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The Lesson of 2021 is Either We Change — or Things Collapse Around Us

Here’s a tiny question. What is the lesson Covid is trying to teach us? As we settle in to a new normal, where Covid is going permanent, and there’s not much anyone can do about it except the billionaires who could vaccinate the world, but won’t — what should we be learning?

I think of Covid as a message backwards, from the future. And it says something like this. Life as you knew it is now over. The future is now going to become a bitter and bruising battle for the basics. The basics. Air, water, food, medicine, energy. Things that many of us once took for granted, and assumed would simply be around, as if by magic.

That age is now coming to an end. Did you ever think that breathable air would be in short supply? Where you have to wear a mask, because the air could infect you with a respiratory virus? That is what the future looks like, except for all the basics.

Another way to say that is that a certain way of life is now coming to an end.

To make that point, let me ask the question: why have Eastern countries done better on Covid than Western ones? What does that teach us about the future? Well, the first thing it teaches us that money and power and history are no guarantee of success in this battle for basics that the future is now about. Maybe the rich can buy clean air — but a whole society? Forget it.

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

Welcome to the 21st Century Sequel of the Catastrophic 1600s

July 17, 2021

Welcome to the 21st Century Sequel of the Catastrophic 1600s

As the chart below on ‘how systems collapse’ illustrates, the loss of stabilizing buffers goes unnoticed until the entire structure collapses under its own weight.

Disruptive extremes of weather: check

Rising geopolitical tensions with no diplomatic resolution: check

Multiplying scarcities in essential commodities: check

Domestic disorder accelerates as extreme positions harden into irreconcilable conflicts: check

Welcome to the 21st century sequel of the catastrophic 1600s, an extended period of mutually reinforcing crises that overturned regimes and empires from England to China and triggered unremitting misery across much of the human populace. (Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the 17th Century is a riveting overview of this complex era.)

What can we learn from the catastrophic 1600s? Leading the list: humans don’t respond well to scarcities. They get crotchety, argumentative, and prone to finding ways to become disagreeable rather than agreeable. Their derangement deepens as they form self-reinforcing echo-chambers of the like-minded, and the source of their misfortune shifts from fate to equally fixated human opponents.

Three extended quotes come to mind: the first bitter satirical rant from Mark Twain, the second from Patrick Henry and the third from James Madison:

Mark Twain: “O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle — be Thou near them! With them — in spirit — we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire…

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

Is Society Collapsing?

December 27, 2020

Is Society Collapsing?

Abandoned passenger train car, Astoria, Oregon. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Twenty-five years ago, when the high-tech Second Industrial Revolution had just begun, I made a bet with an editor from Wired magazine that global society led by the United States would collapse in the year 2020 from a confluence of causes created by modern technology out of control.

It would be, I said, a mix of ecological disasters including earth overheating and polar ice melting, political disintegration including failed states worldwide and uprisings in major cities, and economic chaos including insurmountable debt and a stock-market crash and depression. He said, “We won’t even be close,” and slapped down a $1,000 check on my desk. Though a tidy sum in those days, I matched it and we settled on a mutual editor friend as the arbiter, to make the call when the time came.

That time, the end of the year 2020, has now indeed come. Who wins?

As to ecological disaster, the evidence is ample even though the response to it has been negligible. The ten hottest years on earth have been between 2005 and 2020, with 2019 the hottest ever recorded and 2020 very close. That means ice melting at a record rate, with significant loss at glaciers around the world, in Greenland, and at the poles, with ice going three times as fast in the last three years in the Antarctic as just ten years ago and the Arctic in what a scientist at the Polar Ocean Physics Group at Cambridge University has called a “death spiral.” The U.N. climate panel, which puts the blame for global warming on “greenhouse gasses,” says these must cease by 2030, a goal that not a single major country is capable of meeting.

