how to save the world

forms of activism, adapted from the book Deep Green Resistance

We are learning, I think more and more, that most activism simply doesn’t work — it may change minds for a while, but it rarely seems to change anything in the real world, at least not on any scale or for long. Arguments about the “ripple effects” by which symbolic actions by leading activists produce major shifts in what is tolerable to the majority of the populace are pretty much, I think, a leap of faith; they remind me of conservatives’ arguments for the validity of “trickle down” economics.

So the perpetrators of the atrocities that activists rail against are quite content to allow activism as a safety valve for public outrage, as long as it remains impotent.

Some activists are now realizing that impotence, and they now seem to be moving in one or both of two directions: towards direct action that obstructs, occupies, destroys, reclaims and expropriates the activities of the most egregious ecological miscreants (“take it, break it, block it”, as shown at the top of the chart above); and/or towards hyper-local action that remediates damage in one small but significant way, at least for a while.

Activists are mostly finding, I think, that the former will simply not be tolerated, as there is no limit to the level of arrests, police actions and other steps the perpetrators will go to to prevent, punish and discourage such actions. The jails, hospitals and morgues may fill to overflowing as long as the disruption continues, but soon enough business as usual will resume.

The hope is, supposedly, that such activism will reach the scale at which it becomes impracticable to arrest everyone, and there won’t be enough enforcers to keep the atrocities going, so eventually the perpetrators will give up and cease their ways. This might be possible, but particularly given the current state of the media, it seems unlikely to me that enough people will ever be roused enough to take the very real risks needed to make this happen, until and unless there is an immediate, existential threat to all of them personally.

Many of the past takeovers of national power by fascists have been enabled by this lack of critical mass of people roused enough to put their lives on the line to oppose it. And fascist movements in many other countries are counting on similar reticence as they plan their antidemocratic takeovers for the coming months and years. This is happening all over the world, and so far there is not much evidence it won’t continue despite all the protests. Most of us have become understandably cynical about our quasi-democracies, and most of us have never lived under a fascist tyranny and hence don’t realize how awful they will be (though Texans and Floridians are getting a taste). It seems doubtful to me that enough of us will be willing to put our lives on the line to defend a system that seems pretty dysfunctional, when most can’t imagine fascism being much worse (though it will be). A recent global survey suggested that relatively few of us, especially young people, still think it’s essential to live in a democracy.

And globally, relatively few of us still live in a real democracy.

Good luck to any activists who continue direct action under fascism. To discourage followers, they will simply be shot, or worse. Lots of Guantánamos and gulags waiting to be built. Reeducation is a growth industry.

The more pragmatic activists are opting for focused, hyper-local actions — getting dams decommissioned, cleaning up local water supplies etc. You can fight successfully to save a particular grove of trees that locals have come to love. But as soon as you try to increase the scale to, for example, try to end harvesting the last 2% of old-growth forests in a region, the corporatists’ gloves will come off, and you’ll find yourself made an example of.

So my guess is that, soon enough, activists in more and more countries will have to turn their full attention to fighting fascism, principally within their own country. The war against climate collapse, ecological collapse, and economic inequality will have to be shelved, as it so often has been in past, to focus on the more immediate, personal existential threat of political and social oppression. And power is so unequally distributed now, and public opinion so imbued with disinformation and misinformation, that that struggle is likely to be long, and not go well.

Before it’s resolved, global economic collapse will be upon us, and over the following decade or two it will be exacerbated by the more severe manifestations of climate and ecological collapse. Power will then inevitably devolve to the local level, and we will have no choice but to put aside our political differences and work together to deal with the everyday crises at hand. We will all, at last, be activists.

We’ll then learn what we’re really made of, as so many around the world, living in collapse under undemocratic but largely powerless, inept and ineffectual governments, are already experiencing.

It won’t be easy, but it will be interesting. This is what collapse looks like.

