how to save the world

Trump as Canute, ordering back the waves; my own prompt*

Aurélien has written a series of articles recently on the subject of competence, or, more specifically, its absence in our globalized civilization culture. As many of our political, economic, social, educational, health and other systems teeter, and in an increasing number of cases (and places) collapse, competence naturally becomes harder to come by. It’s hard to keep your wits about you when everything around you is falling apart.

These systems have grown in size and complexity to the point that they can no longer provide what they were designed to provide. And as Jared Diamond, Ronald Wright and others have explained, all civilizations inevitably collapse when they reach this stage. There is no bringing collapsing systems back from the brink, no matter what Hollywood might tell you.

This drop in learning, skill, and experience in positions of authority is coming, Aurélien suggests, at exactly the time we need competence more than ever.

One need only look at what passes for leaders in pivotal positions of power these days to see how bad it’s become. The pathetic quadrumvirate of current leaders of the US Empire show this particularly starkly:

• We have Blinken, the military leader: “The world doesn’t organize itself. When we’re not engaged, when we don’t lead, then one of two things happens: either some other country tries to take our place, but probably not in a way that advances our interests and values, or no one does, and then you get chaos.”
• We have Yellen, the financial leader: “Unemployment serves as a worker-discipline device because the prospect of a costly unemployment spell produces sufficient fear of job loss.”
• We have Nuland, the ‘foreign policy’ leader, organizing reckless, murderous coups all over the world and calling for all-out armageddon-level wars against Russia and China. And saying: “Fuck the EU.”
• And we have Warmonger-in-Chief Biden: “American leadership is what holds the world together”. Uh huh.

It would be hard to imagine a less competent group of people to have in power. You could pick four people off the streets and put them in power and they would almost certainly be less-awful fuck-ups than this gang of clowns.

I’m not sure Aurélien ‘blames’ anyone or anything for this dearth of competence. There are times when he seems to acknowledge that we’re all doing our best (which is what I, really, honestly, believe, sad to say), and other times when he seems ready to blame the education system, or a powerful-but-unorganized group he calls the Professional-Managerial Caste (PMC), or just character flaws among those in power.

But whether or not anyone is responsible, he says the result is the tendency of those in power, realizing that, perhaps due to widespread incompetence or system sclerosis or system collapse or some combination thereof, they cannot really accomplish anything, to substitute talk for action.

He calls this “performative behaviour”. So, for example, since Bernie Sanders knows he will never be allowed by the Democratic Party establishment to do any of the things he knows needs to be done (like instituting universal free health care, or opposing the Israeli-American genocide in Palestine), he has to settle for expressing his strong opinions on these subjects “in no uncertain terms”.

The Democratic Party establishment is delighted for him to do so. His speeches keep some hopeful leftists in the Democratic tent a little longer, while actually accomplishing nothing whatsoever, least of all affecting government policies and actions.

Devoid of the capacity and competence to actually get anything done (and hence to promise to do something, lest you be called on it later), our ‘leaders’ are content instead to issue what Aurélien calls “statements of what they Are [or Think, or Believe], not what they are [actually] doing or intend to Do”. Or even worse, statements that merely say what or who they are opposed to.

I guess when you never actually do anything, it’s hard to be accused of doing anything wrong. You just stand up there with the flag behind you, and an appropriately culturally diverse group of people smiling at your side, and tell the world what you Believe. (And then have the press corps scribes ready to repeat your statement as truth and ‘action’, in all the major media and through your bots in the social media.)

Whole parties and movements are now merely based on proclamations of what the group believes or how it identifies itself, or what it thinks “needs to be done”, or “must be done”, or “must be opposed” or “must be stopped”. Who is supposed to do it or stop it, and how, is usually left conveniently unstated. Or there’s always the fall-back to the not-so-royal “we”, as in “We all must now…” No actual action is required, other than group gatherings to make the rhetorical proclamations, loudly and righteously, over and over.

As I have said repeatedly: This is what collapse looks like. One can imagine the last leaders of the Roman Empire urging the masses with speeches from the rooftops and ramparts to “Make Rome Great Again!”

In short, what we have seen over the past century, as all of civilization’s systems have become more and more complex and unmanageable, is an unrelenting, uninterrupted, 100-year-long succession of failures in all our systems and institutions. The utter failure of all of the many recent wars engineered by the US Empire to accomplish anything is the obvious example.

