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People grow old and die. Civilizations eventually fail. For centuries amateur philosophers have used the former as a metaphor for the latter, leading to a few useful insights and just as many misleading generalizations. The comparison becomes more immediately interesting as our own civilization stumbles blindly toward collapse. While not the cheeriest of subjects, it’s worth exploring.

A metaphor is not an explanation.

First, it’s important to point out that serious contemporary researchers studying the phenomenon of societal collapse generally find little or no explanatory value in the metaphorical link with individual human mortality.

The reasons for individual decline and death have to do with genetics, disease, nutrition, and personal history (including accidents and habits such as smoking). We are all genetically programmed to age and die, though lifespans differ greatly.

Reasons for societal decline appear to have little or nothing to do with genetics. Some complex societies have failed due to invasion by foreign marauders (and sometimes the diseases they brought); others have succumbed to resource depletion, unforeseeable natural catastrophe, or class conflict. Anthropologist Joseph Tainter proposed what is perhaps the best general theory of collapse in his 1988 book The Collapse of Complex Societies, which argued that the development of societal complexity is a problem-solving strategy that’s subject to diminishing marginal returns. Once a civilization’s return on investment in complexity goes negative, that civilization becomes vulnerable to stresses of all sorts that it previously could have withstood.

There is a superficial similarity between individual aging, on one hand, and societal vulnerability once returns on investments in complexity have gone negative, on the other. In both cases, what would otherwise be survivable becomes deadly—whether it’s a fall on an uneven sidewalk or a barbarian invasion. But this similarity doesn’t provide explanatory value in either case. No physician or historian will be able to do her job better by use of the metaphor.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How Big a Disaster Can Climate Change Be?

February 3, 2018

How Big a Disaster Can Climate Change Be?

Above, you can see an image from the paper by Marsicek et al., just appeared on Nature. It shows a reconstruction from pollen records of the temperatures of the past 10,000 year or so, the “Holocene,” for North America and Europe. Note the black squares, showing how fast temperatures have been growing during the past 50 years or so.

As all reconstructions of the past, this one has to be taken with some caution, but it fits well with the various “hockey sticks” that research continues to produce despite the attempts to discredit both the science and the scientists who work in this field. So, we can assume these results to be reasonably reliable. Then, we can note a few interesting things.

1. What we call “civilization” arose and continued to exist during a period of relatively constant temperatures, that is, during the past 5000 years or so. During this period, the oscillations in the graph are never more than about half a degree. That’s probably not a coincidence. Agriculture and civilization come together and it is unlikely that agriculture could have been developed for wildly oscillating temperatures and rapidly varying climates

2. Civilizations seem to grow and collapse because of internal factors – the fall of empires doesn’t seem to be correlated to climate change. For instance, you can look in the graph for the data corresponding to the fall of the Roman Empire, between 2000 and 1500 years ago. Temperatures are flat, at most cooling a little. It is a point that I already made on the basis of another set of data specific for the region occupied by the Roman Empire. These more detailed data show a cooling period in Europe, but after the fall of the Empire.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

“The collapse of our civilization is not a political issue.” Really??

January 25, 2018

“The collapse of our civilization is not a political issue.” Really??

The cover article of New Scientist this week asks “Is Western civilization on the brink of collapse?” I’m glad they’re raising this question, but their discussion was extremely disappointing.

First, as George Monbiot points out in a follow-up article, the article fails to distinguish between Western and global civilization, conflating two very different issues: 1.) the recent historical dominance of the West over the rest of the world, and 2.) the unsustainable dynamics of our global civilization.

Worse, in their editorial, they argue that on the issues of climate breakdown and environmental collapse, those raising the alarm have “prematurely politicised the science and hence provoked pushback from people on the other side of the fence.” To me, that reads like saying that those who argue that the Earth orbits the Sun have prematurely provoked pushback from the Flat Earth Society by emphasizing the role of gravity. It’s the kind of thinking that grants false equivalency to climate deniers and leads to pseudo-scientists funded by the Koch brothers getting equal television time to real scientists representing 98% of scientific opinion.