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

Demand For “Prepper Properties” Is Soaring As More People Seek Refuge From The Nightmare That Is Coming To America

January 28, 2020

Demand For “Prepper Properties” Is Soaring As More People Seek Refuge From The Nightmare That Is Coming To America

In 2017 and 2018, most Americans were generally feeling pretty good about the future, and interest in “prepping” plummeted nationwide. But now things have changed. All of a sudden, demand for “prepper properties” is absolutely soaring, and this is driving up the prices of rural homes all over the nation. In fact, in some of the hottest areas working class families have already been completely priced out of the market. Meanwhile, luxury home prices in the heart of New York City have fallen to the lowest level in six years. Many are deeply concerned about the upcoming election, and many others are alarmed by all the other crazy stuff happening all over the world, but whatever the motivation it is undeniable that an increasing number of Americans are seeking to flee the major cities right now. There seems to be a growing consensus that our society is rapidly steamrolling toward a nightmare, and a lot of people are purchasing “prepper properties” while they still can.

I knew that conditions were shifting, but I was stunned when I saw that even Realtor.com had posted an article about this growing trend…

But today, Americans en masse are again preparing for the worst—and Communists are just about the only thing not on their list. What is? Terrorist attacks, a total economic collapse, perhaps even zombie invasions. Or maybe just a complete societal breakdown after this November’s scorched-Earth presidential election.

And Reuters just posted an article in which they discussed the fact that preppers have “boosted rural land values” in property markets all across the nation…

Whichever camp, realtors say the new dropouts are not “crackpots” and often include affluent professionals whose run for the hills has boosted rural land values and started to change their property market.

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

‘Deaths Of Despair’ In The U.S. Hit Record High – So How Bad Will Things Get When Society Starts To Completely Collapse?

June 13, 2019

‘Deaths Of Despair’ In The U.S. Hit Record High – So How Bad Will Things Get When Society Starts To Completely Collapse?

According to a shocking new report from the Commonwealth Fund, the suicide rate in the United States is the highest that it has ever been before. Sadly, the same thing can be said about the death rates from drug overdoses and alcohol. All three death rates are at an all-time record high, and yet our society is still fairly stable at the moment. So if we are seeing this many “deaths of despair” right now, what in the world are things going to look like when our society really begins to start crumbling? Today, Americans have literally thousands of different ways to entertain themselves, and yet we have never been unhappier. One out of every six Americans is taking psychiatric drugs, we are currently dealing with “the worst drug crisis in American history”, and people are killing themselves in record numbers. Nobody likes to be told that they are a failure, but it certainly appears that our nation has been on an extremely self-destructive path for a very long time.

Even though “deaths of despair” have reached record levels, the researchers at the Commonwealth Fund found that there are major regional differences. The following comes from NBC News…

Rates of deaths from suicides, drug overdoses and alcohol have reached an all-time high in the United States, but some states have been hit far harder than others, according to a report released Wednesday by the Commonwealth Fund.

As far as drug overdose deaths are concerned, researchers discovered that the states with the highest death rates were all in northern Appalachia…

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

The End of the Line – A Climate in Crisis

August 4, 2018

The End of the Line – A Climate in Crisis

Train Wreck, Montparnasse, 1895

The world of academia is starting to pick up on the concept that humanity is unknowingly cruising on a train ride to doomsday, a surefire encounter with collapse of society based upon climate crises brought on by exponential climate change. The depth of the problem: It’s inevitable and inescapable.

Nonetheless, people do not want to discuss and/or read about an impending disruption to society, especially on the scale of a collapse. Still, some academics consider it responsible and in fact necessary to communicate the issue on a pre-collapse basis in order for people to learn to support each other and to explore the radical implications well ahead of time.

Hence, the premise for Professor Jem Bendell’s brilliant seminal work, “Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy, July 27th 2018.” (http://www.lifeworth.com/deepadaptation.pdf)

Accordingly, at the opening of the essay: “It is time we consider the implications of it being too late to avert a global environmental catastrophe in the lifetimes of people alive today.”

Seemingly, Professor Bendell is going out on a limb by calling for ecosystem catastrophes followed by social collapse within current lifetimes. Few, if any, academicians dare make such a prediction, and the few that do risk loss of jobs, grant funding, and renunciation by colleagues.

Kevin Anderson, deputy director of the prestigious Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in a live interview with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! at Paris 15 admitted that climate scientists low-ball their findings, often times to protect grant funding.

