard enough, or that someone or some group is somehow to blame for it all. This has also allowed me to liberate myself from the propaganda of the media, since I have stopped reading ‘news’ that is clearly oversimplified, deliberately distorted, unactionable, and needlessly stressful.
4. Learning and honing capacities that are useful and/or fun: In The Once and Future King, Merlyn says “The best thing for being sad is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then–to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you. Look at what a lot of things there are to learn–pure science, the only purity there is. You can learn astronomy in a lifetime, natural history in three, literature in six. And then, after you have exhausted a milliard lifetimes in biology and medicine and theocriticism and geography and history and economics–why, you can start to make a cartwheel out of the appropriate wood, or spend fifty years learning to begin to learn to beat your adversary at fencing. After that you can start again on mathematics, until is it is time to learn to plough.” I’ve identified some of the capacities that might be useful, but in learning new things I’m guided more by what’s fun, what’s play, because that’s how I learn best. In my work with facilitators and Transition I’m also working to help groups that I’m part of learn collective capacities, again mainly through games and play (role-plays etc.) This is essential to reducing our dependence on civilization culture, so we are no longer vested in its continuance.
5. Reconnection practices: I’ve written a lot about my search to become more present, because I really believe that if I can get outside my head and truly live in the moment, outside my head, with my body and senses and instincts connected with each other and with all life on earth, everything else I am trying to do, and to be, will suddenly become much easier. Another part of my reconnection practices is connecting with other people in community, moving past my social anxiety and arrogant misanthropy, and in so doing learning how to build community, collaboratively. This is also about finding others who share my sensibilities and connecting on a deep level with them: Understanding we’re not alone in this struggle for understanding and healing at the end of civilization’s empire, and coping with grief. Learning to collaborate with others in working on other parts of this strategy and projects we care about.
6. Personal rewilding exercises: I’ve managed to deschool myself, but that’s just the first part of my rehabilitation — not to make me fit better into civilization culture, but rather to make me fit better into the cultures that will follow its collapse. Most of these exercises are rewilding practices, part of re-becoming animal. They include making art, making music, making love (in every sense of the word), and un-domesticating myself.

My hope is that I can ‘model’ a way of living following this strategy and these practices that will give others the self-confidence to pursue a similar strategy and find their own liberation and disease management practices. I have a long way to go, but I think I finally know the way.

Is it working for me today, this personal disease management strategy? From the perspective of feeling better, most assuredly: My life is pretty joyful and happy these days. I’ve been extraordinarily fortunate in my life, so I’m sheltered from many of the worst stressors and effects of civilization disease.

But while I’ve been free from serious depression for a couple of years now, I’m really not doing much in any of the strategy areas above. I’m constantly exhausted and uninspired to do much of anything, despite my high level of health and fitness. I spend much of my post-paid-work life distracting myself — video games, masturbation, consuming clever and amusing but ultimately inconsequential and unactionable articles and videos. I think it would be a stretch to say these are ‘fun’ activities to which my exhausted self is entitled after a lifetime of mostly useless paid work — they’re more compulsive and self-indulgent than joyful, and pretty devoid of useful learning. They’re not really play. And in the meantime, the actions in my strategy, which could make me a more useful, informed, well-balanced,  and purposeful person, remain largely un-begun (I’ve given up on the folly of ‘self-improvement’ or ‘personal growth’ as something to aspire to, and the strategies above have no intention to make me other than who I really already am, under this gunk that civilization culture has caused me to cover myself in).

But intuitively I believe I am on the right track, for me. As James Taylor said, sometimes it’s enough to be on your way. I hope you’re coping well, in your own way, with civilization disease’s effect on you and those you love. It’s all about healing, while knowing that in this mad world we cannot ever really be well. Perhaps we’ll meet, some time, in this joyful pessimist’s part of the cage.

It’s hopeless, but we’ll be fine.

cartoon by David Sipress  from (of course) the New Yorker

I don’t read much ‘news’ anymore. I read articles and books that promise new knowledge, insight, ideas or perspectives on the huge energy, economic and ecological challenges facing us now, as our civilization accelerates into collapse. I read articles and books that offer practical actions that go beyond protesting and signing petitions. They’re pretty rare these days, and seem to be getting rarer.

I continue to skim the headlines of the NYT every day, and pick from them the articles and op eds (perhaps one every couple of days) that would seem to meet the above criteria. And I read the New Yorker every week, focused on the lead editorial, James Surowiecki’s column when he’s in good form, and an average of one in-depth report each week (some of them are small-book length), though the quality of the reporting is variable and the trend is discouraging. And of course I read the cartoons.

The alt-media resources I read mainly for local news (the Tyee, Vancouver Observer and Vancouver Media Co-op mostly), to keep abreast of recent corporate and government atrocities and the utter inability of our political system to deal with or even acknowledge them. There’s an election for a new Provincial Government next week, but in our FPTP system my vote is wasted, since the outcome in my constituency is already certain. I will keep alive my 43-year-long streak of always voting, and of never having my candidate even come close to winning. I’m confident that the new government (the NDP is expected to win by a wide margin), which purports to be pro-labour and light-green, will change essentially nothing, as they did(n’t) last time they were elected. I keep my expectations low.

Lately I’ve found myself rushing through the NYT and the New Yorker as quickly as possible, and I wasn’t sure why until this past week. I’m used to this with the dismal and unactionable articles in the ‘alternative’ press, and now only subscribe to indymedia aggregators, and race through their headlines, out of habit, just hoping to find something non-whiny or actionable. But my Links of the Month still often contain links to intriguing articles in these two publications, so I was puzzled by my impatience at wading through them.

The first clue was when I realized the NYT was, at the same time it was including articles and op eds about the inevitability of disastrous climate change, constantly trumpeting the need for ‘economic recovery’ and ‘new sustained growth’. The paper, I guess in the interest of keeping a broad swath of readers happy, as well as their advertisers, seems content to include articles with totally irreconcilable worldviews and contradictory messages and ideas, often on the same page. And this cognitive dissonance is not confined to the unreal writings of their three token conservative op ed writers (Brooks, Douthat and Friedman), which I never read.

What does it do to your brain when you read one of Paul Krugman’s pro-growth exhortations, and then flip the page and read that that growth is precisely what is precipitating the destruction of the natural environment, the critical exhaustion of natural resources, the obscene and ever-widening chasm between rich and poor, the spiral of unrepayable debt (financial, social and ecological) we are loading onto our children’s shoulders, the desperate economic state and ecological exhaustion of most ‘third world’ nations, the stretching of our economy to a horrific and inevitable breaking point, and the disastrous and accelerating emission of carbon into our atmosphere? Yet the reader of the NYT is left with no choice but to wonder if they are (or the NYT is) missing something really, really important here. It’s like the right wingnuts who are somehow able to reconcile support for the Patriot Act with opposition to background checks for people buying assault rifles. It truly boggles the mind.

My guess is that most of the editorial staff of the NYT are still in denial about the inevitable collapse of our energy, economic and ecological systems, and hence our civilization culture. A few have probably read the books and articles of ‘collapsnik’ writers and acknowledged that they might just be right (but hope they’re not), but while these few enable some of the reportage of collapse to get into the pages of the NYT, none of them is prepared (or, most likely, allowed) to point out the total cognitive dissonance between these reports and rest of the reporting in the newspaper. What would it take for a publication like the NYT to report that we’re fucked, and explain every day why that is? It would render almost everything else that appears in the paper trivial. So they just go on obliviously, I suppose hoping that no one will notice and call them on it, at least until it’s staring them in the face and the advertisers have all gone south.

