how to save the world

Voters in most so-called western democracies could not be blamed if they feel a bit like innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire of a gang war: Whew! We dodged the Trump bullet, but damn! now Biden’s taking aim!

The problem with this metaphor is that we may see ourselves as what is now euphemistically called “collateral damage” in this war. We’re actually the targets. The politicians would seem to be shooting at each other, but that’s only because they’re fighting over who gets to steal our stuff. The politicians are just pawns for a handful of powerful cadres who have already stolen 90% of the power and wealth of the planet. What they want is to ensure they get to keep all that, and slowly acquire the other 10%. To do that they want regressive taxation (see my last post), complete deregulation of their activities, and new laws that benefit and protect them.

In fancy activist terms, we are ruled by a corporatist plutocracy. “Corporatist” is just a fancy word for fascist, which means nothing more than an authoritarian dictatorship run in perpetuity by an elite power group that represses all opposition. That is essentially the modus operandi of all large corporations, and, now, most governments. “Plutocracy” means government control by the very wealthy.

There is nothing inherently evil or even necessarily corrupt in this. Corporatism can come in a variety of ideological flavours, depending on which elite it favours — “everyone in their place” patriarchal conservatives, the military-industrial complex, the “Main Street” corporate oligopolies, or the financial banksters. These gangs overlap and cooperate, but they also compete for who’s going to get the 10% of wealth and power that still hasn’t been stolen from the rest of us.

The patriarchal conservatives are especially popular in gang circles because they will often settle for more repressive laws (eg no abortions, no right to die, no immigrants stealing our share of the pie, jail all the protesters and militarize the cops); in return for support on this, they will support just about any laws that allow the theft and divvying up of the rest of the world’s wealth, the starving of social services for the “masses”, deregulation of every industry, tax cuts for the rich, and defunding of government services except the military.

So in the US we are seeing, for now, the departure of Trump, a chameleon who promised the moon to the white working class and then betrayed them when he realized his own wealth and power depended completely on playing nice with the corporatist gangs, who begrudgingly allowed the fake-nouveau riche orange tub of lard into their gang as long as he behaved. And for them, he has behaved very well.

And we’re seeing the installation of Biden, the long-time warmonger, social conservative, and corporatist shill reinstated in his place. No change at all behind the scenes, other than the superficial ideological difference (Like Trump’s, Biden’s position on abortion, for example, has been all over the map), and a different set of names of the specific group of gang leaders appointed to oversee the corporatist plutocracy for the next four years. This year’s appointees have been at least as notable for their military-industrial connections and their corporate lobbying connections as for their symbolic diversity.

So we can expect much more “defence” spending by the Biden gang — meaning that money will be spent on military budgets and war-mongering against Russia, China, Iran and Syria, although none of them poses any threat to the US. But it’s good for “the economy”! It also means that the criminal war against the civilians of Yemen will continue under this “moderate” administration, and that anti-progressive interventions in the rest of the world will be stepped up.

The complete lack of any so-called “leftists” in the cabinet suggests that the gang has concluded that the half-way measure of the Affordable Care Act was seen by the corporatists as an expensive sop that didn’t provide enough bang (in terms of placating the outrage of the masses) for the considerable buck.

Hence, don’t look for any expansions to public services under Biden, and especially don’t expect any reforms to regulations over monopolies, financial usury, and similar “unfair” business practices. Expect lots of symbolic gestures and platitudes on the environment, since polls show they are popular and don’t cost anything, but don’t expect anything of substance, such as an admission that the capitalist industrial growth economy is making our planet uninhabitable and has to be stopped at all costs, or even a Green New Deal.

There will be more hand-wringing under Biden, since he can do this more convincingly than the smug-faced Trump. He will also have much better speech-writers, which will play well to the dwindling portion of the electorate that is both literate and inclined to listen to speeches.

There actually was an election coup in 2020, but it’s not the one Trump has attempted, nor the alleged one conspiracy theorists posit Biden to have accomplished. It was the coup that, just like four years ago, blackballed Bernie Sanders when it looked like he was getting more popular than their hand-picked gang-member-for-president.

Four years ago, deciding that Bernie was more of a threat to the establishment than Trump, they used the mainstream media to spread fear and misinformation about him, who they feared could cost them the election to Cruz, Rubio, Bush or Kasich (and who might cost them big-time if he actually acted on his campaign promises). Their nasty campaign worked: Hillary Clinton, the “sure-fire” candidate, was selected instead.

That backfired, but they discovered the politically malleable Trump was actually pretty easy for them to control, and his blather distracted from their successes at increasing their share of wealth, and deregulating industry, at an unprecedented pace.