Anderson: “Yet so far we simply have not been prepared to accept the revolutionary implications of our own findings, and even when we do we are reluctant to voice such thoughts openly… many are ultimately choosing to censor their own research.”

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

How To Recognize When Your Society Is Suffering A Dramatic Decline

April 5, 2018

How To Recognize When Your Society Is Suffering A Dramatic Decline

When historians and analysts look at the factors surrounding the collapse of a society, they often focus on the larger events and indicators — the moments of infamy. However, I think it’s important to consider the reality that large scale societal decline is built upon a mixture of elements, prominent as well as small. Collapse is a process, not a singular event. It happens over time, not overnight. It is a spectrum of moments and terrible choices, set in motion in most cases by people in positions of power, but helped along by useful idiots among the masses. The decline of a nation or civilization requires the complicity of a host of saboteurs.

So, instead of focusing on the top down approach, which is rather common, let’s start from the foundations of our culture to better understand why there is clear and definable destabilization.

Declining Moral Compass

There is always a conflict between personal gain and personal conscience — this is the nature of being human. But in a stable society, these two things tend to balance out. Not so during societal decline, as personal gain (and even personal comfort and gratification) tends to greatly outweigh the checks and balances of moral principles.

People often mistake the term “morality” to be a religious creation, but this is not what I am necessarily referring to. The concepts of “good” and “evil” are archetypal — that is to say they are psychologically inherent in most human beings from the moment of birth. This is not a matter of faith, but a matter of fact, observed by those in the field of psychology and anthropology over the course of a century of study. How we relate to these concepts can be affected by our environment and upbringing, but for the most part, our moral compass is psychologically ingrained. It is up to us to either follow it or not follow it.

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

The Pendulum, Part Two–Hard Work, Bad Luck and Murphy’s Law

February 25, 2018

THE PENDULUM – PART TWO – HARD WORK, BAD LUCK AND MURPHY’S LAW

Missing in the mix of hundreds of bug-out stories is a forth right and candid self appraisal of lessons learned containing practical experience along with deep humility and honest self examination. High Desert expressed a willingness to share his and his wife’s adventure with TwoIceFloes and we eagerly embraced the opportunity to post his story as a three part series. Below is presented Part Two. – Cognitive Dissonance

In Part One of The Pendulum I described our red pill experience which transformed our life of blissful ignorance to one initially of fear and anxiety and later of drive and determination. Our awakening was sudden and shocking, and not something that developed slowly over the course of many years.

It was a rapid and deep immersion, a brutally cold realization what we had always believed in, of why and how the world works as it does, was in fact an externally induced false reality. We will always remember that initial sick-to-the-stomach feeling when we realized we’d been had, followed soon after by a spine tingling fear.

What we had stumbled upon was a coordinated and manipulated illusion intentionally perpetrated by those who do not have our best interest at heart and who benefit from our ignorance. Conditioned from birth to believe untruths, half truths and at times everything but the truth, the impulse to flee immediately was nearly overwhelming.

But we did not.

During the following 12-16 months we carefully and methodically worked through the issues involved with reorganizing our lives in order to leave the big city and embark on a mission to save ourselves from what we were certain at that time was just around the corner. We were on a mission. The truth of imminent economic and social collapse was, from our perspective, glaringly self evident.

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

Why Governments are Like an Ameba

January 10, 2018

Why Governments are Like an Ameba

QUESTION: Mr. Armstrong; You may be called the legend because of your forecasts on so many levels, but it might also be because you have met with more governments than probably any economist or analyst. My question is simple. From your experience, do you believe you can prevent the economic carnage that is becoming so obvious to everyone except those in government?

ANSWER: The idealistic belief in intelligence and goodness embedded within human beings is increasingly confronted with the harsh experiences of reality. We all indeed act in our own self-interest or we would take no action (Smith’s Invisible Hand). Even an ameba, which lacks consciousness as we define it being self-aware, still responds to its surrounding and engulfs its prey to survive. It responds due to its hardwired nature. Unfortunately, humans also possess at that inner level this same survival instinct that is hardwired. This makes it increasingly unlikely that willingness to change gains sufficient strength in time before the abyss is reached. Hence, we must crash and burn.