This week’s New Yorker contains two articles that evidence the same kind of cognitive dissonance. The first is The Deportation Machine (full article, alas, is behind their paywall — here’s a precis), by William Finnegan, which describes the almost incredible ordeal of a wrongfully deported man (a life-long but dysfunctional US citizen with cognitive disorders who’s been severely damaged by childhood trauma) and the massive machinery that systematically and horrifically abuses citizens and immigrants under the guise of homeland security, and how these abuses have become much larger in scale and more flagrant under Obama than they were under Bush. He describes a Kafkaesque bureaucracy that works hand in hand with a bloated and run-amok security apparatus that is desperately trying to justify its existence and a cynical fantastically profitable private prison corpocracy that feeds off fear, violence and the abuse of power. The US is now deporting a record 400,000 people every year, in an impersonal, dehumanizing, brutal, mechanistic mass process that would make any observer or student of history shudder. The reader’s reaction is inevitably: This is insane. This is evidence of a state in the advanced stages of self-destruction and collapse. We have to find a way to stop this, and other abuses, soon. The globally embarrassing, intractable Guantanamo situation, the failure (and vulnerability to unwinding) of even modest health care reform, the debacle of attempts to put a lid on epidemic gun violence, and the militarization of the police and brutal repression of non-violent protests such as Occupy (all subjects covered in the New Yorker in the past couple of years), are all chapters in the same story, the story of a nation that has lost its reason and lost control of its agents of authority.

Yet a few pages on in the same New Yorker edition is a George Packer article called Don’t Look Down (also behind their paywall), ostensibly about reportage of the current economic turndown versus reporting of the 1930s Great Depression. The article is all over the place, very briefly reviewing more than a dozen books from the 1930s and a similar number from the current ‘recession’. There seem to be two theses: (1) That it’s nowhere as bad as it was in the 1930s, and isn’t likely to ever be; and (2) That the reason there have been so few protests or mass movements this time around is that today there is “a lack of a vision of the future… and the moral and intellectual energy such a vision confers.” My response would be (1) Just wait a few years, and in the meantime read your colleague Finnegan’s article to see how dissent and desperate poverty are likely to be handled by your country’s enforcers of law and order; and (2) If the Occupy mission of ending abusive corporate personhood, and ending the obscene disparity of wealth and power that is killing the economy and the planet, isn’t a vision, what is?

But I read on, and finally got a sense of Packer’s real worldview of the society that Finnegan’s article exposes, as Packer ridicules Chris Hedges’ Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, supposedly for its “inflated prose”, but mostly because Hedges dares to talk about what underlies the desperation, the fear, the bewilderment, the lack of direction or purpose, the sense of hopelessness, the anomie that pervades modern American life. Here are two passes from Hedges that Packer picks out for special scorn, dismissing Hedges as someone who “can’t describe a dilapidated house without pronouncing damnation on the corporate state.”:

Those who carry out this pillage [mountaintop removal] probably believe they can outrun their own destructiveness. They think that their wealth, privilege, and gated communities will save them. Or maybe they do not think about the future at all. But the death they have unleashed, the relentless contamination of air, soil, and water, the physical collapse of communities, and the eventual exhaustion of coal and fossil fuels themselves, will not spare them. They, too, will succumb to the poisoning of nature; the climate dislocations and freak weather caused by global warming; the spread of new, deadly viruses; and the food riots and huge migrations that will begin as the desperate flee from flooded or drought-stricken pockets of the earth. The steady plundering of the natural world, the failure to heed the warning signs of the planet, will teach us a lesson about the danger of hubris. The health of the land and the purity of water is the final measurement of whether any society is sustainable. “A culture,” the poet W.H. Auden observed, “is no better than its woods.”

What would cause a New Yorker reporter to ridicule such writing? I think it’s a fear of acknowledging the cognitive dissonance that allows the New Yorker to publish exposes like Finnegan’s sandwiched between greenwashing ads for Shell and Chevron. Here’s the second passage from Days of Destruction that Packer mocks, after setting it up this way: “Hedges takes [Occupy] for the first tremors of a revolutionary uprising against the long history of corporate and state atrocities described in his book. He ends with a dramatization of his arrest at a protest in front of the Goldman Sachs building…”:

To be intelligent, as many are at least in a narrow, analytical way, is morally neutral. These respectable citizens are inculcated in their elitist enclaves with “values” and “norms,” including pious acts of charity used to justify their privilege, and a belief in the innate goodness of American power. They are trained to pay deference to systems of authority. They are taught to believe in their own goodness, unable to see or comprehend—and are perhaps indifferent to—the cruelty inflicted on others by the exclusive systems they serve. And as norms mutate and change, as the world is steadily transformed by corporate forces into one of a small cabal of predators and a vast herd of human prey, these elites seamlessly replace one set of “values” with another. These elites obey the rules. They make the system work. And they are rewarded for this. In return, they do not question.

Those who resist—the doubters, outcasts, renegades, skeptics and rebels—rarely come from the elite. They ask different questions. They seek something else—a life of meaning. They have grasped Immanuel Kant’s dictum, “If justice perishes, human life on Earth has lost its meaning.” And in their search they come to the conclusion that, as Socrates said, it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong. This conclusion is rational, yet cannot be rationally defended. It makes a leap into the moral, which is beyond rational thought. It refuses to place a monetary value on human life. It acknowledges human life, indeed all life, as sacred. And this is why, as Arendt points out, the only morally reliable people when the chips are down are not those who say “this is wrong,” or “this should not be done,” but those who say “I can’t.”

There are streaks in my lungs, traces of the tuberculosis that I picked up around hundreds of dying Sudanese during the famine I covered as a foreign correspondent. I was strong and privileged and fought off the disease. They were not and did not. The bodies, most of them children, were dumped into hastily dug mass graves. The scars I carry within me are the whispers of these dead. They are the faint marks of those who never had a chance to become men or women, to fall in love and have children of their own. I carried these scars to the doors of Goldman Sachs. I had returned to living. Those whose last breaths had marked my lungs had not. I placed myself at the feet of these commodity traders to call for justice because the dead, and those who are dying in slums and refugee camps across the planet, could not make this journey. I see their faces. They haunt me in the day and come to me in the dark. They force me to remember. They make me choose sides.

In order to justify writing this off as “inflated prose”, Packer has to dismiss the entire Occupy movement with two sentences: “But Occupy turned out to be a moment of its time — a cri de coeur, stylish, media-distracted, and… not so hardly wounded as easily killed… [w]ithout an idea of the future that’s genuinely shared by large numbers of people, a real and lasting solution to the conditions described in these books.”

It’s hard to imagine how Packer, if he indeed spent any time at Occupy at all, or had researched the ongoing work that Occupy is doing fighting against foreclosures and helping hurricane victims (far more effectively than the state did, and yes I appreciate the irony that this link is from the NYT), or had read any of the cogent analyses of what Occupy did and is now moving to do, could say anything so outrageous. Unless it was to cover his own outrage, his own unease at having someone else draw the sensible, terrible conclusions that the New Yorker’s dystopian portraits of a country in collapse lead you to. While the New Yorker itself draws back, afraid of being too radical, too dark, of scaring off its complacent and respectable readers and rich corporatist advertisers. The cognitive dissonance is jarring.

I still read them, the New Yorker and the NYT. Now that I understand what they can add (some rare and often penetrating investigative reporting in the New Yorker, and occasionally brilliant ‘guest editorial’ writing in the NYT), and what they can’t, or won’t add (a stark and unvarnished acknowledgement of what it really means), it’s less troubling to have to turn from their work to the work of the ‘collapsniks’ who have moved past that denial and fear, and the absurd demand for “real and lasting solutions”, to provide the terrible knowledge of what has begun, and what is inevitably to come, and what we must do now to prepare for it.

my sketch of the ‘camps’ of political and philosophical movements of the 21st century; elaborated on here

David Graeber, who was actively involved in the early days of Occupy Wall Street and continues to work to advance its principles, starts his new book The Democracy Project with a fascinating (if long) personal history of how OWS found its legs and what it had to deal with (notably the brutal suppression of November 2011 when the governments of the day decided to shut down the protest through a sustained, globally coordinated and ruthless operation, and the disgraceful behaviour of the media ‘covering’ the movement, and then abruptly not covering it at all).