The staggering incompetence of our handling of the CoVid-19 pandemic, which we knew was coming, and which nevertheless our broken systems enabled millions of people to die horrible, unnecessary deaths, is just kind of the icing on the incompetence cake. Whether or not the public health systems were already so broken that those millions would have died even if the system leaders were competent, is pretty much a moot point.

There is IMO no one to ‘blame’ for this, and I sense that our absurd and incompetent leaders are now mostly just pretending (even to themselves) that these collapsing systems — overburdened by unsustainable debts, desolated ecosystems, exhausted resources, and insane overpopulation of the species, among other things — can somehow respond to their bidding when they are irreparably broken. Our ‘leaders’ (especially Trump, the epitome of incompetence) are like King Canute, ordering back the waves*.

So now the citizens have largely given up belief that our systems and institutions are incapable of doing anything competently, leading to a nostalgic and deluded view among conservatives that things were better in the rugged individualist old days when it was every man for himself (pioneers), when adults were competent at doing everything needed to survive and thrive (hard-working men in patriarchal families), when good guys fought evil (cowboys, vigilantes), when the responsibility was on you yourself to succeed (rags-to-riches stories), and to heal yourself (religions, self-help), when you learned what you needed from your parents or on the streets, when geniuses single-handedly invented miraculous world-changing technologies (Franklin, Ford). And the same nostalgia prevails among leftists about the dashed promises of progress, innovation, the American Dream, socialism, anarchism, working-class revolution, left-libertarian communitarianism, etc.

So we see many new right-wing governments trying to turn back the clock to fictitious past days of glory, order and self-discipline. And the left, unable to sell nostalgia to their slightly-smarter supporters, and devoid of any new answers, is in broad and chaotic, self-blame-y retreat.

This substituting belief and speech for action may be partly due to laziness, or fear of consequences, but mostly I think it’s the awareness that when systems are falling apart, they become dysfunctional and sclerotic to the point it actually becomes impossible to do anything other than what the system in place is already doing. (You know, like launching endless wars, and tinkering with interest rates.) When no one can actually change or fix the system, politicians mostly differentiate themselves on the basis of what they might ideally like to do in accordance with their beliefs, but cannot. Though of course they won’t admit their incapacity, or their incompetence, to their supporters. Hope, anyone?

So now, the game is just playing itself out, with the systems, designed to resist change, so entrenched and inflexible and broken that even with near-universal agreement we cannot do something as simple as reversing the error of Daylight Saving Time.

It’s all coming down, and nothing — not appeal to the Rapture, not nostalgia for the good old days when things were simpler and better, not new technology or better morals or magical humanist thinking — is going to stop it. All we can do is chronicle it and do what we can do to cope as it all falls apart, slowly and then all at once.

* Yes, I’m aware that most scholars believe Canute was actually merely pointing out to his followers the limitations of human, even royal, power, compared to that of nature (God). 

I don’t believe we have free will, nor do I believe that our civilization’s accelerating collapse can be prevented or even mitigated. So I no longer provide advice on what people “should do” in the face of collapse. Instead, I just refer to this ‘reminders’ list to try to assess how adaptable I will be as collapse deepens, and hence how useful I am likely to be to the world as that happens. Some people I know have said they found it valuable to compile a similar list for themselves. [Updated Jan.5/24; image by Midjourney AI, my own prompt]

I was recently honoured to be selected to be the first interviewee on a new podcast series called Reskillience, led by Australian permaculturalist Catie Payne. Catie’s an accomplished podcaster (having done a series of over 100 programs on homesteading), and an extraordinarily fine interviewer. This was far and away the easiest interview I’ve ever done.

The series is all about developing useful skills for coping with collapse, and I was chosen based on this article  from last September called How Do We Teach the Critical Skills Needed to Face Collapse?, which was republished by Resilience.

There’s not a lot that regular readers will get from the podcast that you haven’t already heard me say, but if you’re curious to hear what my voice sounds like talking about this for an hour and a quarter (believe me, I’m a better writer than speaker), it was fun to do and you might enjoy it. And by all means check out and subscribe to the rest of Catie’s series; the second program in the series is now up as well.

The interview with me is available on Zencastr here, on Apple Podcasts here, and on Spotify podcasts here.

“Riding Into the Unknown”: as depicted by Midjourney AI; not my prompt 

Much has been written of late about the “collapse of the left” and the global rise of right-wing populism. In many cases this is (somewhat understandably) blamed on infighting among ‘factions’ of the left. This recent article laments the “abandonment” by leading leftist thinkers of their commitment to the values that have traditionally defined the left, and the embrace by “high-profile defectors” of xenophobic and neocon causes, suggesting some of them are doing it “for the money”.