Bill Nye and climate deniers — Arguing against “politicizing” civilizational collapse is the same mindset that leads to offering equal TV time to pseudo-scientific climate deniers

As I describe in my recent article, “What Will It Really Take to Avoid Collapse?“, the underlying drivers impelling our global civilization to the precipice are the economic structures of a global capitalist growth-based system driven by massive transnational corporations that are more powerful than individual nations. Since politics is, by definition, about the dynamics of power and governance, how is it possible either to diagnose the problem or suggest solutions without it being political?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Old Age and Societal Decline

January 18, 2018

Old Age and Societal Decline

A metaphor is not an explanation.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How A North Korean Electromagnetic Pulse Attack Could Kill Millions And Turn America Into A Post-Apocalyptic Wasteland

November 29, 2017

How A North Korean Electromagnetic Pulse Attack Could Kill Millions And Turn America Into A Post-Apocalyptic Wasteland

This is why North Korea’s test of an intercontinental ballistic missile is so important. North Korea had test fired a total of 22 missiles so far this year, but this latest one showed that nobody on the globe is out of their reach. In fact, General Mattis is now admitting that “North Korea can basically threaten everywhere in the world”, and that includes the entire continental United States. In addition to hitting individual cities with nukes, there is also the possibility that someday North Korea could try to take down the entire country with an EMP attack. If the North Koreans detonated a single nuclear warhead several hundred miles above the center of the country, it would destroy the power grid and fry electronics from coast to coast.

I would like you to think about what that would mean for a few moments. Suddenly there would be no power at home, at work or at school. Since nearly all of our vehicles rely on computerized systems, you wouldn’t be able to go anywhere and nobody would be able to get to you. And you wouldn’t be able to contact anyone because all phones would be dead. Basically, pretty much everything electronic would be dead. I am talking about computers, televisions, GPS devices, ATMs, heating and cooling systems, refrigerators, credit card readers, gas pumps, cash registers, hospital equipment, traffic lights, etc.

For the first couple of days life would continue somewhat normally, but then people would soon start to realize that the power isn’t coming back on and panic would begin to erupt.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Taxes the Lynch-Pin of Civilization

October 12, 2017

Taxes the Lynch-Pin of Civilization

QUESTION: Mr. Armstrong: I find it disheartening the more I try to advance my family to build a better future for them, the more I realize that the harder I work we do not really get ahead. I agree that taxes just keep moving higher and I am now looking for a job in my field to leave California. A friend of mine from school left Illinois and moved to Texas. He said he feels much better and is gaining ground instead of losing it. Has taxes been the driving force to create migration in advanced civilization?

ANSWER: Absolutely. I have written how Rome fell and just mapping the population of Rome you can see the fate of Illinois – people sell and just leave. It is different this time because, under socialism, the government has become abusive. When it came to integration, they sought to implement it by sheer force.

You simply can’t legislate the poor into prosperity by legislating the wealthy out of prosperity. Jobs are created by the wealthy who become wealthy because of their innovation as a vision – i.e. Henry Ford, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and so on. Hemry Ford’s vision created the auto industry. Bill Gates in bringing DOS to life, created the personal computer industry as did Steve Jobs. How much employment did just those three men create? Far more than government.

Government creates nothing to advance society or to increase GDP in any positive manner. It is a natural human response not to pay taxes and this is why taxes have been the number one reason for civil war and revolution. It is always resentful to pay taxes whereas to give money to help someone is rewarding. Taxes tend to support politicians and their pensions which they exempt themselves from everything from Inside Trading to Obamacare. If they must sell some asset to take a government job, it is tax-free.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Cycle of Civilization

August 29, 2017

COMMENT: Interestingly enough, in Switzerland the -in majority- leftish and Pro-EU government has been trying to push Switzerland into EU for years as you’re aware of.

Now the SVP is fighting against a new international contract, called “institutional agreement” which would give (amongst others) the EUGH the Supremacy Clause over Switzerland – end of Swiss direct democracy plus all still existing “state” rights (despite 60% – 80% of all new regulations/laws are already taken over from Brussels..)

REPLY: While the revisionists want to claim that the Civil War was only about slavery when in fact the overwhelming majority of Confederate soldiers owned no slaves, they say history is written by the victor not the loser. There is never a single reason for any war. Iraq was claimed to be protecting the people who Saddam Hussein was gassing. The weapons of mass destruction was thrown in for good measure to make it sound urgent when it was Dick Cheney and his greedy buddies looking for oil. Nevertheless, the Civil War was really part of the Cycle of Civilization. We band together creating large governments and then we disband and move back to tribal jurisdiction. This Cycle of Civilization has been going on for thousands of years.

