you don’t want to know

this is a work of fiction

 

it’s been going on for years,
the quiet disappearances, the coups,
the money passed behind backs,
the smearing of reputations:
“having that person in power is not acceptable”

it’s been going on for years,
the stroking of her hair, her arm
making her want to scream,
making her wish she were dead:
“don’t tell your mother”

it’s been going on for years,
the torture and terror of animals,
the kicks to the head when no one is looking,
their death by suffocation in trucks with tiny vents:
“we call them ‘downers’ if they’re crippled or die en route”

it’s been going on for years,
the little digs, the belittling, the sneers, the threats
on the school grounds, by the storefront, in the alley, on the job site,
the endless dread of what happens if you tell, or if you don’t:
“i could crush you in a second; hand it over; do what you’re told”

it’s been going on for years,
the lies, the promises, the torture prisons, the ’shock and awe’,
the reneging, the devastating sanctions, the threats of escalation,
the calls in the night, before the bombs fall again:
“you have 58 seconds: run

it’s been going on for years,
for centuries, millennia:

this is who we are now,
this is who we always have been.

Posted in Creative Works | Leave a comment

Links of the Month: September 2024


the explosion of “vaccine hesitancy” since the start of the pandemic, per poll tabulations by YLE

I’ve added a fifth ‘regular’ section to the “Politics & Economics As Usual” category of my monthly links. I’ve called it “Industrial Disease and Malnutrition”, kind of as a sly reference to the Dire Straits song. It’s for news about how our modern food, drug and ‘health’ systems are making us progressively sicker. It’s the Fifth Horseman, I suppose, the successor to pestilence. As the politicians, the scientists, the corporations, and the economists all try to tell us ‘their’ truth, the horsemen are starting to trip over each other.

As the endless, useless wars and genocides continue to expand, and the collapse of our broken economic, political and ecological systems accelerates, it’s not looking good out there, folks.


COLLAPSE WATCH


“Over the past twenty years, reported average annual GDP ‘growth’ of 3.5% has been made possible by borrowing at an annual average growth rate of 10.6%. Adding “real” GDP of $92tn came at a cost of $280tn in net new debt.”

Phantom “growth”: Economists continue to insist the economy is “growing” while the majority of citizens insist they are dealing with more financial and economic hardship than at any time in their lives. The citizens are right. Tim Morgan explains the smoke-and-mirrors arguments, and what they bode for our future.

Betting it all on sci-fi solutions: Three climate scientists admit that 1.5ºC — which we’ve already at least temporarily overshot — was a hopeless goal, and describe the massive and rapid changes that would be needed to avert much greater global warming. The biggest problem, they say, is that leaders are going all in on discovery of magical new, unproven and unlikely future technologies to do essentially all of the work to reduce emissions.

When the reservoirs and dams dry up: Sustained droughts have meant that across Canada, dams are unable to produce the hydro energy that energy companies banked on, and instead are substituting and importing more and more fossil fuel energy. The same is happening in other freshwater-rich countries in Scandinavia, central Europe, NZ, China and South America.

Three new kinds of refugees: Traditionally, refugee numbers have consisted mostly of people fleeing direct persecution by their country’s authorities. But now, the vast majority of refugees are of three new types: economic refugees fleeing crippling IMF austerity programs pushing them to the edge of starvation, “regime-change” refugees fleeing brutal dictatorships, often brought about by coups enabled by the CIA and corrupt large “we’ll coup who we want” corporations, and climate refugees fleeing the horrific effects of climate collapse.

“The world is coming apart, isn’t it, dad”: In an editorial by an award-winning cartoonist that the NYT surprising published, the author confesses that his son’s, and his wife’s (she grew up in Eastern Europe) profoundly pessimistic views about the inevitability of collapse, are well-founded, and his own, based on reading the mainstream western media, are not.

Blue states turn against the homeless and refugees: New York joins California in introducing draconian new laws to penalize, criminalize, evict and expel the homeless and those living in migrant shelters.


LIVING BETTER


greeting card in their “on second thought” series, from someecards

Wait, really?: Rebecca Watson laments the loss of critical thinking skills, especially among young people passively accepting conspiracy theories and hate- and war-mongering rhetoric.

Québec moves ahead with implementing MAID as Trudeau waffles and Poilievre vows to cancel it: The province has told enforcement agencies to accept advance directives and not to interfere with doctors carrying out legal wishes for dignified death. Trudeau has postponed and postponed implementing this element of MAID, to placate the right wing and religious groups in his own party. Meanwhile, in Ontario, Dying With Dignity is suing Trudeau’s government for excluding excruciating mental illness from eligibility for MAID even after the courts ruled that exclusion was unconstitutional.

Approval voting is best: Veritasium consults with mathematicians to understand why various proportional representation systems can be almost as undemocratic as first-past-the-post, and concludes that only one voting system is actually consistent with the idea of truly democratic representation: Approval voting.

Wingnuttery, deconstructed: Lyz Lenz explains why JD Vance hates single women.

How Community Bonds and Community Land Trusts enable non-profits to provide affordable housing: Community Bonds are doing what the banks should be doing, but aren’t. Community Land Trusts can also be an important part of the solution. Watch the video on Peace Village in Oregon to see what CLT-based housing can look like. Thanks to Kavana Tree Bressen for the video link.

Why “codifying Roe” is the wrong way to establish women’s reproductive rights: Restrictions and interference with abortion rights were already rife when Roe was law; much stronger legislation is needed.

We’re not crazy: Hear Jill Stein talk about the real issues facing the US and the west, as she responds to the sham ‘presidential’ debate between the two Tweedles. Thanks to Gerry Gras for the link.

What it’s really like to live in China: A long-time businessman and former westerner gives viewers a balanced view of the pros (safety, cleanliness) and cons (lack of privacy) of living in China. And a Scandinavian traveler weighs in with his experiences in Xinjiang (the comments to this video are even more interesting than the video itself).

Small acts of sedition: Committing small acts of ‘sedition’ can help you keep your sanity, and reduce your sense of powerlessness. Caitlin Johnstone explains what these are. “Giving a receptive listener some information about what’s going on in the world. Creating dissident media online. Graffiti with a powerful message. Amplifying an inconvenient voice. Sharing a disruptive idea. Supporting an unauthorized cause. Organizing toward forbidden ends. Distributing literature. Creating literature. Having authentic conversations about real things with anyone who can hear you.” And do something every day to help de-normalize the abuses of the Empire. “Denormalize poverty. Denormalize injustice and inequality. Denormalize the ruined buildings and ruined bodies in Gaza. Denormalize the nuclear brinkmanship with Russia. Denormalize the destruction of our biosphere in the ravages of ecocidal capitalism. Denormalize the surging authoritarianism we’re experiencing as the empire works frantically to stomp out dissent. Denormalize the war machinery rolling out around the world, and the increasingly militarized police forces in our streets. Denormalize the psychopathy of the politicians and government officials who cheerfully serve the empire in facilitation of these horrors. Denormalize the way media and government institutions controlled by the powerful work to manipulate the way we think and perceive every day of our fucking lives for the benefit of the powerful.”


POLITICS AND ECONOMICS AS USUAL


“I’m speaking”, a painting by Caitlin Johnstone

Imperialism, Militarism & Fascism: Short takes:

Propaganda, Censorship, Misinformation and Disinformation: Short takes:

Corpocracy & Unregulated Capitalism: Short takes:

Administrative Mismanagement & Incompetence: Short takes:

Industrial Disease & Malnutrition: Short takes:


FUN AND INSPIRATION


cartoon by Instachazz (Chaz Hutton)

How “sound illusions” work: Fun facts about how our brain processes sound. Worthy of a Pullet Surprise.

Digging towards hell: Indi relates the ‘industry’ of mining to our rapacious relationship with the earth as a whole. Sheer poetry.