Rhyd Wildermuth, one of those who has been accused of going over to the other side by joining the sometimes-disturbing right-wing-funded platform UnHerd, rebuked the charges, blaming the intransigence of diehard “woke” liberals for the disillusionment of many leftists with the idealistic neoliberal party line. The term “loss of faith”, tellingly, is much used to describe the behaviour of such “defectors”. An excerpt from Rhyd’s rebuttal, explaining why he believes it is the self-proclaimed spokespeople for the left who have, in recent years, “lost the thread”:

Suddenly, using a material analysis to understand economic disparity meant you were anti-Black, anti-trans, and anti-disabled. Suddenly, thinking that the concerns of the working class mattered more than ever-changing academic theories meant you were a fascist. Just as suddenly, criticizing the globalization of capitalism and the erosion of local democratic control meant you were antisemitic. Believing humans should be allowed to decide what they do with their bodies suddenly meant you’d fallen for far right conspiracy theories about micro-chipped vaccines. And practically (or perhaps truly) overnight, standing for the principles of free speech and due process meant being a white supremacist and a rape-apologist.

On the other hand, what being “leftist” meant no longer looked anything like what it used to. What passes for it now is indistinguishable from capitalist optimism: an embrace of technological disruption as the key to social progress, a focus on individualistic identity-markers rather than collective class struggle, an increasing vilification of manual labor and non-urban cultural and religious forms, and a fanatic belief that every natural limit to human consumption and behavior can be transcended.

I wonder, though, whether there isn’t a deeper explanation for the apparent dysfunction of the political left, that also explains the growing success of demagogues in appealing to conservatives in many countries.

My reading of anthropology suggests that we humans are susceptible to three core, instinctive emotions that we share, for evident evolutionary reasons, with all creatures — anger, fear, and sadness. These emotions motivate us, when it’s appropriate, to fight, flee, freeze, or move on to new places. But in our modern civilization culture, these emotions (plus some additional uniquely human ones like hatred, shame, jealousy and guilt) can be provoked in ways that can render us dysfunctional.

We’ve learned to ignore, distrust and deny what our instincts tell us, but that won’t stop them from telling us about the dangers we face.

It’s pretty easy to understand the fear and anger of conservatives and of what used to be called the “working classes”. The cities have become alien, frightening places to them (fears which the right-wing media are all too willing to amplify). Everything they believed in, especially the American Dream (“you can do anything if you work hard enough”), seems broken, lost. Their lives are defined by precarity. There are no jobs, and no job security (and heaven forbid that our educational systems should teach young people how to create their own). Their debts have been rising and their income and net worth falling (especially if you use real inflation numbers) for 50 years. The values they were taught (hard work, obedience, religious faith) seem to have fallen out of favour. They are utterly baffled by complex issues like the economy and climate change.

No surprise then that when demagogues come along that rail against “modernity” (everyone’s favourite new whipping boy, since it can mean anything you hate about the current state of the world), and promise a return to nostalgic past times that never actually existed (eg “MAGA”), and also promise to punish the sinners whom they blame for everything falling apart (liberals, feminists, foreigners and of course “the government”), these demagogues are often welcomed by conservatives and the “working classes”. They’re terrified, and angry, and they’re looking for someone who will tell them they’re right, and that soon everything will be put right again. The most telling word in MAGA is the last one.

It’s been half a century, I would say, since self-proclaimed leftists actually gave a damn about the “working classes”, so caught up are they in their humanistic, idealistic, ideology of endless progress, “fairness” and “justice” (vague terms that, like “freedom”, “democracy” and “modernity” mean vastly different things to different people). The working classes have surely noticed that there is no more progress, fairness or justice today, at least how they would define those terms, than there was 50 years ago, despite self-proclaimed progressives being in power for quite a bit more than half of that time. It is hard to deny that that power has been squandered by successive “progressive” administrations in favour of what Aurélien calls “performative governance” (saying the right things and showing the right, diverse, public faces, while doing substantively nothing).

And it is equally hard to deny that these “progressive” administrations have been every bit as incompetent at accomplishing anything of lasting value, as the “conservative” and populist administrations they have traded power with. It isn’t hard, with that record, to see how politicians who vow to lessen the role and cost of government forever, successfully play on the simple thinking and naiveté of most voters (across the political spectrum).

