Tag: Dmitry Orlov

Hermann Nitsch

[Guest post by Makeda.]

Recently I have run across a number of articles in American newspapers which emphasize the importance of higher education and reassure us that there is no crisis with the way it is being financed. The fact that such articles are written by PhDs speaks to some of the unfortunate aspects of the problem. I am probably being too kind in assuming that the authors of these articles are deluded; I could just as easily accuse them of being high-ups in a massive Ponzi scheme.

The Washington Post published recently published an article by Donald Heller, an academic and a dean, who asserted that the $1.2 trillion-plus in student loans, with a 15% default rate, is no big deal. Now, even social scientists are supposed to understand that correlation does not equal causality, while some facts he mentioned, such as the fact that college grads are more often employed than high school grads or drop outs, may just indicate that they have more active personalities, not that college allowed them to learn some special skill that made them better baristas. A college degree may or may not pay off over a lifetime, but the debt will certainly come due. While $29,000 (which Heller asserted was an average debt for undergraduate training) may seem like pocket change to an overpaid college administrator, it translates into the inability to afford food or rent for many a college-educated debt slave. Not to be outdone, the New York Times published an article about the “education debate” in which David Leonhart, a journalist of some acclaim and accomplishment, offered what many commenters saw as an advertorial for the higher education industry.

It is interesting to think about how our country produces so many educated fools. Education has been democratized to some extent, and standards have fallen. Today a high school diploma is available to students who can barely read. Mediocre students tend to funnel towards the humanities or social sciences, where mediocrity has become a form of high art. Under the tutelage of professors in these fields who are at best mediocre and at worst ignorant or fraudsters, a new generation of academics is being minted right now. Professors and students alike tend to hide behind large words and awkward turns of phrase.

In science, we use precise terminology to describe specific, observable phenomena. The constant discovery of new organisms, organelles and organic compounds necessitates an ever-expanding vocabulary. Academics in certain other disciplines seem to use highly specific jargon to disguise their lack of new ideas or even the absence of any sort of logic. I do some academic editing, so I know this situation has come full circle—to the point where students of the humanities are unaware that it is only their disciplines that are engaged in the use of specious language to obscure simple concepts. When explaining to one graduate student how he could not make certain assertions about traumatic brain injury based on current science, he told me he didn’t need to understand biology or neuroscience to write about them, he only needed to “understand the discourse.” His liberal arts training, that kind so often claimed to open minds, clearly had the opposite effect: it closed his to reality.

Perhaps this has made him happier? After all, reality can be a pain, so why not just ignore it and engage in “discourse.” Here’s a sample: “The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure. It has marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power…” wrote Judith Butler, who happens to be one of the top philosophers of our day. Do you have any idea what she means? Does she? Exactly! But don’t worry; nobody will ever ask her, or you, to act on it in any meaningful way. All that can be expected of you is that you drink it in, partially digest it, and regurgitate it.

When the physicist Sokal purposely published an article in a prestigious journal for the humanities, which he later revealed to be absolute nonsense, it should have been treated a polite wake up call for the humanities to get rid of the obfuscating mumbo- jumbo and post-modernist blather that clouds so much academic work in these disciplines. Unfortunately, little has changed, and increasing numbers of academics continue to publish works with tenuous connections to reality in ever-less-read journals and books. It is now not unheard of for an academic text to have a publishing run of under 100 books, but even 100 books might be generous given the complete lack of relevance to anything at all of the topics some academics choose to investigate.

When and where the subjects and methods of inquiry are of little relevance, the personalities involved in academia become even more central to their success. Much in the same way that no man would pick a trophy wife based on her ability to solve differential equations rather than on her appearance and demeanor, academia today tends to select for people of little intellectual ability, but with personality traits that are seen as most fitting for academic departments. These traits include embrace of the obligatory optimism of the privileged, which automatically translates into enthusiasm for evangelizing education in the face of pitiful realities.

The list of pitiful realities is too long to include here, but I will highlight just one: the number of people with graduate degrees who rely on food stamps is growing every year. While some might argue the financial consequences of the latest downturn for some uneducated folks have been as dire, this is not a relevant comparison. Hardly anyone who could get a graduate degree would contemplate working as a hamburger flipper instead. The relevant comparison would be with people who invested their time to train for specific trades. A union electrician or carpenter, a construction supervisor, a scrap metal dealer or a plumber usually achieves a six-figure income without incurring any significant educational debt, yet there are plenty of linguists, historians, lawyers and even medical doctors who can only dream of being so lucky.

Academic career paths conform to the same shape as many vaunted professions: it is a pyramid, with little room at the top. Anyone who tells you that upward mobility and advancement are likely outcomes of obtaining higher education is suffering for some sort of vision or logic problem, for it is easy to see that most people will be stuck somewhere near the bottom of the pyramid. The opposite argument—that one progresses through the pyramid—flies in the face of reality. Do you know of any workplaces in America that need more managers than actual workers? Most of us by definition will be humble workers trying to eke out a living in the face of ever-increasing demands and the bizarre whims of ever-richer managers who wll be at best indifferent to our fate.

In my own field the apex of the pyramid is now reaching into the stratosphere. A mere two decades ago the Boston Globe chided a doctor working as a hospital administrator over his generous salary. The doctor made about $300,000 a year while nurses at the hospital he managed made $30,000 a year. Today such numbers seem quaint. Many nurses lost to retirement and attrition have been replaced with an army of “techs” who make 9 or 10 dollars an hour without benefits, while healthcare administrators are paid salaries in the millions. Many high level administrators don’t even possess the credential of being a medical doctor, nurse or scientist; after all, why would our managers ever get their hands dirty with the actual real painful work of medicine when they can manage it from oak-paneled board rooms?

Defenders of academia claim that a similar process has taken place within American universities, and that an evil class of administrators has taken over their precious collective body. To the extent such a process has happened, it may have been due to the weaknesses of the academy and academics. Ironically the liberal arts are not intellectual enough. The average café in the Middle East often has more honest conversation about ideas and social realities going on than many graduate departments of the humanities in the US.

Ask some average, practical-minded Americans how they feel about academics, and they will admit that these emperors have no clothes. At best, academia is seen as providing a refuge for people who can’t cope with the real world—a sort of collection of mental institutions and halfway houses for the intellectually differently abled, if you will. The question is, as a society with so many poor people, increasing numbers of them direct products of academia, should we continue to support these academic institutions by entrusting our children to their care?

Shouldn’t the real intellectuals (should any still exist) be the first to publicly question the validity of this arrangement? Where are the great minds of the day, and why won’t they speak about this loudly and publicly? Instead, the pages of this nation’s papers which have been crowded with nonsense by half-wits claiming that more and more debt-enabled education will make this a stronger nation.

[Guest post by Peter.]

At first sight you may think that this is a nonsensical topic. Is anyone really going to care about your professional credentials post-collapse? Unfortunately the answer may be “yes.” In order to illustrate the problems you may face, I am going to present you with a hypothetical scenario of a physician providing general medical services in an ongoing-collapse or post-collapse environment. The general principles are also applicable to other professions such as nursing, dentistry and pharmacy, civil engineering, etc.

Imagine that you are the sole physician in a large village or small town providing medical services to a few hundred people. You are going through a “slow collapse” scenario where there is no dramatic crash, but services are slowly deteriorating. The electricity supply is intermittent and the telephones, television, internet and banking ceased to function a while ago. The postal service is slow and unreliable but you can still tune in some radio stations. These tell you that there is fighting and civil disorder in some parts of the country, but your area has been relatively spared and remains peaceful.

