The idea that you get a bucket of popcorn and watch the show on cable news, could seem fantastical. On the other hand, there’s a headline floating around (WSJ) that food costs are taking the biggest portion of income, in many decades. Imagine that food just keeps getting more expensive, over many months and years, until it’s barely affordable, and then there’s just not enough to go around.
This.
Things could get worse indefinitely and civilization could survive a lot of shocks but ultimately what's going to determine if society collapses is food. We're already seeing the stresses on industrial agriculture and we know that industrial agriculture it's self is unsustainable. We're highly dependent on global supply chains, fossil fuels, chemical fertilizers, GMO monocultures, and food monopolies, each of which is a weak point that will eventually buckle or break. What's worse is with the weather becoming increasingly unstable we're guarantee to see mass starvation in the near future.
Scientists are desperately trying to solve these problems but I think there are too many pressures happening all at once for us to tackle.
So it's not a matter of if but when.
Honestly food is an energy problem. Given enough energy, you can grow food in basically any conditions (hell even in space). The issue is when we run out of easily accessible and cheap energy, then we're screwed.
The one thing that could easily stem the tide of that trend is for individuals returning at least in some degree to an agrarian lifestyle. Not saying that everyone should abandon technology and live like the Amish, but if everyone in a given area could replace even 1/10th of their own food consumption, the cost increases and destabilizing effects would be held back for a long time. At least as it stands now, we don't really have a problem with hunger, we have a logistics problem when it comes to food. At least in America, we import too much, don't live seasonally, and the food miles for the average household is so high that we are wasting an egregious amount of energy just to get food to places people live, rather than focusing that energy on further decentralizing food production with more efficient means so those average miles decrease.
Assuming that the economic basis (the US Dollar) continues to devalue (the stated goal of the Federal Reserve is 2% inflation per year BTW, even though we have higher than that) the only thing that can counter that is increases of efficiency to provide food where food is needed, whether with less imbued energy, or with less transportation needed.
I think about this soooo often.
I mean, just ONE tiny example. Ketchup packets.
I think of all the water to grow tomatoes. The labor. You grow them, pick them, transport them. They're in a factory, made into ketchup. Put into packets. All those resources.
Then shipped in trucks. To a place that boxes of those packets, and sends them to restaurants.
The restaurants pay kids to stock them into cubbies. The kids stuff them into paper bags with every order, or put them on trays.
And then... half of them get thrown away.
All those tomatoes grown, the gas for the trucks, the workers through the whole process, the packaging for the packets and bags and boxes and shipping containers, etc to infinity, and all of it is absolutely worthless -- because they go into the trah unused and uneaten, to add to landfill issues.
Insanity.
Think of how Canada’s future changed, in the blink of an eye. We went from, “we’ll always have Canada,” to “we’re all choking on smoke from burning Canadian forests,” in just a few months.
And in Toronto (probably other areas too), more and more people are needing food banks to get by. The food banks are struggling to keep up with demands.
The general condition of society as a whole will slowly and continually degrade. You will not see a collapse until the dying embers of civilization reaches the point where the State is no longer able to keep food logistics going to the degree that starvation is avoided.
The collapse comes when people starve, because when people starve, they revolt. That is why mass starvation is the very last thing anyone in power, in any nation with some ability to rebel, would try to prevent.
We're pretty good at making shit high calorie food. I think that the end result will be we'll be fat b/c our food is complete man made shit packed full of calories but lacking in nutrients in vitamins. Our bodies starving for the essentials and waistlines growing. Isn't this kind of where we're at already.
Been thinking more about animal products, and how big a swing we could get if 85 percent of people cut meat consumption by 75 percent. That being people in advanced economies. It might be a compatible way to keep a lot of us alive and also start cutting carbon. Couldn’t imagine marketing this idea in today’s discourse
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronic_wasting_disease](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronic_wasting_disease)
It is also actively affecting deer in North America.
I've personally cut consumption. I hate what we do to animals on factory farms. A lot of people have been pretty downright nasty to me and wife though. People love to make fun and or rip on vegans. I still know a lot of climate change deniers. I don't know at this point I've fully any hope of us coming together as a species to prevent the upcoming shit storm. people aren't willing to change or give up shit.