I see the fragmentation of what used to be called “the left” as being largely the result of a very similar intuitive sense of anger and fear among leftists. Like the rest of the population, I think, leftists sense there is something very wrong with the way things are, and the way they seem to be headed. Their anger, I think, reflects a sense of betrayal by so-called “progressive” political “leaders” whose only drive seems to be how to stir up opposition to conservatives and populists (ie foment more anger and fear) as their means to obtain or retain power.

The vast majority of what Aurélien calls the Professional-Managerial Caste (PMC) — the part of the “left” that remains when the “working classes” have deserted it — have not benefited at all from the supposed “growth” in the economy for the last 50 years, and find their situation almost as precarious as that of the “working classes”. They have seen carefully crafted performances by “progressive” administrations while the economy continues to crash and become ever-more inequitable, and while the world burns (in many senses of the word). They have seen the small top-caste segment of the PMC (with loud media support) refashion the alleged values of the left to be around an abstract, ideological platform of identity, theory and principles, largely, as Rhyd says, divorced from any connection with action (other than performative “actions”), and divorced from most people’s actual material lives.

Why should they support any party or leader or movement that utterly betrays in their actions (and inactions) what their words espouse?

[As an aside: What the political ‘pundits’ miss in their furious election polling is that, notwithstanding which party the befuddled citizens claim to support (ie hate least), the citizens in almost all ‘western’ countries have consistently, and by a large margin, supported what were traditionally “progressive” programs and policies — free access to abortion, universal free health care, and sharply graduated taxation of the rich, most notably. The fact that these citizens are now concluding that the self-proclaimed “progressive” and “centrist” parties are not actually willing to face the political storm required to implement these programs and policies, bodes poorly for these parties and well for the conservative and populist parties that oppose them.]

I believe that most of the population, in most of the world, across the political spectrum, probably intuitively knows (but refuses to let themselves believe) that the polycrisis can only end in one way — collapse. Most, I think, have no clear sense of what “collapse” means, but the daily doom-scroll keeps telling them that things are getting worse, and are out of control, and the future looks even worse. And so they are, understandably, angry, fearful, and sad.

As I keep saying ad nauseum, this is what collapse looks like. When everything has become dysfunctional, so the entirety of our civilization is operating largely on auto-pilot, continuing its corporate-capitalism-programmed attempts to grow and consume as many resources as possible, most people are starting to look for an exit ramp (preferably a reassuring, simple, populist one, though a religious/spiritual/ideological one will do in a pinch), and, I think, have largely, and not irrationally, given up on the political process. Most won’t of course acknowledge this — the vacuum it leaves behind is too awful to countenance — but we are, I believe, starting to act as if this civilization is (almost assuredly but not quite certainly) done for.

This is indeed a “loss of faith”, and I’m not surprised at all at the number of former leftists and collapsniks who have retreated to religious beliefs, or to (mostly ancient) spiritual and mythic beliefs and practices. A lot of people, it seems, need to have faith in something.

Collapse is what happens when this is finally admitted, and people head for the hills. Most people don’t really believe Trump will be any better than the execrable war-monger and PMC-top-caste patsy Biden. They’re both known quantities, and both they and their political machines are almost universally loathed by the citizens, and pretty much equally incompetent and ideologically sclerotic. The same, I think, applies in most ‘western’ nations, and the same may also be true in non-Empire nations, who have their own share of incompetent demagogues. Aurélien argues that in times of crisis we turn politically to whoever is best able to offer us some basic security to weather the storm, and the answer to that, increasingly, is none of the above.

If you read Jared Diamond, or Ronald Wright, they will tell you what happens next when a civilization collapses. There will be attempts to keep it going, and attempts to reform it to make it work, neither of which can succeed because neither changes the broken underlying fundamentals (too big, unsustainable, resource scarcities, complicating ecological collapse, etc etc). If there were any functioning alternatives to the collapsing power structure (“uncivilized hordes”), they would then try to fill the power vacuum. But with this collapse being global, there are no functional powers waiting in the wings to take over.

Finally, when attempts to bandage up the failed civilization have clearly not worked, there will be a reluctant “walking away”, as the shreds of the dysfunctional civilization fail to meet even the basic needs of citizens (and as this dysfunction is amplified by the movement of potentially billions of climate refugees). And with no other civilization to walk away to join, whatever emerges in our attempt to reorganize citizens into viable communities will, I think, of necessity be utterly chaotic — millions of small experiments, most of which will fail, because we no longer have the basic skills, hard or soft, or the preconditions needed to create and sustain communities. We have forgotten how to live the way we lived for a million ‘pre-civ’ years.