You provide basic medical services to the community, doing the best you can with what you have. These include minor surgery, suturing wounds, setting broken bones, delivering babies, using herbal medicine and comforting the dying. You also provide the community with public health advice on clean water, sewage disposal and limiting the spread of infectious diseases. There is little paper money in circulation and you are mostly paid in kind with food, favors and maybe a little gold and silver. There are few supplies coming in from outside the area, and consequently consumable/disposable items like latex gloves, paper towels, plastic syringes and plastic speculum tips are in short supply. Because of the lack of writing paper, you make brief, if any, medical notes, and store most of the information in your head. You sterilize and re-use most of your surgical equipment. You haven’t been approached for annual subscriptions by your medical licensing board or malpractice insurers for a couple of years, so you have let those lapse, considering them no longer important. Nobody has the time, the money or the inclination to hire lawyers any more anyway. The community understands the limitations on what is available and is grateful for your services.

One day you receive an unexpected visit from representatives of the state medical licensing board. The board’s head office is in the state capital some 200 miles away. The representatives are touring the outlying areas ensuring that standards of medical services are being maintained even in these difficult times. They ask to inspect your premises and your charts, and you comply. At the end of their inspection they state that they are dissatisfied with many aspects of your care. You have not paid your malpractice or licensing board subscriptions. You are not using sterile disposable items. You are not keeping adequate records. You are setting fractures without taking x-rays. You are growing opium poppies and preparing opium for medical purposes but you do not have a license to do this.

The representatives of the board inform you that you have 14 days in which to remedy all of these deficiencies, failing which your medical license will be revoked and you will be required to close your practice.

What should you do? Here is a suggested 9-point plan.

1. DON’T PANIC. Similar scenarios have probably been played out many thousands of times during this and other collapses. There are multiple ways out of this dilemma. What you are observing here is the struggle between the dying old order and the emerging new order. Slow collapses are messy and confusing because people are unsure of who is in charge, what rules apply and what their roles should be. The old order is like a fatally wounded dinosaur: doomed, increasingly irrelevant, but still dangerous until it is completely dead.

2. Maintain the four C’s: stay cool, calm, collected and courteous. There is nothing to be gained by appearing angry, rude or flustered. Be cooperative. These people are here to do business with you and, like it or not, you will have to do business with them. Tell the board representatives that of course you understand their concerns, and any misunderstandings or defects in performance will soon be rectified. Offer them your hospitality. Smile a lot. (People rarely hit a man who is smiling: they might cut their knuckles on his teeth.) Tell them you need a little time to sort things out and to wait while you go and speak to some people.

3. Comply with their requests if it is possible to do so. In normal times the medical licensing boards do a reasonably good job of maintaining medical standards and protecting the public, and they deserve the cooperation of practitioners. However, these are not normal times, and in the scenario I have outlined, it is not possible to comply with the requests because there is neither the money nor the materials to do so.

4. Try to establish the facts. In times of slow collapse and increasing lawlessness, things (and people) may not always be what they seem. Your visitors may indeed be representatives of the medical licensing board, as they claim, and the board may just be out of touch with reality. Or they may be former employees of the board who have discovered a lucrative sideline in extracting money from physicians. Or they may be con artists with no connection to the board at all. Your response may have to be tailored depending on the reality of the situation. But you can’t rely on the facts being what your visitors say they are: try to verify them from third party sources (see Step 5, below).

5. Recognize that this is a situation you cannot handle on your own. You need the support of the community, both for information about the situation and, if necessary, for bodies on the ground. It helps if you already have the support of the community before trouble occurs; in other words, if you have been providing a good service to the community, and they are grateful for it and don’t want to see you go. If this is the case, then go and see whoever is in charge (village elders, mayor, chief of police, sheriff, chair of town council), explain the situation and see if they have any information which could shed light on it (see Step 4, above). Does anyone know these people? Are they who they say they are? Have they visited other physicians or communities in the area and what was the result?

6. If the visitors are genuinely from the medical licensing board, try to make a realistic assessment of what powers of enforcement they have. In normal times, if a physician continues to practice after his license is revoked, this becomes a criminal offence and enforcement is handed over to the police and the criminal justice system. However, if the police and the justice system are locally based and not willing to carry out enforcement, or absent altogether, the board has no power to enforce its orders. Explain the situation to the local sheriff or police chief if you haven’t already done so, and see what his view is. He may be quite happy to throw the visitors in the local jail, under a charge such as the all-purpose “Vagrancy with intent to commit a felony,” and release them once they come up with the requisite paperwork to certify your practice as fully compliant with their demands.

7. If collapse is quite far advanced in your area, the ultimate person in charge may be local representative of an organized crime syndicate, who has extensive (although informal) powers of persuasion, enforcement and protection. Let’s call him Mr. Big for short. His people may already have approached you and persuaded you to purchase an insurance policy of sorts; if not, it may be time to inquire about their services, because it may soon be the time to make a claim on that policy. If you feel squeamish about this, you need to overcome that squeamishness; these are different times and you need to adapt to the new ways of doing business, or perish. Go and see Mr. Big and explain the situation. He will probably be eager to help because, as a matter of principle, he can’t allow outsiders coming onto his turf to interfere with his clients. Also, he won’t want to lose a paying customer, and he won’t want to lose a physician who is a useful resource to him and his men. Lastly, his men need something to do, to keep them in practice. However, having informed him of the situation, do not make any specific suggestions or requests. Instead, tell him that you still hope that the matter can be settled amicably. If he laughs in your face, don’t argue.

8. Now report back to your visitors. The exact conversation you have with them will depend on the information you have been able to gather and the resources available to you, but it will probably be something like this. Tell them that although you would like very much to comply with their requests, unfortunately the lack of money and materials makes it very difficult to do so, and request their patience and understanding. Tell them that, even more unfortunately, their visit has come to the attention of some very influential locals, who are not happy about the situation. Tell them that you will do everything you can to ensure their safety, provided they leave, but if they choose to return, then all bets are off. Say that you would be very grateful if they would give you a good inspection report and recommend to the board that your license be renewed. Make it look like a win-win situation all round. Keep smiling (see Step 2, above).

9. Ideally, this business should be concluded with Step 8. There should be no need for any physical unpleasantness, which should be kept as an absolute last resort. However, if all else fails you may have to return to Mr. Big, explain that despite your best efforts, the business could not be concluded peaceably, and call in your insurance policy. It is then up to Mr. Big, as a matter of principle, to find and negotiate an equitable settlement with your visitors’ “insurer,” provided they happen to have one. And, in case they do not, be sure say a prayer for them.

Although the discussion above used a medical practice as an example, the exact same principles apply in most other professional activities that currently require licenses, certificates, liability insurance and memberships in professional associations.

Over the past two weeks I have been reaching out to my readers in an effort to come up with some answers to four very difficult questions that have come out of the third annual Age of Limits Conference. Some of the answers that have rolled in, via blog comments and emails, are very good—much better than anything I could have come up with. All I had to do was select the best of the bunch and edit them for clarity. I omitted the names, to help you take them in the right spirit: as anonymous gifts from disembodied voices on the internet. That’s probably the best that a transitory virtual community, linked together by a predominantly coal-fired energy technology that powers some unbelievably resource-intensive microchips, should ever hope to achieve.

First, here are some meta-level observations that are worthwhile:

“Thank you for leading this conversation. I am sure we all feel the same emptiness that comes with the certainty of what’s happening. I live with a quiet sense of sadness even as I fight to at least try to be ready. In truth there is probably no such thing as ‘ready.’ Humans are, like all creatures, expedient actors: we choose and decide based on conditions as they appear at the present moment, and we project our present experience into the future. Disrupting that projection is what we are doing when we try to teach others about collapse: very difficult! The real, soul-searching question is, What can I do and how do I live with myself when I have to abandon others who have no hope of adapting? Ultimately, we will all find ourselves in situations where we will be forced do things that will shame us in order to survive.”