Because the government will respond in the same manner as an ameba, there is no hope that they will spontaneously look in the mirror and reach an OMG moment of realizing that they are causing the demise of our society. Consequently, they will consume our liberty until they push it to the point that society will then act only in its self-interest to survive. Historically, all governments collapse once they have consumed rights, liberty, and privileges in their desire to maintain control and in the end, die by their own greed for power. They lack any consciousness of what they are doing precisely as an ameba. There is no reasoning for there is no one single mind to reason with.

Therefore, neither I nor anyone else, possess the power to prevent the cycle from unfolding. The very best I can hope for is perhaps to influence the reconstruction.

The Structure of Collapse: 2016-2019

June 4, 2016

The Structure of Collapse: 2016-2019

Leaders face a no-win dilemma: any change of course will crash the system, but maintaining the current course will also crash the system.

The end-state of unsustainable systems is collapse. Though collapse may appear to be sudden and chaotic, we can discern key structures that guide the processes of collapse.

Though the subject is complex enough to justify an entire shelf of books, these six dynamics are sufficient to illuminate the inevitable collapse of the status quo.

1. Doing more of what has failed spectacularly. The leaders of the status quo inevitably keep doing more of what worked in the past, even when it no longer works. Indeed, the failure only increases the leadership’s push to new extremes of what has failed spectacularly. At some point, this single-minded pursuit of failed policies speeds the system’s collapse.

2. Emergency measures become permanent policies. The status quo’s leaders expect the system to right itself once emergency measures stabilize a crisis. But broken systems cannot right themselves, and so the leadership is forced to make temporary emergency measures (such as lowering interest rates to zero) permanent policy. This increases the fragility of the system, as any attempt to end the emergency measures triggers a system-threatening crisis.

3. Diminishing returns on status quo solutions. Back when the economic tree was loaded with low-hanging fruit, solutions such as lowering interest rates had a large multiplier effect. But as the tree is stripped of fruit, the returns on these solutions diminish to zero.

4. Declining social mobility. As the economic pie shrinks, the privileged maintain or increase their share, and the slice left to the disenfranchised shrinks. As the privileged take care of their own class, there are fewer slots open for talented outsiders. The status quo is slowly starved of talent and the ranks of those opposed to the status quo swell with those denied access to the top rungs of the social mobility ladder.

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

Donald Trump and the collapse of the Western Empire

April 3, 2016

Donald Trump and the collapse of the Western Empire

In this post, I argue that the ascent of Donald Trump in the US presidential race is a symptom of the ongoing breakdown of society, in turn caused by the loss of control generated by resource depletion. At the bottom of this post, you’ll find a simple system dynamics model describing the situation and generating another example of “Seneca Collapse”

Donald Trump seems to have taken everyone by surprise. Whether or not he gains the Republican nomination, and whether or not he becomes president, he took the media by storm: people writing on blogs and newspapers are reeling from the impact, asking themselves: where the heck did this come from? What is he? A God? The reincarnation of Hitler? Or of Mussolini? The devil? Or what? Personally, I don’t claim to have been less surprised than most by Trump but, rethinking about the situation, I think it is reasonable to say that something like Trump was unavoidable. He is, really, best defined as the visible effect of the ongoing social phase transition. A discrete change in our path in the direction of collapse.

For a good number of years, I have been studying the reasons for the collapse of societies. And, at the beginning, I tended to explain it as mainly the result of the depletion of crucial resources; crude oil, in our case. But, the more I think about that, the more I understand that the relation between depletion and collapse is far from being straightforward. A society can very well collapse without running out of anything; think of the case of the Soviet Union. When it collapsed, the Union had still plenty of mineral resources, but it couldn’t find a way to exploit them in a convenient manner.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How Do You Recover From An Economic Collapse?

March 7, 2016

How Do You Recover From An Economic Collapse?