Photo by Steve Toombs, North Vancouver, young bobcat in the rain

I can see the place where I came from
I can hear those sounds right now
I can find the paths I used to run
And believe I still know how

Time keeps moving faster and faster
I’m not losing track
I’m afraid that something’s forgotten
So I keep looking back

I shake my head, clear my vision,
Keep those scenes at bay,
Feel the way I used to feel
Slip further and further away

— Cheryl Wheeler

COLLAPSE WATCH

Cartoon by Graham MacKay; thanks to David Svarrer for the link. The fifth wave at the right end is, of course, civilization’s collapse. Text at left says “Be sure to wash your hands and all will be well.”

Five ways to deny collapse: Utah environmentalist Jim Catano outlines the five stages of denial that precede recognizing that civilizational collapse in this century is now inevitable. He interviews four people who have accepted that reality, including Guy McPherson and Michael Dowd, who sent me this link.

The stock market is a ticker of doom: Indi Samarajiva describes how our current multifaceted crises reflect a state of ongoing collapse, and reminds us that, in past collapses, no one recognized it or called it ‘collapse’ until after it had ended, in retrospect.

All growth is based on increasing energy consumption: Tim Watkins explains how our economy is founded on ever-increasing low-cost energy use and low-interest debt, and how the current collapse of EROEI (energy return on energy invested) belies its continuance.

The empty sea: A new Club of Rome report describes the ongoing collapse of ocean life and what that portends for our future.

When collapsniks become conspiracy theorists: Facing the cognitive dissonance between the denialist messages of the press, economists and politicians on one hand, and the increasingly obvious realities of climate, economic and ecological collapse on the other, it’s not surprising that many of us have become skeptical of what we read. What’s tragic is that this cynicism, combined with a lack of appreciation of scientific knowledge, has led a number of once highly credible collapsnik writers, including Ilargi at The Automatic Earth, Dmitry Orlov, and now permaculture pioneer David Holmgren, to become CoVid-19 skeptics or to embrace other ill-founded conspiracy theories. This is a great tragedy, because it leads otherwise sensible followers off the cliff of anti-science paranoia and misinformation, and in so doing undermines the entire field of research and study of civilizational collapse, and energizes denialists. It’s almost too depressing to write about. Thanks to Paul Heft for the link.

LIVING BETTER

Cartoon by Drew Dernavich from his website

Putting public health first: Atul Gawande explains why Costa Ricans live longer healthier lives than Americans despite spending a tenth as much per capita on health care, because of how that money is spent.

How China eliminated malaria: From 30 million cases a year to zero, largely because of the dogged determination and brilliance of an unknown, under-acknowledged woman epidemiologist named Tu Youyou. Thanks to Kavana* for the link.

POLITICS AND ECONOMICS AS USUAL

chart by Eric Topol, via Leo Beletsky

A terminal case of capitalism: Indi uses the chart above to explain how unregulated capitalism has become so dysfunctional that it now produces not just diminishing returns but negative returns.

Corpocracy, Imperialism & Propaganda: Short takes:

• How Chinese diplomacy differs from American diplomacy
• Why the American media love war
• Biden’s imperialist neo-Keynesianism — Ashley Smith brilliantly deconstructs Biden’s policies as an attempt to “rehabilitate US capitalism”

CoVid-19 Becomes the Pandemic (mostly) of the Unvaccinated: Short takes:

• Reassurance for the vaccine-hesitant — vaccines are safe, and not taking them is not. The author, Dr Clayton Dalton, accepts that most of the unvaccinated are worried about side effects, and are not believers in anti-vaxxer conspiracy theories.
• One in 5,000 — that’s your daily risk of getting CoVid-19 if you’ve been vaccinated, and even if you’re vaccinated and get it, chances are very low that you’ll suffer serious symptoms. More info on navigating your risks once you’re vaccinated. Thanks to Kavana for the links.
• Gabor Maté argues that many anti-vaxxers’ rage, fears and distrust are rooted in childhood trauma.
• Zeynep Tüfekçi makes the case for vaccine mandates.  EDIT: As the earlier link doesn’t work, here’s the gist of this post:

This week, I’m thinking about how little we actually understand the broad non-vaccinating population. Yes, for sure, there are some strong ideologues among them. But I’m also pretty sure there is a whole range of reasons people have found themselves unvaccinated at this point in the United States ranging from mistrust to misinformation to fear to identity to a mix of everything. That is why I think most people will go along with mandates.