“Your four questions remind me of Zen koans, existential questions that help bring about a change in outlook and behavior if the person questioned pursues the answers diligently. Just like koans, your four questions are existential questions and, as such, they need existential answers. Intellectual answers are of no use.”

And here are the answers:

1. How can we communicate the reality of collapse to family and friends in ways that are constructive rather than destructive and find helpful ways to reflect our “endarkenment” in our everyday behavior?

“In many cases I don’t think it’s possible to communicate the reality of collapse to family and friends, because some people are simply unable to shake themselves loose from the dominant paradigm of endless growth, and will go to their graves believing that a return to growth is just around the corner, regardless of all evidence to the contrary. There are many intelligent, educated people—chairmen of central banks and professors of economics—who believe in infinite growth, even though it is mathematically impossible, and they are educated in math. Given this level of denial, how can I even start to communicate collapse to my wife if she believes in infinite growth, while neither of us are professors of economics?”

“If friends and family have a vested interest in the status quo, they will stay with it. It doesn’t matter if it’s crumbling or increasingly insecure. It’s a bit like the scenario depicted in E.M. Forster’s old story ‘The Machine Stops.’ Inertia and reluctance to make abrupt changes is a major factor—not only for others but for oneself. And exactly what alternative is on offer? Jettison one’s attachment to the current status quo—for what exactly? What is one to do if one has a job and needs it to put food on the table? The consequence is that as the ship goes down, the passengers remain willfully oblivious, and even the few who do know what’s going on are confused about what is to be done.”

“If you can’t fix this problem then you are on your own—and lost. It took each of us a lifetime to build our closest family relationships and we are not going to be able to walk out on them and start afresh. It also took us a long time to get to our individual understandings of where we are in terms of collapse, and there is no shortcut—so the answer is patience, mutual tolerance, and facilitating the learning process in one’s nearest circle.”

“I’ve warned everyone I know about imminent collapse. Now I no longer have any friends. But seriously, I approach it from a different angle altogether, where preparing for collapse becomes logical from the standpoint of offering a less threatening reality. For example, start by discussing medicinal plants as a way of resolving health issues. Then extend that discussion to freedom from expensive doctors and costly pharmaceuticals. Then project it further to the joys of developing the personal security and independence from large bureaucratic systems, Before you know it, you can talk about collapse without ever dropping the ‘C’ word.”

“The trick is to have a consistent message and to not overstate the situation. Anyone who remembers your position from a few years ago, and can see that your story for how the world works is more consistent with reality than the mainstream story, is going to become your ally. Trying to convince people quickly is counterproductive.”

“When people are confronted with a shock—such as a drastic lack of fuel—they become like stunned mullets. That is an opportune time to make a constructive intervention, and to warm them up to the choices this moment provides. Timing is important because they soon stop flapping around like mullets and start looking around for the nearest bag to put over their heads to shut out the nastiness and relieve the pain. The truth is a secret to those who do not seek it. Knowing the truth about the state of the world equips us to make interventions with individuals and groups when they may be open to making the right choices.”

“I find it essential to avoid trying to convince people of my conclusions, judgments and solutions, because this inevitably creates a sense of threat. I find that most of us have our very sense of survival tied up in the positions we’ve identified with: our conclusions about reality, about what’s true and false, right and wrong, and what we should or shouldn’t do. When someone’s position is threatened, they naturally become defensive: the reptilian brain kicks in and limits access to our reasoning abilities. There is an emotional factor which limits what we are willing to face—because fully facing something requires not just thought, but feeling too. What I find important is to create a safe space for a conversation, where the other person can face what might otherwise seem too threatening. There is an art to this. Part of it involves noticing how, where and to what extent you are judging the other person, their beliefs, their way of life, etc., and realigning with what and who you stand for, rather than with own judgment and position. When done well, there is a response from the heart, and the walls come down: you are open, and the other person feels you to be offering an inviting, welcoming and safe space. Part of it includes avoiding the use of what I call positional speaking: speaking in terms of conclusions, problems, solutions, and judgements of other people. Part of it includes being ready and willing to feel your own pain and discomfort, in that moment, with that person. The extent to which you are closed to feeling is the extent to which the other person will not feel it safe enough to let their guard down. Part of it includes listening and speaking in a way that generates a sense of reverence and care for the other person, listening not for how their position is opposed to yours, but for what underlies their position: the challenges, feelings and pain they are facing, and the people and values for which they stand. In this way, they learn to see you as their ally in a common quest, not their adversary. All of this is not so much an intellectual challenge as an emotional one. We are bred to be tough and can discuss arbitrarily disturbing ideas without feeling the impact of these ideas on us. Positional thinking is a great way to build walls to protect ourselves, and those we talk to, from facing what we’re about to face. We can judge them for not opening themselves up to hear, but so long as we are using a language that expresses opposition, we can’t blame them for remaining aloof, indifferent and detached, because we are giving them good reason to experience us as a threat, even if unconsciously. First priority, I’d say, is choosing to be ‘the one’ for your people, come what may. Sooner or later your people will feel that you are fully ‘for them,’ and from that point on sharing difficult information will become less difficult.”

2. How can we form personal relationships with people that can survive the disappearance of official life support systems based on finance, commerce and centralized authority?

“It is like any group situation, be it who you work with or your neighbors. You don’t get to choose the people you are going to be washed up with, and there are bound to be a few awkward characters among them. Most people will moan and whinge about them, and hope that they get fired or move house, but generally you have no influence over this and you are stuck with them. The best policy is to accept that they are there to stay and that you cannot change them. You can only change how you react to them. They will respond to how you react, so if you continue to show respect and listen to their views, however negative they may be, they are more likely to feel secure and become less of a problem. If they sense a negative vibe, then, chances are, the situation will deteriorate.”

“Collapse won’t wait for anyone’s personal change, so we’re all going to be renovating the people we’re living with, and there will be a lot more disassembling and reassembling than starting from scratch. You may not survive, but some other spirit that inhabits your body just might, and being willing and able to discard your old self-image will be crucial. Once I started letting old opinions go, then, much to my surprise, old bad habits fell away as well. I once thought that this was impossible, that humans couldn’t change sufficiently; now I know that it is possible, but see that it is unthinkable for most.”

“It helps to start living as if you believe that collapse is inevitable; that is, preaching by example rather than by word. Specifically, it is important for other people to see that you can be happy without all the trappings of wealth and prosperity that we have come to expect. Once you start living a post-collapse lifestyle, others that are aware of collapse will recognize that you are one of them and will engage with you. People who are attached to growth and prosperity will avoid you like they avoid panhandlers. That is, they will pretend that you do not exist. If the rest of your family is firmly mired in the status quo, you may have a hard time living a post-collapse lifestyle right now. If you care for them and their well-being, then there is not much you can do other than be kind to them, knowing that they might form the core of your post-collapse community.”

“We need to be focusing on those relationships that are not dependent on the official life support systems. A relationship that is based on occupying a shared physical space is more likely to persist. The shared space must be physical. If it is conceptual—such as relationships with those who share a belief system with you—then there must also be a physical element to it. I will never meet most of you who are reading this, although we do occupy a shared conceptual space on this blog, and so there is no basis for this relationship to persist if electronic communication becomes unavailable (the internet being an example of an official life support system).”