It’s going to be hard, and very likely last centuries, perhaps even millennia, during which we’ll watch the long tail of a suddenly much smaller human population stretch out, in endless decline. Perhaps ending in extinction, or perhaps in a much smaller population of radically local tribal communities, struggling their way to rediscover how to learn to live sustainably, together, in community.

It’s going to be hard, and, I truly believe, based on everything I’ve read about civilizations and cultures and human nature, it’s more than likely going to be exciting, even awesome. I wish I could be there to see and participate! (Yeah, crazy thinking, I know. I’m weird that way.)

This is what we are, intuitively, I think, all afraid of. Across the political spectrum, we don’t like things falling apart. We don’t like precarity, uncertainty, struggle, having to change, and making mistakes. We don’t like complexity, and how it plays with our foolish ideologies and humbles us — and when it comes to complexity, Gaia has no peers. And most of all, we don’t like chaos. We are absolutely right to be instinctively afraid, angry, and sad in these, the declining, frail years of our once-promising civilization. And we are right to feel betrayed by political, economic and social ideologies that have done us no favours, and which led us, inadvertently, to this collapse.

In praise of the vernacular.

photo of Ivan Illich (2nd left) and Gustavo Esteva (2nd right), from Radical Ecological Democracy

The idea of ‘practicing’ how we might live in the societies that emerge after civilization’s collapse has always interested me. I’m convinced that we’re not likely going to be able to create viable models of new ways to live, at least not at any scale, until our current global industrial civilization culture has collapsed and ‘gotten out of the way’. But why not practice now anyway, and learn a thing or two in the process?

This is what underlies my fascination with Intentional Communities, which are, in many cases, attempts to do just that — to find a more resilient, sustainable, humane, peaceful and connected way to live and make a living together than the ones on offer from our global industrial civilization. While there are some remarkable, enduring exceptions, most of these ‘model communities’ rarely last. The reasons for that are complicated and varied (loss of founders, financial problems, unreasonable expectations, inequitable workload, dysfunctional members etc.)

In any case, it’s unlikely that anything we learn now will be of much use to post-civilization societies when they emerge — in a generation, a century, or even a millennium from now. And it’s far from certain our species will survive at all. Still, there’s no harm thinking about what models might work, and, perhaps more importantly, about the factors that distinguish those that work from those that don’t.

There are two dangerous tendencies among those who like to think about creating alternative models of how humans ‘should’ live — (i) the tendency to idealize, and invent a ‘one-size-fits-all’ model that fits with one’s personal (often impracticable) ideals and parochial worldview, and (ii) the tendency to think that any effective community model can be ‘designed’ top-down, rather than it just emerging and evolving, through the collective efforts of its participants, to meet uniquely local, ‘vernacular’ needs.

As an incorrigible idealist myself, I confess that, especially in its early years, this blog was replete with idealistic models of better ways to live and be in the world, which are now mostly cringe-worthy. I refuse to take them down because they remind me of past errors in my thinking, and hopefully prevent me from making the same errors again.

And as an impatient person who loves to design things, I confess I have often thought I ‘knew better’ what needed to be done in a particular situation than the people actually personally steeped in the problem. I have often later apologized for my hubris.

I preface this article with those caveats because two of the people who tried valiantly to develop alternative models to the capitalistic crypto-democratic hierarchical massive-scale globalized systems we are struggling with today (and watching fall apart) were staunch, almost rabid, idealists. They were Ivan Illich (1926-2002) and Gustavo Esteva (1936-2022 — a victim of CoVid-19).

What I appreciated about these two, who knew each other well and worked together in some of the most impoverished parts of México, is that they had the courage to try to implement their vision and model of a better way to live in the communities they were adopted into and grew to love. Nothing like a dose of practical reality to take the polished edge off your idealism.

Both of them had seen (mostly from the work of religious missionaries) the carnage that results from attempts to impose an ideology (religious, political, or economic), and even impose a way of being, on an entire population. Instead, as Ivan put it, it’s essential to understand and embrace the vernacular — the ways that have emerged and evolved in each local place to suit their unique circumstances and cultures, ways that “made poverty tolerable” there.

Ivan focused much of his attention on two rigid, imposed European-model systems — education and ‘health care’. The alternative, community-based, community-responsive systems he strove to implement were ‘convivial’ — based on local knowledge and local connection, and on the development of demonstrated competencies, not academic degrees.