He sees OWS and its sister movements in Europe and the Mideast as important experiments in rediscovering the potential of a real democracy, and a society which retains real freedoms, even at a cost. To explain both the meaning and value of that, he presents a history of both democracy and anarchism that are starkly different from the histories we are taught in school. Democracy, he explains, was initially a derogatory term used interchangeably with the term “anarchy” by the ruling educated elites in most non-egalitarian, hierarchical, class-defined nations:

Jackson was running as a populist—once again, against the central banking system, which he did temporarily manage to dismantle. As Dupuis-Déri observes, “Jackson and his allies were well aware that their use of democracy was akin to what would today be called political marketing”; it was basically a cynical ploy, but it was wildly successful—so much so that within ten years time all candidates of all political parties were referring to themselves as “democrats.” Since the same thing happened everywhere—France, England, Canada—where the franchise was widened sufficiently that masses of ordinary citizens were allowed to vote, the result was that the term “democracy” itself changed as well—so that the elaborate republican system that the Founders had created with the express purpose of containing the dangers of democracy, itself was relabeled “democracy,” which is how we continue to use the term today.

What is democracy, in its essence? David defines it this way:

Democracy was not invented in ancient Greece. Granted, the word “democracy” was invented in ancient Greece—but largely by people who didn’t like the thing itself very much. Democracy was never really “invented” at all. Neither does it emerge from any particular intellectual tradition. It’s not even really a mode of government. In its essence it is just the belief that humans are fundamentally equal and ought to be allowed to manage their collective affairs in an egalitarian fashion, using whatever means appear most conducive. That, and the hard work of bringing arrangements based on those principles into being.

Consensus, rather than voting, has always, he says, been the preferred means of group decision-making in decentralized, non-militarized societies:

Even if people throughout history have always known how to count, there are good reasons why counting has often been avoided as a means of reaching group decisions. Voting is divisive. If a community lacks means to compel its members to obey a collective decision, then probably the stupidest thing one could do is to stage a series of public contests in which one side will, necessarily, be seen to lose; this would not only allow decisions that as many as 49 percent of the community strongly oppose, it would also maximize the possibility of hard feelings among that part of the community one most needs to convince to go along despite their opposition. A process of consensus finding, of mutual accommodation and compromise to reach a collective decision everyone at least does not find strongly objectionable, is far more suited to [a true democracy, i.e. to] situations where those who have to carry out a decision lack the sort of centralized bureaucracy, and particularly, the means of systematic coercion, that would be required to force an angry minority to comply with decisions they found stupid, obnoxious, or unfair.

Over the past two centuries, while the term “democracy”, in its distorted current sense of voting for one or another slate of elite leaders, rather than as defined above, has developed a positive connotation, “anarchy” has developed a negative one, for reasons that suit those with power. David explains:

In 1550, or even 1750, when both words were still terms of abuse, detractors often used “democracy” interchangeably with “anarchy,” or “democrat” with “anarchist.” In each case, some radicals eventually began using the term, defiantly, to describe themselves. But while “democracy” gradually became something everyone felt they had to support (even as no one agreed on what precisely it was), “anarchy” took the opposite path, becoming for most a synonym for violent disorder.

What then is anarchism? David defines it this way:

Actually the term means simply “without rulers.” The easiest way to explain anarchism … is to say that it is a political movement that aims to bring about a genuinely free society—and that defines a “free society” as one where humans only enter those kinds of relations with one another that would not have to be enforced by the constant threat of violence. History has shown that vast inequalities of wealth, institutions like slavery, debt peonage, or wage labor, can only exist if backed up by armies, prisons, and police. Even deeper structural inequalities like racism and sexism are ultimately based on the (more subtle and insidious) threat of force. Anarchists thus envision a world based on equality and solidarity, in which human beings would be free to associate with one another to pursue an endless variety of visions, projects, and conceptions of what they find valuable in life.

image from Justin Bale’s OWS archive 

Far from being the philosophy of crazed bomb-throwers set on terrifying and unsettling the populace, anarchism has a long pacifist tradition, one whose greatest challenge is not a lack of purpose, but an almost dreamy idealism that many would probably think impossible to achieve in the “real” world. David asserts:

[In Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries] anarchists insisted that it wasn’t just that the ends do not justify the means (though the ends do not, of course, justify the means) but that you will never achieve the ends at all unless the means are themselves a model for the world you wish to create.

David is pragmatic about how this convergence of real (direct, egalitarian, non-hierarchical) democracy and true (with complete freedom of action and freedom from violence and coercion) anarchism might be achieved. He seems to suggest we should just start; disconnect from the dysfunctional political and economic systems that current oppress us and try living together in ways consistent with democratic and anarchist principles (which are, in fact, totally aligned):

It’s hard to figure out exactly what kind of anarchism makes the most sense when so many questions can only be answered further down the road. Would there be a role for markets in a truly free society? How could we know? I myself am confident, based on history, that even if we did try to maintain a market economy in such a free society—that is, one in which there would be no state to enforce contracts, so that agreements came to be based only on trust—economic relations would rapidly morph into something libertarians would find completely unrecognizable, and would soon not resemble anything we are used to thinking of as a “market” at all. I certainly can’t imagine anyone agreeing to work for wages if they have any other options. But who knows, maybe I’m wrong. I am less interested in working out what the detailed architecture of what a free society would be like than in creating the conditions that would enable us to find out.

To my colleagues doing the difficult and important work of being facilitators in a world used to right by might, David would suggest that it is you who are leading the anarchist charge, you who hold the key to helping citizens find a better way to live:

What has now come to be called Anarchist Process—all those elaborate techniques of facilitation and consensus finding, the hand signals and the like—emerged from radical feminism, Quakerism, and even Native American traditions… Consensus is not just a set of techniques. When we talk about process, what we’re really talking about is the gradual creation of a culture of democracy… Consensus is an attempt to create a politics founded on the principle of reasonableness—one that, as feminist philosopher Deborah Heikes has pointed out, requires not only logical consistency, but “a measure of good judgment, self-criticism, a capacity for social interaction, and a willingness to give and consider reasons.” Genuine deliberation, in short. As a facilitation trainer would likely put it, it requires the ability to listen well enough to understand perspectives that are fundamentally different from one’s own, and then try to find pragmatic common ground without attempting to convert one’s interlocutors completely to one’s own perspective. It means viewing democracy as common problem solving among those who respect the fact they will always have, like all humans, somewhat incommensurable points of view.”

David then goes on to provide some of the techniques he believes could be instrumental in The Democracy Project — working to institute a true democratic and anarchic society. They include

• (i) learning, practicing and instituting principles of consensus (in various forms, pragmatically) in all group deliberations, problem-solving and decision-making;
• (ii) direct action,  civil disobedience and camping/occupying initiatives (creating in the process “communities of caring”) striving to achieve solidarity and freedoms, and to achieve a more just and egalitarian distribution of wealth, income and power; that includes respecting but not liaising or cooperating in any way with police and other authorities, applying improvisation and creativity to keep the forces of power off-guard, and, like the Zapatistas, “using precisely [and only] as much outright violence as [required] in order to put [our]selves in a position not to have to use violence anymore”; and
• (iii) creating “liberated spaces” and institutions within those spaces that demonstrate the viability of alternative democratic/anarchic models of living and self-governance and which reflect the dysfunction and illegitimacy of the current undemocratic and oppressive systems.