“It looks like we are on a journey back toward a wild state, and away from pyramid-shaped social hierarchies. We have to form transitional communities, because the bands that thrive in the wilderness are family-based, while most of us can’t take our blood relations with us because they don’t want to come with us. So we have to form our bands with whoever we end up with, and later form families—if we survive. Right now, the rigid social forms are shaking so much they are turning to liquid. If you notice, nation-states seem to be on their way out.”

“Building healthy, useful relationships with people is something that happens spontaneously when you back away from corporate and institutional life. You then get a chance to meet other refugees from the system. Don’t expect to meet fellow collapsniks in the boardroom or at faculty meetings. It is also necessary to let go of some very unhelpful notions of status, knowledge and intellectual superiority, which very much get in the way of friendships of the more useful kind. I see this all the time, often amongst those who imagine themselves as members of the elect.”

“One of my degrees is in sociology, and I’ve always had a deep interest in and appreciation for groups like the Amish, Hutterites, Mennonites and various religious orders including the Buddhist traditions. The various groups, structures and numbers make enlightening, required reading and discussion. These groups are often rather closed. Little tolerance is given for wandering in and out. The Mormons are a classic structure with their Wards: you go where you are assigned, based on where you live, not wherever you please. The best chance for survival would be in groups of 50-100 persons of all ages who share a common bond. Spiritual practice is strongest in such groups. Very often they have very healthy practices: no smoking or drinking, a vegetarian diet and so on. Do study the group structures of these groups!”

“Growing your own food has a brilliant side effect: if you grow too much of something (inevitable if you are doing it right) then you can parcel it off to neighbors. It’s a great ice breaker, and a way to quickly distinguish those who are worth the bother from those you might want to avoid.”

“People will need to make a big shift from: individual responsibility to collective responsibility; individual accountability to collective accountability; individual ownership to collective ownership; rights of the individual to rights of the group; survival of the individual to survival of the group. I have observed over the years that my educated friends are stuck in a world full of individuals and don’t have a clue on how to embrace the collective ways and values of successful ethnic communities.”

“There are so many good reasons to make the necessary preparations: improving health, getting out of debt, living frugally, building community, becoming better prepared for power outages and price spikes in food and fuel. A culture of resilience can be built without ever uttering the word ‘collapse,’ by paying attention to the people around you and doing little things to strengthen connections and build up goodwill.”

3. How can we transform our physical selves into ones that will stand a chance, by eliminating lifestyle diseases, bad habits, luxuries and comforts, and by finding maximally independent and resilient ways to provide the necessities?

“Leave the US! Because of the very high-energy intensive lifestyle baked into the car-centric living arrangement there, collapse will be sudden, devastating and violent. The government is already mobilizing the military to contain the riots and chaos they now see coming. Go south—to Mexico, Columbia, Bolivia or Vietnam, where the living is cheaper, easier and much more family- and community-centric. You may think this is hard to do. It is not. I did it.”

“To the extent that I’ve been able to rid myself of industrial capitalism, I’ve tried to avoid profligate use of oil. For things that aren’t clear-cut, my criteria usually are that if ‘they’—the pure profit-seekers—show any interest in something, I’d best avoid it. The pure profit-seekers seem to love cars. They hate buses, they really hate trains, and streetcars make them apoplectic. As a general rule, the lower-powered something is, the less they like it. But I find that I like lower-powered more and more as time goes on.”

“Personal action to promote the personal changes is available to everyone. Get rid of the TV, stop consuming news, start growing your own food, or go foraging for it. Take steps to disconnect yourself from the system. Cultivate invisibility, flexibility. Be open to trying new things: try living in a tent or on a boat for a few days; spend a day—or more—without using fossil fuels or electricity. Doing this in little bits makes it possible to do more and more.”

“Our culture has been built on patterns of addiction. Freeing yourself from them is a long journey, and the first step has to be personal, and start with a realization: ‘This isn’t working for me!’ Without it, all this talk will fall on deaf ears. Someone may agree about the limits to growth, for example, but cannot detach themselves from their patterns of addiction. As long as there’s a feeling of ‘This works for me!’ there’s no motive to change.”

“I found the ritual of buying junk food, opening it, looking at it, smelling it, and then throwing it away to be very helpful: the commercially programmed sequence of anticipation/instant gratification is destroyed, and you end up grateful that you didn’t eat the rubbish. It makes you focus on the money you just wasted as well. I wonder if a neo-Luddite movement that features ritualized disposal of the trappings of modern life could take off and give people a starting point.”

“This is the state we are in: adjusting our habits. Unfortunately, to the extent that this is within the current menu of shopping choices, it can be difficult to maintain motivation. Opting out is the right and ultimate choice we must make. But we will still need some money, because the rent seekers will throw you out if they find that your opting out interferes with their ability to collect rent.”

4. How can we make use of ritual and spiritual practice to transform a group of individuals into a community?

“Some people have a knack for ritual and are good at initiating it. It may be as simple as sharing a meal, building a fire or saying out loud what everyone is feeling. Some people are also intuitives: they have a certain knack for deciding in which direction to turn. Invariably, any group will discover who these people are and will turn to them when decisions need to be made. They are the shamans, the people who feel a connection to the spirit world. Then there are musicians and artists and story tellers, people who in our industrial society are marginal but who in a post-collapse society are important weavers of community.”

“You can’t create a community; it evolves. Shared rituals that give a spiritual dimension to life are important elements of abiding communities, but they needs to start in very simple ways. Once a day we come together to eat; once a week we come together to sing. The meaning of these repeated acts evolves over time. You can’t start off by saying ‘We are doing this as a shared spiritual ritual!’ You have to start by saying ‘We are doing this because we need to eat,’ or ‘We like singing together,’ and allow the rituals to develop.”

“Religion and belief are what holds people together. Get back to that! This means going back on your modernism, but maybe this is the price of survival. If modernism implies amorality—and then your family falls apart—then what are you left with? No family—no community. Looking at China, perhaps you don’t even need a god; perhaps traditional ancestor worship, Buddhist and Confucian values, respect for authority and parents, are enough. I think that a resurgent traditionalism will stabilize cultures, as we get back to working with our hands and relying on ourselves—not on systems or machines.”

“This will sound flip, but I don’t mean it that way. I joined the Mormons. All four questions are being realistically addressed by them. This became my choice after years of study and prayer. There may be other answers for other people, but this one works—if you are willing to make the commitment. I realize that this answer will not be popular, but if serious and sustained change is needed, any answer is going to require commitment, and you will need a way to find others who share the ability to commit.”

“Cultural change is one of the big missing pieces in this evolution that we are trying to spark in ourselves. History is full of reasons to despair that humanity will veer from the destructive course it is on, but history also can teach us how to alter this course in small ways that can add up to a massive shift.”

“The absolute magnificence and incomprehensible mystery of the very fact of existence, and the very fact of this sentience that is peering out of these eyes right now, thrills me and sustains me. I am still hopeful in the face of all of this; not sure why, given that I know what is coming.”

“Celebrate the seasons, the harvests, the migrations of birds. Treat nature, life, knowledge and wisdom with reverence.”

The topic of the future of medicine hits a nerve with a great many people. We all know people whose ability to function depends on an uninterrupted flow of “regimen” drugs. Even those who are healthy (in the sense of not having to take anything except air, water, food and a bit of sunshine) still worry about having access to medical care for emergencies, for giving birth, and for palliative care in our final months and days. It is good to know that there can be recourse (with a bit of preparation); it is also good to know what to expect and what not to expect.

Western medicine starts with the promise of eternal life but ends with hospital hallways filled with the dying while the rest of the population avoids them like the plague, for fear of getting sick. Somewhere in between, if the conditions are right, it goes through a phase of financial gluttony: how much should Americans spend on health care (whether they are healthy or not)? 20%? 30%? The sky is the limit. But the end result will be the same.