He fiercely defended his uncompromising ideals — including that the precondition for creating more responsive, effective, local communities and competencies was the complete abolition of the existing systems. He intuitively understood that radical change was not possible as long as the existing systems, dysfunctional as they were, remained in place, with their inevitably invested, change-resistant, staunch defenders.

He described the ‘health care system’ as inherently iatrogenic — causing and increasing disease rather than reducing it — and favoured systems that empowered the ‘patient’ citizen to learn enough to self-diagnose and self-treat many illnesses, to prevent rather than treat illnesses, and to work as a partner with community health care practitioners instead of waiting for the practitioners to just tell them what was wrong and what to do.

His colleague Gustavo worked closely with the Zapatistas to support their efforts to create a revolutionary, autonomous state free from Méxican government interference and ‘help’. He established the anti-authoritarian unschooling Universidad de la Tierra and spent his life working against the “hegemony” of both nation-states and corporate oligopolies, which he saw as dysfunctional institutions that needed to be abolished. A better alternative, he insisted, would come from indigenous communities themselves, developing local solutions that they would then share with other communities. The educational, political, economic, health care and other systems being forced on nations all over the world had never worked for the benefit of the citizens, he said, nor could they be reformed. They needed to be replaced.

Both men were extremely outspoken, often controversial, and not always particularly liked. They both intuitively loathed institutions and institutional ‘solutions’, believing that they were inflexible, incapable of evolving and learning, and that they incapacitated citizens from learning to do things for themselves. Even fans and positive reviewers of their work often criticized much of what they said for “going too far”.

Here’s my brief summary of what I thought were the main points from two of Ivan’s best-known books, with some excerpts of his principal ideas. And here’s an article by Gustavo explaining his “path to freedom” for communities. They’ll give you a bit of a flavour for their beliefs and approaches in their own words.

What are the shared principles that underlie small-scale, autonomous ‘vernacular’ systems that have emerged and evolved in indigenous communities and enabled their citizens to thrive? I don’t know that they have ever been specifically articulated, but I thought I would try to identify some of them. There is probably no ‘process’ that could necessarily nurture this emergence; like most natural systems, it’s a matter of trial and error, and learning and evolving by doing. Here’s what I came up with (it’s far from complete):

The emergence of effective ways to be in community requires:

1.  That the members of the community learn and practice the ‘convivial’ arts of listening, conversation, collaboration, consensus building, critical thinking, conflict resolution, self-management, and self-directed learning — a curiosity-driven ‘learning how to learn’ for oneself instead of having to be ‘taught’.
2. A deep understanding and appreciation of the local land and its inhabitants, all the forms of life including humans who ‘belong’ to the land; and hence what the land and its inhabitants offer, and what they need, and a continuous effort to sustainably draw on (accept, gift, harvest) what they offer and to meet their needs, cooperatively. And an ethic that enables everyone to appreciate when the interests of the community outweigh personal interests.
3. Constant opportunities to learn and practice new capacities, both ‘hard’ and ‘soft’, to hone these capacities through working with self-selected mentors, watching demonstrations, apprenticing, and through doing and learning from facilitated practice and from mistakes, rather than ‘schooling’ or textbook-based ‘instruction’. And from play! [I saw this learning-from-demonstrations-and-apprenticing ably demonstrated during my short visit with Joe Bageant in a small village in Belize many years ago.]
4. Nurturing the capacity in each of us to take care of our own and others’ health and well-being, including preventative actions (such as a good diet and exercise and accident prevention), self-diagnostic and self-treatment capacities, and understanding what constitutes a ‘good death’. And it requires ensuring that every child achieves the sense of secure attachment and the capacity to be authentic and true to him- or herself, free from abuse, that are needed to grow up to be a healthy, competent, non-dependent adult within a healthy, competent, self-sufficient community.
5. The nurturing of opportunities to give vent to our passions to create and express ourselves through the arts, and to explore, and to discover.
6. A capacity to create lasting confederations with other nearby communities, each respecting each other’s autonomy and unique ways, but also supporting each other in facing shared challenges.
7. The creation of structures (eg for housing and transportation) that maximize conviviality and connection, and minimize isolation.
8. An appreciation of the need to keep the community small, resilient, autonomous, adaptable, and in balance with the rest of life on the land (ie the objective is never ‘growth’).
9. In all of the above, a continuing collective self-assessment of how the community is doing in each of these areas, and a collective determination of remedial actions when necessary.