So this year, knowing that they couldn’t get the Republicans to dump Trump for a more mentally stable candidate, they again focused on defeating Bernie Sanders (and to a lesser extent Elizabeth Warren), when Bernie appeared poised to win the nomination again (see chart above). They posted hundreds of op-eds in the mainstream media warning that the so-called “leftist” candidates were “unelectable”, and had ill-thought-out and “dangerous” platforms — and that voting for any of them was “handing the election to Donald Trump”. They said this with no sense of irony. They endorsed the obedient Biden and poured money into his campaign, and strong-armed other candidates to endorse Biden or face being the “spoiler” (shades of Ralph Nader) who forever destroyed the Democrats’ presidential hopes.

This campaign also worked, so they got their candidate nominated and into office, and the strong-arm tactics even worked on the so-called “leftists”, who endorsed and worked furiously for Biden. Though they really had no choice — if they’d refused to endorse Biden and Trump had won (which he would have), they’d have become perpetual pariahs.

So, as in most western so-called “democracies”, your choice really comes down to which corporatist tool candidate to support. Any candidate that rouses the masses to take back wealth and power from the gangs is going to face the wealth and power of those who simply will not allow that to happen. If that wealth and power were more equally distributed, a “democratic” rebuff might be possible. But it is no longer so. Even when the occasional non-gang member is elected, it is quickly made very clear to them the consequences of not doing what they’re told, and they fall into line.

It’s pretty much foolproof. The incumbent fools in the US, Canada, the UK and Australia, among others, make that quite clear. They all reneged on election “promises” to favour the corporatists.

This is mad. It’s not democracy. Yet the mainstream media continue, despite all the evidence, to talk about how a new democratic resurgence is possible. We have a new opportunity, they extol, to tackle the ecological, economic and social justice crises that are getting ever-worse, and to wipe away the scourge of crippling, cruel, and unsustainable debt levels. George Packer in the Atlantic writes:

Beneath the dreary furor of the partisan wars, most Americans agree on fundamental issues facing the country. Large majorities say that government should ensure some form of universal health care, that it should do more to mitigate global warming, that the rich should pay higher taxes, that racial inequality is a significant problem, that workers should have the right to join unions, that immigrants are a good thing for American life, that the federal government is plagued by corruption. These majorities have remained strong for years. The readiness, the demand for action, is new.

George is a wonderful investigative reporter, and of course he is right. But surely he understands that all of the above actions, if taken, would redistribute wealth and power away from the gangs that control both parties (and their counterparts in many other countries). As such, they simply will not be allowed to occur.

I know I sound cynical in this, but what I’m describing isn’t an evil plot; it’s just humans behaving in their self-interest in a system that is not in anyone’s control, not even theirs.

It’s completely insane, but it’s perfectly understandable. And, just as the inequality I described in my last article won’t go away as a result of some great human enlightenment, neither will the perversion of the (never entirely noble) idea of democracy.

Thanks to systems no one actually designed, that are now so dysfunctional they are collapsing, most of the citizens of earth in 2020 are fated to live in an alms-based economy and ruled by a corporatist plutocracy.

It’s mad. But it will be over soon.

Next in the “mad world” series: Taking stock of our health care and education systems.

Image by kaaathi from Pixabay CC0

I have argued before that there is no such thing as an “inalienable right” — in a civilized society, rights and freedoms are granted to us in return for commensurate responsibilities, and balanced against other rights and freedoms with which they may conflict. It’s a bargain, and the price of living in civilization.

Once upon a time, idealists not interested in the terms of the bargain were “free” to opt out of civilization, and go where there was none, or where the new settlers were still defining the rights, freedoms and responsibilities that would apply in their new frontier. But today there are no such frontiers left. Civilization is global, and while one’s rights and freedoms and responsibilities vary (at least formally) from country to country, our only choice if we don’t like the local bargain is to beg admission to another place whose bargain seems more to our liking. And few countries are accepting more than a tiny portion of those looking for a better bargain.

In Canada, for example, the rights and freedoms granted to citizens, residents and visitors are codified in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which is a part of the Canadian Constitution, and which prevails (with a couple of notable exceptions) over any and all laws and regulations of the land. The Charter explicitly acknowledges that no rights or freedoms are absolute — they can be “limited to protect other rights or important national values” (eg hate speech is not protected by the freedom of speech provision). Nevertheless, they are not to be trifled with lightly. They have been the basis for Canada’s hard-fought laws for women’s reproductive freedom. Their violation by laws restricting Canadians’ right to die with dignity have been struck down by the courts (and the newest attempt to restrict those rights seems similarly likely to be struck down almost as soon as it is passed into law, unless the Canadian Senate prevails upon Trudeau to gather up the courage to confront the right-to-lifers).

Much of the global outrage over CoVid-19 restrictions seems to be a fundamental disagreement over whether the right of the majority to protection from an out-of-control pandemic (and the right of governments to impose restrictions to enforce that right) does, or does not, supersede the right of any individual or group to pursue activities they believe to be essential to their spiritual or financial health. American constitutional law is much clumsier and more ambiguous than the modern Canadian equivalent, so the US courts have been inconsistently adjudicating this dispute over whose rights should prevail, unfortunately largely along ideological lines rather than those based either in jurisprudence or overarching principle. Similar conflicts are playing out all over the world.