“I think like you do, and it’s nice to know that I’m not alone”: Robert Jensen writes about what it’s like to always be outside the Overton window. Thanks to Gerry Gras for the link.

What would Marshall say?: A student of Marshall McLuhan speculates on how he might have responded to AI and other current technologies.

Live Nature Cams: Set 1 and Set 2

How Subarus became seen as cars for lesbians: It was all planned, kind of. Thanks to Kavana Tree Bressen for the link.


THOUGHTS OF THE MONTH


cartoon by John Atkinson

From Shuly Xóchitl Cawood – in Something So Good It Can Never Be Enough

The Laws of Less and More

I’m still thinking about what my tio said when I was twelve:
that I was chubby and needed to watch my weight.

Until then, my body had been meant
for only me.

Even decades later I am thinking of this seed he planted,
the soil I gave it, the sun of my belief.

I am thinking of what I did not eat for so long:
milk, cheese, peanut butter, bread, mayonnaise.

I did not eat a sandwich for so many years. I only yearned for
parts of me to disappear, for other parts

to show, be admired, render me beautiful. I believed
a body could do so much more if I gave it less.

Recently when I, in middle age, told my doctor I was giving
weight despite no change in diet or exercise, she said, you need to eat

less. And now I think of all the lessons I learned when I was twelve
that I practiced for years—all the times I told myself you should not have,

you will not have, you should never, ever have. Restriction as devotion
became what others saw as disciplined, the only part of me I allowed to grow
wild.

From Lena Khalaf Tuffaha in Water & Salt (Red Hen Press, 2017). Please read these words from her, written in January of this year, entitled Against Silence. The poem that follows may make more sense with that context. 

Running Orders

They call us now,
before they drop the bombs.
The phone rings
and someone who knows my first name
calls and says in perfect Arabic
“This is David.”
And in my stupor of sonic booms and glass-shattering symphonies
still smashing around in my head
I think, Do I know any Davids in Gaza?
They call us now to say
Run.
You have 58 seconds from the end of this message.
Your house is next.
They think of it as some kind of
war-time courtesy.
It doesn’t matter that
there is nowhere to run to.
It means nothing that the borders are closed
and your papers are worthless
and mark you only for a life sentence
in this prison by the sea
and the alleyways are narrow
and there are more human lives
packed one against the other
more than any other place on earth
Just run.
We aren’t trying to kill you.
It doesn’t matter that
you can’t call us back to tell us
the people we claim to want aren’t in your house
that there’s no one here
except you and your children
who were cheering for Argentina
sharing the last loaf of bread for this week
counting candles left in case the power goes out.
It doesn’t matter that you have children.
You live in the wrong place
and now is your chance to run
to nowhere.
It doesn’t matter
that 58 seconds isn’t long enough
to find your wedding album
or your son’s favorite blanket
or your daughter’s almost completed college application
or your shoes
or to gather everyone in the house.
It doesn’t matter what you had planned.
It doesn’t matter who you are.
Prove you’re human.
Prove you stand on two legs.
Run.


 

Posted in Collapse Watch, How the World Really Works, Our Culture / Ourselves | 3 Comments

How We’re Supposed to Live Now


what Jim Kunstler calls “The Long Emergency” — a gradual multi-stage collapse over an extended period

Nate Bear writes:

I live in a dry, water-stressed patch of the planet. Not far from us villages have been under water rationing measures this summer, although so far we’ve been spared.

A friend messaged me the other day asking about my predictions for water availability in the future. I suggested it would eventually run out but with ‘false’ years where things look normal and everyone forgets it’s a problem and then next year it’s worse than ever, then it gets better again for a bit and so on. Authorities will react minimally, afraid to take on big agriculture that drains so much water, and will apply temporary fixes.

I said we’d have enough notice to plan, or not plan, or react, or not react. Irrigated fruit tree agriculture will end. Eventually most agriculture will end. But we’d know months in advance that a bad water crisis moment was approaching. I said that what we should be really worried about, the thing we’d have only days to plan for, is a catastrophic heat burst that took temperatures close to 50C for weeks on end, buckle the infrastructure, stop the AC, dry the land, spur mega fires, cause many thousands to drop dead within hours, cooked from the inside out, our bodies unable to shed heat in overheated homes. I said this would happen in the nearer term than the water crisis, but that both would happen in our lifetime and then I went back to watching US Open tennis highlights on youtube.

And it got me thinking about how we’re supposed to live now. About the facade of normality that envelops us in every moment despite the planet collapsing conditions we live within.

It’s an interesting question, How we’re supposed to live now. For much of the world, I doubt that there is much of a façade of normality. For most in the Global South, and most of the world’s poor, I think, there’s just the daily ordeal of scraping by, of making do, of dealing with endless anxiety and precarity. Even in the affluent west, every few decades a war or an economic depression comes along that re-teaches everyone that ‘normality’ is fleeting.

My sense is that what Nate calls “the ‘false’ years where things look normal” will slowly become rarer, and it will begin to dawn on us that the ‘false’ years are not years of recovery to the old ‘normal’, but a plateau at a new ‘false-normal’ level, a hiatus before the next stage of collapse weighs in. That seems to be how collapse works.

And I think Nate is correct in predicting that we’ll “have enough notice to plan, or not plan, or react, or not react”. It’s become a cliché that change happens gradually, and then all-at-once. The problem is, we’re not very good planners, and we’re notorious over-reactors. Our behaviours and our beliefs change slowly, reluctantly, and we live in an age of enormous imaginative poverty, because technology has deprived most of us of the exercise needed to imagine other possibilities, other ways of living and being, for ourselves. And thanks to our collapsing educational systems, few of us learn about such ‘other possibilities’ from a serious study of history.

There is of course no one way we’re “supposed” to live. We used to be a very adaptable species, before most of us moved to the prosthetic environment of cities, where we’re utterly dependent on other people knowing how to do things for us, and on their being able to do them. So, pre-civilization, when crises occurred, we tended to the needs of the moment, as we and all species have always done, and we had the competencies to change, self-adapt, and endure.

Now, incompetent as babies, we can only cry and wail that we can no longer get what we want, and Why doesn’t someone stop the evil or insane person we are told is to blame, so we can get back to our normal state of comfort?

But the important lesson, of history, and of the fragility of civilizations, and of Nate’s lament, I think, is that When we have to learn new ways of living and being, most of us will do so. My (urban) grandparents’ stories of how utterly their lives changed during the Great Depression, and how much they learned, quickly and of necessity, as a result, have always stuck with me. So have their stories about the propensity of communities of strangers to suddenly come together and help each other out in difficult times.

I think it’s not only unnecessary, but quite possibly premature, for us to try to guess what new and old competencies will be need in our post-normal, collapsing world, and to strive to acquire those skills and competencies now. We cannot know how, and where, and when the multiple phases of collapse will uniquely unfold in each place. We cannot even know whether we will ourselves be among the two billion climate refugees that scientists now think collapse is likely to produce. Even if I were to acquire the agricultural skills needed to survive where I live now, with the resources available for agriculture now, they will do me no good if collapse forces me to migrate to, say, an area we now call ‘tundra’, where I’d likely have to learn a very different hunter-gatherer way of living or perish.

There is a lot of wringing of hands about how many billions will starve to death as collapse deepens. That is certainly a possibility: Read up about the horrors of the Irish potato famine to see how easily and quickly that can happen. But if you look at how wild creatures respond to situations where the population is much greater than what the land can sustain, you might conclude that a much more gradual and less gruesome resolution is more likely. Stories of lemmings and locusts notwithstanding, most animals, it seems, voluntarily and instinctively reduce their populations to bring them back into balance with the local ecosystem’s carrying capacity. And as Nate says, we’ll have enough notice to do the same. Once it’s clear that the best alternative to condemning your future children to a life of starvation is not to have any children, my guess is that much of our overpopulation problem will (though too slowly) diminish.