In the concluding chapter, some of which was recently posted online as A Practical Utopian’s Guide to the Coming Collapse, he talks about how much of the political and military policy in the US since Vietnam has been about minimizing dissent among the domestic population, and how policies like the use of drones (with huge ‘collateral’ damages but minimal harm to red-blooded Americans) directly stem from that. He asks “What happens when the creation of [a] sense of failure, of the complete ineffectiveness of political action against the system, becomes the chief objective of those in power?”

He goes on:

The politicians, CEOs, trade bureaucrats, and so forth who regularly meet at summits like Davos or the G20 may have done a miserable job in creating a world capitalist economy that meets the needs of a majority of the world’s inhabitants (let alone produces hope, happiness, security, or meaning), but they have succeeded magnificently in convincing the world that capitalism—and not just capitalism, but exactly the financialized, semifeudal capitalism we happen to have right now—is the only viable economic system. If you think about it, this is a remarkable accomplishment.

How did they pull it off? The preemptive attitude toward social movements is clearly a part of it; under no conditions can alternatives, or anyone proposing alternatives, be seen to experience success. This helps explain the almost unimaginable investment in ‘security systems’ of one sort or another: the fact that the United States, which lacks any major rival, spends more on its military and intelligence than it did during the Cold War, along with the almost dazzling accumulation of private security agencies, intelligence agencies, militarized police, guards, and mercenaries. Then there are the propaganda organs, including a massive media industry that did not even exist before the sixties, celebrating police. Mostly these systems do not so much attack dissidents directly as contribute to a pervasive climate of fear, jingoistic conformity, life insecurity, and simple despair that makes any thought of changing the world seem an idle fantasy. Yet these security systems are also extremely expensive. Some economists estimate that a quarter of the American population is now engaged in ‘guard labor’ of one sort or another—defending property, supervising work, or otherwise keeping their fellow Americans in line.

To exploit this, he says, strategies for The Democracy Project might include persuading the corporatists that a general debt amnesty would be an excellent release valve for growing citizen anger over inequality. It would bankrupt Wall Street, and devastate some (mostly financial) sectors of the stock market, but it would give citizens back a modicum of control over their lives, and enable them to contribute again to the rest of the economy, and also rein in the catastrophic growth (and the need for it) that is desolating our planet. He writes:

Even those running the system are reluctantly beginning to conclude that some kind of mass debt cancellation—some kind of jubilee—is inevitable. The real political struggle is going to be over the form that it takes. Well, isn’t the obvious thing to address both problems simultaneously? Why not a planetary debt cancellation, as broad as practically possible, followed by a mass reduction in working hours: a four-hour day, perhaps, or a guaranteed five-month vacation? This might not only save the planet but also (since it’s not like everyone would just be sitting around in their newfound hours of freedom) begin to change our basic conceptions of what value-creating labor might actually be.

Occupy was surely right not to make demands, but if I were to have to formulate one, that would be it. After all, this would be an attack on the dominant ideology at its very strongest points. The morality of debt and the morality of work are the most powerful ideological weapons in the hands of those running the current system. That’s why they cling to them even as they are effectively destroying everything else. It’s also why debt cancellation would make the perfect revolutionary demand… [It would] bring home that money is really just a human product, a set of promises, that by its nature can always be renegotiated…

[And] I think any levelheaded assessment of the world situation would have to conclude that what’s really needed is not more work, but less. And this is true even if we don’t take into account ecological concerns—that is, the fact that the current pace of the global work machine is rapidly rendering the planet uninhabitable… It’s not a question of building an entirely new society whole cloth. It’s a question of building on what we are already doing, expanding the zones of freedom, until freedom becomes the ultimate organizing principle. I actually don’t think the technical aspects of coming up with how to produce and distribute manufactured objects is likely to be the great problem, though we are constantly told to believe it’s the only problem.

David is skeptical of the value of complicated ‘designs’ for an alternative economy and society, arguing that this isn’t how change happens. He says “I am less interested in deciding what sort of economic system we should have in a free society than in creating the means by which people can make such decisions for themselves. This is why I spent so much of this book talking about democratic decision making. And the very experience of taking part in such new forms of decision making encourages one to look on the world with new eyes.”

When I predicted the failure of OWS, it was not because I believed there is no alternative to the economic and political systems we have now. I expected that the powers of the day would not tolerate any threatening dissent for a prolonged period, and would use the newly militarized police and media to smash the movement. And I expected it to fail as well because of the endemic poverty of imagination of our dumbed-down citizens, who have been schooled and propagandized from birth to believe there are only variations of the one way to live. Too many in OWS just wanted their ‘fair share’ of the wealth and power of the 1%, a redistribution of resources of the unsustainable, massively destructive and dehumanizing society we have created, a rearrangement of the deck chairs on the Titanic. Too many believed that things really weren’t that bad, and that in any case nothing could be done to make it measurably better.

It’s great to read about someone, still active in the movement, with the knowledge, intelligence and imagination to see not only a better way to live that is radically different, but a means to overthrow (with minimal violence) the existing power structure in order to institute it.

I have written often on these pages that everything I know leads me to believe we are too late to prevent or even mitigate the collapse of civilization culture, and that we will be wracked in the coming decades by a cascading series of energy, economic and ecological crises. I have personally given up aspiring to be a radical activist, because I believe it would be too little too late, and that thanks to the Jevons Paradox anything I was able to accomplish would almost surely be offset or undone by positive feedback loops committed to the insane perpetuation of the existing systems for a while longer. And because I am afraid of pain and imprisonment.

But I am still a cheerleader for Occupy (camp F in the map above), still active in the Transition movement (camp G), still a supporter of Deep Green Resistance (camp H), especially against the Tar Sands, factory farming and other ecological and humanitarian corporatist atrocities, and still a believer in Communitarianism (camp I). All these movements embrace the only forms of action that still make sense:

• learning how to live together in community,
• learning the essential capacities of resilience that will make us better able to cope with collapse,
• fighting back against the worst injustices of the global corporatist cabal, and
• creating models of a better way to live that just might be useful to the survivors of collapse, our descendants, as they work to create what will be almost unrecognizably different, relocalized post-collapse cultures.

David Graeber’s vision draws on elements of all four camps, and his call for mass debt cancellation and the reinvention of work (to be meaningful, self-determined, sustainable and responsible), is just what’s needed to yank us out of our state of exhausted resignation and stir the idealist in us. Time for those of us who got our first real taste, our first sense of the possibility of real democracy and real freedom in the streets and parks and places we Occupied, to come together again.

Of late I have, at last, begun to act in accordance with my stated beliefs and intentions — spending more time in beautiful natural places, and composing creative works (poetry, music, games). Spending less time reading (and writing) non-fiction, especially online. Doing and thinking and talking less, and seeing and being more. I’ve always been a slow learner, but I think I’m finally ‘getting’ what I have been writing and talking about for nearly a decade now (this blog passed its 10th anniversary in February).

It’s curious how, when we have a breakthrough in our thinking that transforms our worldview and our belief systems, we live in a state of considerable cognitive dissonance for a while (a long while in my case), during which our ongoing actions and our new beliefs are very much at odds. Many of us talk about changing the work we do, changing our relationships, changing our whole way of being in the world,  long before we do it. For some, the change never comes — there are too many excuses for continuing the old behaviours even though the cognitive dissonance is obvious to everyone. Both of Pollard’s Laws apply here.

I expect to keep blogging at my current miserly pace of a few articles a month, because it’s my way of keeping track both of my own evolving ideas and of how our civilization’s collapse is unfolding. But my real energies now are focused elsewhere. I expect to publish some of my creative work here, though music and games are less well-suited to a blog than what I have been producing. In accordance with my desire to ‘play’ more (since that is as close to a purpose for my life as I’ve found), I want to perform my creative work (poetry, stories, songs, and perhaps plays and films and some new vehicles that don’t really have a name yet), and I want to learn and help others learn (especially young people) through playing games (face-to-face, not online). I want my creations to be more social, more interactive, more collaborative, more physical. I’ve even started to paint.