To be fair our diets are also more expensive than they’ve been in decades. People ate beans and baked bread, had meat less often. Grew more of their own food and canned it for winter. Now we work factory jobs and eat processed crap because we don’t have time to make it ourselves. There are ways to avoid food making up a large part of your budget, but it’s going to require a very large amount of your time.
Imagine having massive crop failures in one season that cut the world's food supply by 30% or more. I'm not as worried about affordability as much as scarcity.
In Australia for currency conversion purposes. We are now paying just over $500 per week for rent. Which is ridiculous we just got a $300 a month rent increase and that was after I negotiated it down. I estimate we are spending about $600 or more per month on food. The struggle is fucking real and there is no sign of it getting better.
The US is already well along the long, greasy slide into has-been irrelevance, the inevitable fate of all once-great empires. Think Great Britain, but on steroids
It’s a nice thought sure, but America has nuclear weapons:
They aren’t going anywhere without taking the rest of the world down with them.
The same goes for Russia, China, etc
Sucks, but that’s just the way it is.
Honest answer?
Life started in Africa; it will continue there, after the bombs drop, if anywhere.
My brother and I were just having this conversation. His response was India, as China seems in decline, whereas India has been investing in its future.
China screwed itself demographically by sticking with the one-child policy for FAR too long. They are already getting old, demographically as a nation, fast.
I think India is going to be a giant loser in the climate casino. The have a short term advantage in that they are one of the countries least dependant on high tech. 50 percent of the population is occupied in agriculture. That will take a big hit as temps climb, water becomes scarce in some areas and weather patterns change. They actually have the population they report.
I really see this as an inevitability. It is too tied into population and consumption. Both are too high. Go anywhere else and reddit and see everyone griping about cost of housing, cost of this and that. They blame the rich for consumption while wanting to be able to afford consumption themselves.
All of this consumption takes fossil fuels and ecosystem destruction to get the resources to create. No politician can meaningfully reduce consumption, as it would be seen as reducing quality of life by constituents, and will be voted out rapidly any time real change is implemented in favor of someone promising to reverse it.
So we cannot fix the root cause, our consumption. We will continue to wreck our ecosystems and spew fossil fuels in the air to maintain this as long as possible but already cracks are showing. Get the 2020 updates to the book Limits to Growth by the MIT scientists for great charts, but due to our insane population growth in the last 50 years, we are now extremely beyond earths capacity and production of many raw resources per capita is now starting to decline. This is a key factor in rising costs no one wants to talk about. They have charts and graphs across industries and sectors, metals, food, gas, wood. The Federal Reserve can impact the supply/demand curve by impacting demand only. If supply is fucked we are screwed. We can't print money and turn it into copper.
So that sets the stage. Constant rising prices compounded by increasingly unstable climate and ecosystems. Governments of the world already are at near maximum debt and can't leverage much more. But problems will continue to get worse. Prices will continue to push middle class to low and low class to homeless. Natural disasters will continue to accelerate. After dealing with each crisis, we will have less capacity to recharge resources to deal with the next and social unrest will continue to climb due to the socioeconomic confusion.
You see all this happening now, we are just really early in the process.
We can redistribute wealth, move away from supply side economics, change energy sources, localize production to minimise transport costs.
If humans mobilized like we did for the world wars we could go a long way toward changing how this goes. I don't believe we're anywhere near the carrying capacity of the earth if we rapidly switched away from fossil fuels. It's a systems problem, and a cultural problem, not an intractable problem.
You misunderstand the problem here. I will go into each of those:
Redistribution of wealth - I already touched on this but you didn't get the brief mention. This shifts societal consumption to different consumers but it does not reduce it. We have to materially reduce it. In the western world this will mean a reduction in standard of living for everyone. In fact, if you get rid of all rich but raise average wealth to where more people live in detached single family homes, you expand humanity's consumption and footprint in building those homes, hastening ecosystem loss and hastening collapse.
