how to save the world

image from The Daily Show

This is kind of a follow-on from my recent post on Everything Falling Apart, in which I reviewed and compared some cogent writings from Aurélien, Patrick Lawrence and Yanis Varoufakis about the fragmenting of our modern, global, industrial civilization culture. Since I wrote that summary, Aurélien and Patrick have written follow-ups, essentially trying to diagnose why everything is falling apart, and I thought they were worth thinking about.

British historian Aurélien’s newest article is called It’s All About Them, and his thesis is that much of the conflict we are seeing in the world stems from ethnocentrism — a propensity, especially among the Professional Managerial Caste (PMC), to believe that everybody substantially sees the world the same way they do. And that if they don’t, they need to be brought around to doing so, one way or another.

It presumes a cultural superiority and “it can be very dangerous indeed when it is combined with the power to do harm”. And the ethnocentrism of the current Euro-American Empire’s PMC transcends political parties and dominates thinking across the political spectrum in all the Empire’s countries. Even when those parties disagree strongly on social and economic issues, they all see the world through that same narrow, ignorant lens.

Underlying this ethnocentrism, he says, are three largely-unchallenged assumptions:

1. That most people in the world are Like Us in their beliefs and behaviours, or would be if they were not misinformed or oppressed.
2. That we understand why the people who are not Like Us are that way, and we know exactly how to correct their misunderstanding and/or oppression.
3. All international crises and conflicts are ultimately All About Us, and about some peoples’ and governments’ resistance to be Like Us. Even those of us opposed to the Empire’s actions still believe that the behaviours in the rest of the world are essentially All About Us.

He defines the cross-political administration of the western PMC as the Western Security Complex (WSC) — the coalition of western forces, ethnocentric, naive, idealistic, with fragile egos, surrounded by groupthink, and ignorant of history or anything outside their own borders and worldviews. Members of the WSC, which has, he says, low entrance barriers (as long as you’re part of the PMC), presume and are presumed to have expertise to talk, write, advise, and strategize on just about any topic, despite having neither the credentials nor the experience to do so competently. They are subject to the Dunning-Kruger effect (the more ignorant they are, the more wisdom they presume themselves to have, especially on topics on which they have no knowledge or expertise whatsoever). Aurélien goes on:

The result has been the progressive triumph of the WSC discourse, in all its internally-incoherent complexity. Which is fine until the WSC encounters something it cannot understand, but can’t ignore either. Behind the confusion and silliness of much WSC commentary on Ukraine, even by “military experts” and “strategic commentators” is a stubborn refusal to accept that things happen in the world which are outside its frame of reference. From the beginning, the war has been interpreted in terms of what the WSC understands and can talk about: an amalgam of Afghanistan, Iraq and Apocalypse Now. In the end the WSC is unable to imagine a world which is not About Them. It is unthinkable that there should be wars, revolutions and changes of government around the world where the West is not the main actor, and where local and often deep-rooted causes which the WSC cannot understand are the main drivers.

Given these are the people entrusted with the power to launch (and provoke) wars, overthrow foreign governments, and sanction and isolate countries that are not Like Us, it is small wonder that, as global economic and ecological collapse accelerates, we are ignoring these crises entirely and instead charging into (and creating) international political and social crises, in ignorant, childish, and recklessly dangerous ways.

…..

Journalist and foreign correspondent Patrick Lawrence’s latest is called The Undiscovered Country, referring neither to the expression’s use by Shakespeare nor its reuse by Star Trek writers, but rather to the fact that America does not know what it stands for, and neither do Americans. Instead, he says, those in other countries have learned (often the hard way) that what Aurélien would call the PMC and the WSC have never represented ordinary Americans of any political persuasion, and the actions they pursue are often directly contrary to the explicit desires and preferences of the majority of its citizens. (He cites popular support for universal health care and against supplying more arms to Ukraine as examples.) He writes:

We Americans are fortunate in that others are usually able to distinguish between the American people and the American government… We are indeed a fortunate citizenry, considering the so often egregious conduct toward other peoples of those purporting to lead us. People seem to know that what our government does in one or another circumstance is not necessarily a reflection of who we Americans are…

We do not have a government that reflects what we favor at home any more than it does abroad: the kind of society we wish to live in, the “values” we espouse. The world may understand that most of us are not high-handed imperialists, but it does not know much about what, in the positive, we actually are beyond what we are not. At home, corruption, money in politics, obsessions with power, crumbling institutions, and all the rest leave us ever less able to express our public selves in public space. We cannot, if we net all this out, be very sure of who we are. And we owe it to ourselves, and most certainly to others, to know ourselves and learn to act according to who we truly are.