How, I’m wondering, might we create such stuff together, instead of as such solitary pursuits?

.     .     .     .     .

I wanted to give a shoutout to two groups that were kind enough to repost some of my recent blog articles (their reposts engendered a lot more discussion than the original articles did): Generation Alpha (Ben Pennings) and Actions 4 Sustainability (John Strohl and David Cameron).

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PREPARING FOR CIVILIZATION’S COLLAPSE

Collapse Isn’t Coming, It’s Underway: About a year ago, collapsnik blogger and architect escapefromwisconsin posted an article that suggested past collapses weren’t recognized as such until much later, and then went on to catalogue reasons why collapse is already upon us. Reading this a year later is enough to make you shudder — the situation is much worse today. So what happens if we acknowledge that the complete and permanent collapse of our economy, and ultimately our civilization culture, is already well underway? The same thing that happens when we acknowledge that the sixth great extinction of life on the planet actually began with the invention of the arrowhead and the commensurate slaughter of all the world’s great mammals. Nothing. There will come a tipping point at which, like the first declaration in 1932 that the economy was in the midst of a global Great Depression, a large enough proportion of the population will acknowledge that our civilization is done for, that we will start acting accordingly. Those of us who realize this now will find no solace then in saying “I told you so”. (Thanks to Seb Paquet for the link, and the one that follows.)

The Five Stages of Collapse: This is the title of Dmitry Orlov’s new book (available for pre-orders). It’s reviewed on Dmitry’s site by Carolyn Baker, who’s worked with the Transition movement on their “heart and soul” initiative. The five stages of collapse (which Dmitry correctly predicted in the fall of the Soviet Union, and which he sees happening at different rates and in different ways in different places) are as follows:

1. Financial collapse: Faith in business is lost. Banks go bankrupt. Savings and net worth disappear.
2. Commercial collapse: Businesses go bankrupt. Currencies collapse. Trade collapses. Shift from commercial ‘trade’ economy to barter and then to Gift Economy.
3. Political collapse: Governments go bankrupt. Power devolves to local levels by default, and this leads to power struggles. Communications systems collapse.
4. Social collapse: Trust in others is lost. Communities struggle, as charities and other local groups exhaust resources and squabble. This is because “the sort of community that stands a chance post-collapse is simply unacceptable pre-collapse: it is illegal, it is uncomfortable and it is unsafe. No reasonable person would want any part of it.” Those who had power before collapse fight fiercely and desperately to hold on to it.
5. Cultural collapse: Faith in the goodness of humanity is lost. Civilization collapses.

The Collapse of Meaning: Dark Mountain co-founder Dougald Hine writes about the extent to which our sense of ourselves is caught up in our work, which for most means our employment. We depend on it for our financial security, our sense of identity, and our direction for what we should do (next, in the short-term, and for the rest of our lives). As economies collapse, unemployment soars, and young people despair of ever getting a foothold in the work world, more and more of us are having to find financial security, identity and direction from something else than a career as an employee. He suggests that many will, as a result, face a crisis of meaning at the same time that, or even before, they have to face the crises of large-scale economic, energy or ecological collapse. Perhaps how most face this crisis will show us something about how we will face the larger-scale crises to follow.

The Road Down from Empire: John Michael Greer describes the ongoing collapse of the US economy, and the denials and ‘hopeful’ reactions of various factions in that country that prevent any meaningful steps being taken to deal with it. He advocates the personal actions of using less of everything, becoming less dependent and acquiring critical competencies and skills in preparation. But like most collapsniks he acknowledges that these actions will not be enough to prevent the “fall of empire”. Excerpt:

As the costs of empire rise, the profits of empire dwindle, the national economy circles the drain, the burden of deferred maintenance on the nation’s infrastructure grows, and the impact of the limits to growth on industrial civilization worldwide becomes ever harder to evade, they face the unenviable choice between massive trouble now and even more massive trouble later; being human, they repeatedly choose the latter, and console themselves with the empty hope that something might turn up. It’s a common hope these days. I’ve commented here more than once about the way that the Rapture, the Singularity, and all the other apocalyptic fantasies on offer these days serve primarily as a means by which people can pretend to themselves that the future they’re going to get isn’t the one that their actions and evasions are busily creating for them. The same is true of a great many less gaudy fictions about the future—the much-ballyhooed breakthroughs that never quite get around to happening, the would-be mass movements that never attract anyone but the usual handful of activists, the great though usually unspecified leaps in consciousness that will allegedly happen any day now, and all the rest of it.

Environmental Melancholia: Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder: A lovely article by Carolyn Raffensperger describes the unbearable sense of grief that those of us aware of the accelerating damage we are doing to this planet, and the consequent accelerating suffering of creatures (wild and domesticated, including humans), are now living with. Thanks to Anne Proudfire for the link. Excerpt:

The moral injury stemming from our participation in destruction of the planet has two dimensions: knowledge of our role and an inability to act. Our culture lacks the mechanisms for taking account of collective moral injuries and then finding the vision and creativity to address them. The difference between a soldier’s moral injury and our environmental moral injuries is that environmental wounds aren’t a shattering of moral expectations, but a steady, grinding erosion—a slow-motion relentless sorrow.

Environmental lawyer Bob Gough says that he suffers from pre-traumatic stress disorder. Pre-traumatic stress disorder is short hand for the fact that he is fully aware of the future trauma, the moral injury that we individually and collectively suffer, the effects on the Earth of that injury, and our inability to act in time. Essentially pre-traumatic stress disorder, the environmentalist’s malady, is a result of our inability to prevent harm.

Burning Up: A new Shell report forecasts that by 2030, thanks to the Tar Sands, fracking and other goodies jointly brought to us by Big Oil and corrupt corporatist politicians, we will be burning 15% more oil, 26% more coal, and 46& more methane (“natural gas”) than we are now — more than enough to put us into 6C catastrophic climate change by mid-century. This assumes our exhausted economy can afford to pay for its very high extraction and end-user costs. Either we will hit Peak Oil when we cannot afford the cost of new production, or we will burn up from the consequences of affording it. Or both.

State-Wrecked: A Reagan advisor admits, in a NYT op-ed, that the economy is collapsing. His argument is dismissed by a progressive Cornell prof, but not because he doesn’t agree with the prognosis, but because he disagrees about whether and how it can be ‘managed’. Both have made long strides in their thinking, but both have a long way to go to move past the second denial.

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LIVING BETTER

Why We’re All Addicted, and How to Live With That: Gabor Mate is a hard-working physician who learned about addiction by working for years in Vancouver’s grim Downtown East Side, and who has become notorious for promoting the ingesting of the plant ayahuasca (with appropriate professional guidance) as a means of facing your true self and moving past addictions, trauma, and stress-related chronic diseases (including the one I suffer from, ulcerative colitis). He’s a brilliant speaker and the people I’ve met who’ve worked with him hold him in the highest esteem. If you’re curious, here’s a presentation he made in Vancouver; here he is answering questions about the use of ayahuasca, and here’s an audio interview with him (if that’s not enough, there’s tons more on his website). My notes from his presentations, in case they’re of any use:

“Clues” to understanding and overcoming addiction/trauma/chronic illness:

1. It’s important to try to attain (a) a high level of self-awareness, (b) acceptance of and compassion for the self (self-love), and (c) courage to look at what actually is, without denial.
2. It’s useful to disidentify the self from the experience (you are not “an addict” or “a survivor”, those are merely your experiences); in this he quibbles with the labeling of the 12-step programs.
3. Beware of being addicted to being ‘on’ (i.e. being admired, successful) and hence the inevitable withdrawal caused by the egoic mind when experiences of that abate. Even when your experiences are positive you are not your experiences, and your experiences keep you in your addiction.
4. It is in the structural nature of the egoic mind to want, to crave, to get temporary relief and then to want again — we are all addicts, constantly ‘sold’ suffering and scarcity and isolation by our culture, creating an addiction to ‘self-ishness’; every addiction starts with pain and inevitably ends with pain.
5. ‘Attachment’ in addiction terminology is craving and holding on in an unhealthy way to transient pleasure; but in psychology ‘attachment’ is healthy connection to parents — the less you had of the healthy attachment (connection) as a child the more you will have of the unhealthy attachment (addiction) as an adult and vice versa.
6. All (negative) emotions are to some extent evidence of the fundamental experience of being disconnected from the core of your being, your essence.
7. It’s important to accept your pain and remain vulnerable — that pain is the ‘real’ you trying to wake you up and show you the path to reconnection and the need to let go of your egoic mind.