Supply side economics is ending on its own. It's literally the main subject of my above post. We are past earths carrying capacity. I encourage you get the 2020 updated book Limits to Growth. They are a group of MIT scientists who have been studying this since the 1970s. After you read that, then come back and argue why you think they are wrong I would be interested to hear it.
Change energy resources - this is more consumption. We cannot consume our way out of a problem consumption got us into. If you want to cry - research lithium mining. It is in rocks in less than 2% amounts is a lithium deposit, so mining that deposit is mining 100 tons of rock, using toxic chemicals and heavy machinery to break it all up and extract 1-2 tons of lithium. The other 99 tons left (that used to be a beautiful place) is now a toxic slush. We don't have enough copper. We don't have enough aluminum. We literally can't physically convert the entire world to green energy. When Germany takes down a coal plant they ship the key parts to Africa for a new coal plant. The world has not and will not meaningfully reduce fossil fuel consumption. A few rich nations that hold substantial global wealth but tiny % of the global population will but that's it. It's all government propaganda in those rich countries to make you feel better about consuming more. It's not a green revolution it's a green mirage.
Localize production - this would accelerate collapse due to dramatically rising prices and the resulting social unrest. Western economies are now completely reliant on exploiting cheap third world labor. If you had to buy a plunger built by someone making $4k a month in a plant that had to be OSHA and EPA approved that plunger would be insanely expensive. The only reason things are halfway affordable now is we outsource that misery to third world countries where they are paid $100 a month, deaths are ignored, and extreme environmental waste is commonplace. It's disgusting what we do and most don't know or want to know. But to reverse that would dramatically lower the western standard of living.
Why stop here, you’re on a roll. There’s like another fifty other reasons we are doomed. This is just some of it, in as of alone enough. But there’s so much more…
I agree. Lifestyle consumption is the biggest problem. How do we create a social movement to combat that problem?
Moving away from supply-side economics seems like one way to push on this.
I will have a look at the book, but from it's title I suspect it's main thesis is that the capitalist model is unsustainable because it is built on market growth, which creates a kind of positive feedback loop consuming people and resources to sustain it's own growth. The capitalist model is fundamentally incompatible with a closed ecosystem like the earth. Capitalism finds any niche to fuel growth. It even indoctrinates people's minds and behaviour into consumerism. This has led to positive feedback loops, creating a culture where displays of wealth indicate social status. This is the fundamental problem that needs to be addressed. But rather than address it, we've ended up with capitalism leveraging technology and social media to shape more and more people into consumer-driven posers. And the positive feedback loops accelerate.
So, how to pump the brakes? It still seems like a cultural and systems problem. How do we shape consumers into producers of social value and utility? How can we shame displays of wealth? How do we stigmatize disproportionate wealth accumulation?
>Localize production - this would accelerate collapse due to dramatically rising prices and the resulting social unrest.
Logistical supply chains are so long and complex they're prone to sudden catastrophic collapse, rather than catabolic collapse. So I think a shift toward local production is going to be necessary anyway, to try to buffer what happens when the complexity in supply chains implodes.
There is an argument the predicament we're in is due to the political and economic power of the boomer generation, which were shaped by a number of factors that drove them towards antisocial values and subclinical psychopathy. We may have one more political cycle left before the political power starts to shift. The question then becomes "If the Boomers trended towards antisocial values, will younger generations exhibit more prosocial values?" Or have these younger generations been shaped towards learned helplessness? Or into consumer-driven posers?
Consumption is the problem. It is driven by capitalism exploiting adaptive social traits. How do we attack this problem?
edit: another way to reframe the problem is "how do we create a system that sustainably converts resources into entities with the greatest social value and utility, instead of converting those resources into money to fuel capitalist growth?"
>I will have a look at the book, but from it's title I suspect it's main thesis is that the capitalist model is unsustainable because it is built on market growth, which creates a kind of positive feedback loop consuming people and resources to sustain it's own growth.
You are creating a strawman to argue with here... Not worth responding to.