Of course the PMC is all too happy to tell us, amplified by the media they control, who Americans really are and what they should believe, and to pursue a “divide and conquer” strategy to prevent any kind of cohesive alternative to their view of what needs to be done both domestically and internationally.

Is it even possible, he wonders, for divided and manipulated and deceived and befuddled and misinformed Americans to “get their act together” and accept that the PMC does not represent them and find a way to wrest power and control of the American experiment from them? He concludes:

Will we continue indefinitely to live submerged, so to say—an undiscovered country? Or will we come alive again, rediscover ourselves as those before us have done on numerous occasions in response to circumstances different from ours but with some things in common with ours? At home an authentic democracy, abroad, an authentic internationalism… We have lost all sight of our potential, what we are capable of doing—individually and collectively—but I cannot accept that we, any of us, is content in this condition. Robert Putnam’s [Bowling Alone] subtitle, it is worth mentioning, is The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Our better selves, and I will not even argue that we have better selves, will not lie undiscovered indefinitely.

…..

When I read these articles, and the ones I referred to in my earlier post, what most surprised me is that what they are saying is so obvious, but I had never really thought of our situation in these terms. Our ignorance of the world was brought home this week when every one of Canada’s political parties joined in a standing ovation in the House of Commons for a Ukrainian Nazi who fought for Germany in WWII, apparently not aware of the fact that the Russians were the heroes, and were our much-sacrificing allies, in the struggle against German Fascism in WWII.

And our submergence to the will of the PMC and WSC at home and internationally, our learned helplessness and resignation, is brought home again and again with every unchallenged lie in the mainstream media, with every new act of governments to increase oil & gas production, to impoverish and suppress the non-PMC castes (not just the “working class”) by deliberately forcing interest rates and inflationary costs up, to ramp up censorship of critics of the PMC, to subject citizens to the brutal consequences of foreign “sanctions” and embargoes requiring them to deindustrialize their entire economies. And to turn us against each other so they can continue their imperial rule over us without restriction, regardless of whether the Tweedledum PMC or Tweedledee PMC wins the “democratic” election.

This is a horrific tragedy, against the backdrop of civilization’s accelerating collapse, which continues unimpeded. Part of this tragedy is that the PMC are doing their best — they genuinely believe that what they’re doing is in the whole world’s best interest.

Were Shakespeare alive today he could not invent a better plot for a story with an inevitably ghastly ending.

bonobo mother playing with her baby; photo by Frans Lanting in the Smithsonian

The word village comes from the PIE root word weik which refers to a clan or tribe — a small group of people that is larger than just a family of relatives.

The expression “It takes a village”, usually followed by “… to raise a child” speaks to the fundamental way in which humans live together. We cannot survive as individuals, no matter how rich and powerful and clever we may be. Our species just doesn’t have the physiology or the individual capacity to do so.

Primate species have a wide variety of social arrangements, depending on what has provided evolutionary success in their biosphere, but the primates closest to us, the bonobos and chimps, almost always associate in what are called fission-fusion communities.

Fission-fusion communities are less cohesive than [other] multi-male multi-female groups [such as those of baboons and macaques]. These groups occupy very large home ranges in which temporary foraging parties cleave and coalesce over time with changes in resource availability and female reproductive condition. These social systems are typically characterized by female dispersal [females leave the group at puberty and join other groups] and male philopatry [males remain with their natal group for life].

There is an obvious resonance and similarity between this bonobo/chimp social organization and that of humans, dating back to our earliest origins. Land and property has often remained with the (usually first-born) male human, and females have to find accommodation elsewhere, usually mating with males from other nearby communities.

Because of the variable fission-fusion nature of the societies of bonobos and chimps, they are not really ‘troops’, which is why the term ‘community’ is usually used to describe them. Chimp and bonobo communities generally vary from 20-80 individuals.

Historically, in most parts of the world, a village is the closest human settlement in size to a chimp or bonobo community. Wikipedia states: “The population of a village varies; the average population can range in the hundreds. Anthropologists regard the number of about 150 members for tribes as the maximum for a functioning human group.” This (quite controversial) maximum number of 150 is famously known as Dunbar’s number.