This raises the question about what the de facto priorities are in ranking rights and freedoms where they conflict. Some obvious examples (I admit my biases on these issues are pretty obvious in how I frame these conflicts):

• a woman’s right to terminate an unwanted pregnancy versus the rights of a foetus to be carried to term and be supported by that woman for as long as necessary
• a person’s right to end their own life of (what is to them) intolerable physical or mental anguish versus the rights of those dependent on that person for continued support
• a society’s collective right to be free of the scourge of fatal and debilitating contagious diseases versus the rights of individuals to behaviour that is in their own personal best interest but which (on the best available evidence) is likely to increase the spread of such diseases
• the rights of citizens (let’s not get into non-humans’ rights for the moment) to live in a healthy, unpolluted, sustainable environment versus a business’ (and/or its owners’) right to conduct its affairs to maximize profits
• a BIPOC person’s right to freedom from discrimination, assault and harassment versus the rights of all citizens to choose who they want to associate with, say what they believe, and be protected by “law enforcement agencies” they trust
• the rights of citizens to restrict the sale of foods, drugs and other products that are (on the best available evidence) unhealthy, addictive and/or toxic versus the rights of the food industry to maximize profits and the rights of citizens to consume whatever they want
• a conscientious objector’s right not to fight in what they consider an unjust war versus the rights of citizens to raise an army to protect themselves against what they consider an existential threat to their security or sovereignty

As you can tell, these conflicts between rights and freedoms are principally based on disagreements about the facts, more than they are moral disagreements, though there is a moral component to some of these conflicts. The problem is that generally we cannot know the facts (or the future) for certain, so (Pollard’s third law) we believe what we want to believe are the facts, and hence tend to find the “other” side’s position untenable, deniable, or repugnant.

If we could see into the future, or, even better, if we could see into a range of alternatively possible futures based on what we did today, there would likely be much less disagreement over which rights should prevail today. But we cannot, and even in cases where research has indicated how people on both sides of the dispute in past have felt once the consequences were known, this evidence is rarely enough to overcome Pollard’s third law. For example, there is strong evidence that most women choosing to have an abortion have said years later it was the right decision, while those talked out of it were considerably less sure they made the right decision. But there is always the objection that those in both situations are “rationalizing” their decision to assuage their guilt. In these debates, there is never a winner.

Every freedom has its costs. Affirmative action to enable oppressed people to access the same rights and freedoms as the dominant castes, will inevitably disadvantage those ‘displaced’ by these actions. Whether that’s ‘fair’ or not depends on where you stand. The Trudeau government is being guilt-tripped by right-to-lifers into trying to protect disabled Canadians from being coerced into ending their lives unwillingly or unwittingly by unscrupulous heirs or exhausted caregivers. There is always a risk of this, but it has to be weighed against the risk of condemning thousands of times more Canadians to have to live out truly unbearable and agonizing lives (physical or mental — Alzheimers can take a terrible toll) against their will.

As I said in my previous article, I think the last forty years has seen a shift away from willingness to sacrifice personal rights and freedoms in the collective interest, due principally to a growing, and cultivated, distrust of government and central authority.

What would be the price of freedom if (as is highly likely) in the near future we face another pandemic? And what is the price of individual freedom as we slide deeper into collective ecological, economic, and possibly social, collapse? What are we willing to sacrifice for a collective healthy future, or at least the healthiest that is possible given the circumstances we’re likely to face?

The overwhelming consensus of scientists, based on actual scientific data — far from certain but the best available evidence right now — is that we absolutely must prevent a 1.5ºC rise in global average temperature to have a reasonable chance of averting runaway climate collapse (a catastrophic 4-6ºC rise by 2100 rendering most of the planet uninhabitable by humans).

What would we have to give up to prevent such a rise? The various scenarios that have been run so far (and they have all — all — proven to be far too optimistic) suggest that we would essentially have to stop using hydrocarbons entirely within five years, and simultaneously institute a massive, globally-coordinated and globally-honoured campaign to reduce net emissions to zero shortly after that. Setting aside the Rapture, a sudden magical agreement and united effort of 8-9B people to completely change their lifestyle and accept enormous hardships, the technophiles’ wet dream of an energy source that defies the laws of thermodynamics, or a friendly alien intervention, my guess is that the sacrifices we would have to make would be something like this:

1. A complete and immediate shutdown of non-essential industrial activity. That would mean everyone’s “right” to consume anything beyond (government!-rationed) food, water, basic medical goods, and enough heating or cooling to prevent extreme discomfort, would end. We’d each get, as has happened in previous large-scale emergencies like wars and depressions, some coupons for a small quantity of non-essential goods that we could “spend” as we wish. You would not be able to buy anything with currency, credit or savings.
2. This would of course crash the Ponzi scheme stock market and real estate market, and with it most people’s life savings, net worth and pensions. But since very few people would actually be working, we’d all be living on a standard guaranteed annual income anyway, so everyone having zero net worth would only, for most, be a heartbreak, not an existential threat.
3. The most obvious change would be the end of the private automobile and other private transportation, and the end of airplane travel (the biggest single contributor to emissions), and long-distance shipping of goods. Feeling your freedoms impinged upon yet? You’d have a short time to make a final move to be with family and loved ones, and then you’d be left with very expensive and unreliable telecommunications to stay in touch with those more than a short bus ride away.
4. If you’re in the privileged caste, you’d lose a lot more of your “rights”. You wouldn’t be allowed to maintain your expensive property, since that would exceed your personal emissions limit. So you’d either see it collapse, or gift most of it to people who hadn’t used up their limits. Your golf courses would be closed, of course. Your private jet would be grounded.
5. You’d still have the freedom to say and believe what you want, as long as it wasn’t hateful or violence-provoking. You’d have to walk to the steps of the government offices to protest the restrictions on your freedoms, and you still wouldn’t have the right to kidnap the governor. You’d still have freedom of religion (ie to walk to church). You’d still be able to leave the country, on foot or horseback or boat or on public ground transport up to your emissions limit, provided the next country was willing to take you for a while. You’d still have the right to equal treatment and freedom from mistreatment by law enforcement officials, if you ever had that.
6. You’d have the right and freedom, and encouragement, to start up or partner with an enterprise that provided essential goods and services to your local community, within the emissions limit. You wouldn’t be paid for doing so, but you wouldn’t need or have any use for the money anyway. And you’d be thanked.
7. You’d still have a “right” to privacy, even though it’s not a constitutional one. But you’d probably find you had less need to exercise it in a world that would be, of necessity, much more egalitarian and much more “public” — more of what you give and receive would be through collaborative, communitarian, voluntary activities. Not much room, or need, for closed doors for anything but the most personal activities.

So much of the identity of so many in most affluent nations is caught up in our identity as consumers, that any radical shift to an economy of minimal consumption (and production) is likely unfathomable to most of us. We wouldn’t know who we were without our stuff, differentiating us from everybody else (and/or symbolizing our membership, our belonging within some elite group). We would have to relearn how to belong, without money as the currency, in our own local communities.

But don’t worry, none of this is going to happen. Even if we were willing to give up our rights to acquire and to do everything we can afford (and, thanks to credit, to acquire lots of things that we can’t afford) — which we aren’t — no government or corporation would ever allow it to happen. The issue isn’t so much what rights and freedoms we’d have to give up to prevent climate collapse, but why preventing collapse is impossible, and what that will mean to all of us, and to our rights and freedoms, as that collapse advances.

So let’s take a more immediate look at these rights and freedoms “trade-offs”. Given the accelerating rate of pandemics in this century, and the near-impossibility of eliminating factory farming, exotic animal harvesting, and intrusions into the last wildernesses of the planet (which together have led to almost all modern pandemics), we’re very likely to face the next one within a decade at most. How are we likely to respond if, say, seven years from now we get another pandemic that looks, at least at first, like CoVid-19 — that is, it appears highly transmissible (ie most of the planet will get it relatively quickly in the absence of drastic interventions), and its mortality rate is unclear (ie could be like the seasonal flu, or several time more lethal like CoVid-19, or much more lethal like SARS or MERS)?

Let’s consider how CoVid-19 is likely to be remembered looking back from 2027. It now appears likely that the global IFR of the 2020-21 “waves” will be about 0.36%, with much lower rates in countries with young populations and considerably higher rates (averaging about 0.43%) in older populations like North America and Europe.

The death toll so far has been about 1.5M and it’s still accelerating, so suppose it reaches 3.0M by the time an effective vaccine is in effect worldwide. That would mean that 10% of the world’s population was infected before the vaccine inoculated the rest of us. If we’d waited for “herd immunity”, when more than 50% of the population was infected, then conservatively 15M would have died instead of 3M; ie we saved 12M lives through globally-imposed restrictions.

[Equivalent numbers for the US: current deaths 275,000; projected by vaccine date 400-500,000; percent of population then infected 30-35%; lives saved 600,000-1 million.] These numbers are based on current best estimates and are conservative — they don’t factor in any unreported “excess deaths” likely attributable to CoVid-19.

And these are just deaths; we’re not talking about hospital overwhelm, which could easily have doubled the number of deaths, and we’re not talking about the billions spared from the disease, a disease whose long-term effect on the bodies, hearts, brains, lungs, other organs and lives of close to a billion people that will have been infected before inoculation, is utterly unknown. And we’re assuming the virus doesn’t mutate, as happened in the 1918 pandemic.