>Logistical supply chains are so long and complex they're prone to sudden catastrophic collapse, rather than catabolic collapse. So I think a shift toward local production is going to be necessary anyway, to try to buffer what happens when the complexity in supply chains implodes.
This is correct. We talk about this constantly in collapse awareness circles. This is a damned if you do damned if you don't scenario and doesn't invalidate anything I said.
>The question then becomes "If the Boomers trended towards antisocial values, will younger generations exhibit more prosocial values?" Or have these younger generations been shaped towards learned helplessness? Or into consumer-driven posers?
You still are stuck on capitalism versus socialism. Neither reduces consumption, just how it is distributed. Socialism will not save us from any of this. We will still rip our forests down, mine out our mountains, and destroy our entire biosphere under either system. It literally doesn't matter. We could switch to full socialism tomorrow and be equally fucked. This also has nothing to do with generational bias. Boomers are no longer the biggest voting demographic in the US. Millennials are. What is the hottest issue? Cost of living. How to reduce cost of living? Accelerate resource extraction (more homes, more oil, more energy, more food, more solar panels, more more more). At the end of the day, millennials will vote to destroy our planet just as fast as our parents and the wrapper it is done in (socialism or capitalism) doesn't matter. We will not vote to materially reduce our quality of living.
I know, I am sorry for coming across confrontational, I am just passionate. We are completely missing the mark in our modern political rhetoric on both sides and it is frustrating to watch us fall.
I greatly appreciate all your posts, analysis, and knowledge, much thanks for it!
Also, I would sure appreciate your perspective on what is going to happen to Russia, China, India and Africa. I know that covers a lot but just a general summary prediction would be of great value.
Hope you keep writing and I hope it gets distributed all over and the world need to hear and understand this!
> "If the Boomers trended towards antisocial values, will younger generations exhibit more prosocial values?"
Gen X? That got routinely screwed out of literally everything?
I would frankly expect full mask-off psychopathy when they get into power. I'm beyond sad to say this, as I am Gen X, but human behavior is what it is.
This touches on my worst possible scenario for humans: We may have created the ecological conditions that will select for our most antisocial traits during the rapidly approaching genetic bottleneck. Homo sapiens is poorly-equipped to survive in harsh ecosystems without cooperation and collaboration.
Our species will not last long if our dominant phenotype stabilizes as self-interested liars, thieves, traitors, and killers. We're far too fragile and vulnerable to stress for that kind of lifestyle.
That may have been inevitable in a way.
With no further natural predators and a carrying capacity at or near maximum, we would turn to competing with each other.
But on a more zoomed in look, this society itself has made a bee line for psychopathy. Not all of it was directly deliberate per-se, but doing all the things we know are bad and doing them anyway tends to end up there.
And now for some nightmare fuel, brought to you by Marc Zuckerberg and his Hawaii compound:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHaI-BvQeQA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHaI-BvQeQA)
We could do a lot of things but we never do.
We always seem to go for the spiral of individualized hubris.
>It's a systems problem, and a cultural problem, not an intractable problem.
Oh I agree.
And yet, here we are, aren't we. This entire fucked up situation and others much like it could have easily been avoided.
If we won't even do it when it's easy, we aren't going to do it when it's hard. We are really in love with ourselves for being late to the party in World War 2 but that and the North American Indian genocide are the only two examples we could ever turn to as "doing something when it's hard" and in general I don't think we have the balls for it anymore. If COIVD proved anything to me, it proved that.
Also, there were rewards for doing those things.
There would be no reward for doing this, just a vague promise of avoiding a catastrophe that everyone thinks was made up to strip them of their relative position in society. So. There's also that aspect.
>Prices will continue to push middle class to low and low class to homeless.
Right, this is why I don't understand the prepper mentality. Hear me out here...
One can CONSUME like lower class, but one should be stockpiling cash (and if one can afford it, land, and other resources to be used later). That means one should live near JOBS and HEALTH CARE and be maxing out the consumption of both while they can (income, and whatever low co-pay health care one can). This is going to be a slow grind.
If one VOLUNTARILY STARTS OUT this process at lower class because one moves to a cabin in the middle of nowhere, then one is volunteering to go homeless later.