And hence “it takes a village”, not only to raise a child, but to function effectively and sustainably at all as a human society. Fewer than 20 and you don’t have the diversity needed to reproduce healthily and learn effectively from others. More than 150 and the group loses cohesion and effectively becomes chaotic and ungovernable.

Of course, it takes a lot more than the right number of ‘members’ to constitute a healthy, cohesive, and functional community. Most of us, regardless of what we are used to calling a “community”, have absolutely no idea of what actually building and being in community entails. But here’s a list of some of the qualities I have observed or been told about, that every effective community must have:

1. Mutual trust
2. A diversity of skills, knowledge and capacities (“mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive” to meet all the community’s requirements)
3. A willingness, and the experience, of the whole group to self-manage
4. Love and respect for all of the community’s members, including those you don’t particularly like
5. The will and capacity to collaborate rather than compete with other members
6. An appreciation of the resources, advantages, limitations and dangers of the specific place where you live
7. Freedom from chronic debilitating stress
8. Enough local basic resources to enable the community’s self-sufficiency

On a psychological level, there are additional individual needs that the community has to meet (healthy attachment and capacity for authenticity, a sense of meaning and purpose, possibility of optimism, sufficient attention and appreciation, connection with the natural world etc). The community cannot hope to be healthy if many of its members are ailing or dysfunctional.

How does a community self-organize and self-manage to ensure these requirements are met, so that the community remains caring, cohesive, collaborative and functional?

The simple answer is: practice. There is no formula or rule-book for managing a community, which depends on the community’s ever-evolving culture, preferences, opportunities, appetites, needs, situation, and passions. The sense of community is an emergent phenomenon of its membership and its circumstances.

Why is this important? Because as collapse deepens, our very survival will ultimately depend on our capacity to build and live in community. Fortunately, the collapse we are now going through is a long (relatively-speaking) emergency. We will have time to practice, to learn, to fail, and to start all over again, and again.

We might begin now to identify where we think we want to establish community when the SHTF in our particular part of the world, and who we think we might want to live in community with. But what will ultimately happen in and to our particular little community is unpredictable.

As Tyson Yunkaporta says, the key is not to try to create community by imposing or following any particular ideology, theory or model, but rather to stay adaptable to ever-changing circumstances. We may be looking at multiple long-distance migrations to new and unfamiliar places before our community takes root, and its membership will likely change during those journeys.

That will also mean leaving egos at the door. What one person thinks, believes, or thinks they know, is not going to matter. The building of community, especially among the ruins of a dying civilization, cannot be designed, planned, directed, or conducted. To create a true community, there will first have to be a sense of urgency, since as Joe Bageant often said “Community is born of necessity.” In most places we are not even close to a recognition of its necessity.

And then, once there is a sense of necessity, we will, one way or another, look around and find a way to create a community with those with whom we find ourselves, wherever we may then happen to be. And when we get to that point, ready to self-organize, well, then… it will take a village to make it happen.

an old cartoon by Michael Leunig, from his fans’ Facebook site.  “What has been lost…”

All around me are familiar faces, worn out places, worn out faces
Bright and early for the daily races, going nowhere, going nowhere
Their tears are filling up their glasses, no expression, no expression
Hide my head, I wanna drown my sorrow, no tomorrow, no tomorrow

And I find it kind of funny, I find it kind of sad
The dreams in which I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had
I find it hard to tell you, I find it hard to take
When people run in circles, it’s a very, very
Mad world, mad world

Children waiting for the day they feel good, Happy birthday, happy birthday!
And I feel the way that every child should — sit and listen, sit and listen
Went to school and I was very nervous, no one knew me, no one knew me
“Hello, teacher! Tell me, what’s my lesson?” Looked right through me, looked right through me

And I find it kind of funny, I find it kind of sad
The dreams in which I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had
I find it hard to tell you, I find it hard to take
When people run in circles, it’s a very, very
Mad world, mad world
— Roland Orzabal

COLLAPSE WATCH

wind and solar energy remain an insignificant source of energy, as oil, gas and coal dependence continues unabated; chart from Our World in Data

Collapse goes (briefly) mainstream: CNN actually interviews a climate scientist about collapse without challenging or dismissing his statements.

Why we’re running out of affordable energy: Tim Morgan explains in detail, one more time, the imminent collapse of cheap, affordable energy, which spells the end for industrial civilization.

