The Collapse Party
(No, I am not suggesting that we all get hammered to make it easier to sit around watching the slow crash…)
The delightfully cynical Dmitry Orlov is at it again, with an excerpt from his new book:
If the entire country were to embrace the notion that collapse is inevitable and that it must prepare for it, a new political party might be formed: the Collapse Party. If this party were to succeed in upending the two-party monopoly and forming a majority government, this government would then want to implement a crash program to dismantle institutions that have no future, create new ones that are designed to survive collapse and save whatever can be saved. If, further, this crash program somehow succeeded, in spite of constitutional limitations on government action, and in spite of the inevitable lack of financial resources for such an ambitious undertaking, and in spite of the insurmountable bureaucratic complexity, then I for one would be really surprised!
Barring such surprises, sometimes it is possible for small groups of capable and motivated individuals to succeed where governments fear to tread. And so here are some things that I would like to see taken care of, in preparation for collapse.
I am particularly concerned about all the radioactive and toxic installations, stockpiles and dumps. Future generations are unlikely to be able to control them, especially if global warming puts them underwater. There is enough of this muck sitting around to kill off most of us. There are abandoned mine sites at which, soon after the bulldozers and the excavators stop running, toxic tailings and the contents of settling ponds will flow into and poison the waters of major rivers, making their flood plains and estuaries uninhabitable for many centuries. Many nuclear power plants have been built near coastlines, for access to ocean water for cooling. These will be at risk of inundation due to extreme weather events and rising sea levels caused by global warming. At many nuclear power stations, spent fuel rods are stored in a pool right at the reactor site, because the search for a more permanent storage place has been mired in politics. There are surely better places to store them than next to population centers and bodies of water. Nuclear reservations — sites that have been permanently contaminated in the process of manufacturing nuclear weapons — should be marked with sufficiently large, durable and frightening obelisks to warn off travelers long after all memory of their builders has faded away.
I am also worried about soldiers getting stranded overseas — abandoning its soldiers is among the most shameful things a country can do. Not only is it an indelible stain on the country’s honor, it is an effective way to create a large underclass of desperate armed men who do not answer to any authority, creating a society where the price of a contract killing is only slightly higher than the price of the ammunition. The United States maintains over a thousand overseas military bases, most of which serve no purpose other than maintaining a megalomaniac fiction of American military superiority. They are often resupplied by private contractors, whose procurement operations rely on the domestic civilian economy. As long as the economy is intact, they can bring three flavors of ice cream to an air-conditioned tent in the middle of a desert, but once the economy collapses, they will collapse with it, and the military may turn out to lack even the resources to truck in water. Overseas military bases should be dismantled and the troops repatriated.
I would like to see the huge prison population whittled away in a controlled manner, ahead of time, instead of in a chaotic general amnesty. Such an amnesty will have to happen as a matter of course, once the resources that sustain the prison system stop flowing. The scenario to avoid is one in which, in the midst of general chaos, the entire population of prisoners is released en masse and, with no other resources available to them, they start plying their various criminal trades. Paroling the non-violent, shortening sentences, decriminalizing drugs, and providing room and board to former inmates, are all reasonable steps to take to prevent a crime wave of staggering proportions once the criminal justice system finally shuts down.
Lastly, I think that this farce with debts that will never be repaid has gone on long enough. Collateralized debt will evaporate once the value of the collateral is too low to secure the debt: if the house has no water, cannot be lit, heated or reached by transportation, its value is effectively zero, and so is the value of the mortgage. Non-collateralized debt, such as credit card debt in the post-bankruptcy-reform era, is secured by the threat of force — be it breaking legs or garnering wages — and even such measures bring diminishing returns in a collapsing economy. Wiping the slate clean ahead of time will give society some time to readjust to the new reality. Perhaps most importantly, by canceling debts before they become unrepayable, it may be possible to prevent the current system — one of indentured servitude based on debt — from evolving into a system of permanent servitude based on force: a new American slavery. I remain optimistic that the forces of chaos will prevent such a system from becoming entrenched; nevertheless, it might be prudent to take some measures to make such an outcome even less likely.