Radical Conservation: Brian Fey is the director of the Bosque Village in Mexico, a combination forest permaculture project and intentional community. In this candid and disarming video, he explains the idea of creating an intentional ‘village’ with more decision-making and living autonomy than most intentional communities offer (while still sharing and centralizing resources as much as possible), the challenges of finding compatible residents and coping with eager but time- and resource-sapping volunteers, and the idea that the key to sustainability now and in the future is “radical conservation” — reducing the human footprint by using the absolute minimum amount of resources of all kinds and leaving as much of the natural life of the area as intact as possible, while still engendering a joyful and comfortable community life. More on his work here. Thanks to Seb Paquet for the link.

One Day Everything Will Be Free: A different community but with a remarkably similar set of underlying principles to Brian Fey’s is Haiti’s Sadhana Forest, also in substance a combination of a forest permaculture project and an intentional community. Sadhana is the subject of an upcoming documentary film by Joseph Redwood-Martinez that I’ve had the privilege of viewing an advance copy of. The film is called One Day Everything Will Be Free and is an immersive experience, with gorgeous photography and no prescribed message. It drops you into the village where you can hear comments, both critical and supportive, about the issues they are facing. The community is an experiment in progress, with a long-term vision but no NGO-type time-fixed goals. Watching the film is like being in the village, as a new volunteer walking around getting oriented, left to make your own decisions. It’s a remarkable achievement, and if you’re a member of a film club or transition or permaculture group you can host a screening and have Joseph call in for a Q&A session with your group by Skype. Thanks to Michel Bauwens for the link.

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POLITICS AND ECONOMICS AS USUAL

 

graphic from the other 98% (thanks to David Hodgson for the link)

Politicians Cede Drafting New Laws to Corporatists: For those not familiar with it, ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, is a cabal of right-wing multinational corporate executives and right-wing politicians, whose role is to draft legislation that furthers corporatist agendas and introduce it in each US state and nationwide (and even internationally). Armies of corporate-funded lawyers do the dirty work for ultraconservative politicians. Here’s the scoop on what these influence peddlers are doing now. Thanks to Sam Rose for the link.

The War on Terra: Biting look from Juice Media at what the governments of Canada and Australia are doing to contribute shamelessly and disproportionately to climate change. Thanks to Paul Heft for the link. More seriously, in the NYT, Thomas Homer-Dixon summarizes the Tar Sands disaster, and Tar Sands Blockade works around the media blackout of the recent horrific Exxon Mayflower Arkansas Tar Sands spill.

How the Rich Pay No Taxes: A massive international investigative project by the ICIJ that involved poring through mountains of leaked documents has revealed the astonishing extent to which the rich and super-rich around the world use secret accounts and offshore tax havens to avoid income and wealth taxes. Thanks to Seb Paquet for the link.

What is Actually Going On in Iceland and Venezuela: We progressives like to point to these two countries as alternative models to corporatist-dominated western governments. But maybe they are not such good models after all. A progressive in Iceland, and the New Yorker’s Jon Lee Anderson writing Hugo Chavez’s obituary, suggest that we are not likely to find alternatives to our collapsing global industrial economy there, or perhaps anywhere. (And no, I’m not going to take sides in the debate about Anderson’s journalistic integrity.)

Homeland Security and Drones at the Canadian Border: I cross the US border quite regularly, and every time I do it’s with trepidation. Ever since learning about Canadians who were arrested on false information and sent to foreign torture prisons, I wonder what risks I take entering the increasingly foreigner-hostile US. Most Americans I know are welcoming and generous, but what’s happening at the Canadian border is scary. As Todd Miller reports, experiments with drones, surveillance and ever-increasing numbers of multiple types of security forces, all gorging on the endless and absurd budget increases the US government doles out for “security” (that has done nothing but make the US less safe), are continuing with increasing fervour, and in a legal limbo that makes the situation there largely lawless, and border justice arbitrary.

Avian Flu Update: So far there are 16 confirmed deaths and millions of birds slaughtered in the recent outbreak of H7N9 avian flu. So far the virulence and transmissability of the new strain seem to be low. But as long as industrial agriculture continues, the billions of cruelly confined antibiotic-laden birds in factory farms are a vector for disaster, and sooner or later we’ll see a pandemic that will, at least for a few years, dwarf all of the other issues facing us.

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FUN AND INSPIRATION

 

cartoon by arnie levin in the new yorker

The Words We Have Inherited: Niigaan Sinclair responds to a racist editorial by the publisher of the Morris (Manitoba) Mirror newspaper. It’s a beautiful, articulate, disarming response. Thanks to Chris Corrigan for the link.

Whale Shows Appreciation for Rescue: Amazing video of a whale’s celebration after being cut free from a fishing net by conservationists. Thanks to Beth Patterson for the link.

Being Afraid of the Wrong Things: Jared Diamond explains that we should be more focused on statistically real dangers to our health and safety — showers, stepladders, staircases and slippery sidewalks — and less on statistically insignificant risks like terrorists, robbers and armed strangers. Thanks to Sue Bullock for the link.

The Big Electron: A mash-up of Bill Hicks and George Carlin musings on the wonder of life, by melodysheep. Thanks to Paul Chefurka for the link.

Contronyms: These are words that have evolved two opposite meanings: sanction, oversight, left, dust, seed, stone, trim, cleave, resign, fast, off, weather, screen, help, apology, bill, bolt, buckle, clip, consult, continue, custom, enjoin, fine, finish, garnish, handicap, lease, liege, overlook, peer, rent, sanguine, scan, splice, table, temper, transparent. Be careful when you use them!

Not As Good For You As You Thought: A new scoring system for foods has some nutritional value surprises. Paleo diet fans will disagree with the scoring. Thanks to Tree for the link.

Shit Facilitators Say: Confess, you’ve said some of these things. And cringed at some others. Thanks to Hildy Gottlieb for the link.

Shaggy Dog Story: In California, a blind stray Husky was ‘adopted’ by a stray terrier, and when they were captured on the streets, they’d become inseparable.

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THOUGHTS FOR THE MONTH

From Ralph Waldo Emerson (thanks to Jeff Mincey for the link):

Nothing is more disgusting than the crowing about liberty by slaves, as most men are, and the flippant mistaking for freedom of some paper preamble like a Declaration of Independence, or the statute right to vote, by those who never dared to think or to act.

From Jeff Mincey:

The odds are that in the course of your life, someone you know by the name parent, friend, lover, or spouse will project their own dreams upon you — often in the name of having your best interests at heart. Or they may genuinely have good intentions, even as they nonetheless advocate in behalf of their own agenda for how you should live your life. Either way, resist. Hold fast to your dreams, for they are yours. To consider the advice or counsel of others is fine; but never let anyone talk you out of your dreams.

From May Sarton: New Year Resolve (thanks to Tree for the link):

The time has come to stop allowing the clutter
to clutter my mind like dirty snow,
shove it off and find clear time, clear water.