Indeed, this trend is part of the Cycle of Civilization we must understand run the course throughout history of human existence. The Roman Empire took over states and absorbed them to dominate the Western World. Previously, those states suppresses tribes to create states with a central power. When Rome fell, it broke up not into states, but back into tribes and then feudalism. As invaders reemerged, then these feudal castles banned together for a common defense.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

A Simpler Way: Crisis as Opportunity

June 7, 2016

A Simpler Way: Crisis as Opportunity

Jordan Osmond and Samuel Alexander Image from ‘A Simpler Way: Crisis as Opportunity’ 2016

On July 27 2015, I posted a 2-hour interview with Nicole Foss that was recorded when we were in Melbourne in April that year. The interview -though not the full two hours of course- was always meant to be part of a documentary by our friends Jordan Osmond and Samuel Alexander. The documentary is now out.

Below, you can find the trailer, the full documentary, as well as a re-run of the full interview with Nicole. I haven’t had time to watch the documentary, just got the mail from Sam, but I will later today. No doubt, it’ll be worth your while and mine. I remember complimenting them on the sound- and picture quality of the interview last year. Plus, get the likes of our dear friend Dave Holmgren together with Nicole and Ted Trainer, amongst others, and you can’t very well go wrong, can you?

(NOTE: Saw some rushes, and it may contain a tad much hippieness and/or reality-TV semblance for some)

The trailer:

With the text published with it:

The overlapping economic, environmental, and cultural crises of our times can seem overwhelming, can seem like challenges so great and urgent that they have no solutions. But rather than sticking our heads in the sand or falling into despair, we should respond with defiant positivity and try to turn the crises we face into opportunities for civilisational renewal.

During the year of 2015 a small community formed on an emerging ecovillage in Gippsland, Australia, and challenged themselves to explore a radically ‘simpler way’ of life based on material sufficiency, frugality, permaculture, alternative technology and local economy. This documentary by Jordan Osmond and Samuel Alexander tells the story of this community’s living experiment, in the hope of sparking a broader conversation about the challenges and opportunities of living in an age of limits.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Civilization Ebbs and Flows: You Remain

April 20, 2016

CIVILIZATION EBBS AND FLOWS: YOU REMAIN

When I was planning my three Matrix collections, I made this note:

“Civilizations ebb and flow, rise and fall, but the individual remains. He needs, under any and all circumstances, to keep two capacities intact: 1) reasoning, logic, analysis; and 2) imagination. These are the well springs. No matter what situation he finds himself in, he will need these. He should not only preserve these two faculties, but also expand and deepen them. Nothing that could be happening around him is an excuse to desert these cores.”

What is happening around us now, in these times, certainly provides major distractions and diversions. It’s easy to go off on tangents and engineer reasons why we can’t achieve goals and embody our dreams. But that doesn’t help us. It doesn’t serve our interests.

After 30 years of working as a reporter, author, and researcher, I’ve come to understand that an imagined vision of what a person truly wants is his North Star. Working at higher and higher levels to fulfill that vision and make it into fact in the world eventually produces unexpected rewards. And also spills over into benefits for others.

The phrase “truly wants” is a key. When you reach down to that level of desire and see it, you find both peace and energy.

You find leverage. Now circumstances tend to adjust to you, rather than you adjusting to them.

It is as if the status quo has been waiting for a change, a transformation, and it moves toward you for assistance.

At the root of ancient alchemy was the notion that nature, in all its manifestations, was engaged in conflict, and a “quintessence” was needed to work a higher resolution. That quintessence is born out of imagination, the envisioning of new possibilities.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The other side of the global crisis: entropy and the collapse of civilizations

March 4, 2016

The other side of the global crisis: entropy and the collapse of civilizations

When we discuss the impending crisis of our civilisation, we mainly look at the resources our economy need in a growing quantity. And we explain why the Diminishing Returns of resource exploitation pose a growing burden on the possibility of a further growing of the global economy. It is a very interesting topic, indeed, but here I suggest to turn 180 degrees around and take a look at the “other side;” that is to what happens where the used resources are discarded.