Badmouthing collapse realism: First it was Rebecca Solnit “doomer-shaming” collapsniks for telling the truth about the inevitability of ecological collapse. Renaee Churches was one of many to reply to her offensive and divisive Guardian article. Then it was Rachel Donald arguing (her word) with her guest, Bill Rees, on the same subject, on her podcast. At least she followed up with an article acknowledging what Rebecca has not — that we have to work together to deal with the climate crisis, not fight among ourselves over how bad it is. Thanks to Indrajit Samarajiva and Paul Heft for the links.

Protection racket: As social collapse deepens, especially among the homeless, sick and poor, the ultra-rich, and even government authorities, are responding by hiring their own private police and security forces. This is not a good sign.

Close to extinction, the first five times: There have been at least five times in the last million years when humans nearly became extinct, all with different causes but all of them related to sudden drastic climate change. The latest study suggests the human population 900,000 years ago dropped to as little as 1,300 people.

Move that shit over here: The Honest Sorcerer describes how much of our non-renewable energy consumption consists of moving goods and materials around to where we are, and explains that that need is expected to triple by 2040. Ain’t going to happen. Thanks to Paul Heft for the link.

“Forests are no longer our friends”: David Wallace-Wells, in a masterful understatement, explains that massive and ubiquitous forest fires have switched our forests from being net carbon sinks to net carbon emitters.

The Maldives as a microcosm of climate collapse: Coming soon to nations everywhere.

LIVING BETTER

‘accommodating’ sculpture by Tuck Langland in the Goshen IN public library; image from the memebrary

How to really address rising crime: Better social supports, instead of more police. Well, duh.

Mutual willing incomprehension: Political detente and peace require a willingness by all ‘sides’ to try to really understand the others — both what they are actually trying to do, and why. This is obvious, but in all our major current conflicts, such willingness, and even capacity, is absent.

Moving from self-help to collective action: The key to achieving change, says the author of this year’s Massey Lectures, is re-learning how to collectively organize to fight existing power structures.

The myths of happiness: Claims that people are happier if they exercise, spend time in nature, pursue “mindfulness/meditation”, and have active social lives, are simply not supported by credible evidence. They’re just psychobabble.

#1 tip for internet content providers: It’s ignore the trolls.

POLITICS AND ECONOMICS AS USUAL

Cartoon by Colombian cartoonist Boligan, from Cartooning for Peace

Corpocracy, Imperialism & Fascism: Short takes (thanks to John Whiting for many of these links):

• Biden wants billions more in military funding for the Ukraine war.
• And by sending long-range missiles to attack Russia, and officially condoning their use for that purpose, Biden is again sharply escalating the risk of global nuclear war.
• The rest of the world, outside the west, understands that ‘power’ is the capacity to get people to actually do things.
• Biden’s DOJ states in court “There is no constitutional right to a stable climate”.
• Trudeau’s biggest oil & gas boondoggle, the Trans Mountain Alberta Tar Sands pipeline, is in logistical and financial difficulties yet again.
• Why Americans should give blood, but not money, to the politically compromised American Red Cross.
• More new info on the US/UK/CIA-orchestrated coup that destroyed democracy in Iran 70 years ago.
• China responds aggressively to US attempts to cripple China’s growing tech dominance through restrictions and sanctions on parts and materials, and a ‘silicon blockade’, an act of economic warfare against China (thanks to Kavana Tree Bressen for the link).
• Europe is once again attempting to force disastrous, immiserating austerity measures on its citizens to try to deal with its sanctions-induced economic collapse.
• John Pilger told us back in 2016 exactly what was coming in Ukraine and the new war against China. So did John Mearsheimer.
• NED, the CIA front, is planning the overthrow of the government of Indonesia.
• A criminal arms dealer who is now the largest military supplier to Zelinskyy personally orchestrated the 2014 Ukraine Maidan Massacre that led to the US/CIA-orchestrated coup in Ukraine and the resulting civil war.
• Will the newly elected government of Guatemala be allowed to end 36 years of war, genocide and corruption, or will right-wing forces prevent it from taking power?

Propaganda, Censorship, Misinformation and Disinformation: Short takes:

• Former intelligence agent and UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter’s YouTube channel, and all of its content, has been deleted by Google. Ritter has been an outspoken critic of US foreign policy and the outsized and uncontrolled role of the CIA for many years.
• Based on a smear piece in the NYT, Marco Rubio has accused anti-war activists and peace groups like Code Pink of being Chinese agents and called for them to be investigated and expunged.
• Taiwanese pro-independence groups are working hand-in-hand with the FBI and US media and ‘think-tanks’ to persecute Chinese citizens in the US, intimidate pro-China US politicians, and foment anti-China hatred. (They’re doing the same in Canada.)
• CNN continues to faithfully scribe and repeat US intelligence agency propaganda as news.