So the restrictions on our rights and freedoms saved a “mere” 12 million lives around the world and a bit less than a million American lives in 2020-21. It reduced the degree of infection of probably more than half a billion people, and prevented any infection in around 4 billion humans, even assuming this incredibly transmissible disease would only have touched half the planet without our interventions.

Meanwhile, the 1918 pandemic killed 50 million (700,000 in the US), the average annual flu kills about 500,000 (50,000 in the US), heart diseases and strokes kill 18 million a year (800,000 in the US), lung diseases including pulmonary disease and lung cancer kill 5 million a year (300,000 in the US), and pneumonia and other respiratory infections kill a total of 3 million a year (160,000 in the US).

So looking back from the perspective of 2027, and the advent of, say, disease H7N9-27, having spread through Tyson’s massive factory farms in Arkansas and just recently leapt the species barrier to humans, how do you think we might react to the news?

My guess is that we’ll be no better prepared for this than we were this year for CoVid-19. We had warning of the dangers of coronaviruses in 2003 (SARS, CFR=11%) and again in 2012 (MERS, CFR=34%) which mercifully had low transmissibility, and in the years since we did essentially nothing to prepare for the inevitable next one. And since we’ll be no better prepared, we will inevitably be stuck with the same ineffective “yo-yo” response regime, at best, next time. In fact, there may be more intransigence about restrictions since CoVid-19 had a much-lower-than-feared fatality rate.

So, what price freedom? The freedom to suffer and die from heart diseases, strokes, lung diseases, cancers, diabetes and dozens of other chronic conditions directly related to our poor diets, to preserve our right to ingest whatever we want, whatever tastes good and makes us feel good.

The freedom to die a ghastly death from a suffocating respiratory and circulatory system illness caused by a pandemic knowingly allowed to run out of control for fear of damaging “the economy” or letting governments “control our lives”.

The freedom to struggle and die in a world devastated and desolated by climate and ecological collapse, with 2B climate refugees and comparable numbers dying in place for want of the basic necessities of life, when we knew what had to be done to at least have a chance of preventing it.

Wolfi Landstreicher, in a quote I have used often on this blog, explains the primeval sentiment that underlies our yearning for freedom, for independence:

In a very general way, we know what we want. We want to live as wild, free beings in a world of wild, free beings. The humiliation of having to follow rules, of having to sell our lives away to buy survival, of seeing our usurped desires transformed into abstractions and images in order to sell us commodities fills us with rage. How long will we put up with this misery? We want to make this world into a place where our desires can be immediately realized, not just sporadically, but normally. We want to re-eroticize our lives. We want to live not in a dead world of resources, but in a living world of free wild lovers. We need to start exploring the extent to which we are capable of living these dreams in the present without isolating ourselves. This will give us a clearer understanding of the domination of civilization over our lives, an understanding which will allow us to fight domestication more intensely and so expand the extent to which we can live wildly.

So this instinctive revulsion to restrictions on our freedoms is, to me, completely understandable. The problem is, its realization is utterly incompatible with civilization. We can’t have it both ways. We can give up the narrow freedom to buy and own stuff, whatever we can afford, or not afford, in order to regain the broader freedom Wolfi describes, but to do so we will have to give up the civilization on which the narrow freedom depends. With 7.8B crowded like tribbles onto this increasingly biologically and ecologically impoverished planet, we have to accept more and more restrictions on our freedoms in order to avoid massive violence and chaos. We all have to obey, all have to answer the call to keep rowing, faster and faster, over the edge into oblivion. We have to deny that this is madness, that it cannot go on, that it’s going to kill all of us.

We long ago gave up our freedom, and our illusory rights, in the bargain that brought us civilization, its creature comforts, its conformity, its ghastly and oblivious destruction. We were conned, but we didn’t know any better, and neither did the con artists who struck the bargain with us. “Ladies and gentlemen, the ride is coming to an end. Please remain in your seats.” It will be over soon. As JT said: No one’s gonna stop us now.

For many years, my writing about collapse centred around the “3 E’s” — economic, energy, and ecological collapse. They are of course connected. An economy cannot be maintained when severe weather events keep crashing the infrastructure everywhere, or when climate collapse produces 2 billion climate refugees or makes large parts of the planet unfit for either habitation or agriculture.

Likewise, we cannot prevent an ever-worsening ecological collapse when we apply a religion of never-ending industrial growth and increasing human population far beyond what our finite earth systems can support. And our economy depends entirely on cheap, affordable energy which, even with today’s massive subsidies of fossil fuel production, is running out. Most of it will likely be left in the ground not because it will reduce the severity of climate change, but because as our economy stumbles it will simply be too expensive to extract. So decline in energy use may mean both a brief respite for the planet’s ecological systems and a precipitator of collapse of our economic systems.