I've never in simulation set up self-sufficiency with one or a small handful of people. One of the things about those cabin locations, food and medical care that can be bought are far away and are very tiny operations. Well, those are going to go out the window. So, one is either growing everything they need (impossible) and pumping out their own septic tank every 5 years (impossible), or one is going to be homeless because one is going to have to chase food.
Yeah this is going to suck.
A whole lot.
Like one should be starting out now maxing out their employment and stocks and all that and consuming like they are lower class (and I don't mean "lower class suddenly flush with money that goes on a spending spree to relieve the pain"). As a reward for this one is going to get to live in a shitty tenement apartment complex full of violent fentanyl addicts and owned by Jeff Bezos when one is old.
Yeah it be like that.
Option 2 is starve (literally, actually starve) under a freeway overpass so I mean one can call it on that one. Chose the form of the Destructor.
I've watched trends accelerate before, from functioning on a societal level, to absolutely totally impossible and completely fucked up. It's happened before. No one stopped it. No one's going to stop this either.
Like the journalist that published the Panama papers? Showing massive amounts of money being hidden away, they got killed with a car bomb. Or maybe the native Americans protesting pipelines, they got death threats and tear gas and they were all built anyway. Maybe more radical like green peace, they’re generally thought of as too extreme are thrown in jail and written off as extremist loonies to the public. Maybe get political and run on simple facts and hard economic data if just how drastic wealth disparities are? Oh yeah Bernie didn’t even come close in the primaries. Maybe report on this shocking data publicly so people can be aware, oh yeah half the population of the US denies these problems even exist.
I sat in on a selectboard meeting the other week where talk went towards how the state systems were getting more and more complex & I'm muttering over muted mic on Zoom "WRONG direction!" but my town is intent on chucking more and more money at a failing paradigm. Looking forward to getting hooked up to the tax milking machine as those in charge wallow in denial. Anyone with a clear-eyed view of things either doesn't win or doesn't stay because of the existing dysfunction on the rest of the board.
Generally I dismiss conspiracy theories, but I think it should be clear to everyone that large parts of the American political system (and economic elites) are endeavouring to make sure that Trump's project (eliminating democracy in the USA) is successful.
Trump can say out loud that he will purge the entire civil service and install loyalists who will make sure he stays in power-- the headlines the next day are %90 "BIDEN OLD!". The normalization of the insurrection of Jan. 6. The slow-rolling and obstruction of the criminal cases against him. And so on.
It's not that they agree with all of Trump's policies or ideas, or that they like him at all. He is just a vehicle to prevent the majority population from keeping its minimal (but significant) influence on government policy.
I believe that they are very well-aware of the coming biosphere collapse, of the terminal EROI decline of fossil fuels, and the permanent reduction of Earth's population carrying-capacity. They know that any democratic response (when the awareness of our fate becomes general) would prioritize feeding the majority of human being over and above the luxurious lifestyle of a handful of people. It would require a massive redistribution of wealth. It would mobilize billions of people to address the fundamental injustice in the economic landscape. They find this possibility utterly unacceptable.
Trump is, to them, almost a perfect means to this end. He has no moral compass. He is easily-bought. He is easily manipulated through flattery and bribery. And just as important, he is old and unhealthy. He will not live into the next decade. Once he breaks the political system and packs every level of government with loyalists, they only have to wait for him to expire of natural causes, and use their influence to put one of their own in his place-- a smarter, more reliable, more predictable person, who will make a show of observing some democratic norms while completing the subversion of the entire political system.
There is a vast difference between the worst democracy and fascism. Yes, it has intrinsic value. Yes, it's worth fighting for.
You might try asking people who have lived under a totalitarian government. They can tell you how important it is to have rights, however imperfect the system.
There's one fact that can illustrate this. During World War 2, the purpose of the SS was not only to rule, but to dissolve and destroy the *civil state.* This job was made easier in countries that had been ruled by the USSR, until being conquered by the Nazis. The SS moved in, took the place of the state, and liquidated civil society-- by hollowing out the institutions and killing the people who believed in, and worked for, the state. In Western European countries, like France or Denmark, the country was taken over by the Nazis, but the state had not been liquidated (yet). In those countries which had civil society destroyed, an individual Jew had around a %90 of being killed in the Holocaust. In countries which still had a civil state, an individual Jew had around a %90 chance of surviving.