CoVid-19 the Gift That Keeps On Giving: Short takes:

• The importance of avoiding CoVid-19 even if you’re healthy. Please keep masking up in crowded indoor spaces, especially if you’re in them for an extended time, get your booster shots, test if you get symptoms, and self-isolate if you test positive.
• New research indicates that exposure to the virus increases, not decreases, your vulnerability to future infection from newer variants.
• Health authorities in some jurisdictions, like BC Canada, have been ordered to stop using the term “outbreak” when CoVid-19 outbreaks occur, because of the term’s “negative connotations”, and to use euphemisms instead.

FUN AND INSPIRATION

cartoon by Christopher Weyant in the New Yorker

We owe everything to trees: Fascinating article by Jill Lepore traces our dependence on trees as our homes for most of our time on earth, as our source of fire which was essential to our capacity to migrate from our early forest homes, for our earliest weapons to survive as hunters, for paper and books, and many other purposes. The earliest human age should, she says, be called the Wood Age, as it was more transformative than those named after stone or metals. She describes some of the reasons we might have been forced to abandon these Edenic structures as our homes, but strangely omits the cosmic ray theory, that suggests the forests were all burned several million years ago by an exploding Nova. Thanks to Kavana Tree Bressen for the link.

State security secrets!: A priceless exploration into AI by Thomas Wade, who asked ChatGPT what tactics the US security state could use to undermine, gaslight and control us, and got a list of 500 mind-blowing methods. The list would be falling-down-funny if it weren’t exactly what propagandists and sociopaths (and probably most governments) actually do. Thanks to Peter Webb for the link.

Being adopted by a cat: A charming tale from Indrajit Samarajiva. Some things are the same the world over. 

Things are  not as they seem: Another gem from Indrajit about the nature of reality and the stories we tell about it, inspired by a visit from the tooth fairy.

Abandoning the Big Bang myth: Webb telescope data suggests our mythological stories about the origin of the universe just don’t jibe with the facts. Sadly, our response always seems to be to create an even more complicated story. I’m absolutely convinced that if we gave up storytelling and just accepted, as adults, that we cannot possibly hope to know the true nature of the universe and its origins, it would be a great step forward.

No, there is no new global mental health crisis: There are many surveys and news headlines suggesting the current political and social stresses have created a monstrous new global mental health crisis. But drill down into the data and you’ll find it’s only American youth who are suffering. And a more likely cause of that is their unhealthy addiction to social media.

Mindfulness: The useless billion dollar industry: There is absolutely no credible research that ‘mindfulness’ meditation has any enduring therapeutic value whatsoever, beyond the placebo effect. And no, it doesn’t help you lose weight either.

Headline from the Beaverton (Canadian version of The Onion): “Toronto Goodwill asking people to stop donating Leafs jerseys” (ask a Canadian)

Mitch McConnell’s brief flash of humanity: The moment he had his mini-strokes, or whatever they were, the monster in Mitch briefly disappeared, and a real person appeared. A lovely read.

THOUGHTS OF THE MONTH

“Sadness”, by Midjourney AI. Not my prompt.

From Matt Haig, in The Midnight Library:

Nora had always had a problem accepting herself. From as far back as she could remember, she’d had the sense that she wasn’t enough. Her parents who both had their own insecurities, had encouraged that idea.

She imagined, now, what it would be like to accept herself completely. Every mistake she had ever made. Every mark on her body. Every dream she had ever made. Every dream she hadn’t reached or pain she had felt. Every lust or longing she had suppressed.

She imagined accepting it all. The way she accepted nature. The way she accepted a glacier or a puffin or the breach of a whale.

She imagined seeing herself as just another brilliant freak of nature. Just another sentient animal, trying her best. And in doing so, she imagined what it was like to be free.

From Caitlin Johnstone, on western xenophobia and propaganda and on Hollywood’s copaganda and psyopaganda:

Nothing will shatter your dreams of a broad left-right antiwar coalition faster than publicly opposing US warmongering against both Russia and China simultaneously.

…..

Hollywood overdubs the [wimpy peeps of the] bald eagle with the [more powerful-sounding screech of the] red-tailed hawk in precisely the same way it depicts police officers as spending their time fighting crime, and depicts news reporters as brave muckrakers digging for the truth to expose the wicked and corrupt, and depicts soldiers as heroic defenders of the American people.