Eventually, our society (as any other society in history) is a dissipative structure. It means that it exist only because it is able to dissipate energy in order to stock information inside itself. And there is a positive feedback: more energy permits to implement more complexity; and more complexity needs, but it also permits a larger energy flow. This, I think, is a crucial point: at the very end, wealth is information stocked inside the socio-economic system in different forms (such livestock, infrastructures, agrarian facilities, machines, buildings, books, the web and so on). Human population is peculiar because it is a large part of the information stocked inside the society system. So, from a thermodynamic point of view, it is the key part of “wealth”, while from an economic point of view people can be seen as the denominator of the global wealth.

The accumulation of information inside a system is possible only by an increment of entropy outside the same system. This is usual with all the dissipative structures, but our civilisation is unique in its dimension. Today about 97% of the terrestrial vertebrate biomass is composed of humans and of their symbionts and we use about the 50% of the primary production (400 TW?), plus a little less than 20 TW we have from fossil fuels and other inorganic sources.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Cashless Crisis: “With Digital Payments, Civilization Comes To An End Until Power is Restored”

February 16, 2016

Cashless Crisis: “With Digital Payments, Civilization Comes To An End Until Power is Restored”

grid-vulnerable

The coming brave new world may also be a fragile one.

As most of the Western world is pushed into abandoning cash and embracing a fully digital cashless grid, it is apparent how vulnerable populations will become in times of crisis.

If the power grid were to go down in a storm or an attack, it is readily apparent that the system of commerce would go down with it; payments would stop and desperate people would line up for help. Those with their own supplies, barter items and physical commodities will remain the most comfortable, but the very fabric of society could come unglued.

Will they really ban cash when so much could go wrong?

Paul-Martin Foss writes for the Carl Menger Center:

Cash is being displaced by credit and debit cards, which are themselves beginning to be displaced by new digital currencies and payment systems …

But despite all the advances brought about by the digital revolution, there are still quite a few drawbacks. The most obvious is that it is reliant on electricity. One major hurricane knocking out power, a mid-summer brownout, or a hacker attack on the power grid could bring commerce to a halt. With cash, transactions are still possible. With digital payments, civilization comes to an end until power is restored. Unless you have food stored or goods with which to barter, you’re out of luck. Just imagine a city like New York with no power and no way to buy or sell anything. It won’t be pretty.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Opaque Process of Collapse

February 4, 2016

The Opaque Process of Collapse

The ultimate cost of protecting the privileges of the few at the expense of the many is the dissolution of the social order that enabled the rule of the privileged few.

When I write about the demise of unsustainable systems, readers often ask me to describe the collapse I see as inevitable. This is a tough assignment, as there are as many kinds of collapse as there are systems: fragile ones can collapse suddenly, and resilient ones can decay for years or even decades before finally imploding or withering away.

Another way of describing collapse is: complex systems become much less complex.

Certain features of modern life could collapse without affecting everyday life much–for example, the derivatives markets could stop working and the impact would be enormous on those playing financial games and those who entrusted money to the gamblers, but the consequences would be extremely concentrated in the gambler/speculator class. Despite the usual cries that financial losses in the gambler/speculator class will destroy civilization, the disruptions and losses would be widely dispersed for the economy as a whole.

Other collapses–in food or energy distribution, digital communications, etc.–would have immediate and severe impacts on daily life.

My three primary models of decay and collapse are:

1. Historian David Hackett Fischer’s masterwork The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History (given to me by longtime correspondent Cheryl A.)

2. Thomas Homer-Dixon’s The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization

3. The decline of the Western Roman Empire (the process, not Edward Gibbon’s epic 6-volume history). My recommended book on the topic (a short read): The Fall of the Roman Empire

Fischer’s primary thesis is that society and the economy expand in times of plentiful resources and credit, and this increased demand eventually consumes all available resources. When demand exceeds supply and excesses of credit reach extremes, inflation and social disorder arise together.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Derrick Jensen has Inspired Me to Question Civilization

October 22, 2015

Derrick Jensen has Inspired Me to Question Civilization

liberate from civilization Photo: Hartwig HKD/Flickr CC.

I rode my horse out through the woods the other day. It was a beautiful Autumn afternoon as golden light filtered through the trees. My horse was keen to graze in an open meadow, so we found a spot where he could forage for some greenery among the late season grasses.