I suspect the actual quitting the job because of vaccine mandates will be less than the [recent WaPo] poll indicates. The unvaccinated include many people who were just hesitant or scared rather than forceful ideologues, but when asked, people like to sound like they know what they’re doing.

I know the social media/mass media examples tend to highlight committed, outspoken anti-vaxxers but this is where a real ethnography/reporting with better sampling would help. When looking at reporting/self-narratives, I see a lot of “I was scared, kinda waited, kinda got stuck.”

Just today, I saw a tiktok from someone who, tragically, died from COVID. She says she was scared, worried vaccine wasn’t yet FDA approved, and wanted to do it later, together with her family. She needed a nudge, a push and hand-holding. A mandate could have saved life her life.

But I’m also frustrated as a researcher. I want to go talk to people, read more systematic research and try to better understand the dynamics and the proportions in the population. The pandemic has distorted our understanding of people, too: many of our examples come from social media which tends to highlight extreme and non-representative cases. It’s not that they are not real, but they are not representative, and they are especially flattened.

On pandemic news: not much new to say. I think this will rage on in the United States till more people get vaccinated or infected (but I suspect this is not a lot of time). I think there is a good case for immunocompromised, elderly, high-risk and J&J recipients to get a booster, but still not seeing the data that justifies it for healthy and immunocompetent people—especially given the still ongoing global shortage.

Inequality and Caste-ism: Short takes:

• The need for safe, self-managed abortions using pills (thanks to PS Pirro for the link)
• How the education system creates the caste system (class starts in the classroom)

FUN  AND INSPIRATION

Cartoon by Drew Dernavich in the New Yorker

The viruses that shouldn’t exist: We’ve only just discovered giruses (= giant viruses), a new form of life (or perhaps non-life) with a staggeringly complex ecosystem, most of which was also just newly discovered. We thought they were some kind of bacteria, but they’re not. They’re something else again. We’re basically clueless about what they’re for, but they’re everywhere.

Caitlin Johnstone channels Tony Parsons: Caitlin can usually be found railing, brilliantly and persuasively, against war-mongers, powerful psychopaths, and dumbed-down media, but here she perfectly articulates the core message of radical non-duality. What I can’t fathom is how she can reconcile this message with cajoling her readers to wake themselves up from their ignorance and passivity. If there is no “one” there is no “one” that can do anything. I love reading her work, but she makes my brain hurt.

Scientific tangents: A podcast developed by the vlog brothers, on fascinating aspects of everyday science. Silly, harmless fun. Like, did you know bee pheromones are being used to repel elephants from nearby farmlands? Or that Bill Gates has a huge campaign to reinvent the toilet?

First there is a mountain: Ever wondered what that mountain is that you can see from your house, your favourite campsite, or from another mountain you’ve just climbed? Now there are some fun online tools you can use, together, to solve the mystery:

• First, enter your coordinates into this site, PeakVisor. Or just move around the map in the upper left until it’s pointing where you are. Once it’s mapped the mountains, use the black and white bar to set your elevation. Then just wait for it to show you the entire 360º skyline from that location.
• To confirm your identification, enter the mountain’s name in the quick search bar in this site, Peakbagger. Copy the mountain’s precise coordinates in the upper left.
• Now, paste those coordinates in the “Coordinates B” box in this site, SunEarthTools. Enter your coordinates in the “Coordinates” box, and then click “Calculate distance and bearing”. It will show you a map, and the distance and bearing should make sense from what you are seeing. Or, alternatively, if you see a mountain that PeakVisor doesn’t identify, estimate its bearing from other mountains you can identify, and enter that bearing and the distance of the farthest mountain you can identify, and click “Calculate destination point B”. It’ll probably show you your mountain at point B on the map, or somewhere along the intermediate line.
• And of course you can use Google Maps/Earth’s 3D features to do the same, though it takes some practice to use all the settings. Once you’ve got the mountain showing on your map, right click and copy its coordinates, and paste them onto another Google Maps tab to identify the mountain. Or right click and then click “What’s here?”