From Scott Cook — his latest song “A Bigger Pull” (thanks to Kavana Tree Bressen for the link — song has not yet been released):

I got friends who live in cities with brewpubs and bike lanes
Who got sweet tattoos and charcuterie, and ancient grains
Who seek out the finest, frothiest flat whites and macchiatos
Who eat cheese made out of cashews and CBD gelatos

And I got friends who live in small towns and like to shoot at deer
Who like dogs that like working, who like beer that tastes like beer
Who say yes sir, and thank you ma’am, and even God bless y’all
Who castrate and brand and have a testicle festival

And where my city friends are careful with the language that they use
Some of my country friends just get a kick out of trampling on taboos
But if I call and tell ’em I’m broke down, they’ll be there in an instant
My city friends would ask, “don’t you have roadside assistance?”

I got friends who give their kids names like Leaf and Tree and Arlo
Who feel like their fellow grownups failed the grownups of tomorrow
And I got friends who give their kids names like Colton and Shelby
Who think teachin”em to respect the flag and their elders is healthy

I got friends who go to seminars and ayahuasca retreats
Who might spill their deepest secrets to the kindred souls they meet
And I got friends who don’t say a lot, but mean everything they say
Who believed every word of Scripture (’til their daughter turned out gay)

I’ve seen forests of culture flattened by the money machine
All the houses with Black Lives Matter signs and no black folks to be seen
And I got friends who’d never hunt or fish but love their surf and turf
And me, I’m burning diesel drivin’ ’round singing songs to save the Earth

Sometimes it hurts to hear my friends talk about some of my other friends
Like everything that’s going wrong has somehow got to do with them
As if they’re so completely different they just can’t be understood
As if one side’s all bad and the other side’s all good

But from a certain angle they look similar to me
Whether they get worked up by Fox News or MSNBC
I’m not saying there aren’t real concerns, no, everybody’s got ’em
Just that it’s less about the left and right than the top against the bottom

‘Cause a few folks aim to own the world and they’re well on their way
And no matter what crisis comes, they’ll make sure they’re okay
They’ll short-sell and hedge and make profit from misery
If they wanna catch a bunch of fruit they just gotta shake the tree

Well, the left I loved was punk rock and Food Not Bombs
Now it’s cancelling comedians and policing language norms
Greenwashing corporations with whatever’s on brand
With the fresh new hell they’re dreaming up in Davos Switzerland

Well, correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t it with less of a smirk
That our Grandpas fought the fascists and built all the public works?
Back when unions gave us weekends, faced the bosses and their thugs
How come now it seems so joyless, censorious and smug?

With an ever-narrowing circle who think just like we do
We went from we are the 99% to we are the chosen few
If we’re gonna move the needle, if we even have a chance
What’ll it take to make all us snowflakes into an avalanche?

And didn’t conservative used to mean careful and considered
Rather than racing to sell off everything to the highest bidder
Weren’t lying and cheating condemned in the Bible
Didn’t there used to be a wheat pool to keep the farmers viable?

Is there something wrong with public roads, the library and post office?
And who really thinks it’s a good idea to run prisons for a profit?
Now we all believe in freedom, what about the freedom to live?
And not to go bankrupt buying medicine for your kids?

There ain’t no one who’s just one thing, there ain’t nothin’ uncomplicated
There ain’t one without the other, man, we’re all interrelated
We belong to one another, we drink from the same cup
Stop throwing punches at each other and start punching up

Fortune favours the fortunate, it don’t trickle down
Gonna need most of us paddling to turn this ship around
Gonna need a tent big enough to fit most of us inside
Gonna need a bigger pull to turn the tide

From Confucius: “The hardest thing of all is to find a black cat in a dark room, especially if there is no cat.”

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

Aurélien, Patrick Lawrence and Yanis Varoufakis are IMO three of the most astute observers of our modern, global, industrial civilization culture. It is now pretty apparent that collapse of that culture is well underway, and no longer just the looming danger I’ve been writing about for twenty years.

These three writers have all recently written “state of the world” articles from very different perspectives. They’re all well worth reading and thinking about. I thought it might be useful to summarize, contrast and comment on them. The common thread of all of them might be “everything slowly falling apart”. That’s perhaps an excellent descriptor of this, the first of the three phases of each stage of collapse. The disintegration phase.