While all this is still true, I’ve come to realize that there are many more inextricably interconnected systems that comprise the earth (ecological) systems and human (civilizational) systems on which our lives depend, and that they are all poised to collapse. Some of these are listed in the chart above.

History is replete with examples of political, financial and economic collapse, and often when one fails the rest of these systems follow. Much of the world already lives in cities and countries that are in fairly advanced stages of both civilizational and ecological collapse. I have argued that the collapse of our human systems is likely to precede the collapse of the world’s ecological systems, which I think will be more gradual. But ecological collapse is still accelerating, and my sense is it will almost inevitably inflict the final blow on civilization by the end of this century.

The many economic crashes we have seen in past, and which various countries have seen lead to panic and even starvation, have occurred frightening quickly — in a matter of months when a “tipping point” is reached. The problem now is that our economy is so tightly globally integrated, and so lacking in resilience (“efficiency”, being cheaper and more profitable for corporations, has been pursued instead) that the next crash is highly likely to be global. And since the mechanisms to recover from a crash have now all been exhausted (we used the last of them up in 2008), when it happens it will probably be a ‘permanent’ (unrecoverable) collapse.

As I’ve written about often, this will mean a collapse of substantially all currencies, businesses, international (and most domestic) trade, the job market, and the value of real estate, investments and pensions. This will likely lead, as it has before (but this time globally), to the bankruptcy of governments and the devolution of almost all economic activity by default to the community level. We will essentially have to start again to build, community by community, economies that are sustainable and radically relocalized, rather than predicated on the current centralized Ponzi scheme of perpetual double-digit growth and ignored externalities.

Many writers on collapse have expressed the hope that we can manage, with difficulty, collapse of our economic and political systems, while keeping our social systems more or less intact. Social disintegration, if it happens, will create vastly more suffering than the collapse of our economic, financial and political systems (and the educational, health care, technological infrastructure and other systems that depend on them).

As someone who believes we’re all doing our best, my sense has always been that salvaging our social systems should be possible, and will be essential to avoiding chaos as the rest of our systems collapse. But of late I’m becoming less confident that that is possible.

What exactly are our “social systems”? They are, in essence, a vast array of tacit agreements on how we will individually and collectively behave. These agreements are built on a mutual trust that it is in the collective interest of everyone to respect them. Some examples:

1. Contribution to shared services: We agree to pay a fair amount of taxes, tithes or similar payments to finance what we agree to be “essential services” — our collective health, education, roads, communications and other infrastructure, and “defence” and “security”.
2. Abiding by laws: We agree to respect and uphold the laws of the land, even when we don’t agree with all of them.
3. Unified response to crises: We agree to subordinate our personal interests to some extent to the collective interest in times of recognized crisis (wars, depressions, “natural” disasters).
4. Allow governments to do their best: We respect governments to have the collective best interest of the whole population in mind, even when we disagree with what they see that best interest to be.
5. Universal rights and responsibilities: We agree to respect a broad set of rights and freedoms for everyone, and to amicably and peacefully resolve differences when these rights and freedoms are perceived to conflict. These rights include property rights. These rights and freedoms come with a commensurate set of responsibilities, including the responsibility to ensure one’s property doesn’t harm others, and the responsibility to dutifully discharge one’s debts so as to not undermine confidence in the system of exchange.

I would argue that since the 1980s — just 40 years ago — most of the population in most nations has moved from a profound respect for these agreements to a position of no longer accepting most or all of these agreements. That is neither a good nor a bad thing in itself, and it is certainly understandable given the current utter dysfunction of most of our human systems. But the prevalence of this new antipathy towards any basic social contracts has profound implications for social cohesion, locally, nationally and globally.

Here are some examples of how this has manifested since it seemingly began in the reactionary Reagan/Thatcher era:

1. Loss of commitment to paying for and providing shared services for all:

• • Tax cheats, corrupt administrations and powerful international corporate lobbies openly reject the idea of paying taxes for “others’” essential services.
  • Tax fraud is euphemistically reframed as “tax avoidance” and rewarded.
  • Social services are starved for funds as more and more tax monies are spent on international (wars, invasions, coups and assassinations) and domestic (spying, militarized police) repression of citizens.
  • Tax havens openly embrace corporate grifters.
  • The privileged castes’ lawyers write tax laws to make the poor pay higher tax rates than the ultra-rich.
  • Starved public education, public health care, public transportation and other systems deteriorate closer and closer to a state of total dysfunction, while the privileged castes and their friends and families access exclusive first class private education, private health care, and private transportation, subsidized by public moneys.
  • The word “services” is replaced by the derogatory term “entitlements” by the privileged castes and their government cronies to discredit public programs, so that they can be further starved and eventually dismantled.