There’s also some evidence from history that, if and when the situation gets bad enough that starvation is unavoidable, a certain proportion of the population will voluntarily and instinctively self-select to die so that others may live. Those who are old and infirm, and those who just cannot psychologically bear the thought of living out the rest of their lives in desperation and deprivation, may well just choose to end their own lives more peacefully.

As for me, my ‘preparation’ for collapse, rather than entailing the learning of new skills and competencies, is about psychological preparedness — imagining, based on studies of past collapses, and on mostly fictional, non-dystopian writing about post-collapse earth, what it might be like to live in such a world, and imagining myself and those I know in such a world. Essentially, to imagine if, and how, we could cope.

My sense is that our rediscovery of the power, value, and importance of community will be at first bewildering and frustrating, but then become our most important, and astonishing, re-learning. We will ask ourselves: How did we ever forget that we are entirely and only a part of something larger, not individuals but members of a community of humans that is part of a larger community of all life?

And at the same time we will learn how a healthy community adapts to its environment, rather than trying for force the environment to change to meet its needs. And, just as my reading leads me to believe we will re-learn how to be a part of a community that is part of a greater community, it also leads me to believe that we will learn, as collapse deepens, to evolve a society and a local economy based on the resources at hand, as all post-collapse and frontier communities have done.

From reading books like The Mushroom at the End of the World, The Logic of Sufficiency, and A Scientific Romance, I imagine that that post-collapse economy will be a salvage and scavenger economy, perhaps like the one that today’s largely-urbanized crows have evolved. Rather than a life of struggle, scarcity and disease, such an economy could easily be one of considerable comfort and leisure, if we are smart about it. The crows and bonobos, amongst others, might show us the way. There is enormous logic in a life of sufficiency, rather than the life of efficiency so many of us have come to worship. But we will see whether our species, with its huge but oft-befuddled brain, will one day figure that out.

I don’t know how we’re “supposed” to live now, but for me, that’s the only way to make sense of things, to give myself some perspective about it, and to become a little more equanimous about what we will soon face, and what we cannot hope to change. To me, it’s exhilarating to imagine what might emerge once our well-intentioned but broken, crumbling, numbing, ubiquitous civilization has at last vanished from the face of the earth.

As Ronald Wright put it in A Scientific Romance, “if a dinosaur can become a hummingbird, all things are possible”.

Posted in Collapse Watch, Our Culture / Ourselves | 4 Comments

Witnessing


photo from Jonathan Cook’s latest article on the genocide in Palestine, source uncited

As long as I’ve been chronicling the collapse of our global industrial civilization and its systems, I’ve described myself not as an activist — someone determined to “do something about” collapse — but as a witness to this accelerating and uneven disaster.

The word witness comes from an ancient root word that synonymizes three meanings: to see, to say (what is seen), and to understand (what is seen). Hence we also have viewvision, wise, wisdomidea, story, historyprovideadvise, wit and a host of other essential words, all deriving from the same root.

Of course, the three meanings aren’t all inherent in all the words that have sprung from this proto-idea. We can ‘see’ things, both in the sensory and metaphorical sense of the word, without necessarily saying anything, and without necessarily understanding what we’ve seen. Two people can ‘witness’ the same apparent happening, and yet derive completely different views and ideas of what was seen.

This concatenation of meaning has even given rise to two distinct negatives — unwitting (meaning they didn’t understand what it ‘meant’), and witless (meaning they couldn’t understand what it meant, due to cognitive impairment).

I have long argued that we believe what we want to believe — what fits with our existing, conditioned worldview — not necessarily what aligns in any way with the facts or evidence, ie with what we ‘see’. That doesn’t mean that we’re all witless. There are sound evolutionary reasons why human brains are conditioned to find patterns and to disregard what doesn’t fit with those patterns — to dismiss things and not ‘see’ them at all if we can’t ‘make sense’ of them.

Devoutly religious people will see one or more gods’ hands at work in many things that happen, for example, and their belief systems will be untouched by any facts that contradict those interpretations. What we want to believe will affect what we actually believe and hence what we ‘see’ as having actually happened. People with strongly-held beliefs (dogmas and rigid ideologies) will be quick to assert (in testimony, in conversations, in op-eds etc) their own belief about what happened (and why it happened), and will be utterly intolerant of (and deaf to) any other possible interpretation of what was witnessed, and of anyone who says or understands differently.

So the facts about how the US (through “fuck the EU” Victoria Nuland’s 2014 coup, the subsequent CIA-supported civil war etc), with its compliant military sidekick NATO, deliberately and systematically provoked the Russian invasion of the Donbas regions of Ukraine to justify its attempts to destabilize and bring down the Russian government, don’t really matter to most people. And the facts about the ongoing and relentless US-powered genocide in Palestine by Israel really don’t matter to most people. Those facts don’t ‘fit’ with what they believe, so they can’t be right.

Of course, if those currently supporting the Ukraine proxy war and the Palestinian genocide were to witness first-hand what had happened and is happening in either of those countries, then what they saw, what they said, and what they understood, would most likely be very different from what they would be asserting today.

So this raises the question: What exactly does it mean to ‘witness’ something? How can I presume to call myself a witness to the collapse of our entire civilization, when I have not (and probably no one can) ‘witness’ that collapse in its entirety first-hand?

I would argue that it’s because over the past fifty years I have seen mountains of evidence, in the context of the history of past civilizations, that ours is collapsing at an accelerating rate, and that no one and no ‘group’ of people, no matter how large and smart and rich and well-organized, can prevent or even mitigate that collapse. My conditioning (as a nature-lover, and as a student of history and culture and human nature) is such that I must do my best to ‘witness’ this collapse: to see it happening, say what I think is happening, and try to understand why it is happening.

I do not presume to be a ‘witness’ to the ghastly events unfolding in Ukraine or Palestine. But in my writing about these events, I rely substantially on the first-hand accounts of those who have been and continue to witness these events. And their accounts tell a very, very different story from the fourth-hand press releases, propagandized ‘intelligence’ reports, and hate- and war-mongering op-eds in the media.

And perhaps more importantly, my writing attempts to discern not only what is ‘seen’ by others, first-hand, to be happening in those countries, but why it might be happening — not because people are simply ‘evil’ or ‘insane’, but rather as the combatants’ automatic, entrained responses to a lifetime of cultural and biological conditioning, under the ever-worsening circumstances of our pressure-cooker, overcrowded, falling-apart civilization. My job, and our job, I believe, is not to condone or condemn, but simply to understand. (Of course, as someone who has been conditioned to believe we have no free will over what we do and what we believe, I would say that.)

That does not imply that I cannot be outraged, and am not outraged, by what is apparently happening — that’s part of my conditioning too. But while I completely understand the expressions of outrage from those personally affected by these ghastly events, I have absolutely no time for those not personally affected who vent their outrage and righteous indignation, to assuage their own neuroses and uselessly rile up others. Inflicting your hate- and fear-driven mental illness on others is an act of cruelty, and it has no value other than to dangerously and destructively self-perpetuate.

Yet, even when it comes to these hordes of ignorant opinionated spewers of hate and fear, I believe my job is to witness (and understand) their dysfunctional behaviour, too. So-called “social media” seem to have evolved specifically to attract and inflame these sad people, in order to sell them crap they don’t need, and thus they encourage behaviours that will probably make their psychological illnesses even worse. I have met a number of these people, whose uninformed and misinformed, second-hand opinions, “likes”, piling-on, trolling, and emotional outbursts bear all the signs of deep trauma, childhood neglect, social isolation and abuse. It says a great deal about our crumbling civilization that the “social media” cesspool has become, by default, the primary means by which so many people meet their needs for attention, appreciation, and reassurance, needs they can’t fulfil through genuine, coherent, practiced communication with other human beings face-to-face.