Headline from the Beaverton: Toronto police leave homeless encampment in peace after residents say they’re just a 24-hour anti-mask protest.

THOUGHTS OF THE MONTH

This is how Conservatives in North America fundraise. Canadians will find out Monday how well the strategy works.

From Richard Heinberg’s Museletter #342 in response to the question: Do electric, biofuel, and hydrogen powered vehicles make it somewhat more difficult to wean ourselves away from fossil fuel power?

The one thing we could do within the transport sector to ease and speed the transition would be to reduce transportation in certain modes, particularly air transport. Some vehicles are practical to electrify (bicycles, cars), while others aren’t (planes, ships, big trucks). Biofuels are ecologically a dead end, and hydrogen is problematic because it leaks so readily, and because producing it is energy inefficient. Synthetic fuels made with hydrogen solve the leakage problem, but are even more inefficient. So: there are alternatives, all of which work in the laboratory, but each suffers from some serious practical drawback if scaled up. That’s why we need to reduce transport and re-localize our economies as much as possible. As we do so, we should prioritize public transit and bicycles over automobiles of any kind, because bikes and well-designed public transit systems use much less energy and materials than cars—even electric cars.

From Caitlin Johnstone, from “Nothing to Celebrate”:

This [withdrawal from Afghanistan] is not something that Biden should be applauded for. Nobody deserves praise or credit for ending a twenty-year disaster, especially one they helped start. Nobody applauds the mass shooter for finally setting down the rifle and surrendering…

Invade a nation, kill hundreds of thousands of its inhabitants, stay for decades, accomplish nothing besides making war profiteers wealthy, drop everything and leave, then have your armed goon squad take PR photos with local infants so everyone thinks your military is awesome.

From Tim Cliss This:

This is complete vulnerability. Without the one who fears vulnerability, and works hard to assuage this fear with the illusion of invulnerability… there is neither.

The nakedness of no one to protect is total vulnerability, but no one to feel vulnerable.

Everything is nothing. Life is not a matter of life or death. Nor a question of one thing or the other. When things are no things the questions cease. This is nothing. Nothing to questions, nothing to gain, nothing to lose. Just always everything already.

This isn’t a story, but what is said or thought about this is. This is, regardless of thoughts and words about this. These words too are a story about this. Of course any thoughts or words are this too. Only this, and this alone.

From Dan Riffle, advisor to AOC: Every billionaire is a policy failure.

From Derrick Jensen, in A Language Older than Words:

What do you do, how tired do you get, when each day you struggle against an entire culture based on the normalization of trauma-inducing behaviour? There is no sanctuary.

From John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath (thanks to Caitlin Johnstone for the link):

“We’re sorry. It’s not us. It’s the monster. The bank isn’t like a man.”

“Yes, but the bank is only made of men.”

“No, you’re wrong there—quite wrong there. The bank is something else than men. It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It’s the monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it.”

* Kavana is Tree Bressen‘s new name.

Photo credits, clockwise from upper left:  1. China pollution — Damir Sagoli for Reuters; 2. Trump stormtroopers in Portland — Noah Berger for AP: 3. Garbage-pickers in Lagos — Samantha Appleton, in The New Yorker;  4. Refugees in Greece — Daniel Etter/New York Times/Redux /eyevine:  5. Child labourers in Pennsylvania — Lewis Hine in the National Archives

Discuss.

photo by włodi on flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

PS Pirro recently riffed off a quote from Margaret Atwood that went: “Every dystopia is someone’s utopia. So whose utopia is this?” This was my reply:

Margaret is a brilliant writer, but sometimes she says/writes things that sound very clever but are actually just wrong. IMO, this is no one’s utopia. This is just one more outcome of 7.8B people desperately doing what they think is the best thing they can do under the immediate circumstances of each moment.