Time for a change. Let silence in like a cat
who has sat at my door neither wild nor strange
hoping for food from my store, and shivering on the mat.

Let silence in. She will rarely speak or mew,
she will sleep on my bed, and all I have ever been
either false or true will live again in my head.

For it is now or not, as old age silts the stream,
to shove away the clutter, to untie every knot,
to take the time to dream, to come back to still water.

From Kobutsu Malone, on the narcissism that pervades the ‘new age’ movement (thanks to Tim Bennett for the link):

In our Western society materialism has become so all encompassing that we have no clue as to any alternatives, since our foundation, our psychology, our spiritual leanings have all been contaminated by materialism. We have no way to relate to things other than materialistically. The New Age phenomenon is very much a materialistic approach; in fact it is a thinly disguised system of conquest applied to what we perceive as the spiritual. In so many cases, our thirst for meaning, our need for fulfillment, can only manifest in terms of wanting to appropriate more “stuff.” In the New Age this means appropriating the spirituality of other cultures because we are so impoverished and have squandered our heritage and fatally polluted it with our materialistic attitude of conquest and ownership.

From Stuart Malcolm Scott, on Presence:

The act of noticing I am not present is an opening to presence. Admitting I didn’t understand something. Admitting my mind wandered momentarily and asking somebody to repeat. Admitting I am stuck and don’t know what to do next. These are ways of allowing myself to be without defenses. And for me, to be defenseless is to be present.

From Daniel Quinn, on Unschooling, from his book Providence (thanks to Tim Bennett for the quote):

Our entire program [Compulsory Schooling] is based on this argument: “We know kids learn effortlessly if they have their own reasons for learning, but we can’t wait for them to find their own reasons. We have to provide them with reasons that are not their own. This doesn’t work, but it’s the only practical way to organize our schools.” … How would I organize the schools? To ask this question presupposes that we must have schools, doesn’t it? … We know what works for children up to the age where we ship them off to school: Let them be around you, pay attention to them, give them access to as much as you can, let them try things, and that’s it. They’ll take care of the rest.

From Tim Minchin (from his animated short film Storm):

Isn’t this enough? Just this world? Just this beautiful, complex wonderfully unfathomable world? How does it so fail to hold our attention that we have to diminish it with the invention of cheap, man-made myths and monsters?

From Hafiz, 14th century Sufi poet (thanks to Seb Paquet for the link):

The small man
builds cages for everyone he knows,
while the sage,
who has to duck his head
when the moon is low,
keeps dropping keys all night long
for the
beautiful
rowdy
prisoners.

System diagram of the vicious cycle of the Industrial Economy (red, top) and the virtuous cycle of the Natural Economy (green, bottom)

One of the things Ferananda Ibarra and Jeff Clearwater stress in their New Economy workshops is the importance of not framing the terms and concepts of this economy the same way the old Industrial Growth Economy is framed. It’s much like getting sucked into debating conservative or Orwellian terms like “right to life”, “entitlements” or “freedom” (as in “free” trade etc.) in the frames in which proponents of a particular worldview on these subjects argue from. Or trying to explain how to meditate using intellectual language. You’re at a disadvantage before you start.

I’m planning a workshop on the New Economy (also known variously as the Gift Economy, Leisure Economy or Natural Economy) this spring. First task on the agenda is to explain what an “economy” is, and hence the difference between the current Industrial Growth Economy and the New Economy that will emerge when the Industrial Growth Economy collapses. Complicating matters is that the New Economy already exists in some ways and places, and the Industrial Growth Economy is likely to fall apart slowly, so the two will co-exist for at least the next few decades.

So my first task is to create a new ‘frame’ to explain the New Economy, a ‘skin’ that it naturally fits within, instead of trying to explain it in terms of the Industrial Growth Economy’s vocabulary and core concepts. This will also help me explain (a subject for a future article) what community currencies are and why they’re beneficial and will soon be essential.

The very word ‘economy’ has come to mean something very different from its original meaning. Its etymological meaning is “stewardship of the village or household”, and that’s what it meant until the 17th century, when industrial society began using the word as a shortened form of “political economy”, to mean “governance of the wealth and resources of a region or nation”. The industrial growth economy pushed the definition even further, so that the economy became about the means to increase wealth and resources (i.e. perpetual growth) and about its allocation and distribution (who gets what wealth and resources for what purposes). Neoclassical ‘capitalist’ (political-) economists believe the ‘market’ (i.e. those who have wealth and power) should make decisions about allocation and distribution of wealth and resources. Their policies have inevitably led to ever-greater concentration of wealth and resources (those that have, can get more; those without continue to get none). Socialist (political-) economists believe government should intervene in decisions about allocation and distribution of wealth and resources, sufficiently to ensure reasonably equitable allocation and distribution. The power of money ensures that capitalist politicians (and corrupt politicians that can be bought) prevail in most nations.

So now, immersed in the newspeak of neoclassical economics, we take for granted that “free” (i.e. unregulated, easily corrupted) markets are the ‘best’ way to allocate and distribute wealth and resources, that ‘private’ ownership and ‘enclosure’ (legally preventing others from accessing or using wealth and resources that used to be part of the Commons) are in everyone’s best interest, and are inalienable ‘rights’, and that ‘economic growth’ (i.e. perpetual, exponential increases in the use of resources, production of goods and creation of ‘wealth’) is inherently good for all, or at least for all humans.

To try to explain the New Economy to people who have accepted these (recent) ‘economic’ developments as the way things always have been, are and must be in a ‘democratic’ world, is immensely difficult. It is hard, when you’ve never known anything else, to conceive of a world without centralized ‘market-based’ economic decision-making, without (fiat currency) money, without ‘private’ property, and without debts. Depending on your worldview, such an economic world probably seems either anarchic (and dangerous) or utopian (and naive). No wonder discussion of the New Economy has so many people rolling their eyes.

The first thing we have to explain is that the Industrial Growth Economy that began in the 17th century and is now global in reach (and in political, philosophical and, some would say, religious acceptance) is a modern aberration, not the historical norm in human societies, and that most human cultures throughout history and across the world would find our acceptance of the Industrial Growth Economy unfathomable and pathological. What we’re talking about when we talk about the New Economy is, essentially, the economy (in its original meaning) of the vast majority of human cultures throughout history.

To explain this, we have to ‘reframe’ the terms and concepts of the Industrial Growth Economy into a New Economy framework.

Such a framework has no place (or equivalents) for some of the accepted and essential concepts of the Industrial Growth Economy: (personal or corporate) assets, wealth, capital and property, debts (liabilities), revenues and income, expenses, customers, suppliers, financing, marketing, and work. Instead, this framework is based on the concepts of the Commons, sufficiency, sustainability, well-being, stewardship and generosity.

There is considerable evidence that most indigenous peoples had no need for money, and consensual exchange between tribes (although such exchanges were apparently rare, since tribes were economically self-sufficient and often distrustful or belligerent) were not money-denominated or barter transactions, but rather arose from generosity and as a gesture of welcome. While there is much controversy about the degree to which indigenous peoples in various parts of the world recognized individual property rights, it is doubtful that they recognized them to the extent of modern property ‘ownership’, carrying with it the unrestricted right to sell, use exclusively, and protect (fence off, defend with arms) that we accept today.

Most indigenous tribes, from what I can see in my research, had established territories and a buffer zone between their territories and those of neighbouring tribes. These territories were Commons, not individually owned but stewarded collectively by the members of the tribe for the benefit of all members, to provide sufficient resources and well-being for all in a sustainable (ecological) way. This is an evolutionary success strategy in both human and non-human animal populations, one that our modern culture has forgotten.