2. Loss of commitment to fairly create and uphold, and obey the law:

• • The privileged castes break the law with complete impunity, including laws against murder, mega-pollution, fraud, bribery, price-fixing, oligopoly and sexual assault. Laws are harshly applied against everyone else.
  • When the privileged castes buy, bribe or extort their way out of punishment, their success is celebrated, or their crimes “pardoned”.
  • When the privileged castes’ enterprises fail due to greed, corruption or mismanagement, they are bailed out at public expense (“too big to fail”).
  • Corporate oligopolies receive massive corporate subsidies, some of them buried in opaque “omnibus” packages of laws too huge and convoluted for anyone to wade through and object to. This includes horrifically inequitable and misdirected CoVid-19 subsidies.
  • Other laws written by the lawyers of the privileged castes and dutifully passed by well-paid-off semi-literate politicians, often without them even having being read before they are “passed”, enable and encourage the oppression of the country’s citizens by (a) surveilling and often targeting them for harassment, (b) enabling the charging of usurious interest rates on their debts, and (c) depriving them of essential health care, education and other vital services.
  • Still other laws enable the bombing and slaughtering of citizens anywhere in the world if they happen to be in countries whose governments don’t offer fealty to the privileged castes.
  • Law “enforcement” has become militarized, overtly biased and racist, and governments seemingly lack both the will and means to rein in the excesses of “officers”.

3. “Everyone for themselves” response to crises:

• • The cult of individuality has reached the extreme where citizens claim that a requirement to wear a mask or get a vaccine is an outrageous violation of their “personal freedom”, and is deliberately and ostentatiously ignored.
  • Trust in the judgement of scientists has been systematically destroyed through disinformation campaigns, so attempts to coordinate science-based emergency responses result in lawsuits, death threats against public health experts, and at least one attempted coup.
  • An ever-growing number of both progressives and conservatives describe themselves as “libertarians” who want to be “left alone” to make all decisions for themselves, even in times of emergency.

4. Widespread distrust of government intentions and actions:

• • There is a broad distrust, hatred and loathing for anything that even vaguely smacks of government or involves any government agencies. This is amplified and constantly played up in the oligopolistic media and social media, whose technocrats just shrug and say “up to you to decide what is true” or “we’re just a platform, not responsible for content”.
  • Hysterical claims about the “deep state”, alleged government plots, conspiracies and cover-ups are becoming more widespread and more popular. Attempts to debunk and fact-check misinformation and disinformation are assailed as “censorship” and merely drive their believers to unmonitored underground sites and into conspiracy theory cults.
  • Among conservatives and the uneducated, we have returned to a 1950s-era sensibility that “collective” and “community” are synonymous with communism and totalitarianism. This myth never really went away, but recently-sowed anti-Russian and anti-Chinese sentiment (to provide cover for domestic failures) is strengthening this myth’s hold. So any government action that benefits a collective (ie everyone) is viewed with suspicion.

5. Unequal “rights” and abrogation of commensurate responsibilities:

• • Thanks to vast deregulation, non-enforcement, and granting of “rights” to corporations, corporate mega-polluters are free to destroy the world’s natural heritage (land, soil, air, water), accelerating the sixth extinction of life on earth. And they are free to distribute toxic and unhealthy foods that now cause most of the world’s deaths and diseases.
  • Meanwhile, whistle-blowers and protesters objecting to these actions are killed, threatened, imprisoned and “disappeared”.
  • Hiding behind corporate charters, the privileged castes now exercise the “right” to do anything that increases profits for their corporations, executives and shareholders, regardless of the cost to citizens, impact on citizens’ rights, and the viability of life on the planet. And they buy judicial appointments that will ensure this “right” is never infringed upon.
  • Debts have reached staggering levels in every part of the economy — corporate, individual and government. Interest rates are fixed by the privileged castes so that large corporations, the privileged caste and “friendly” governments pay essentially zero interest, while the poorest citizens pay 24-28% on credit cards, the only credit they can obtain, and credit that they are constantly pushed to take on more of (and have to, when the real cost of living is rising at four times the rate average workers’ wages are).
  • The privileged castes’ corporations now have the “right” to write off as tax losses the results of their misadventures and mismanagement, and to push the numbered companies of unsuccessful high-risk ventures into bankruptcy with impunity. Meanwhile, new laws have largely removed the corresponding right of individuals to declare personal bankruptcy.

These betrayals and abrogations of the agreements by which our societies function were initially propagated mostly by the privileged castes, with the often-overt encouragement and enablement of governments. It is not surprising, then, that the rest of the population, seeing itself discriminated against and oppressed by the privileged castes’ disregard for these agreements, are showing a similar disregard for these agreements, saying:

2. 2. • If the privileged castes aren’t respecting the agreements, why should they?
      • Why should they have any trust in, or respect for, governments and the agreements they are only enforcing to their disadvantage?
      • Why should they not cheat on their taxes as well?
      • Why should they obey laws that seem designed to discriminate against and oppress them?
      • Why should they trust governments to pass and enforce laws in the “collective interest” when governments seemingly only cater to the vested interests of the privileged castes?
      • Why should they respect corporations’ and privileged castes’ “rights and freedoms” when they seem to amount to the right to destroy the planet, poison its citizens, and deprive them of their own rights and freedoms?
      • Why when inequality has skyrocketed over the past 40 years should citizens presume anything governments do is in the “collective interest”?