No one is in control. This is not a game between two clearly articulated sides working within well-established rules. This is collapse, and chaos, playing itself out. This is the end of the myth of progress — that things will inevitably get better for most, with occasional setbacks. This is fear of loss and of lack of control frantically and foolishly inducing more fear in other groups, destabilizing everything. This is terrified, angry people nostalgic for a past that never was, trying, impossibly, to wish a time of stability, familiarity, authority, security and changelessness into existence. This is happening all over the world.

This is what happens in end times. First there is the scapegoating, the burning of witches and heretics, in an atmosphere of disbelief and denial. Then there is the scramble for what is left, the glorious and ghastly migration (physical and psychological) in search of enough to keep going on. Finally, for those unable to adapt, there is the eating of the young. And then it will be over, and something utterly new, unpredictable, unimaginable will emerge. Whatever that is, it’s got to be better than this. No animal is meant to live the way we have lived for the last ten thousand years.

Humans think and make sense of things through metaphor. Our metaphors are of necessity simplistic. One of the reasons we loathe complexity (and all ecological and social systems are, inherently, massively complex) is that complexity defies metaphorical description. It can’t be understood by metaphor. It can’t be understood at all — complex systems entail an infinite number of variables interacting in an infinite number of completely unpredictable ways. They can’t be usefully reduced to a merely complicated diagram or chart, like a car engine. No human story (and we also make sense of things through stories) can hope to embrace and tell the tale of what is far too complex, nuanced and unknowable to learn any practicable lessons from.

Still, metaphor and story are the tools we have to work with, so we do our best. We make charts, we keep score, we invent simplistic theories, models, games and simulations. And we tell stories, total fictions. It’s all we can do. Using the metaphor of a game, life has winners and losers, and the rules of the game can be changed by collective will to make the game fairer. And as the rules are refined, the game will get better, fairer for all. The myth — the story — of progress is one we cling to most fervently. Without it, our religions, our history, our politics, and all our striving has no meaning, no purpose.

But life is not a game, nor “like” a game. We don’t make the rules and we can’t change them. Progress and human control over our species’ actions and evolution are indeed a myth. But we’re addicted to this myth. We cannot give up our belief in it. And as long as we believe in it, we will continue to believe that this is, outrageously, someone’s utopia, that things can be and will be better if only we understand better and take appropriate actions. We are shouting furiously at the actors in the tragedy flickering on the screen in front of us, as if the characters were real, as if the plot were really happening, as if our shouting could possibly have any impact on the events or outcome we are witnessing. “No, no, don’t go up into the attic!!”

My blog’s primary purpose, beyond allowing me to publish my pretentious fiction and to think out loud about what’s going through my head, is to chronicle our civilization’s collapse. A chronicle is, of course, a story, just as much a fiction as my poetry. But where most chronicles are attempts to make sense of what has happened and is happening, by documenting facts and observations, my chronicle is in a way the opposite. It’s an attempt to undo, at least in my own mind, the mythological sense-making and meaning-making of the day, as reported in the press, bleated by politicians, pundits and other self-important blowhards, and mindlessly, desperately parroted on social media, in cafés, on street corners and around dinner tables, all in an attempt to make sense of what we cannot hope to make sense of, or even understand. Because it makes no sense, it has no meaning or purpose or direction.

When we can’t make sense of things, we are rendered impotent to act on them. And that we can’t abide. The abominable, illusory human self has no choice but to make sense of things, forge that sense-making into a worldview, a set of consistent beliefs, and then to act on them. That is what the human self does.

Except it doesn’t really do any of those things. It only believes that it is real, and in control of its actions and decisions, and that its beliefs bear some semblance to the truth. It’s furiously wielding and manipulating the joystick and watching the video game unfolding on the screen, unaware that the joystick is disconnected from the game module, which is displaying a game in demo mode. But it seems, at least sometimes, as if the movement of the levers on the joystick are having some impact on what is happening on the screen. And that is enough to keep us going, red-knuckled until the final flash of the Game Over sign.