There are probably many other requirements that a post-civ community will have to accommodate to thrive when our species starts over (probably again and again) after civilization’s collapse, to learn how to live as part of and in concert with all-life-on-earth. Thinking about what I have observed and read about wild creatures, it seems to me they mostly have these capacities, remarkably without the need for language to acquire or sustain them.

We also surely have much to learn from indigenous communities and those who have lived in them, though I suspect that, because their cultures have been so diminished by the destruction of their ways of life by our industrial civilization, that wisdom is quickly being lost.

I think Ivan and Gustavo, were they to look at the above list, would say that these were some of the qualities they spent their lives trying to help the communities they worked with, to achieve.

So this is not a model, a prescription, a process, a recipe, or even a set of ingredients for a functional community. It’s really, I think, just a list of preconditions for any successful human culture. Almost none of these preconditions are present, I would say, in most of our current cultures, or at least our western cultures. There is no prescription for how these preconditions might or could or should be met; they are emergent properties, not something that can be planned for or imposed. We will learn to meet them when we have to — or not. And most of that learning will likely have to await the collapse of the existing systems that consume almost all of our time and attention, and which fiercely resist such alternative ways of being and doing.

In reading this list, though, the joyful pessimist in me believes that some day in the long distant future there could well be many flourishing (probably largely tribal) human societies that meet these preconditions. Much will depend, I think, on our capacity to deal with the affliction of our species’ large brains and the separate, fearful selves they have concocted, inventions that, I suspect, make creating and sustaining cohesive communities so much harder than it has to be.

Me, I just watch the local community of crows out my window, with wonder and awe. They obviously meet all these preconditions and do all these things, in spades.

Y’know, what healthy creatures do.

I want to apologize for the ads that appeared on of one of my recent posts on the version sent out by follow.it to email subscribers — I failed to renew my premium membership that allows these emails to go out without ads. Hopefully I won’t forget again.

image by Midjourney AI; not my prompt

Recently, some mostly right-wing opinionators* have been tut-tutting about the extensive research that suggests that long-term, even generational trauma underlies much of the violence and hatred we see playing out in the world today. Their argument seems to be that war, violence and cruelty have always been with us, and so it makes no sense to argue that we are, as a species, any more traumatized than we have been in centuries past. Their implication is that past generations were just more self-disciplined and hence better behaved than we are.

Of course, they’re entitled to their opinion, and since studies of human behaviour lack the rigour of scientific evidence, it’s hard to prove them wrong. I cannot speak about the experience of previous generations — it may be that in the past, religion, political and social indoctrination, and other forms of conditioning made humans more self-restrained and self-censoring, sublimating and turning their trauma inward instead of expressing it outwardly in acts of violence, except behind closed doors.

But if you believe, as I do, that our behaviour is simply the reflection of our biological and cultural conditioning, given the circumstances of the moment, then the expression of our internal trauma (a form of mental illness) through external acts of physical and psychological violence would seem almost tautological. If our species has been rendered pathological by the stresses and traumas of living in a horrifically fast-changing, perilous, brutal, scarcity-plagued, uncertain, disconnected, insensitive, unfathomable, seemingly out-of-control and massively over-crowded and fragile civilization, it only makes sense that that pathology would be manifested in acts of brutal cruelty, extreme hatred, violence, war, and genocide as this civilization falls over the brink into collapse.

One of the whipping-boys of the opinionators is the idea (of psychologists) that to prevent early trauma, humans need, in early childhood, a sense of secure attachment (to their mothers, primarily, but also to their ‘tribe’ and to the place where they ‘belong’), and also need the ability to be their authentic selves and to relate to other people authentically.

Secure attachment from infancy means, in substance, that you know you will be cared for and looked after, and that you will therefore develop the capacity and the belief in the importance of caring for and looking after others. Authenticity means that when you are asked something, you are not afraid to tell the truth, and not afraid to say what you really believe, out of fear of adverse consequences for doing so.

Secure attachment enables the development of trust and mutuality, self-confidence, and connection to others, and is arguably a prerequisite to genuinely caring about other people and the world. Authenticity enables the development of a coherent sense of identity, beliefs and worldview, and comfort in your sense of who you are and where and how you stand in relation to others and the world.

“Nonsense,” say the opinionators. “All it requires is a bit of backbone, self-control, and a strong moral upbringing to overcome not having these things in early childhood. No need to baby people to have them behave decently.”