This is what happens, I guess, as a civilization enters its final stages of decline. It was inevitable, but that doesn’t make it any less tragic. Our means of coping with the increasingly unbearable reality of chaotic collapse seems to entail us, somehow, becoming less human, less capable of authentic human appreciation, empathy, and understanding. Like rats in an overcrowded laboratory cage, fighting over the dregs, increasingly, we can no longer tolerate, no longer witness, and no longer care.

.  .  .  .  .

’Cúagilákv Jess Housty, a citizen of the Haíłzaqv First Nation, recently wrote her own essay on witnessing, based on her years of living alongside the whales of the Pacific coast.

“I’ve learned the greatest threat to life is disconnection”, she writes. The culture of her people is all about relationship, about caring, and about the interconnectedness of all life on earth. She speaks of bearing witness as an act of humility, a precondition to conscious living and acting with humanity:

Like many others, I watched with an ache in my heart in 2018 when Tahlequah, an orca in the Southern Resident J pod, nudged her dead calf to the ocean’s surface for 17 days in what appeared to be a ritual of mourning…

Grief is ceremony. It can have elements that are both private and public, but when it is enacted in a public way as Tahlequah’s was, we can’t be simple spectators. We need to be witnesses.

In Haíłzaqv culture, to be a witness is a deep responsibility. It obligates you to be an archive embodied, ready to recall the events and the ceremonies you have witnessed and the business that has been conducted before you when the record of your testimony is required… In the context of Tahlequah’s mourning, bearing witness is how we must reciprocate the ocean’s generosity, the feasts it has provided us, the gifts it has given us.

I don’t know why Tahlequah’s calf died. I can recite the pressures that bear down on the ocean, on orcas in general, on Tahlequah’s pod in particular. I carry that anxiety in my bones like ocean salt etching into my marrow. Dwindling food sources. Chemical and noise pollution. The lingering intergenerational impacts of all the live captures in decades past. The hazards of shipping oil. The low howl of climate change.

My empathy overwhelms me at times because what I see in our ocean relatives so closely parallels what I see in my own community; we’ve also felt starvation and contamination. We’ve also heard our languages drowned out by white noise and felt the intergenerational trauma of fractured families. We’ve also calculated what we stand to lose to an oil spill and stared down the uncertain future of a wildly shifting climate…

I cannot imagine the deep grief of losing your offspring. If that mourning was an ocean, I’m not sure I could even imagine standing at its shore. But when I watched the footage of her nosing her dead calf to the ocean’s surface, I felt her pain — in my head, my heart, and my womb. And when I watched her pod take turns lifting that calf up so she could rest as she completed her sacred work, Tahlequah reminded me that we do not move through grief and uncertainty alone. We do it with our community, bearing witness. And thus, our community endures.

Posted in Collapse Watch, How the World Really Works | 3 Comments

Thank You, John Whiting (1931-2024)


John’s study, in London

John Whiting’s wife, Mary, let me know today that John, who was 93 and not in the best of health, recently passed away.

Many of you will recognize the name from my many, many “Thanks to John Whiting for the link” references in my monthly Links of the Month blog posts. He and I exchanged over 500 emails over the years, and through that exchange I got to know John quite well. Our earliest communications were about a summary I had posted twenty years ago of Ronald Wright’s book A Short History of Progress, a book that John said transformed his worldview.

John was the exemplary “Joyful Pessimist”, always ready to respond to anything I said with a witty, informed, and entertaining anecdote, often about some famous person he’d rubbed shoulders with in his many pursuits in academia, the media, the culinary arts, writing, and the “music biz”. But he was a voracious reader, and over time his perspective on the future of our current civilization, fed by the assessments of how previous civilizations collapsed, and by the endless scroll of bad news in the media, grew steadily darker.

John’s humble reflections about having had a privileged and bountiful life, and, in that context, his equanimity about facing the end of that life, and the precarious and difficult future that the younger generations will face, have served as a model for me in my later years, as we pass the torch, unsteadily, to those who will likely live lives both more awful and more awesome than the stable, comfortable ones that were afforded us.

One of John’s ‘signature’ expressions was ’Thank You, One and All’. So this is a reply ‘thank you’ for John, and Mary, and those he leaves behind, richer for having known him. For all you did, and all you told us about, and laughed with us about, and warned us about, John — thank you.

Posted in Collapse Watch | Leave a comment

The Marshmallow Myth


photo by Alex SooJung-Kim Pang on Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Cory Doctorow recently wrote an article debunking the myth surrounding the so-called “marshmallow test”. In the test, young children are told that they can either eat a marshmallow placed in front of them, or, if they wait for a prescribed amount of time, they will instead be given two marshmallows. The tester then leaves the room and records the results.

The research findings allegedly showed that, even years later, the children who forewent the immediate gratification to get the second marshmallow proved to be more ‘successful’ in their lives. These ‘findings’ have been used by conservatives, moralists, and longtermism/effective altruism crackpots to make a borderline-eugenics argument that your success depends on your innate “character” — and that those who have succeeded therefore fully ‘deserve’ the fruits of their success.

As Cory explains, however, subsequent research has indicated that the immediate-gratification kids actually came from significantly poorer and more stressful backgrounds than the ‘two-marshmallow’ kids. They took the first marshmallow because their learning from a lifetime of precarity was not to trust people who make promises, and to take what you can get when you can get it. Their lack of subsequent ‘success’, therefore, was due not to their short-termist ‘character’, but due to the fact that their circumstances were inevitably more difficult, their opportunities and resources inevitably more limited, and their challenges inevitably greater. Cory summarizes:

Once you understand this, the lesson of the Marshmallow Experiment is inverted. The reason two-marshmallow kids thrived is that they came from privileged backgrounds: their high grades were down to private tutors, not the choice to study rather than partying. Their plum jobs and high salaries came from university and family connections, not merit. Their brain differences were the result of a life free from the chronic, extreme stress that comes with poverty.

He goes on to point out that conservatives are completely hypocritical when it comes to patience and long-term thinking. If they really wanted to think long-term, he says, they would have rolled up their sleeves to confront issues like climate collapse and wealth inequality full-on, rather than self-interestedly denying the former and shrugging off the latter by marshmallow victim-blaming. He concludes:

Koch and his fellow oligarchs are, first and foremost, supporters of oligarchy, an intrinsically destabilizing political arrangement that actually threatens their fortunes. Policies that favor the wealthy are always seeking an equilibrium between instability and inequality: a rich person can either submit to having their money taxed away to build hospitals, roads and schools, or they can invest in building high walls and paying guards to keep the rest of us from building guillotines on their lawns. Rich people gobble that marshmallow like there’s no tomorrow (literally). They always overestimate how much bang they’ll get for their guard-labor buck, and underestimate how determined the poor will get after watching their children die of starvation and preventable diseases.

In The Triple Helix, biologist Richard Lewontin argues that it is important to winnow out the seemingly simple, “obvious” causes of our civilization’s problems, and those that conveniently align with our particular political and social ideologies, to reveal what really underlies them. He provides two important examples. He asserts that the commonly-accepted explanations (better hygiene and sanitation, antibiotics and other medicines) for the dramatic drop in deaths from infectious diseases in “industrialized” nations, represent a complete misunderstanding of historical events and the impact of technologies. Instead, he argues,

Infectious diseases were not the causes of death, but only the agencies. The causes of death in Europe in earlier times were what they still are in the Third World [and among the poor the world over]: overwork and undernourishment.

And he goes on to argue that our modern western chronic diseases, and the ecological devastation of our planet, are the agencies, not the causes, of the horrific and grossly unequally-distributed crises and suffering humans and the more-than-human world are contending with in this century.