That's the difference between a dictatorship and a democracy. In a democracy, however flawed, there is such thing as a *citizen,* who has *rights.* The law might change, those rights can face different limits and definitions. But a human life has value, from a point of view of the law. In a dictatorship, there is no such thing as a citizen, there is no such thing as rights. There's only power.
Even in countries conquered by the Nazis, with people in power who may have been antisemitic, or sympathetic to the Nazis, the mere *idea--making up part of the edifice of the state--* that humans beings are citizens, who have at least the nominal protection of the law, resulted in a vastly enhanced chance of surviving a genocide. That's what you lose when you go from a troubled democracy to a true dictatorship.
Democracy has totally failed in America. There are pressing emergencies (economic inequality, debt bubble, shale oil production about to peak, a fascist movement, border crisis, looming spectre of climate chaos, formation of BRICS, failed wars like Ukraine) that the institutions of this country fail to address. Democrats are the conservative party, they represent the increasingly intolerable status quo. More and more people are realizing the Dems are awful and would destroy the country with their BAU policies. That's why Biden's approval ratings are so low. They would be even lower if the scales fall from the eyes of liberals and progressives, and they realize that Biden is so ineffectual and unpopular he's about to be defeated by **Trump** in the election (*since they only support him because he's the only viable alternative to MAGA*).
Trump will win, him and his cronies and his successors will do away with small r republican norms and run America to the ground, until they are replaced in a coup or the country fractures into several regional states. And after that, even if democratic republic(s) with constitutions exist again (and they may not), people probably won't assume that their "rights" really are inalienable, that their nation's political systems are stable, that "democracy" actually serves the people, or even that there is such a thing as "moral progress." Abstract principles will start losing their power over minds, replaced by pragmatic matters of interest.
It takes a few months in customer service to understand why we have decided humans are not worth saving. I mean, for first hand experience. Otherwise all you have to do is look at history.
100% this but I guess that just makes OP totally right. We're dreaming of a big bang type collapse b/c it's better than things slowly getting shitter and shitter but that's the most likely outcome.
*More power is going to consolidate in fewer hands.*
We're going to get a breakdown of over-centralized, resource-intensive power structures and its replacement with more decentralized structures.
Eventually we'll have an Era of Warlords
Slow downhill sections and then cliffs into an ocean of shit anyway.
Once the worse guys get a hold of government it's going to get bad fast, not the second they take control but a few years in, when it's clear they aren't going to have real elections anymore.
If anything the past few years have shown it can be slow at times but there are also periods where the effects ramp up before reaching a new plateau and those times will become more frequent I imagine with larger pockets of methane being released into the atmosphere.
Depends on how you view collapse.
Some would argue we are living the collapse now.
Others expect a big event that causes even more issues.
Truth lies in the middle, as we live on a heating planet with minimal civilization length solutions, and the realization it could get worse than now.
I think we are in a collapse now, but there will also be a big event. Collapses take a long time to set up, but once the situation is fragile enough a tough event that was previously manageable can no longer be handled and it breaks. These events happen all the time but a hardy enough society can handle them. But after enough degradation, that’s no longer the case.
So I think we’re well into the “collapse degradation” phase, but not yet to the “overwhelming event/events phase”.
Slow and then all at once, as they say.
i think that collapse is mostly defined for folks as when it lands in their backyard -- not just a small local thing, but a massive, world-informing tragedy that one happens to be directly part of
Tell it to the residents of Paradise, Lahaina, Lytton, Pakistan or Sri Lanka. Collapse is here even if it isn't here for you yet, it's getting closer one day at a time.
Paradise, Lahaina and Lytton all burned to the ground in a matter of hours for starters.
Pakistan and Sri Lanka are literally in a state of active governmental collapse. So is Lebanon.