So the population, no longer able to discern what they can and can’t believe and who they can trust, are filled with fear, bewilderment, rage and hopelessness. With trust gone, these social agreements are now, in many countries, in tatters.

And without them, the social fabric that has kept 7.8B people in line, and functioning at least superficially as a civil society, is rapidly tearing apart.

In many parts of the world where collapse is well-advanced, the members of constituent communities have learned to create a new local, social fabric. That may be in intentional community, or in a gang or cult, or less formally just in an evolving sense of “who’s in our community and how are we looking after each other?”. They are practicing, trying to figure out how to create a local economy, politic, health care system, education system, and social systems, in the vacuum left by government neglect and incapacity, and by the abandonment and abrogation of basic social agreements. They have forged new agreements, for better or worse. Some of the ones I’ve seen are amazing, while others are horrifying. We should be watching, and learning.

In parts of the world like (most of) ours where collapse still seems a way off, there hasn’t been much if any thought given to how, if the social fabric that is now so badly torn cannot be mended, we are going to follow “third world” examples and create new agreements that will work well-enough for us to survive.

It won’t be easy. We are like dogs that have been looked after all our lives and are suddenly witnessing the breakup of our family and the possibility we are going to have to make do for ourselves, in collaboration with the other dogs suddenly in the same position. We have become so dependent on civilization’s systems we have never given a thought to having to create whole “new” societies, from the bottom up, from the ruins of the one that is now quickly disintegrating.

Where once I was confident we’d muddle along, I now fear it may be a more brutal adaptation. We do have good intentions, but that’s about all we have going for us right now. We suffer from severe imaginative poverty (from 40 years’ lack of exercise of our imaginations). We have almost no residual skill or experience in community-building, consensus-building, or living and working in self-sufficient and self-managed communities. It may take two or three generations of experiment and practice to build up the skills and experience to be able to do what wild animals do innately.

We are inevitably, due to lack of imagination and better models, going to try to create new societies similar to the only ones we were familiar with, even though they were hopelessly dysfunctional and are unworkable in a world where all of the systems in the diagram above have already collapsed or are in the process of collapsing. We will probably try out neo-tribal models first, which will provide some useful lessons but likely won’t work well in our vastly diverse, vastly under-skilled post-civilization societies.

We will have to cope with the death throes of the top privileged castes as they desperately attempt to retain their wealth, power and influence. They will likely create a kind of neo-feudal model which will work for a while and then fail spectacularly once the “nobles” run out of money (and hence power; since most of their wealth is in real estate and “financial assets”, that shouldn’t take too long, but it will be chaotic). If you’ve ever lived in a “company town” you probably have a good idea how this works.

The biggest unknown in building post-civilization societies is whether some of the technologies we have produced during our civilization’s reign, such as nuclear and biological resources that have been or could be adapted for weaponry, could be used by very small groups of people to produce a global catastrophe, even before the catastrophes that ecological collapse is just now starting to present us with, weigh in. It really wouldn’t take a rocket scientist. (I’m much less worried about AI, nano-bots etc — that stuff takes a lot of energy to sustain, and I think we’ll run out before new technologies emerge that can start to rival in destructive capacity what’s already out there in military arsenals, power plants and laboratories.) And if neglected after collapse, all the existing nuclear power plants could melt down, and the mega-warehouses full of lethal chemicals could crumble, with disastrous consequences that could last for millennia.

The next biggest unknown is how severe the ecological collapse will be over the next couple of centuries. I think at least a small part of the planet will remain habitable to humans as this collapse unfolds, even without the energy-dependent, prosthetic, artificial environments in which almost all of us now live. But there are models that suggest otherwise. And it hasn’t been that long since the entire planet was wrapped in hot toxic gases that only microscopic creatures could endure. Even less time has passed since the entire planet was last covered in miles-thick ice. We can’t know.

If we can dodge these two bullets (and a few others equally as depressing), I still believe the human race can survive the collapse of global civilization, and in a couple of millennia, humbled, much smaller in number, and back to being a tiny and insignificant part of Gaia’s awesome experiment of life on earth, we might find our distant descendants living very happy, peaceful, simple lives, mostly free from stress and struggle. As Anna Tsing explains in The Mushroom at the End of the World, it will probably be a salvage-gift-and-scavenger society, similar and yet in ways amazingly different from how prehistoric humans lived.

That’s what I want to believe anyway.