The alternative does exist. Peter picks up where James left off, responding to questions that my readers have asked me, and that we will all find ourselves trying to answer as we search for alternatives to the “radical cashectomy”—a non-elective surgery with a poor survival rate that is currently on offer at most of our contemporary medical establishments. The areas he addresses are:

• Keeping healthy
• Stockpiling medications
• Insulin-dependent diabetics
• Immunization
• Psychological medicine
• Herbal medicines (legal and illegal)
• Surgery
• Making difficult choices

1. How can we communicate the reality of collapse to family and friends in ways that are constructive rather than destructive and find helpful ways to reflect our “endarkenment” in our everyday behavior?

2. How can we form personal relationships with people that can survive the disappearance of official life support systems based on finance, commerce and centralized authority?

3. How can we transform our physical selves into ones that will stand a chance, by eliminating lifestyle diseases, bad habits, luxuries and comforts, and by finding maximally independent and resilient ways to provide the necessities?

4. How can we make use of ritual and spiritual practice to transform a group of individuals into a community?

Over the past week I have collected a number of responses from a number of people. Rachel jumped the gun, sending in comments even before I posted my questions:

The biggest specific suggestion I have for next year is something you mentioned on Monday morning: the need for a session on how to respond and deal with family and friends around us who have a different worldview that does not involve a collapse narrative. I don’t know a single person who wouldn’t benefit from this discussion. … I talked to my sister when I got home. She had attended … just [on] Saturday and got a lot out of hearing both you and Dennis Meadows speak. … After coming home, she tried to explain the conference to her husband, who dismissed the conclusions, saying the usual types of things, like “Paul Ehrlich was proved wrong.” My sister didn’t know how to talk about it. How then can she even start making changes in her own family? … How can one make important changes if one’s spouse, parent, close friend, or whoever has a different worldview? Maybe in some cases it’s simply impossible without divorcing from a relationship. But maybe there are strategies.

Ellen wrote:

Your questions just posed need to be answered. … I don’t know if the human species can or even should survive. What poor stewards of the earth we have been. But if there is to be anything of value salvaged, if we as a species are not to degenerate into mindless barbarism, then we have to create a new paradigm and a new culture. Somehow I would like to save the intellectual capital our species has evolved over the millennia. How to accomplish that is worthy of prolonged and thoughtful debate and discussion.

Pete wrote:

[Collapse] is a very depressing subject for [my family] (not so much for me) and they therefore resist because they cannot “live there”. Well, I don’t live there. I am open to what comes, will do the best I can when it does and have made common sense preparations, in addition to putting some of my savings into precious metals. I am doubtful that we can convince most people of anything. Here in the US especially they live in their own made-up world, having always during their lifetime experienced nothing but relative prosperity.

Liam wrote:

Nobody can be … sold on collapse without first experiencing it in the own lives (illness, tragedy, dissolution, etc.) and then also being curious enough about the larger world to look.

Yossi wrote:

I worked as a psychotherapist and often used the [Kübler-Ross] model with people who had experienced loss. I was able to invest in the model emotionally as well as intellectually because I too had suffered losses. None of the people attending your conference have actually experienced collapse – if they had you would not be attending a conference, using a flush toilet, eating two nice meals a day and commenting about it on the internet. Nobody really knows how they will react to loss until they have suffered it and I think that the same will apply to collapse. I am not saying that it isn’t useful to think deeply about it and have a considered response ready but when it happens the trauma will be unimaginable and emotions will overwhelm people.

On question 2, Robert wrote:

The current deep drought in California may be a valuable empirical model of how very large numbers of people respond to accelerating depletion of an essential resource. The water supply situation in California is dire. … There is abundant data on the accelerating trend of water resource depletion and the situation will worsen in the coming months. If the drought persists through the coming winter the situation will take a dramatic turn to the realm of disaster. How will the populous behave? How is California government respond? Much handwrining in State government, especially the legislature, but no tangible plan and little action. Folks watering their front lawn at mid-afternoon on hot days.

Kathy wrote:

Thank you … for writing about the Ik and introducing me to the concept of culture death. It gave me a new way to perceive that what has happened to my people was a kinder gentler version of what happened to the Ik, and [that] we are simply a little kinder and gentler than the Ik but otherwise—well the mean-as-a-snake hillbilly is not a myth. … John Michael Greer [once] mentioned in a throw-away line that if you want to understand what culture death looks like, consider Southern Appalachia.

John wrote:

At some point there will be a turning of the collective ship towards the ominous black clouds of the collapse storm. I suspect the world will quickly divide into three groups, the hopeless/helpless/abandoned urban and suburban folk (dead) the pull together/circle the wagons/we can adapt folk (mostly dead, unless lucky in location) and the various flavors of nomads, prepared and unprepared (mostly dead as well, for where is there to go?).

Jerry wrote:

I have personal experience with recently moving to a small (pop 1,200) rural but compact town that is traditionally conservative, and down on its luck economically, but also has a small community of white, middle-aged liberal progressives (for lack of a better term). Those folks are somewhat aware of the problems we face, although it rarely goes beyond the usual litany of white middle class environmental issues such as GMO’s, factory farms, etc. As such, they have recently started a food co-op that sells VERY expensive and supposedly organic food. A few of them are currently engaged in trying to get a transition movement off the ground, but whenever I try to raise the issue of global ecological overshoot and collapse with them I am literally told to shut up for being too “negative.” Right to my face. There are one or two white, middle aged, right wing preppers in town, living in luxury RV’s and stockpiling guns, ammo, rice, and beans. I can talk to those folks about collapse, but mention anything remotely like an ecological basis for our predicament and I can expect a wild-eyed, spittle-flecked tirade against the climate change “hoax.” The vast majority of the remaining population are either low-wage working class, or people living in outright poverty. Most are politically conservative and very religious. Drugs and alcohol are big problems. How then can you present the challenges we face in terms that are not political, religious, or environmental, but which somehow still communicates the urgency of the situation? And how can you communicate that urgency in a way that is not perceived as fatalistic or unnecessarily negative? How can you ask people to explore the possibility of radically rethinking their living arrangements without posing a direct threat to their worldview? I am increasingly convinced that the answer lies in one word: Security.

Kevin wrote:

You need a clan. Not a bunch of folks like you or that you like, but a group that accepts each other and will circle the wagons and not bitch too much. We need to practice it on the crowded plane, the local fair, the funerals and weddings, the office, the home. It requires virtually no moving parts, and it is what keeps folks sane when things are crappy. So when the blowhard is yammering on at conference, I have been there, just see it as practice. You have socks! And a chair! And you’re not dead!

Doug wrote:

The greatest conundrum our species faces in this dire time is our tendency toward hierarchy. 10000 years of it may be too much for our species to overcome. I feel anarchy is the only way forward, but honestly can’t see how we get from here to there.

Liam wrote:

Get into the habit of trading favors, being reliable and nonjudgmental, and the relationships will blossom. Remember we live in a toxic social context, anything less pathological sells itself.

Only Pete ventured to say anything on question 3:

I’d say by knowing what’s what, exercising common sense and doing what’s sensible and prudent while we can. The milieu with which we will be confronted is so complex that any sort of detailed planning is useless. … I would include as sensible getting rid of as much debt as is possible, owning some precious metals and storing some food, water, currency and “tradeables”.

On question 4, Pete again:

I don’t think it can be done. … For myself, I have for decades looked into that realm between religion and science, if you will, with an open mind while accepting no dogmas, and have found, I think, a few answers. But these are just for myself, unburdened by any felt need to seek agreement.