So, no, this is no one’s utopia. Not even those who might think they are living in a utopia, and might think that their personal actions have had anything to do with how things have played out. The first pixels of the Game Over sign are already starting to appear on the screen, everywhere on the planet. Nice try, though, player. You did your best.

The history of medicine, both within and across cultures, is fascinating. Many cultures have designated medicine men and medicine women, and a propensity for referring to many non-pharmacological substances as medicines. Other cultures entrust decisions on self-health largely to the individual.

Our own, dominant culture has vacillated between these positions, at least insofar as substances are concerned. In the US and many other countries, prior to the start of the 20th century, almost all drugs were legal. Then regulations were introduced, ostensibly because of the dangers of toxic, mislabeled and falsely-promoted drugs in the new age of mass marketing and media. Throughout the century restrictions were strengthened, broadened, and globalized. In this century, there is a small movement towards re-legalization, or at least de-criminalization, suggesting the majority of people think the pendulum has swung too far.

This article isn’t about the merits of regulated re-legalization of all drugs (which I favour, in a rare instance of concurrence with libertarians). It’s about our attitude to self-managed health care in general. We have inadvertently created a paradoxical situation where many or most of us have been rendered incompetent to manage, even in partnership with medical “professionals”, our own health.

How did this happen? I think it began with the “professionals'” patriarchal and condescending belief that most people couldn’t be trusted to self-manage their health. In the new age of Lydia Pinkham’s medicinal compound and other miracle cure-alls, being marketed ferociously to people unused to media advertising and deception, people were dying from taking such “medicines”. The medical profession was still in the dark ages, prescribing tonics containing substances like mercury, and procedures like leeching, for diseases they had not even a basic understanding of. So laws were introduced in the hope that by bolstering the profession’s reputation, fewer toxic fake medicines would be consumed.

That turned out to be a slippery slope. The medical profession, as it struggles to learn more, and pretends to know everything that they need to know to be competent caregivers, remains a leading killer of people in many countries, due to botched surgeries, misdiagnosis, mis-prescription and other forms of malpractice, most of it unintentional. The prevailing view became that, as abominable as the profession is at managing patients’ health, they couldn’t possibly be worse at it than the patients themselves.

So with citizens (now ironically renamed “patients” — the term etymologically means “sufferers”) prohibited from managing their own health, the marketing vultures of Big Pharma switched to bribing doctors to prescribe their patented cures, and to blanketing the media with ads urging citizens to “ask your doctor if Oxytherazone 5 is right for you!”

Like many, I have a rather sad medical history as a blindly-trusting patient. It turned out the drug of choice for my teenage acne precipitated a much-later bout with ulcerative colitis that nearly killed me, and when I suffered my first kidney stone (at age 40) and was told to cut back on my calcium intake (bad advice), I decided enough was enough. Since then, I have researched my own conditions, painstakingly tracked my own health indicators (in enough detail to enable successful use of regression analysis for my treatment regimen), and largely taken control of my own health. I don’t blame the doctors — they’re doing their best with utterly inadequate information and knowledge. Their lawyers won’t let them admit their ignorance, and their insurance companies won’t let them spend enough time with patients to competently advise them.

Since then, my contacts with the medical profession have been eye-opening for them and for me. The following two visits to the hospital for kidney stones (hopefully the last, though my latest workup continues to show calcium oxalate in my urine) went like lightning. To the triage nurses’ astonishment, I arrived at emergency with a list of current medications, the history and nature of previous stones, and how each was treated, and was whisked through the system in record time.

When I went to my doctor when the ulcerative colitis hit, I already knew what it was, what had probably enabled it (massive doses of oral tetracycline as a teenager, destroying my natural gut flora), what had probably precipitated the attack (some horrific and unexpected financial news), and how I wanted it treated. The doctor just nodded and signed the consent and referral.

When the specialist defied my express wishes and (with me being too far out of it to object) put me on a different, dangerous regimen, I was furious, and when I recovered I met with him to explain why I was “firing” him. He was astonished — no one had ever questioned his judgement before, and he acknowledged (off the record of course) that he should have followed my instructions.