For related reading see the excellent speculative nonfiction book The World Without Us, which details the breakdown pattern (and elapsed times) for various human artifacts like cities, nuke plants, the Texas petrochemical complexes, the Chunnel, etc. A great (and sobering) read. The presentation (as a sci fi scenario) is an oddly effective way of explaining the amount of damage and the number of high-risk installations we have inflicted on the biosphere.
Legume Sam:
De, I’m not sure anymore about how much people really need persuading of any great truth anymore. Do we really need to change everyone’s minds about the state of affairs in some dramatic way? Or is it that folks are so glued to the cash nexus of human behavior that they can’t be bothered to respond to the state of affairs? “Sorry, I’d like to save the world from immediate destruction, but I’m too busy. Say, I’ve got fifteen minutes next Wednesday. Will that do?”
2 April 2008, 2:13 ampeggy:
Just my point of view, but if a large number of people in communication with each other have a specific goal, and push in the direction of that goal, they stand a good chance of reaching it. The only thing that can stop them is a large number of people pushing in the opposite direction, for an opposing goal.
2 April 2008, 5:20 amStan:
Where do I sign up for the Collapse Party?
2 April 2008, 6:23 amWinston Warfield:
Ever get the feeling we as a society are a vast insane asylum, as in “doing the same (dysfunctional) thing over and over and expecting different results”? I would heartily agree with Orlov’s recommendations, especially on dismantling the American gulag, having done serious street work with violent, armed urban affinity groups (”gangs”), so can appreciate the contradictions of total amnesty vs. controlled dismantling of the cage system. For wake-up-and-smell-the-coffee reads, wherein the issue of collapse is intricately presented, don’t miss Catton’s “Overshoot”. Even “Collapse”, by Diamond, while a tad optimistic, is good. They both investigate the Easter Island society’s birth, growth, and death (replete with cannibalism and genocide). And, yes, any party (or group), or idea, which is serious about preparation is worth more than gold. The storm is here already; we in the insulated world are just starting to notice the chop and wind. USA Today’s frontpage piece is on the foreclosure wave rolling over the bow of the American Dream in Denver’s suburbs, where every third particle-board McMansion wet-dream is sporting bank padlocks on the doors, and 3/4″ plywood “windows”.
2 April 2008, 8:28 amJosiah:
This reminds me of the Duwamish River in my hometown, Seattle, Washington. The Duwamish River (which bears the name of the original inhabitants of Seattle, who were exiled to a reservation by the white settler gov’t in the 1850s) has been declared a “superfund” site by the EPA. After being turned into an industrial waterway in the 20th century, it became a dumping ground for the effluent and toxic waste of hundreds of different factories, shipping terminals, warehouses, processing plants, etc. including the Boeing Corporation’s manufacturing platforms for “Flying Fortress” bombers in WWII. As a result of all of this all-but-unregulated dumping, the Duwamish is now so contaminated with PCBs and dioxin that attempts to dredge it over the years have resulted in a disastrous spreading of contamination throughout the Puget Sound estuary. Indian communities which have been eating salmon from the estuary for thousands of years now have abnormally high cancer rates, and the Duwamish appears to be a huge environmental disaster waiting to happen. (I used to work in a warehouse along the Duwamish, and I always got a headache from the heavy air pollution surrounding the river, which looks like a chemical cesspool.)
What Orlov points out, with his signature dry wit, is that the world is now covered with accidents like this waiting to happen, the toxicological equivalent of lethal booby traps. Whatever the right approach for us is, it has to be calculated in relation to the childish recklessness of the dominant culture.
These are the kinds of things I try not to think about before going to sleep…
2 April 2008, 8:51 amdarkdaughta:
I don’t think he’s being cynical at all. I think the collapse is coming. Not an end of the world scenario. Just a gradual collapse of the structures we were all raised to believe in as sure things. What he describes is creative. If the whole book is like that, then I have to go out and buy it….when there’s money, anyways.
2 April 2008, 1:40 pmCharles:
Sounds like the next Party of a New Type.
3 April 2008, 3:26 pmRez:
Long-time reader but first post, hopefully more to come in the future. And hopefully of more substance than this little aside:
At the end of the excerpt you write, “For related reading see the excellent speculative nonfiction book The World Without Us..” If you can’t get your hands on this book, which I haven’t read (or heard of) but now plan to, or you have and want a more visually oriented approach to the same topic, here’s a suggestion. There’s an hour long special called “After People” which airs on History or the Discovery channel periodically, I’m not sure which. It deals with precisely the same subject - what happens to human edifices and constructs in a hypothetical world where all humans suddenly vanished - in a very visually striking and tolerably well-researched manner. Check it.