…..

Aurélien’s contribution is called, aptly enough, “Going to Pieces Slowly“. The British historian, diplomat, and cultural analyst (now based in France) writes:

Given the many developing crises that are jostling for priority now, social breakdown, either self-generated, or more likely a consequence of multiple economic or environmental and health crises, may well not be far away. In fact social breakdown is perhaps already here, even if, as William Gibson might say, it’s not evenly distributed… People accept the legitimacy and authority of the state as much out of habit and collective self-protection as anything else. So the kind of decay in state legitimacy that we are now starting to see is less likely to lead to violent conflict, than to a kind of sour apathy and disengagement, and a search for some [group that can fill the power vacuum or some] way of making up for what the state can’t do. There are parts of the world where you can see this in action…

No western country has remotely the internal security forces required to defeat a serious massed challenge to the legitimacy of the state, because so much depends on unspoken social contracts between the governors and the governed. But supposing that starts to break down?… We forget the extent to which it is safe to go out into the streets precisely because the vast majority of people never think about smashing their way into a supermarket and looting the goods, or attacking police or firemen. But this is only a convention and, beyond a certain point, if too many people decide to disobey it, there is nothing much that the authorities can do…

For the first time in modern western history, there are no groups with organisations and ideologies waiting in the wings [when civil order breaks down], either to launch a struggle for power, or to profit from a power vacuum.

Aurélien goes on to explain that the crumbling of political and social system legitimacy would immediately have knock-on economic effects that would amplify political and social unrest: the collapse of investment, currency and housing markets, massive disruption of food and energy supply chains, degraded road and public transport and communication infrastructure, and a surge in organized crime. This is where the slide into chaos begins, and we’d be wise, he says, to study some African, Latin American and Asian countries where this has already happened, to see what may come next.

…..

Patrick Lawrence’s new piece, entitled “Psychology & Disorder“, is a history of American Exceptionalism, describing the history of that unique ideology that runs right across the political spectrum, and has now, like one of those pathetic western-supplied tanks rotting in the fields of Eastern Ukraine, run out of ammunition and fuel. In the text of a speech he gave to a Swiss conference on multipolarity, the American author, foreign correspondent and globe-trotting university lecturer writes:

Little that America has done, from the earliest settlements and the Quaker hangings in the late seventeenth century to its nineteenth century wars, expansions, and annexations, to its anti–Communist crusades in the last century, to Vietnam, and all the coups and interventions in the post–1945 decades: To grasp all of this fully we must see the underlying, driving psychology… All of these events, disparate as they are as historical phenomena, arise from the same consciousness: They are all part of the same root phenomenon. And all of this goes, it hardly bears mentioning, for all that we witness now: The cruelly inhumane proxy war in Ukraine, the dangerously provocative encirclement of China, America’s unruly conduct in the Middle East, in Latin America—America’s claim to exceptionalism lies behind all of this…

After the débacle of the Vietnam War, Ronald Reagan’s [subsequent] feat was to persuade an entire nation, or most of it, that it was all right to pretend: All was affect and imagery. He licensed Americans to avoid facing the truth of defeat and failure and of professed principle betrayed. He demonstrated in his words and demeanor that greatness could be acted out even after it was lost as spectacularly as it had been in Indochina.

This is the exceptionalism whose many destructive consequences we now witness. It is an ideology whose most peculiar feature is that it is subliminally understood to be exhausted and that it rests in large measure on denial. No American political figure would dare now to speak sensibly against the exceptionalist orthodoxy. This is ever more the case as the orthodoxy becomes more obviously hollow, more detached from perfectly discernible realities…

[In her essay “Ideology and Terror Hannah Arendt notes that ideologies] replace thought with belief, so obviating the need for ideological believers to indulge in the act of thinking—to respond with rational judgment to events and circumstances. Another [of ideologies’ consequences] is the effect of isolation. Ideologies are in one dimension boundaries, and one stands on either side of these. Those inside these boundaries share a bond made of allegiances of which no one else can partake. Those outside these boundaries are simply excluded: They are Others. The implied separation is sometimes much more than psychological, but it is psychological before it is anything else.

Americans [in addition to now being politically isolated from much of the world], are also isolated from others psychologically, and I would say this is also in direct consequence of their claim to be exceptional. Like all ideologues, and here I will make a generality I am prepared to defend, Americans, by and large, would much rather believe than think. This in itself tends to leave Americans isolated, because he who believes but cannot think is incapable of relating to the world… We trap ourselves within a fantasy of eternal superiority and triumph. So we cannot hope to speak the same language as the rest of the world, and we don’t. We do not see events the same way. We do not react to events in the same way. We do not calculate the same paths forward.