On my ride out, I had been thinking about the widening gulf between the natural world and contemporary civilization. I had recently read Derrick Jensen’s anthology, How Shall I Live My Life: On Liberating the Earth from Civilization. In this collection of interviews, Jensen discusses the destructive dominant culture with various people who have devoted their lives to trying to re-vision it.

In the meadow, it seemed as if I were surrounded by the natural world.

There were birds, rabbits, deer, trees, grasses, insects and even a dried up creek bed. I could hear my horse snorting softly, with satisfaction, as he munched.

But, I also heard the sounds of the dominant culture’s industrialization — the railroad, the highway, chainsaws, lawn mowers, motorcycles, backhoes, leaf blowers, motorized children’s toys. All vestiges of our current civilization.

It didn’t have to go this way. We could have built a civilization that harmonized with our home, the Earth. But we didn’t. Instead, we built a civilization that revolved around money. And, as Marx said, money is dead. So, if we’ve built a culture around something that is dead, we will soon become dead ourselves. And kill the whole planet in the process.

As we begin to notice this, we can challenge the idea that a life motivated by desire for personal gain is either necessary or desirable. We can point to things like the collapse of the environment, suffering of the Third World, alienation, the harried style in which we live and the reductionistic values of most of Western culture.

– See more at: http://transitionvoice.com/2015/10/derrick-jensen-has-inspired-me-to-question-civilization/#sthash.5oHuGZvM.dpuf

Impunity, Functional Equivalent of Genocide: Collapse of Social Institutions

September 7, 2015

Impunity, Functional Equivalent of Genocide: Collapse of Social Institutions

The horrific refugee problem we see today, so reminiscent of population movements during World War II, next to the Holocaust itself in the historical annals of Crimes Against Humanity, and to which it was then related, remains in our times below the moral radar screen as though somehow inevitable, beyond solution, something that just happens. That is how jaded the world has become. Human flotsam, period; humanity, as the central organizing principle of life, stinks in the nostrils of nations preoccupied with other things to do. This is what I mean by the collapse of social institutions, with no guiding hand (where in all of this, e.g., is the UN or some suitable alternative if such were possible?) to prevent the humanitarian crater where a power vacuum reigns and the bottom has dropped out of global responsibility for the lives and dignity of people.

Events (i.e., human suffering) have already gone beyond what self-proclaimed civilization would allow, raising questions about whether or not there is a moral order shaping, defining, underpinning the international political system and its capacity for ensuring, or at least working toward, social justice and even human sustainability. Children and their mother drown, trucks sealed tight become mass graves, ordinary people, their belongings on their backs, pushing baby carriages, marching/walking along railroad tracks—from a descriptive point of view, prelude to World War III? Perhaps not. The world can contain (somewhat) volatility, but does a lousy job at removing the causes of human misery, indeed seems to require such a condition as validation of power and national sovereignty.

Why do present-day actors, starting with alliances, nations, social movements, and corporate units of the great chain of capitalistic being, finally, individuals in their asocial behavior, have and enjoy the capacity to act with impunity—no effective whistles blown, the smugglers of human traffic (impersonalization as seldom seen in recent years) serving as a microcosm of the whole.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Noam Chomsky: How America’s Way of Thinking About the World Naturally Produces Human Catastrophes

August 15, 2015

Noam Chomsky: How America’s Way of Thinking About the World Naturally Produces Human Catastrophes

The scholar talks about the seemingly innocuous elements of our socialization that promote one-world view over another.

Tavis: Noam Chomsky is, of course, internationally recognized as one of the world’s most critically engaged public intellectuals. The MIT professor of linguistics has long been an unapologetic critic of both American foreign policy and the ideological role of the mainstream media.

He joins us now from MIT to talk about the seemingly innocuous elements of our socialization that promote one-world view over another. Before we start our conversation, a clip from “The West Wing” that I think will set this conversation up quite nicely.

Tavis: Professor Chomsky, good to have you on this program. Thank you for your time, sir.

Noam Chomsky: Glad to be with you.

[Clip]

Tavis: I think that clip, again, sets up our conversation nicely. Let me just jump right in. Why all these years later is the west better than the east, the north better than the south, Europe better than Africa? These notions continue to persist. Tell me why.

Chomsky: There’s a generalization. We are better than they, whoever we are. So if you look through the whole history of China, one of the most ancient, most developed, civilizations which, in fact, was one of the centers of the world economy as late as the 18th century, China was better than everyone else.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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