In this short video, Gabor Maté summarizes the counter-argument to this. “Trauma is not what happens to you,” he says, “trauma is what happens inside you as a result of what happens to you.” In this video, he explains how what happened inside you (often as a result of your lack of attachment or incapacity for authenticity in early childhood) will get triggered for the rest of your life when an incident occurs that reminds you in any way of what provoked that traumatic feeling inside you. It hence becomes part of your conditioning. The result can be pathological behaviour — constant neurotic feelings of abandonment, inadequacy, profound distrust, betrayal, and extreme suppression of emotions, leading to acts of hatred, cruelty, and violence.

This traumatizing ‘feeling inside of you’ that happened in early childhood is, Gabor explains, actually a coping mechanism, a survival technique, and is your body’s way of recognizing and alerting you about a danger or hurt, so you can supposedly ‘deal’ with it. But if you grow up not being allowed to accept yourself, listen to your ‘gut’ feelings, or express yourself authentically, you may be left with no way to deal with this hurt, so it just festers. “If your ‘survival’ depends on you being a certain way (pathological, inauthentic, dishonest, suppressing your feelings), you’re not going to give it up that easily”.

A lot of Gabor’s interviews have titles about ‘how’ to ‘heal’ from a lack of attachment or authenticity stemming from your earliest childhood. But what he talks about is not a process, but rather a sustained practice developing self-awareness about what it was that, in any particular stressful situation in your life, provoked an angry, sad, or fearful response in you, and what childhood trigger underlay that response, which is rarely related to what actually occurred in that moment. And if you can recognize that it was childhood trauma being triggered and not actually the events of the current moment that produced your reaction, you can then, he says, start to understand and heal from it.

I’m not sure where I stand on the possibility of (self-)healing from the effects of trauma. I think for some of us, though not by any means all of us, our conditioning might equip us to be sufficiently self-aware to heal. But I can accept that it is this triggering of childhood trauma that underlies and enables the ferocious emotional reaction that leads to the (uniquely human) propensity to commit the acts of cruelty, abuse, hatred, violence, war, and genocide that we see everywhere in the world today.

And those suffering from severe trauma who are also in positions of power (and sociopaths often seem to seek power as a futile means of gaining control over their seemingly out-of-control lives), will exploit this knowledge of how trauma works and can be triggered, to ‘deliberately’ (though they actually have no choice over their behaviour) provoke a traumatized response in others — to foment a mob into furious violence, an army into war, or a nation into hate and extremism, for example — by playing on others’ deeply-entrenched anger, fear, and sadness, triggering the emotional response born of internal trauma in each of us.

So I look at the profoundly pathological behaviours of Biden, Trump, Netanyahu, Zelenskyy, and Putin, for example, and I can kind of see how their seemingly irrational behaviour might easily be the result of conditioned, reflexive, trauma-invoked behaviours, responses and triggers stemming from early childhood. And I can see how these men could, given their situations, have likewise been prone to provoke angry, fearful, grief-stricken responses in their colleagues and in their many followers, that have led to such horrific acts of violence by all of them.

Like these sociopathic men, we are all conditioned, and in our species, sadly, it seems much of our conditioning is complicated by trauma, and much of our behaviour therefore ends up being the acting out of that trauma.

Our brutal, frenzied, precarious, disconnected civilization has inevitably, I think, created an environment and circumstances that preclude most of us from developing a sense of secure attachment and a capacity for authenticity when we are young. And the result is that almost all of us have been, I think, to a lesser or greater degree, traumatized and made mentally ill. The desperation that will inevitably accompany the deepening collapse of this civilization may make that situation considerably worse.

In the meantime, some of us, at least, might, through self-awareness of our feelings and what is really triggering them, heal ourselves somewhat from our own personal trauma. That healing will be pretty important in determining what our collective conditioned responses will be to the polycrisis of civilizational collapse. The more of us who are able to keep our wits about us, and not fall victim to the very human propensity to be triggered by, and act out, our trauma, in much of what we do, the better we are likely to cope as a species on the long way down.

* I kinda like this term. I find it applies across the political spectrum to people who offer nothing to a debate or discussion except their personal uninformed or misinformed opinion (or that of someone whose opinions they parrot uncritically), and who mistake righteous indignation for passionate argument. Almost all of what passes for relevant discussion in the mainstream media (notably the op-eds) and in social media is, IMO, nothing but opinionating. But that’s just my opinion.