The cause is the narrow rationality of an anarchic scheme of production that was developed by industrial capitalism and adopted by industrial socialism. In this, as in all else, the confusion between agencies and causes prevents a realistic confrontation with the conditions of human life.

If we look at the marshmallow test through a no-free-will lens, we can see Cory’s point that poverty or trauma might well have conditioned the one-marshmallow kids to behave ‘impatiently’ as they did.

But did conditioning equally determine the fact that Koch, other privileged conservatives, and the two-marshmallow kids have arrogated behaviours and self-important beliefs that have disproportionately contributed to the destruction of our planet and the immiseration of most of its inhabitants? Or, to ask the question from a Richard Lewontin perspective, to what extent did the conditioning of all of us, rich and poor, weak and powerful, contribute to the creation of the massively dysfunctional systems we are struggling with today, systems that have produced a world of chronic stress, poverty, scarcity, precarity, malnourishment, disease and overwork, and consequently horrific violence, trauma, inequality and ecological degradation?

I ask it this way because, tempted as I am, as a lifelong socialist and environmentalist, to blame execrable billionaires like Koch, Musk, and their ilk, for wilfully producing the polycrisis and the staggering global suffering and destruction it is wreaking, as a non-believer in free will, I just can’t accept that it’s that simple.

The cycle of causality would seem to be something like this:

Richard would seem to be saying “it’s the system, stupid”. But no one is in control of the “system” (the upper gold box in this chart). It’s the collective product of eight billion humans’ uncoordinated behaviour, each doing our part, and each doing what we’ve been conditioned to believe to be our best. Of course the rich and powerful have a greater impact on these systems (and their dysfunctionality). But they don’t control them, or even have much impact on them. And their behaviour, like all of ours, is just conditioned anyway — they have no more control over what they do each moment, than they have over the systems we have all created.

In a nutshell: We, all of us, are continuously co-creating the staggeringly complex, dysfunctional systems that have produced the current civilization-shattering polycrisis, with all its horrific consequences and the commensurate stress-driven feelings that have led in turn to all the violence and misbehaviours and trauma we are currently suffering from. And all of those consequences, in turn, feed back to determine our (next) behaviours. Classic ‘vicious cycle’. The endgame, inevitably, is collapse.

That’s not to exonerate the Kochs and Musks and other reprobates who are oblivious to or in denial of the horrific damage they are disproportionally enabling, and the horrific suffering that damage entails. It’s just to say they have no choice in any of it. Like the bad guys in the black hats in a poorly-written Hollywood action flick, they’re just acting their part and reading their lines. Given their conditioning and the (ever-worsening) circumstances of the moment, that’s the only thing they could possibly do. Just like us.

So where does that leave us with the marshmallows? Those ‘choices’, too, are entirely conditioned. They are not choices at all, right down to the wavering until the poor kid gives in and grabs the marshmallow at the eight minute mark, unable to wait for the possibly larger ‘delayed’ award.

We are all those poor kids in the laboratory. Whether it’s marshmallows or ballots or weapons of mass destruction, acts of gratitude or revenge, a thousand small sanities or a thousand acts of cruelty, or lying under oath or whistle-blowing to end a long and brutal outrage, what we’re going to do next, and next week, and next year, is all determined. Not predictable, mind you — no one knows the circumstances that will be in place in each future moment when we do the only thing we could possibly have done.

If you’re like me, you’ll keep stressing about all the stuff in the boxes in the chart above, wondering what might be done to make things better, or prevent them getting worse. Some of you might even write annoying articles like this about them. You have no choice about doing that, either.

I think it’s a wonderful irony that the inventors of the test chose marshmallows as the irresistible temptation for their subjects: There’s not a single healthy or nutritious ingredient in them, and if they knew what was used to hold them together in that scary shape, even the hungriest child might refuse the ‘treat’!

Posted in Collapse Watch, How the World Really Works, Illusion of the Separate Self and Free Will, Our Culture / Ourselves | 4 Comments

A Canadian’s Guide to Voting in the 2024 US Elections

This article is a satire. Though in points 6-8 I get a bit more serious.


Munch’s famous painting; CC0 / public domain

I am not a US citizen, and never have been, nor would I ever qualify to be one. That makes me perfectly unqualified to tell Americans how they should vote. Except for one thing: Canadians tend to read a lot more than Americans, and we also tend to define ourselves by how we are unlike Americans. If it weren’t for the US, it seems, we would have no national identity at all. We simply wouldn’t know who we are. So a surprising number of Canadians, as a result, seem to know more about what’s actually happening in the US than a surprising number of Americans.

In that spirit, and with that caveat, here is my ‘advice’ to beleaguered American voters, especially those voting for the first time:

  1. It can help to realize that you actually have no free will, so how (and if) you are going to vote is already determined by your conditioning, given whatever unimaginably horrific events may transpire between now and voting day. So please don’t get stressed about voting, since you have no choice about what you’ll do anyway. And whomever you vote for, or don’t vote for — they are going to fuck things up even more than they are already, with the best of intentions (usually), so it doesn’t really matter. Don’t beat yourself up over this.
  2. Canadians (like Europeans, and Americans who live in “deep blue” or “deep red” states) have a lot of experience with what is called “strategic voting”, also called “lesser of two evils” voting. Thanks to the absurd voting systems in use just about everywhere, in 90% of cases your vote simply doesn’t count, because the overwhelming majority of people in your constituency have always voted for the same party’s candidates for generations, and will do so again this year. In the other 10% of cases, you get to grit your teeth and vote for the candidate whose official platform is less obnoxious than the other’s. So you learn that voting is a negative experience, not a positive one. You get used to this.
  3. Voting in the US, as in most western nations, is more like a beauty pageant, or, even more accurately, like one of those singing contests like X-Factor or EuroVision. The election campaign is a performance, complete with all the trimmings. What the candidates say in their performances means nothing — their party machine has already written or vetted their speeches, and in any case their speeches and promises, and those made in their parties’ official ‘platform’, bear absolutely no resemblance to what their party, if it wins the pageant, will do in any case. So to protect yourself from disappointment, don’t believe anything that any of them says. If you doubt this, look at what Obama, who was President for eight years, promised to do, and compare this to what his administration actually did.
  4. In case it wasn’t already obvious, the decisions made by governments in ‘democratic’ western countries are not made by elected ‘representatives’. They are made by the administrations, who respond to lobbyists and other rich and powerful pressure groups. Most western nations, including the US (and Canada) are hence corpocracies — where regardless of which party is ‘elected’, the same corporate oligarchies, political lobbyists and moneyed interests will make all the decisions. In some cases these unelected groups even write the entire legislation on a particular issue (vetted by their lawyers), so the elected ‘government’ merely has to sign their ‘X’ at the bottom. In many cases, they will not have read, and will never read, most of the laws they have enacted.
  5. To make the election contest/pageant more interesting, parties will have the platform speeches delivered by a variety of diverse faces, and some of those speeches will directly contradict others, especially those speeches made locally rather than broadcast nationally, where the contradictions are more obvious. “You can announce that program here, but don’t talk about it in Kansas (or in Calgary)”. The objective is to create the impression that the party in question is more ‘diverse’ and hence more ‘representative’ than the other, so that it appears to offer a ‘bigger tent’ accommodating more views, including yours. This is important only if you’re one of the 10% of voters referred to in point 2 above. The ‘tent’ is taken down immediately after each election in any case.
  6. There can occasionally be interesting issues arising at the local/municipal level that can actually warrant your time and attention. Those with wealth and power are usually not terribly interested in local issues, so it can actually matter who wins these local elections. Unfortunately, most local issues, such as homelessness, public transportation, housing costs, and the public education system, are largely insoluble, as they are part of much larger, more complex systems in various stages of inevitable collapse. But decisions on public infrastructure, local environmental regulations, zoning, and local health services can make a difference, and it only takes a few minutes to assess whether or not candidates for local office are competent to make such decisions. It actually takes much more skill and experience to be a competent local administrator than to be a figurehead for a party at the state or national level. You have to know about how things actually work. Sadly, those that have these competencies tend to be rare and to burn out quickly.
  7. Finally, though, while whom you vote for, or whether you vote at all, probably won’t make any difference in the real material world, how you personally feel about your participation or non-participation in the process is, IMO, what’s most important. There is no point making the ‘most informed, logical, pragmatic’ choice on voting day, if you feel bad about having made that choice. Just as an example, if I were a woman voting in the upcoming US presidential election, my ‘head’ might say ‘my’ choice doesn’t make any difference whatsoever on the issues I care about, but my ‘heart’ might say I’m going to vote for one of the two women candidates anyway. Ultimately, your instincts are somewhat attuned to your conditioning, and they kind of ‘talk to’ and inform each other. Learning to trust your instincts these days is actually hard, because everything we learn tells us not to trust them. So if your instincts tell you you’ll feel better by doing X on voting day, no matter what the result, see if you can bring yourself to trust them.
  8. You may have no free will, but you can be influenced (conditioned) by others, and vice versa, especially through candid face-to-face conversations with people you trust about the agonizing process of exercising your ‘democratic’ privilege in 2024, and about how you both feel about the process. Whom you talk with, and the sincerity with which you talk about your deliberations, the process and its frustrations, one-on-one and in real time, between now and election day will probably have much more impact (and in ways you can never know) than the marks you do or do not place on the ballot yourself.