The road to recovery from any type of societal collapse is largely dependent on the mechanism that caused the collapse. For this reason we need to determine what the likely cause of the collapse will be and have the appropriate equipment to fix the malfunction after it happens. This requires society to take a realistic look at the situation as it is and not how we want it to be.

Most people do not even realize that we are heading for an economic collapse of epic proportions so talking about recovery may seem like we are getting too far ahead of ourselves. What you need to understand is that what we do now, before the collapse will determine how well we are able to recover from it and how fast. When you leave on a trip you pack the appropriate clothing and make sure the car is running well and you have emergency equipment like a spare tire with you just in case. When the economy collapses if we do not have the proper emergency equipment on hand to fix the problems, we will find ourselves stranded and unable to move anywhere.

From a societal standpoint, being unable to move means we will not be able to resolve any of our problems quickly and will out of necessity begin to prey on one another to fulfill our needs. This is what will cause loss of life on a monumental scale as the crisis is drawn out over time. Having the proper emergency equipment and a plan to use it will greatly reduce the suffering that is endured by society. This does not mean there will be no pain, only that we can keep it manageable.

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

The Stupid Things People Do When Their Society Breaks Down

March 2, 2016

The Stupid Things People Do When Their Society Breaks Down

A frequent mistake that many people make when considering the concept of social or economic collapse is to imagine how people and groups will behave tomorrow based on how people behave today. It is, though, extremely difficult to predict human behavior in the face of terminal chaos. What we might expect, or what Hollywood fantasy might showcase for entertainment purposes, may not be what actually happens when society breaks down.

It is also important to note that social and economic destabilization is usually a process, not an immediate event. This actually works in the favor of liberty activists and the preparedness minded. As a system moves through the stages of a breakdown, certain signals in the psychology of the population can be observed, and this gives us a warning as to how far down the rabbit hole we have actually gone.

Except in the case of a nuclear or EMP (electromagnetic pulse) event (which unfortunately are concerns because of the powder keg situation in Syria), vigilant liberty proponents could have considerably more time than the average person to preposition themselves safely. That said, there will be a host of expanding problems of a psychological nature we will have to deal with before, during and after the final leg down in the unfolding mess that internationalists often refer to as the “great global reset.”

The following list is based on social behavior patterns commonly seen during systemic crashes through modern history (the past 100 years). These are some of the stupid things people do as they begin to realize, at least subconsciously, that a SHTF scenario is in progress.

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

Could the Post-Pandemic Chaos of ‘The Division’ Really Happen?

February 14, 2016

Could the Post-Pandemic Chaos of ‘The Division’ Really Happen?

It starts on Black Friday, as shoppers storm high street stores in search of the next bargain. Little do they know that the hard-earned cash they’re spending carries something lethal.

Within hours, as consumers mingle and move across town and country, a highly contagious virus has infected millions of Americans in every city.

By the time symptoms of the virus manifest, it’s already too late to prevent the pandemic engulfing the nation. Panic ensues. Borders are closed. Streets, towns, whole cities are quarantined.

Caught off guard, the collapse of the US government commences. Critical public services—water, transport, electricity, food—breakdown, as supply-chains fall apart.

Could it happen?

Before you start hoarding baked beans in a makeshift backyard bunker, this scenario of rapid social collapse is not a prediction. It’s fiction: the brainchild of developer Ubisoft Massive, for their eagerly anticipated game Tom Clancy’s The Division.

Except, to make the scenario as plausible as possible, the developers drew on a wealth of scientific data. If a pandemic really did hit New York City, Tom Clancy’s The Division provides a surprisingly authentic representation of how it could play out.

Over the last few decades, scientific assessments of the risk of a pandemic have viewed the threat with increasing seriousness. And it’s now widely recognized that our societies are woefully unprepared.

What’s worse is that the risk is not from bio-terrorism—but from industrial civilization itself.

In 2006, the US Department of Homeland Security issued a guide on pandemic preparedness, which warned: “The mounting risk of a worldwide influenza pandemic poses numerous potentially devastating consequences for critical infrastructure in the United States. A pandemic will likely reduce dramatically the number of available workers in all sectors, and significantly disrupt the movement of people and goods, which will threaten essential services and operations.”

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

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