Their ‘economies’, inseparable parts of their cultures, were simple: Steward and harvest enough, varied food, medicines and other resources for all members of the tribe to live comfortably even through periods of bad weather and poor growing conditions. Leave the land as you found it. Respect, even revere, the other creatures that play essential roles in the balance of the ecosystem and the food cycle. Don’t take what you don’t need. Live within your means. There was no ‘work’ in these societies, and the responsibilities of stewardship and harvesting generally took no more than an hour per day, leaving the rest of the day for leisure and self-invented recreation. (To be fair, this became less true the further the tribe migrated from the rich rainforest whence the human species first arose.)

It is hard to imagine transplanting such an economy to our modern, globalized culture. We no longer have identifiable ‘tribes’, communities or boundaries. We are not at all self-sufficient, and our massively swollen populations depend utterly on the theft (from the poor, from struggling nations, from our desolated natural environments and from future generations) and importation of huge quantities of complicated manufactured goods and raw materials, and on a fragile economy of just-in-time production and delivery that leaves no room for error or disaster, natural or man-made. The Industrial Growth Economy depends on the wage slavery of all, working at paid and unpaid jobs to eke out just enough to live an unhealthy, violent, fiercely competitive, endlessly stressful life.

Yet the New Economy already co-exists, uneasily, with the dying Industrial Growth Economy it will eventually replace. When we look after each other’s children, when we engage in philanthropy or volunteer our time, when we buy and trade at local community markets, when we share our tools, our knowledge (including expert scientific knowledge among peers), our ideas (online and at community events), our couches, our potluck meals and our files (Open Source), or when we donate used clothing and goods, we are creating and supporting the New Economy. In the process we are at war with wealthy, corrupt corporatists and privatizers and ‘enclosers’ using their media and lawyer mouthpieces to propagandize and threaten us so they can hoard and transfer yet more resources and scarce financial wealth from the poor to the rich.

This New Economy is occurring because, for an increasing number of people, the Industrial Growth Economy is now priced out of reach. The old economy increasingly depends on the rich, and corporations that receive billions in taxpayer subsidies through extortion, graft, bribery and theft, buying more and more stuff from each other, while most citizens can only participate at the marginal Wal-Mart level. Change in human societies generally occurs only when there is no choice but to change, and for the poor and disappearing middle class that time has come, and the New Economy is taking over. Those now living increasingly in the New Economy realize that record Dow Jones market performance is not a sign of economic health, but of the inequality of wealth and the volume of over-priced trade among the rich, their lackeys and apologists and addicted dependents. They realize that real rates of inflation and unemployment are 2-3 times the ‘official’ political rates, and that they will never decline, because the Industrial Growth Economy offers no solution for either problem.

And it is just beginning. Look at your monthly expenditures and you will probably discover that most of your money (rent, financial and consumer purchases) continues to support the Industrial Growth Economy. But as the housing market collapses, as governments run out of money to pay for financial corporation bailouts and subsidies and the big financial institutions and subsidized corporations collapse, as oil costs and climate change events make massive movement of goods uneconomic and import/export markets seize up, driving large centralized corporations out of business, you will find, slowly but surely, that you are more and more a part of the transition to the New Economy.

What will that New Economy look like, once the transition is substantially complete in a few decades? Here’s what I foresee:

•  As growth- and debt-dependent fiat currencies collapse, we will try many alternative standards for exchange (gold, barter etc.), but none of them will work. We will start giving what we have, beyond our personal needs, away to those who need it, without charge, not because we are generous but because there will be no viable currency to use instead of the collapsed currencies. We will reluctantly trust that, by doing so, we will receive enough of the generosity of others to compensate us for our own generosity and will end up with all we need for a comfortable, healthy life. At first, this will seem hopeless and naive. But slowly but surely we will discover that it works, especially among local, coherent communities whose members we know and (perhaps reluctantly at first) come to care about.
• In part because of our doubts about whether such an economy can work, we will instinctively devote much more time to building local communities. There will be no formula for doing this, no ideal community size or location. Pre-existing wealth will not be a success factor, but collective practical knowledge and skills will, as will the health of the local land and ecosystems. We will have time for this community building because we will, with few exceptions, no longer have jobs in the Industrial Growth Economy.
• As we rediscover the value of community, we will rediscover our own gifts and passions and the community’s (many, many) now-unmet needs. We will relearn quickly and joyfully how to make a living for ourselves, in what I have called “Natural Enterprises”, meeting those needs in partnerships and in cooperatives with other community members with complementary knowledge and skills and shared passions. We will develop a deep understanding of what our community needs, so there will be no waste, no losses, no need for ‘marketing’, no risk of failure. We will give away what we produce because we can, because we know it’s needed, and because we care. And we will receive what we need from others in the community.
• We will learn to live with much less, and discover to our astonishment that we are happier than when we had much more ‘wealth’ (and much more debt offsetting it). We will discover the freedom of self-sufficiency, not having to be dependent on big corporations for jobs, on lawyers and bankers for money, on ‘professional’ entertainers and commercial media for fun, on lawyers for compensation for corporatist abuses, on medical professionals and drugs for our well-being, on schools for learning, on our cars to get us everywhere we must be, on stock market growth for financial security, or on the propagandizing media for information.
• We will find ourselves with much more leisure time than we ever imagined. It will change our relationship with time, and with each other, and our priorities of what is important in the world.
• There will be much hardship during the transition, but we will be so busy coping with it, and being astonished at the joys and freedoms that this new economy brings us, that we will not feel as if we are living in times of hardship. Nevertheless, in the process of relearning to look after our own nutrition, health and well-being, many people will die from serious illnesses and injuries who might have lived a while longer (with variable quality of life) under the old Industrial Growth Economy. It will take us a while to wean ourselves off the addictions of the old economy: sugars, salt, corn products, fats, alcohol, drugs, antibiotics and other overused chemicals. In the meantime our lives will remain malnourished and unhealthy and we will suffer accordingly. Birth rates will plummet and death rates rise moderately, until our population begins a rapid decline that will, in concert with the final collapse of the Industrial Growth Economy, eliminate remaining resource scarcities. We will learn to eat and act healthier because in the New Economy there will be no alternative. And our population will drop to each community’s natural carrying capacity because there will be no alternative.

Our tribal natures, encoded for a million years in our DNA, will probably re-emerge. But just as in times of crisis humans tend to pull together and help each other, my guess is that this new tribalism will take a while to reassert itself — possibly until population has dropped enough to provide space between communities and communities have developed a strong sense of loyalty and identity.

Or possibly not. Inter-tribal warfare predates the Industrial Growth Economy by millennia, and we can only speculate on whether it was rare or endemic, and what precipitated it. There are arguments that we have inherited the belligerent genes of our chimpanzee cousins rather than the more peaceful ones of our other cousins, the bonobos, and that we slaughtered our hominid Neanderthal cousins to extinction long before the discovery of agriculture and the possibility of ‘permanent’ settlement. So while we might make the difficult transition to the New Economy, our ability to transition to a new, peaceful political society is a different issue. There is some evidence that human societies have worked to create nations in part precisely for the purpose of reducing inter-tribal strife. Yet those nations have yielded both inter-national and internal wars that dwarf in scale and ferocity the battles between pre-civilization tribes.

That’s the paradox we’re going to face in the coming decades. There’s lots of evidence that humans, prior to the Industrial Growth Economy, were capable of evolving economies of abundance, peace and leisure within tribal groups. But there is little evidence that we have been successful at evolving political systems and cultures that allow these thriving tribes to co-exist with each other.

That shouldn’t stop us from working to enable a transition to the New Economy, community by community around the world, and to help undermine and end the Industrial Growth Economy that is desolating our world and has imprisoned us all. But it should give us pause to wonder whether this is enough, and whether, despite our economic ingenuity and evolutionary capacity, our fierce political nature will yet get the better of us, and undo us all.