Kathy wrote:

I’ve thought and thought about this … and I can’t really justify my stand from a secular point of view. I no longer have the proper secular vocabulary to do so. So anything I said would be meant specifically for a Christian struggling to come to terms [with collapse].

Don wrote:

I would like to make a suggestion relative to rituals. Paul Woodruff, a philosopher at the University of Texas and a former military officer, has written Reverence. As a philosopher, he makes fine discriminations so that we are able to communicate with a minimum or misunderstanding. For exsample, a religious person may be reverent, but a reverent person need not be religious. On page 250, Woodruff identifies music, poetry, and ritual as key languages of reverence. Sacraments and liturgy are not generally useful languages of reverence. Giving a knife blade a sharp edge can be an exercise in reverence, I think. Watching a skilled sharpener we experience the reverence also. My guess is that we need to “re-reverence” as much of our mundane world as possible. As the distractions wind down, we will need to satisfy ourselves with reverence for what we need to do.

I hope that this conversation continues, and actually leads us to something. In the meantime, here are some interim thoughts:

• I am sorry that I didn’t make it clear from the outset, but failure is not an option. If you can’t bring your family and friends on board, then by definition they will end up overboard, and, if you don’t find yourself another group, so will you. If any of us succeed at answering question 1 but fail at 2, 3 or 4, then, again, your chances will be slim to none. Needless to say, commentary along the lines of “We’re all gonna die!” is less than entirely helpful.

• Existing society, be it urban or rural, will be of minimal use. Practice saying “culture death.” At best it will be a source of recycled material—human, animal, vegetable and mineral. Urban settings are definitely a better place to scavenge/recruit: it’s a richer environment, there are more people, a greater diversity of experience, and more immigrants (who have experienced something other than an overfed life on autopilot).

• Those who have led a sheltered and comfortable existence never having had a reason to question the assumptions on which their lives have been based will also be of minimal use. Understanding collapse requires going through it, or at least observing it directly. Prosperity, affluence and security have the same effect on character as a windless environment has on trees: even a weak gust of wind can snap them in half.

• Finally, an entirely intellectual approach will likewise be minimally useful. The task is to get people out of their heads and connect them to each other emotionally (feel the right “vibe,” if you will) and to nature physically (by dropping bad habits and developing good ones), all served up with a sense of reverence for nature (human and otherwise) and a healthy sense of awe for all that which we can never hope to understand.

Now, I would like to hear from someone—anyone—who has succeeded, to whatever small extent, and could tell us what it took and what it was like.

I got back to the boat late last night, after an intense three days of presentations and discussions. This was my third year presenting at this conference, and I am at this point quite heavily invested in this annual event and have started to take on roles I didn’t even know existed when I first showed up there three years ago not knowing what to expect.

For those who haven’t heard of this conference before, here is a synopsis. The venue is unusual for a conference: it is a large campground that occupies a bit of high ground surrounded by a fast-flowing creek nestled in the Allegheny mountains, a few miles from the Maryland border, but quite accessible because it is just a few miles from Interstate 68 and a fast two-hour drive from Baltimore. For those flying via BWI airport, there are usually enough locals driving by BWI on the way to the conference that rides can be arranged. If flying with camping gear is problematic, there is a dormitory with bunk beds and some semi-private rooms. The accommodations are basic, but there are flush toilets, hot showers, free tea and coffee available virtually around the clock, bonfires for when it gets chilly, and two satisfying and plentiful meals a day. A visit to the sweat lodge, optionally followed by a dip in the creek, rounds out the non-intellectual part of the experience.

The intellectual part of the experience is a sort of Epicurean feast for the connoisseurs of collapse. (There are plenty of conferences at which the topic of collapse has been banned; consequently, I am no longer invited to them—to my relief, because life is short, and speaking at these conferences makes it that much shorter.) Virtually all of the attendees without exception have successfully navigated their way through the grieving stage of denial prior to showing up, and there is almost no discussion of whether financial, economic, social or civilizational collapses are possible and/or likely, or whether this is something that beautiful people shouldn’t even worry their pretty little heads about. If you show up while still grappling with denial, then, in all likelihood, your head will explode, and while there will be helpful people on hand to help you find scattered pieces of your cranium in the tall grass, you will spend most of the conference gluing the pieces back together, and will miss out on all the fun. So, if you are new to the topic of collapse but curious about it, please acquaint yourself with the Kübler-Ross model and do whatever you have to, prior to showing up, to get past Stage 1. For maximum effectiveness, try to make it all the way to Stage 5 (acceptance).

In addition to the usual suspects (Gail Tveberg, Albert Bates, John-Michael Greer and me) this year featured a couple of star speakers: Dennis Meadows and Mark Corchrane.

Dennis is Emeritus Professor of Systems Management, former Director of the Institute for Policy and Social Science Research at the University of New Hampshire, and Lead Researcher and co-author of the Club of Rome’s 1972 publication, The Limits to Growth. He successfully predicted the collapse of industrial civilization four decades ago—successfully in that the model he presented back in 1972 has been in remarkable agreement with observations ever since. Since then, he has collected several large boxes of articles attempting to disprove his claims, and a slender stack of articles pointing out that he was right. Even in science, getting it right is not the path to recognition if the truth contradicts the dominant paradigm (of infinite economic growth on a finite planet).

Dennis had agreed to present at this conference reluctantly. He has retired from Club of Rome discussions, and has found more cheerful uses for his time. But he seemed happy with the outcome, saying that this is the first time he faced an audience that did not need convincing. Instead, he took the time to add some details that I think are crucially important, among them the fact that his WORLD3 model is only accurate until the peaks are reached. Once the peaks occur (between 2015 and 2020) all bets are off: past that point, the model’s predictive ability is not to be relied on because the assumptions on which it relies will no longer be valid. Thus, the author of this particular plot, claiming that peak population will occur in 2030, committed the exact error that Dennis warned us against: of looking too far to the right. Once the initial peaks come and go, we will be in a different world than the one he modeled in 1972—a world in which, I foresee, accurate population statistics will no longer be available. We know that the dynamics of global growth are very different from the dynamics of global die-off, but perhaps that is all that we will ever know, because there won’t be anyone left to model or measure the die-off.

Mark Corchrane is Senior Scientist and Professor with the Geospatial Sciences Center of South Dakota State University who specializes in the use of remote sensing to study the impacts of climate change. Mark’s talk was a very thorough demolition job on the various shibboleths that haunt what passes for discourse on climate change in certain intellectually stunted corners of the world. He demolished the denialist claims, and then proceeded to demolish the techno-utopian “solutions,” such as seeding the oceans, seeding the clouds, space mirrors and so on. In doing so, he did not use climate models, explaining that models are quite complicated and open to dispute. Instead, he relied on climate theories which are not in dispute because they agree with observations, and on historical measurements of climate change—its known causes and its apparent effects.

Mark’s conclusions included some tongue-in-cheek “good news”—“We’re all gonna die!”—which I took to be a nod in the general direction of Guy McPherson, who presented at this conference last year, and who predicts near-term human extinction—whereas he clearly feels that “nature bats” (vespertilio naturalis?) do last. But Mark also gave a much more nuanced summation: that while global effects of climate change can be predicted to some extent, the local effects are unpredictable but are certain to be sufficiently dramatic to make life very difficult and perhaps impossible for the vast majority of us. Apparently, there is no place on Earth where you can hide from climate change. Be it the boreal forests of Siberia or the tropics of Borneo, the local destructive effects of climate change on ecosystems are unpredictable. Most of the species alive today have evolved long after the last time such conditions occurred anywhere on Earth, plus the rate of climate change is now very fast, giving them insufficient time to adapt. Consequently, no historical data exists on which such predictions could be based. We do know some things: fish, corals and shellfish will do badly; sea grass and jellyfish will do well. (I hope that there is a sea-grass-and-jellyfish soup recipe out there that results in something palatable!) Overall, his presentation reinforced my feeling that it will be essential to remain mobile, because no one place can be expected to continue to reliably produce food.