Patrick sees little evidence that the US, and its perpetually-governing Professional Managerial Caste in particular, are either willing or able to abandon the bankrupt idea of American exceptionalism, which has propelled us to the brink of nuclear annihilation, and is now largely driving the slowly accelerating economic, political, social and ecological collapse we are now trying to contend with. And as long as this insane ideological belief, rather than rational, evidence-based thought, is what is directing the decisions of those in power, what hope do we have of even softening the blows of collapse before we plunge into the chaotic phase?

…..

Yanus Varoufakis has just written “Technofeudalism Has Just Arrived“, a look at how massive inequality, the demise of democracy, the de facto privatization of the internet, and horrific financial and economic mismanagement, have combined to produce a dramatic shift in the dynamics of power, and has hence shifted the global economy from a capitalist one to a ‘neo-feudal’ one. In the introduction to his new book, the Greek-Australian economist, professor and former parliamentarian writes:

What has happened over the last two decades is that profit and markets have been evicted from the epicentre of our economic and social system, pushed out to its margins, and replaced. With what? Markets, the medium of capitalism, have been replaced by digital trading platforms which look like, but are not, markets, and are better understood as [private] fiefdoms. And profit, the engine of capitalism, has been replaced with its feudal predecessor: rent. Specifically, it is a form of rent that must be paid for access to those platforms and to the cloud more broadly. I call it cloud-rent.

As a result, real power today resides not with the owners of traditional capital, such as machinery, buildings, railway and phone networks, or industrial robots. They continue to extract profits from workers, from waged labour, but they are not in charge as they once were. They have become vassals in relation to a new class of feudal overlord, the owners of cloud capital. As for the rest of us, we have returned to our former status as serfs, contributing to the wealth and power of the new ruling class with our unpaid labour – in addition to the waged labour we perform, when we get the chance.

Yanis asserts that it is essential that we understand this new economic power dynamic in order to grapple effectively with the personal, political, economic, social and ecological challenges we are facing. Although the book has not yet been published, judging from its detailed table of contents, its key ideas will be familiar to readers and viewers of his writings and speeches.

He argues that the US acted as a “Global Minotaur” that used its economic and political power from 1945 through 2008 to essentially repatriate all the proceeds of global production back to the US, despite the fact the US is a massive debtor nation that produces essentially nothing of value (except munitions). But the financial collapse of 2008 brought about the end of the “Minotaur” and opened up the opportunity for the power shift to the private technofeudalists who now control global commerce through ownership of their online ‘platforms’ (their fiefs), and who are indifferent to ‘profits’ because they get their ‘rents’ from both producers and consumers (users) of their platforms.

He attributes the new US hostility to China to the fact that China’s technological advancements (and possibly their superiority) threaten the technofeudalists’ oligopoly over platforms and rents, and hence their wealth and power. And he argues that the Ukraine war, with its crippling economic sanctions and massive theft of non-westerners’ bank deposits, is largely an economic war rather than a political one. The losers in both wars, he says, are Europeans, the Global South, and our ravaged planet.

As an idealist, his answer to these problems is perhaps not surprising: He wants the internet to be de-privatized and reconstituted as a public commons. He wants corporations and currencies to be democratized, repurposed to serve the public good. He wants land to be returned to what it was before the foreclosures — a public commons. I would love to believe that was all possible, but you probably won’t be surprised to hear that I do not. Good diagnosis, though.

…..

So we have the gradual acceleration of global political, social and economic collapse, with no group likely to be able to fill the power vacuum as the world slides more quickly into chaos. And we have only poorer nations, ahead of us on the curve, to study for clues as to how that chaos is going to unfold.

We have an Empire that remains deluded about its ideology to the point that it is in denial about everything happening in the world except what it sees as immediate threats to its supremacy and exceptionalist beliefs, and which is pushing for multiple wars against nuclear armed countries in ‘defence’ of those beliefs.

And we have an economic system that has quietly replaced unregulated capitalism with an even more insidious and destructive private neo-feudal order that views the world’s consumers as its ‘product’ and the world’s producers as its renters, and is completely agnostic to social, labour, economic and ecological abuse.

Sounds like everything slowly falling apart, all right.