I became a vegetarian about 25 years years ago and a vegan (more specifically a varied plant-based diet follower) about 10 years ago. I know how that switch has benefitted me, and what I have had to do (mainly supplements of B12, D3 and flax seed) to accommodate the new diet and stay healthy. I continue to monitor and track what I eat, what medications I take, and how I feel, in considerable detail.

But here’s the paradox: While it is now possible thanks to the internet, and thanks to personally-accessible test results, to monitor one’s own health, take steps to prevent most diseases, self-diagnose and self-treat most symptoms — more people than ever before are falling prey to unhealthy cures, diets, treatments and misinformation. The frenzied flogging of miracle cures a century ago has nothing on the vast modern media-hyped tirade of quackery espoused by the likes of the mentally disturbed RFK Jr, the TV doctors like Oz and Mercola, the homeopaths, and armies of other miscreants spreading misinformation.

My current doctor knows that I know how to research, monitor and manage my own health, and we consult with each other. But his receptionists, inured to the many patients who’ve fallen victim to the quacks and misinformation propagators (not to mention the “ask your doctor if…” Big Pharma companies), basically advise callers to do nothing until they’ve seen or spoken with the doctor. Which is probably wise, but also tragic.

So now, a century after the government and medical profession decided we were too dumb to manage our own health, despite all the information now at our disposal most people really are too dumb to manage their own health.

Libertarians (left and right) tell me that everyone should be free to try to manage their own health anyway. To me that means they should be “free” to make themselves (and others they infect) sick, regardless of the impact on others or the cost to the society as a whole.

I’m an old-fashioned liberal, not a libertarian. I believe in government regulation and intervention whenever this benefits the community and society as a whole. I believe pollution should be illegal. I believe spreading misinformation and hate-mongering should be illegal. I believe that acts endangering other people (such as driving drunk, carrying loaded firearms in public places, and refusing vaccines) should be illegal. That’s not a moral judgement — it’s a belief that the health of the society always outweighs the rights of individuals. For that reason I do lots of things I don’t particularly like doing, and which sometimes rankle.

I don’t want the perpetrators of these dangerous and destructive behaviours to be thrown in prison, shamed, or “made an example of”. I just want our governments, regulators and enforcement authorities to make them stop. For our collective well-being.

This may be an impossible paradox to solve. There is so much money to be made, and so many political points to be scored, by spreading misinformation, by asserting that everyone has the right to believe whatever they want and act accordingly, that trying to rein these things in may be totally futile.

But I think we should try. As collapse advances, we are going to discover that we either make things work together, through assessing and advancing the collective interest, or we will all fail. Now wouldn’t be too soon to start doing this.

We might just find that, without the fear-mongering, the media/marketing hype, and the misinformation, we are able, in true collaboration with the medical profession and our peers, to manage our own health extremely well. The effect of that could be transformative, saving trillions of dollars and reinvigorating us to deal collectively with all the crises we are starting to face.

I’m not optimistic, but the old-fashioned liberal in me isn’t giving up yet.

Paul is one of my closest collapsnik friends, and like me has been active in movements to prepare us for civilization’s end. He lives in Palo Alto. Here’s his latest synthesis of the current state of things.

Photo by Fred Murphy (Creative Commons) via Tempest magazine

To What Extent Is There a Problem? (Guest Post by Paul Heft)

Scientists have been pointing out how modern civilization has been encountering multiple problems that threaten huge impacts, sometimes described as “existential threats”. The combination of threats has been analyzed as “overshoot”, “transgressing planetary boundaries”, and a “complex predicament” lacking linear, mechanistic “solutions”, leading to an impending “collapse of civilization”. In other words, the forces at play have enough inertia that humans (apparently) are unable to control the outcome, which will be disastrous on multiple levels:

• human mass migration and die-off due to decreased food production,
• habitat destruction and extinctions,
• political instability and conflict,
• economic depression (loss of means of living, and loss of common and household wealth),
• institutional breakdown,
• lack of security and loss of meaning, etc.