3 April 2008, 5:54 pmGary Edelburg:
Let’s not forget the ones helping push for the collape.
Another fat man
with a Bible in his hand
looking to nuke Iran
so Isreal will own the land
I read a blog on an “End Times” site where the blogger was hoping, as Jesus comes down to save the faithful, that he might do a loop - the - loop on the way to heaven. He thought that would be real cool. So much for “intelleguent desine . . . “
4 April 2008, 11:47 amDeAnander:
Dmitry’s on a roll.
I notice that some of my own predictions are coming true, i.e. the biofuels scam is being recognised more and more widely as… well… a scam, and ditto for the Carbon-Offset scam. Both are being revealed — and about time too — as feel-good fantasies for hyperconsumers. Let’s face the music, folks: travel by private auto and by plane are climate-wrecking, fossil-guzzling habits, both genocidal and suicidal (omnicidal in fact) to pursue at anything like the levels we’re accustomed to. No amount of cooking the books will change the physics.
4 April 2008, 4:00 pmDeAnander:
@Gary, seems to me stupidity knows no nation and no ideological loyalty — like the common cold, it’s always with us. look up “Lysenkoism” some time for a view of the Deeply Stupid Party at work in Soviet history under the banner of atheistical science
Stupid people can latch on to any ideology or religion and interpret it stupidly.
It’s helpful for me sometimes to remember the etymology of stupid — the noun form is “stupor”, a sleepwalking or trance state. The essence of “stupidity” is being in a trance — dopey, dozy, unaware of one’s surroundings — and the essence of corporate capitalist culture is to keep us all in a trance. Surely it’s no coincidence that megachurches look like shopping malls and shopping malls look like ancient temple structures in their grandiose, suprahuman scale –divorced from the quotidian reality of human life. Is the enthusiasm for Jesus doing Immelman turns in the sky really so different from the naif zeal of the would-be asteroid miners or geo-engineers who think it would be “way, way cool” to implement Larry Niven’s Ringworld dreams?
It is possible for people to be deeply engaged with daily reality in spite of — or because of — their religion, even if someone else (me for example) disagrees with their fundamental premise (a conscious and responsive Creator). And it’s possible for people to be wholly disengaged from urgent daily reality (say, certain GMO tinkerers, space-heads and nuclear fans I personally know) despite their sharing w/me a fundamental premise of atheism and a materialist/empiricist ideology.
There’s a rationalist stupor as well as a deist stupor. Either one can muzzle and bamboozle practical, survival-oriented thinking… just saying.
4 April 2008, 4:10 pmWinston Warfield:
Orlov has a wonderful idea: to replace derelict “anti-houses” with sustainable, food-producing agricultural plots. While we’re at it (any of you urban planners out there), let’s consider removing the asphalt surfacing from streets where it makes sense to do so. They’re already “public” land, so why not turn them into gardens? This will gain popularity as gasoline prices make the twice-weekly trip to the super prohibitive, and food prices there make it out of the question anyway. Why not have your food growing right out front and up and down the block, really close, so you can watch it and anticipate harvest?
4 April 2008, 4:28 pmStan:
Winston identifies one small piece of the design-nature of what is needed (not ideology!). What is needed, however, to get there from here, is a series of strategic phases and directions… generally planned backwards.
If we want public space to be thus redesigned, then we have to get public officials to make it happen.
If we want public officials to make it happen, then we have to tell them specifically what we want.
If we want to tell them what we want, then we have to identify a “we” they will listen to.
I we want a “we,” then we have to patiently persuade enough of the people who share a political space with us to act collectively.
If we want them to act colelctively on behalf of this redesign principle, then they have to understand the designs.
If we want them to understand the designs, then we have to find ways to expose them to those designs.
If we want to expose them to the designs, we need to do convince them of the problems with the old designs.
If we want to convince them of anything, we have to win their trust.
If we want to win their trust, we have to build relationships.
“We” cannot skip over any of these steps.
This is why our future depends on politics, specificallylocal politics.
4 April 2008, 6:18 pmStan:
FULL
1 May 2008, 5:05 pm