how to save the world

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.

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.

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.