This year, each talk was followed by an ample period of moderated discussion. Most of these Q&A sessions quite well, with people queueing up at one of two microphones to ask questions, with plenty of follow-up and group discussion. As always, there were some people who simply craved attention and hogged the microphone in spite of having little to say. But overall this format worked amazingly well: after my talk, one fellow voiced an opinion that home-schooled kids were badly socialized. There followed a spontaneous barrage of commentary on the subject of home schooling (many of the attendees have home-schooled their kids) pretty much blowing his little boat out of the water. After the talk, the discussion continued, with several professional educators providing a lot of detail on how exactly the educational system in the US is broken beyond repair. I walked away with a depth of understanding that I don’t think I would have achieved just by reading books and articles. This is a question that comes up a lot: How do we teach our kids given that the schools (both public and private) are now largely useless (if not harmful)? And the answer seems to be: home-school, or leave the country.

One of the previous presenters who unfortunately did not attend this year was Carolyn Baker. Her presentations had been unique in that they were not all in the head but attempted to get at the emotional side of collapse, and had been found to be helpful by approximately a third of the attendees in overcoming the feelings of shock and grief that naturally arise when delving into the deeply distressing subject matter of this conference. But many other people chose to cope by blocking their emotions and considering collapse as a strictly intellectual challenge, while a small minority compensated for their emotional discomfort by becoming disruptive. An age-old technique for drawing people out of their heads is through drumming and chanting, but certain people chose to ridicule Carolyn’s quite effective use of this technique as “Kumbaya and bongos.” Thus, Carolyn’s work was to some extent polarizing—but in good way, because these people didn’t show up this year. Last year’s attendees included one particularly odious 1%er whose name I forgot, together with her entourage, and they did their best to disrupt things. Needless to say, their absence this year was not missed by anyone.

The nature of the human ape being what it is, once in a while some borderline personalities always find their way into every group, resulting in some amount of drama. But a bigger problem is that the helpful, healthy kind of drama was also almost entirely missing. Most of the attendees seemed to be able to process the intellectual content of the conference, but collapse as an intellectual pursuit seems almost worthless to me. It cannot be reduced to problems and solutions. The universe, and life on earth (jellyfish, cockroaches and all) will go on with or without you, and so the only real problem is you, and how you may need to change in order to adapt. And this is not an entirely intellectual transformation, but also an emotional and a physiological one. To be sure, some of the adaptations are intellectual, and not everyone can surmount even this hurdle. There was one white-haired gentleman in attendance who complimented me on my talk on long-lasting communities by saying that it was interesting to hear “even though we find their business plan distasteful.” He gets an award for the most distasteful use of the phrase “business plan.”

But for those who did manage to grok the content of the conference on an intellectual level, there was nowhere to go further. This problem came up repeatedly in a number of conversations. I hope that these conversations continue, and I hope that next year’s conference does address the questions of personal transformation. Among the questions I would like to see the conference to address are:

1. How can we communicate the reality of collapse to family and friends in ways that are constructive rather than destructive and find helpful ways to reflect our “endarkenment” in our everyday behavior?

2. How can we form personal relationships with people that can survive the disappearance of official life support systems based on finance, commerce and centralized authority?

3. How can we transform our physical selves into ones that will stand a chance, by eliminating lifestyle diseases, bad habits, luxuries and comforts, and by finding maximally independent and resilient ways to provide the necessities?

4. How can we make use of ritual and spiritual practice to transform a group of individuals into a community?

If you have insights that you would like to contribute on any of these questions, please email me directly, and we’ll take it from there. Amazingly, it turns out that there is even some money to throw behind the effort of coming up with good answers to these questions. Don’t worry too much about the mechanics of writing: ClubOrlov’s crack team of editors and proofreaders will transform your writing into publication-quality content. Also, it’s not exactly a rush job: there are twelve months before next year’s conference. But we might as well get started now.

Rafahu

Later this week I am traveling to Artemas, Pennsylvania, to attend the third annual Age of Limits Conference at the Four Quarters Interfaith Sanctuary. I am scheduled to present on the same subject as last year: Communities that Abide, the subject a collection of articles I just published with the help of four illustrious co-authors. Although the subject is the same, I hope that the substance of this year’s discussion will be different. I hope to move beyond principles, which I explained out last year, and which I have since spelled out in the book, to practice. I hope that this year we will be able to focus the discussion on the physical, organizational, cultural and psychological problems that must be solved in order for resilient, self-sustaining communities to form.

Last year’s conference was the second venue at which I gave that talk. The first one was at the North House Folk School in Grand Marais, Minnesota, on the shore of Lake Superior, an hour’s drive from the Canadian border. There, the talk was very warmly received, by the students and the community elders alike, and resulted in very purposeful discussion. You see, this school is very popular and very successful at teaching a wide range of traditional skills. Many of these skills are directly applicable to creating independent, resilient lifestyles within the setting of a small community. But forming such a community is a problem: real estate is expensive, transportation costs are high, jobs are few and far between and pay less and less, and there is a great deal of financial and regulatory overhead that stands in the way community self-sufficiency. After some brainstorming, a potential solution was hit upon: the school would create a colony for its graduates, allowing successful graduates to become part of it. Since, in turn, the colony would embody the principles taught by the school, it would help strengthen the overall effort.

When I gave the same talk a month later at last year’s Age of Limits conference, the reaction was rather different. There was almost no discussion of impediments to implementation or ideas for overcoming them. Instead, the conversation veered off into gender politics, with some amount of booing and hissing from the female members of the audience. You see, the examples I picked, which included, among others, traditional, religious communities with patriarchal gender roles, were said to be ill-suited as models for such a “progressive” group. (By the way, I never proposed that they be used as models, only as examples from which general principles can be uncovered.) Then there followed some harsh (and, to my mind, ridiculous) criticisms of the Amish, who were said to abuse their wives and children. Compared to the focused and productive discussion at Grand Marais, this one turned out to be a complete waste of time. I was flabbergasted by this reaction, only later realizing that I had blundered into an American cultural war zone. I later realized that none of the criticisms raised had the slightest bit of relevance to the topic under discussion. Here, I want to draw a line behind all of that, and establish a basis for moving forward. I hope that this year’s conference will be on target.

Discussions of social policy, especially with regard to such things as the rights of women and sexual and racial minorities, play a very special role in American politics. As I’ve explained recently, it has recently been shown that the US is not a democracy, in which public policy is influenced by public opinion, but an oligarchy, where public policy is driven by the wishes of moneyed interests. On major issues, such as whether to provide public health care or whether to go to war, public opinion matters not a whit. But it is vitally important to maintain the appearance of a vibrant democracy, and here social policy provides a good opportunity for encouraging social divisions: split the country up into red states and blue states, and keep them in balance by carefully measured infusions of money into politics, so as to maintain the illusion of electoral choice. Throw a bit of money at a religious fundamentalist candidate, and plenty of feminists, gays and lesbians will vote for the opposing kleptocrat who will, once elected, help Wall Street confiscate the rest of their retirement savings, in return for a seat on the board; throw another bit of money at a rainbow-colored lesbian, and plenty of bible-thumping traditionalists will vote for the opposing kleptocrat who, once elected, will funnel tax money to his pet defense contractor in return for some juicy kickbacks. This part of the American political system works extremely well. On the other hand, if some matter comes before the politicians that requires helping the people rather than helping themselves and their wealthy masters, the result is a solid wall of partisan deadlock. This part works very well too—for the politicians, and for the moneybags who prop them up, but not for the people.