If we look for root causes, we can find multiple explanations:

• Capitalism has been blamed for destructive attitudes such as a drive for constant economic growth (more, more, more), expanding consumption to satisfy “manufactured needs”, maximizing extraction and energy use with little regard to limits or effects (such as pollution, climate change), and a focus on individual aggrandizement without considering collective (especially long term) effects.
• Modernism has been blamed for downgrading soul, spirit, and meaning in life to matters of individual belief rather than community concerns anchored in tradition and a sense of the sacred.
• Modern technology (including the relatively recent use of energy-rich fossil fuels) has been blamed for amplifying the dangers as well as the benefits of human creativity, while lacking a concomitant development of wisdom regarding its application.
• The Enlightenment has been blamed for emphasizing rational thinking above other modes, and for “reductionist” thinking in which complex phenomena are reduced to constituent parts and mechanisms and complex problems are broken down to be solved as smaller problems, with little understanding of the interconnectedness of the “parts”.
• Civilization has been blamed for imbalances of power leading to relentless importing from periphery to center or overuse of land—that is, a drive for power over others rather than living in harmony or balance with (human and non-human) others.
• Human psychology has been blamed for generating limiting or misleading beliefs and socially-determined “needs” (including status needs, and bias towards an “in group”), excessively using various subconscious simplifying tactics, and conditioning through chronic trauma.

Recently such factors seem to have caused increasing stress for most humans, leading many to look for a way out or through. Many turn toward existing beliefs: religion, the struggle between good and evil, the need to gain power for their class, nation, or other social group, the inevitability of “progress”, a reliance on creativity and technological innovation, and so on.

Many take a more individualistic approach, aiming for self-improvement, building up resources, or seeking advantages of many sorts. Some emphasize political action to reduce the threats, “soften the landing”, or shift the balance of power (for “justice”, for example).

Some seek different ways of living with people or with the land that might attenuate the impacts (perhaps in isolated circumstances) or “plant the seeds” for sustainable living after a collapse—which might include beliefs in “the power of love” rather than “power over”, radical interconnectedness, “interdependent webs”, deep ecology, “intimacy with the living world”, “respect for all our relations”, “all are one”, and so on.

Such orientations can often allow people to feel useful, to possibly be effective, to contribute to the general welfare or to a group or family that is important to them—and thus those orientations provide a comforting meaning-making function for them, and may help to cement them within a social structure—to belong, while that social structure lasts. But those orientations also come with a tendency to rigidify thinking, since humans are very good at rationalization, oversimplification, and clinging to the comfort of certainty. Thus there’s a real danger of missing important aspects of reality, failing to see side effects of their behaviors, and reducing adaptability to changing circumstances.

To what extent is there a “problem”? If your desire is to achieve some ideal or some future state, save someone or something, or avoid or survive the collapse, then the outlook is not good. You will often fool yourself into imagining some sort of control or some sort of success, only to find it receding or melting away as reality imposes itself.

If your desire is to exercise virtues (such as love, care, nurture, support, service) without adopting a goal, then the outlook is good: you can behave accordingly until you die, even as your circumstances become increasingly difficult. You will still have to learn how to deal with grief as the world and the people you know change in undesirable ways. To the extent that you are judging, there will be frustrations, and to that extent there will remain a “problem”.

If I take a much broader, “high altitude” perspective, I can see that we are each small parts of global life (or the planet), and our individual paths or “fates” are not really of consequence. Why hold on to self-importance, when it leads to suffering (as Buddhism explains)? After a lifetime of building a self-concept, of course it’s hard to let go. With the broader perspective I may be able to reduce my frustrations and appreciate the uncontrolled, complex, and often beautiful or mysterious life on earth as it unfolds. To the extent that I cannot take that perspective, that I’m stuck judging, “problems” will continually arise to which I’ll react emotionally and with which I will feel frustrated—when I know they are too big for “us” to “solve”.