I am probably both too young and too old to be so jaded, and I know the above ‘advice’ is not very helpful, but as everything slowly falls apart, it’s the best I can offer. Good luck to you in any case. You’re going to need it.


Thanks to Siyavash Abdolrahimi for inspiring this post.

A postscript on referenda, propositions, initiatives and plebiscites: We don’t see these much in Canada, and the above ‘advice’ may not pertain so much to them. In some cases, initiatives can at least be useful in communicating citizen unhappiness to governments over the administration’s current positions. Where we’ve had them here, they have normally been either non-binding (and usually reneged on by the government even when they’ve passed) or they’ve been defeated by conservative lobby groups’ massive propaganda pushes. (The spuriously-grounded development of ‘recall’ initiatives in the US, used mainly by moneyed conservatives to oust leftists, has spread here to Alberta.) And if you’re fortunate enough to have local Citizens’ Assemblies/ Juries/ Initiative Review panels, their recommendations on (especially complex and contentious) initiatives are usually wise and worth heeding before you vote.

Posted in Creative Works | 2 Comments

Signs of Collapse: Broken Things


drawing by Chaz Hutton; thanks to Wendy Bandurski for the link

One of the costs of “efficiency” — making stuff faster and cheaper (and hence more profitably) — is that it requires a complex supporting infrastructure — international supply chains, trade agreements, subcontractors etc — and a ready, inexpensive supply of resources and labour. As long as the whole system hangs together, it’s fine. Problem is, the more complex it gets, the more fragile it becomes. All it takes is one little fly in the ointment — a trade sanction, a labour disruption, a war, a design flaw, a resource shortage, a pandemic, a skilled labour shortage, a sudden increase in oil or resource costs or just the cost of living — and everything can quickly fall apart.

Today’s massively complex, globalized systems are encountering many of these shocks on a regular basis. There is no resilience in these systems, no redundancy (that would be inefficient, and cut into profits). So now we are entering a period — common to all civilizational collapses — where nothing is working ‘properly’ anymore. More and more of our energies are consumed in ‘workarounds’, instead of how things are ‘supposed’ to work.

David Ehrenfeld, in his prescient book Beginning Again (1994), describes our civilization as a ragged flywheel, over-built, patched and rusty, spinning faster and faster and beginning to rattle and moan as it comes apart:

There goes a chunk — the sick and aged along with the huge apparatus of doctors, social workers, hospitals, nursing homes, drug companies, and manufacturers of sophisticated medical equipment, which service their clients at enormous cost but don’t help them very much.

There go the college students along with the VPs, provosts, deans and professors who have not prepared them for life in a changing world after formal schooling is over. There go the high school and elementary school students, along with the parents, administrators and frustrated teachers who have turned the majority of schools into costly, stagnant and violent babysitting services.

There go the lawyers and their hapless clients in a dust cloud of the ten billion codes, rules and regulations that were produced to organize and control an increasingly intricate, unorganizable and uncontrollable society.

There go the economists with their worthless pretentious predictions and systems, along with the unemployed, the impoverished and the displaced who reaped the consequences of theories and schemes with faulty premises and indecent objectives. There go the engineers, designers and technologists, along with the people stuck with the deadly buildings, roads, power plants, dams and machinery that are the experts’ monuments.

There go the advertising hucksters with their consumer goods, and there go the consumers, consumed with their consumption. And there go the media pundits and pollsters, along with all those unfortunates who wasted precious time listening to them explain why the flywheel could never come apart, or tell how to patch it even while increasing its crazy rate of spin.

The most terrifying thing about this disintegration for a society that believes in prediction and control will be the randomness of its violent consequences. The chaotic violence will include not only desperate ruthless struggles over the wealth that remains, but the last great violation of nature. What will make it worse is that, at least at the beginning, it will take place under a cloud of denial and cynical reassurances.

What we are seeing now, in the growing mountain of broken things that impede us everywhere, is the impact of those flying chunks of the overbuilt flywheel as it slowly comes apart. So we see:

  • An increasing number of power failures, lasting an increasingly long time. The higher prevalence of storms and the increasing unreliability of power sources (due to constraints at refineries, political and military interference, and droughts so severe and extended that many hydro-electric facilities have seen double-digit drops in their generating capacity) mean that more and more people are relying on back-up generators and getting used to just living with brownouts and blackouts. And as we’ve seen in hurricane situations, it turns out those back-up generators are mostly not properly maintained so they don’t work either.
  • Unrepairable and unavailable high-tech equipment, from medical machinery to laptops, due to growing global shortages of metals and other ‘rare earths’ essential to their construction and maintenance, and to shoddy, cost-cutting and under-regulated production processes.
  • Long waits for repairs to transportation equipment, elevators and escalators, and smaller machinery from hot tubs to boilers, due to “supply chain” problems that extend from manufacture to warehousing to transportation to installation.
  • Growing scarcity of service personnel competent to install and repair increasingly-complex technologies, leading to more frequent and longer breakdowns.
  • The collapse of aged public infrastructure, long past its scheduled replacement date, because there’s just no money in government coffers to fix all the broken roads, sewers, water lines, power lines, and decrepit public buildings from substations to hospitals to schools.
  • The corruption of the construction and housing industry and the abandonment by governments of their duty to regulate and supplement that industry to ensure safe, affordable housing for all. It’s just too expensive, now.
  • Construction projects that used to take months now take years, and cause enormous disruption during construction.
  • The collapse of our court systems due to infiltration by moneyed interests, bloated bureaucracy, and such long backups and delays that “justice delayed is justice denied”.
  • The “enshittification” of the internet as it devolves into an impenetrable, useless breeding ground for hysterical misinformation and a shoddy, fake flea-market junk marketing bazaar.
  • The deterioration of the ‘information’ media from a cadre of earnest investigative reporters to mere scribes for governments and ‘intelligence’ agencies.
  • The increasing unreliability (and lack of safety) of public transportation systems.
  • Our utterly broken health care and education systems.

Underlying this mountain of broken things are what I have called the Four Horsemen: Imperialism, Corporatism, Propaganda, and Incompetence, which are themselves symptoms of system collapse. When everything starts to fall apart, imperialists will inevitably attempt to hoard and control what is still intact and functioning, corporatists will attempt to supplant failing democracy with rule by an ‘enlightened’ elite (themselves), propaganda will be used to prevent the citizens from rising up against the ‘leaders’ who are seemingly allowing everything to fall apart, and incompetence will inevitably rise as declining standards of education combine with unwieldy growth in scale, size, and complexity of systems to the point no one knows how to do anything knowledgeably and effectively anymore.