While it is the entire country that is being victimized by this system of governance based on the principle of social divide and conquer, it is women and minorities that are the pawns in this game, and the biggest losers, with some of the worst outcomes out of all of the developed countries. The US has the largest number of children born into poverty and leads the world in teenage pregnancy and the rate of sexually transmitted disease infection among teenage girls. In spite of what’s been called “progress,” the effect of women working outside the home has been to halve family incomes. American women never got equal rights: the Equal Rights Amendment died a painful death in 1982, when the final deadline for its ratification expired. (Compare that to the Russia, where the equal rights of women, including equal pay for equal work, was enshrined in Article 122 of the Constitution of the USSR in 1936, and has been a fixture of the political landscape ever since.) As for minority rights, there are more black slaves in America today than there were before the Civil War—they used to work on plantations, but now they work in prisons, many of which are privately owned, where they make money for their politically connected owners. With regard to the rights of sexual minorities, it needs to be noted that not only does the US lead the developed world in rape, but that here rape is evenly distributed between men and women, male rape being most prevalent, again, among the prison population.

This vast landscape of societal failure is obscured behind a verbal veil of political correctness. Never mind the fact that the nirvana of progressive race and gender politics only exists on television (where it is faked) and among a few of the continuously shrinking remnants of the middle class—we are still required to pay lip service to it. Elite universities have evolved an entire gender-neutral, racially bland system of circumlocution, which is now mandatory for everyone to learn and use: say “he” instead of “she,” and suddenly you are a sexist. Calling a spade a spade is forbidden: idiots no longer exist—now every one of them is “mentally challenged,” nor do senile old fools—who are now “Alzheimer’s sufferers.” Scores of people are required to undergo mandatory sensitivity training, where they are brainwashed until they are no longer capable of telling other people exactly what they think of them. Thus, hypocrisy has been promoted from a character flaw to a national requirement. (By the way, this inability to communicate effectively takes a terrible toll on national productivity, but that’s a side matter.) The important point is that those who insist on acting as willing pawns in this game are choosing a specific path for themselves. I like to call it the path of voluntary extinction—the guaranteed end result of endlessly plastering societal failure over with bullshit.

The Age of Limits conference is based on a certain view of the future, which was first articulated in the Club of Rome study of 1972, and, in spite of a storm of criticism, has been vindicated because its predictions have turned out to be exactly on target. One of the presenters at this year’s conference will be Dennis Meadows, the co-author of the study. This study predicts that global industrial civilization will have largely run its course in as little as two decades. Those who accept the predictions of this study (the purpose of this conference is to discuss their implications and ramifications) also accept a rather austere view of the future.

In this context, the path of communities that abide is not the path of voluntary extinction. It is the path of survival, the path of individual sacrifice for the benefit of the community and its future generations. The tasks of giving birth to, bring up and educating the next generation while keeping everyone housed, fed, clothed, healthy and entertained will leave scarce time for pursuing higher education or a career outside of home, exploring alternative lifestyle choices, or discussing gender politics. The two most important occupations will be Mother and Father. Small communities have little room for specialization, but a basic level of specialization based on whether you are a boy or a girl has been found to be universally advantageous. This is what I would like to take as the point of departure for this year’s conversation, and leave discussions of gender to the session which will specifically focus on questions of gender and which will be run by Carolyn Baker.

When I asked people to contribute content to the book on Communities that Abide, which is now nearing publication (with two chapters already at the proofreading stage), I didn’t know quite to expect. The results went far beyond my expectations. This week I will highlight the chapter by James Truong, MD, who practices emergency and family medicine in rural Canada. His chapter, “Appropriate Health Care for a World In Flux: A Strategy,” is a must-read for anyone thinking about founding or joining a resilient community. It is an in-depth guide to health care in a world where the Health Care System that currently exists in the developed nations of the world is inaccessible, unaffordable, or nonexistent. His subtitle reads: “Monday: feed the family. Tuesday: don’t get sick.” But what if you do? Dr. Truong explains the options.

Dr. Truong carefully teases apart the overwhelmingly complex subject of “health care” into elements that anyone can, and should, understand. First, he teaches us to think about health conditions, by putting them into categories: each condition is either acute or chronic, and either benign or dangerous. Each combination of these requires a different approach: acute-benign better get treated at home, acute-dangerous may require expert intervention from the community’s designated health care provider(s) (whoever they may be), but with no guarantee of a positive outcome. Chronic-benign conditions (lifestyle diseases, boutique diseases such as cosmetics or gender identity) are, in this context, not handled as medical issues at all. Chronic-dangerous conditions (obesity, heart disease, hypertension, diabetes) will, to make a long story short, result in shorter lives.

Next, Dr. Truong focuses on the three aspects of medical preparedness at the community level: Toolset, Skillset and Mindset. In explaining the Toolset, he lists the different categories of drugs and supplies, and describes a general strategy for deciding what to stock. Under Skillset, he describes which skills can and should be practiced at the community level (dressings and stitches), which require expert intervention, and which need not exist at all (surprise: CPR isn’t on any of the lists). But the most important section is on Mindset. Here all the mental clutter caused by two or three generations of medical “miracles” is cleared away, and replaced with an appreciation for the value of good health and an unsentimental understanding of one’s mortality:

“It is sometimes said that past a certain point when you’re climbing Mount Everest, your body is busy dying and the race is just to get to the top and get back down before it finishes the job. There can come a point of literal no-return, where, if the weather changes, or equipment fails, or you can’t descend fast enough, a return to base camp becomes impossible. Yet summit attempts continued despite a tacit understanding that some people are never coming back. I’m not suggesting that climbing tall mountains is appropriate for everyone, but in a sense we all do it anyway, and the mindset when thinking about our own health should be analogous. There’s no point in worrying about the fact that we can’t walk backwards in time, as a society or individually. It’s enough to keep gazing ahead while choosing our footsteps with care, all the while recognizing that we’re climbing the only mountain we’ll ever climb, and that the air is getting thinner.”

In the end, Dr. Truong reminds us, your health care begins with you and ends with your friends:

“Take care of yourself first. This is known as the “airline oxygen mask doctrine”: In case of cabin depressurization, put your own mask on first, then help those beside you. This seems counterintuitive to prospective lay healers, but it holds true. If everyone adopted this policy, we would all be more self-reliant and resilient and more able to pass on a surplus of caring.”

“We need to get away from some of the taboos and hangups of our current medical model. One of them is the prohibition against treating people you know socially, friends and family. In a small town like mine, this is already difficult. In an even smaller community, it would be impossible. I would propose that it is undesirable in the first place. Some of the proudest care I’ve ever given, I’ve given to people close to me.”

“I would remind people to cherish community and the help of others, as they are the cornerstone of a resilient health care system. Other people are the best, most effective tool in your first aid kit. In Emergency Medicine terms, everyone knows (I hope) that the proper response to profuse bleeding is constant, direct pressure. You may know that but if you are alone it’s just that sometimes, you just… can’t… reach. I’ve sutured myself up twice (once without anaesthetic)—both times out of necessity. I’m an excellent surgeon normally. But both times, the result was suboptimal and I would have done better with the help of my seven-year-old daughter.”

Please pre-order your copy of the book by clicking the “Buy Now” button on the right. Just one printing is planned, based on demand, and so this is the only way you can be sure of getting a copy. This is not a book that you will read just once. I promise you: if you are serious about community, it will stay on your bookshelf forever.