The hot tub in the apartment I live in has been out of order for five months — the repair parts brought in after its previous breakdown broke less than a week after it resumed operation and have been on ‘back order’ since then. The boiler on the apartment building’s top floor has broken five times in the past three years, including three times in one month, causing enormous damage. It’s a large, relatively new apartment with three elevators and no ‘service’ elevators, but there always seems to be at least one elevator out of order, and on more than one occasion all three have been out of order. They are apparently on their fourth elevator contractor organization, each of which has blamed the previous contractor for incompetent work.

When I use the LRT system, I’m grateful for my good health — elevators and escalators are out of order more often than not, and while our relatively modern LRT trains are still functional, they are seriously overloaded at times and places, leading to frequent delays, and the passenger train, bus and ferry systems they connect to are largely dysfunctional.

I’ve stopped using most of the so-called ‘social media’ because they have simply ceased having any useful value, and they are seemingly only put up with by most users because those users have become dependent on them (for reasons Cory Doctorow has explained). And now that YouTube has installed highly-offensive ad-blocker blockers, I’m finally ready to give up on Google entirely.

I’ve also given up on the ‘traditional’ media, since the NYT, WaPo, New Yorker and Atlantic all became propaganda mouthpieces for the military-industrial complex. I actually grieve the loss of these once-intelligent and valuable publications. I still read the ‘headlines’ from the CBC, BBC, and NPR just to track what most western readers are being told is factual ‘news’, but the alt media I now read have already provided me with enough to be able to know what the mainstream ‘spin’ on the news of the day is. As for actual investigative reporting and calling-to-account the misdeeds of political and corporate organizations and ‘leaders’, they’re now just a nostalgic memory.

I am privileged in that so far I have access to ways to work around most of the broken things that affect my life. But I know better than to expect that to continue. Many in the Global South have gotten used to going for long periods without light, power, and even water. For most of us in the west, that’s going to be a rude awakening.

Our western comforts have come at a great cost — our total dependence on the fragile, crumbling systems of civilization. We will of course learn how to work around these increasingly broken systems, and in the longer term, how to supplant them with relocalized, small-scale systems that actually serve us. There will inevitably be a lot of pointless blame tossed around for why everything is falling apart, and what could be or should have been done about it.

So, mind the glass, ladies and gentlemen, and we’re going to have to take the fire stairs from now on. It’s only a minor inconvenience for us, so far, so carry on.

Posted in Collapse Watch | 5 Comments

Signs of Collapse: Organized Crime Takes Over Politics and Business

Now that the collapse of our political, economic, social and ecological systems is accelerating, the signs of this collapse, including scapegoating, corruption, and social disorder are becoming more obvious. This is the second of a series of articles on some of these signposts.


image by CaseyColton on DeviantArt — CC BY-NC-ND 3.0

One of the points the British-French historian Aurélien often makes about politics is that humans will naturally pledge allegiance to whichever body — legal or illegal — ‘best’ provides them with security and other social needs like health and education. That might see them supporting governments in functioning democracies (there are a few of those left), and autocratic leaders who aren’t too obviously self-serving, megalomanic, or corrupt.

But when these ‘official’ power blocs do not provide citizens with their basic needs, citizens are forced to turn to other power blocs that deliver, or at least offer, a little more support to cope with their daily struggles. In impoverished areas that governments ignore, and in areas where ‘official’ police forces either fail to ‘serve and protect’ or openly exploit the citizenry, organized crime may offer just enough more to gain the allegiance of local citizens.

Organized crime syndicates take many forms. The mafia-style oligarchies and warlord fiefdoms that now prevail in many ‘failed’ nations are the obvious examples. Give them your allegiance and, provided you pass the ‘tests’, they will look after you. Street gangs are another example. AIPAC’s Congress “babysitters” follow a classic mafia organizational model.

In parts of México, the Zapatistas became popular with citizens as an alternative support network after corrupt local governments had been taken over by drug and crime lords. And much of the vast ‘underground economy’ operates outside the law and the state and provides many people on the planet with what they need that the ‘official’ government can or will no longer provide, or never could.

Many parts of western economies are actually run on the basis of bribes, kickbacks and payoffs both to officials and to ‘unofficials’ who know how to get things done outside of the rules of law and the state, and who command tribute and fealty for doing so. For the most part, the few media that still do investigative reporting have neither the courage nor the resources to bring this illegal activity to light (they may risk death if they try, especially since ‘officials’ and cops are often in on it and, for a price, turn a blind eye to it). So these activities continue ‘under the official radar’, and as our political and economic systems continue to fall apart at an accelerating rate, these activities expand and flourish.

I would argue that corporate and political lobbies like the NRA, AIPAC, Big Pharma and many, many more, are really just different forms of organized crime syndicates that use variations of the ‘mafia model’ to seize power from our failing political and economic systems and exert it for their personal advantage. These organized crime syndicates influence and control a wide swath of our political and economic systems, even above and beyond ‘registered’ lobby groups, and none of them is elected by or responsible to citizens. Examples: political party machines, big corporations and their oligopolies and unregistered lobby groups, the military and ‘defence’ industries, the criminals that run the construction and housing industries, police unions, some politically-active churches, and judiciary bodies stacked with bribed flunkies, just to name a few.


cartoon by Farley Katz from the New Yorker

Oxford defines ‘organized crime’ as “illegal, unethical and coercive activities that are planned and controlled by powerful groups and carried out on a large scale”. By that definition, much of the political and economic activity in western nations is already conducted by organized crime syndicates. As collapse deepens, this is going to get worse, not better.

Once we see that the collapsing political and economic systems, organizations and institutions that governments put in place no longer serve us, where will we turn?

It will of course depend on our situation and location. Once collapse deepens to the point that ‘official’ exercise of power cannot continue (there won’t be enough tax revenues to fund services or to enforce laws), we can expect to see government devolving power to more local levels, or just abandoning the provision of services altogether (starting with the most expensive non-military ones — health, education and social services). With the exception of drugs, most organized crime syndicates will not be much interested in offering these increasingly unprofitable services, so it’s likely that most of us will just have to do without them, or learn to provide them to each other.

Corporate empires, dependent on continuous growth for their survival, artificially low interest rates, ever-growing consumer debt, and cheap energy resources, will collapse along with political ’empires’. Even the very rich will only be able to make do if their wealth is real assets — since stocks and other financial ‘paper’ assets will be worthless as the economy collapses — and if they also have the wherewithal to secure and manage those assets. More and more, as both government and ‘official’ corporate suppliers of goods and services collapse, the vacuum left will inevitably be filled by organized crime.

So in the short run, we are likely going to have to deal with organized crime syndicates of various types for a while as collapse deepens. Look at any of the Global South nations that are already well into collapse and you’ll get the picture. They’ve already learned who they have to pay and what they have to do to get what they need, and you won’t find that information in their government propaganda. In addition to dealing with the reality of ecological collapse and the possibility of becoming climate migrants ourselves, we will have to decide what exactly we can and cannot live without, and pay the appropriate organized crime syndicates when necessary to get what we need.

But in the longer run, we are likely to discover that because power requires wealth to sustain it, and as collapse enters its later stages where no one will have much wealth left, we will all be relatively powerless. It’s at that point, as has been seen in past civilizational collapses, and even in major depressions, that our society will once again become relatively democratic. We’ll all be in the same boat, so we’ll either work together to get what we need, or perish. The once-haughty financiers, arbiters and expensive intermediaries will find their expertise is worthless, and that they have nothing of value to offer to the once-lowly bicycle repair person in return for their services.

And then the hard work will begin of creating radically re-localized subsistence societies that work, uniquely in each location, given that location’s available resources and its citizens’ competencies and cultural conditioning. There will be no cheap easily-extractable energy left to power these new societies, so their economies are likely to be what Anna Tsing has called salvage and scavenger economies. We will learn to reuse and repurpose the waste, weeds, remnants and thrown-away junk of our brief experiment with rapacious industrial economy, to provide us with what we need, wherever we end up finding ourselves living. Societies that actually work well in this world of scarcity may well take centuries to evolve, and we’ll likely have to survive a lot of failed attempts before they do emerge.

In the meantime, it’s useful to recognize, even at this early stage of collapse for many of us, how much of our political and economic system has already fallen to various kinds of organized crime syndicates, many of them masquerading as ‘respectable’ and ‘responsible’ organizations. Given the vast inequalities of wealth and power that our systems have led to, this was inevitable. And as the scarcities get worse, this will inevitably worsen as well.

And then that, too, will pass.

Posted in Collapse Watch | 4 Comments

Signs of Collapse: Blaming It On Immigration

Now that the collapse of our political, economic, social and ecological systems is accelerating, the signs of this collapse, including scapegoating, corruption, and social disorder are becoming more obvious. This is the first of a series of articles on some of these signposts.


anti-immigration rioters try to storm a UK hotel that houses asylum-seekers; photo by Stringer/Reuters via PBS

The mainstream parties in most western countries have become decidedly more hostile to immigration and immigrants over the past 30 years, and especially over the past decade. But strangely, despite all the fear-mongering, the majority of citizens of these countries are seemingly much less opposed to new immigrants than their elected ‘representatives’.

Distress about immigration levels tends to rise during economic slowdowns, and those levels are not much different today than they were 30 years ago. The rather confused message of the pollsters seems to be:

  1. Citizens think immigration has been good for their country, but also think (as they did 30 years ago) that overall immigration levels are significantly too high.
  2. Citizens overwhelmingly believe their governments are mismanaging national immigration policy, but often for opposite reasons (eg letting in too many immigrants versus mistreatment of immigrants).
  3. Citizens tend to generally like current policies towards ‘legal’ immigration, but think more has to be done to reduce ‘illegal’ immigration. They’re very ambivalent about refugees, claiming to have sympathy for them but wanting their numbers “controlled”.
  4. Citizens seem far more concerned about future uncontrolled ‘floods’ of immigration than about historical numbers of immigrants. There is a very clear tone of fear in respondents’ answers that the back-up at borders will very soon become overwhelming and the government will have no mechanism to control the situation, so it will simply explode.
  5. Citizens want to “prioritize” (ie cherry-pick) immigrants who are wealthy or who are willing to do menial labour jobs. They are OK with temporary student visas, but don’t want those students to stay after their studies unless they fill jobs where there is a “high unmet demand” for their skills. The pollsters, of course, don’t blatantly ask respondents which countries their governments should allow more vs fewer immigrants in from, but the underlying racism is very clear in their answers when you read between the lines. Ukrainian refugees are welcome; Palestinians not so much.
  6. Many citizens seem to have a perception that immigrants are more likely than native-born citizens to be ‘associated’ with problems of crime and unemployment (though often “not their fault”), and with a perceived excessive demand on public services. This despite overwhelming evidence the opposite is the case. (They contribute far more in taxes and other payments to ‘the system’ than they take out of it.)

Historian and ex-senior public servant Aurélien has been hammering on what he considers to the root of the immigration “problem” in his essays: That neoliberal governments have tried to be “good guys” by allowing in large numbers of immigrants, but have utterly failed to provide immigrants with the support services (language, health, housing, security etc) that many immigrants need. So it’s largely governments that have created the “problem”, not the immigrants.

This problem is exacerbated because many of these essential services were already and are increasingly collapsing for native-born citizens in many western countries: Health services are dysfunctional, restricted, increasingly not available at all, and absurdly expensive (due to factors including bad management, unwieldy centralization and bureaucracy, and too many f***ing lawyers, Big Pharma and insurance companies gouging them).

The cowardice of governments to create affordable public housing on a massive scale (which would require sizeable new taxes on the rich), and to rein in the corrupt and price-gouging construction and real estate ‘development’ industry, means that housing affordability has become a “trigger point” for many people across the political spectrum. So now racist politicians exploit these triggers by blaming the problem on immigrants, and especially “illegal” immigrants and desperate refugees.

The education systems in many western countries are also failing for a whole series of reasons, and one of the consequences is that areas with the highest immigrant populations (which also tend to have higher-than-average family sizes) are often overburdened both in the numbers of people they have to serve, and in the needs for language classes to get immigrants who don’t speak the native language up to speed.

I confess that I’m not entirely onside with Aurélien’s preoccupation with the immigration “problem” — his tone suggests that sheer numbers, and the incapacity and/or unwillingness of some immigrants to accept and adapt to the local culture, are contributing to it. But whether this old ‘melting pot’ argument is valid or not, the upshot has been that many progressives and people who would call themselves leftists, seem to me increasingly belligerent towards immigrants, and towards the governments of their own countries and the countries driving the exodus, for somehow not preventing or “fixing” the problem, which has been around in many countries as long as those countries have existed.

So we see Biden/Harris out-trumping Trump in his border wall construction and expulsions, and similar anti-immigration rhetoric and actions among once-‘progressive’ parties in the UK, Canada, Europe and Australia.

I would argue that the immigration “problem” is not a problem of numbers, culture, or integration, but principally an unfixable predicament. Our political, economic, ecological, health, education and other systems were already and inevitably falling apart, even without the impact of an influx of new citizens. These systems are calcified, dysfunctional, overburdened, drowning in bureaucracy, overly centralized, and trying to do too much for too many with too few resources and flat or declining tax revenues due to steadily falling standards of living for 90% of the population (and absurdly low and ever-decreasing tax rates on the remaining 10%). The decline in the quality of our education, health and other systems has been going on, and accelerating, for decades. We are demanding more from civilization’s systems, and from the earth, than they can sustainably provide, and now we are seeing the consequences.

We are soon likely, some climate scientists say, to have to deal with two billion climate refugees. If our border management, transportation, health and social services systems haven’t already completely collapsed before this great migration arrives, then that migration will certainly finish the job.

This is, as many have explained, a predicament, not a problem. It doesn’t have ‘solutions’, it has outcomes, one of which is the acceleration of ongoing system collapse.

It may be that leftists, being more inclined to see government services as a good thing, as a part of the ’solution’, are growing increasingly bitter because government now seems helpless and incompetent to provide these services in a time of ever-growing need. This will come as no surprise to students of collapse and complexity. We’ve seen it coming for a long time. But it might explain why a lot of progressives, and the rapidly right-skewing politicians trying (very incompetently) to appeal to them, have become decidedly hawkish on the whole subject of immigration. Their rightward attitude shift mirrors somewhat their frustrated attitude towards another aspect of the predicament of collapse — the three connected epidemics of homelessness, substance addiction, and mental illness, playing out grotesquely in our streets everywhere.

There is no ‘solution’, but one approach we can take is to accept that massive migration from politically, economically and ecologically desolated areas to the few areas that have so far not seen much collapse, is an inevitability. As Warsan Shire put it: “No one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land”. Our systems — all of them — are slowly falling apart anyway, and the great migration will accelerate collapse, but it didn’t cause it. Once we accept massive migration, and collapse, as inevitable, we can start the work, not of planning for it (since we cannot know how it will play out, and we may be among the migrants ourselves), but of starting to learn the many forgotten skills we will need to acquire to deal with both system collapse and a huge influx of refugees.

And the best source of a lot of those skills will be from the refugees and other migrants themselves — many of whom have already lived through collapse, and learned, as best they could, how to cope with it.

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