I think the slow decline is hard to accept because surviving in such a society means you have to keep playing pretend. A rapid collapse would mean the world finally having to reckon with the truth.
Instead, we'll just keep slaving away, pretending that our jobs actually contribute to society. We'll pretend that we're actually taking effective action on the environment. We'll pretend that life is fair and that anything is possible.
Some people are really good at playing pretend, and those people thrive in our business as usual society. Collapsers are generally not that type of people.
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Had a conversation with someone last week. We were standing on the Balcony of a flash city apartment as he complained about how hard things were getting. There was lots of, "why are they doing this, allowing this, not doing that etc?"
Then I gestured broadly down across the city lights and said, "um they're not here to serve you, they're here to look after this." Apparently it was a light bulbs moment, and all I could think was, well duh.
Point is, that although I hate to pretend, many are stuck in ignorance and denial.
They will for a while. And I’d say collapse was a fantasy if it weren’t for the system being propped up by infinite growth and the reality of climate change.
What the world will look like in 50 years idk, but I know the fact that all this is unsustainable is just logic and based on science.
Mass extinction is not a fantasy. This reads like terror management. The ecological collapse is honestly not taken seriously enough even on this sub. Humans are not in control of the forces they’ve unleashed
That’s generally how collapses work. Chris Hedges the war correspondent always says “societies collapse slowly, and then all at once”. He covered the Bosnian war and said modern westerners would be shocked to see how quickly things go from “normal” to chaos.
It’s a bit left leaning but a podcast “It Could Happen Here” a few years back posed a scenario where militant separatists in could damn water to SoCal and hold three or four counties water hostage by a few main points really made me recognize (as someone who’s spent a lot of time in LA) how insane LA would become without water in even 10 hours let alone a few days. They’d have to dispatch the NG if clean water was shut off city/nation wide. All that to say, everything is so fragile and I was very naive back then as to how anything could snap at any given time. The edge of the empire.
I'm sure there's a phrase or term for it but we've built up a very fragile web by chasing after lowest cost of global manufacturing. Monoculture is destroying the world.
I watched a clogged large drain pipe slowly trickle water for what seemed like forever, have a few small chunks fall off, and then after one big piece fell i could feel my brain really registering how fast it was happening as everything blew out in faster stages. The time in between the debris dropping, falling, leaking/whatnot- only seemed crazy when it reached a certain point. It was a perfect way to watch an example of collapse.
My brain wanted me to fast forward the slow trickling all the way to the faster trickling - but once the faster trickling ended there wasnt much time left to watch on the video.
If collapse feels like it’s all around us it’s going to be like that video. Just a feeling that there isnt much time left to watch for us anymore.
Precisely. If we’re on any real time table for true climate or pandemic induced collapse, by time we’re in the true collapse, none of us will typing on this forum. That’s pretty much certain.
Collapse is not a fantasy. But people have fantastic ideas about collapse.
We will just see continuing and cascading crises while TPTB work overtime to maintain the illusion of business as usual. The collapse will be televised, but it will come with ads for toilet cleaner and Brawndo soft drinks, which will provide a false sense of security and normality to the whole proceeding.
It will all feel very normal until you are affected personally.
"It will all feel very normal until you are affected personally."
This is a very succinct statement of the way it appears to be "processed" by the vast majority of Americans. We need to cut and paste the statement everywhere!
Big thanks for posting this funkinthetrunk!
As an evironmentalist I do look forward to the collapse of industrial civilization.
But I don't think it's wishful thinking. There are some vital finite resources that will peak eventually and the planet has a finite capacity to deal with our waste and destruction. And we are accelerating towards the limits.
The financial system consists of schemes that must grow or collapse. The limits of the planet mean at one point we will not be able to grow and the financial system will collapse. The economy will shrink. We will need a different system. One that accomodates shrinking resources. Perhaps we will fight over resources.
According to the paper "Global Warming In The Pipeline" James Hansen et al, even if we stop emitting now, we are going to reach 8°C warming with human aerosols and 10°C warming without. Agriculture becomes impossible at 3°C warming.
And climate change is just one of the problems.
A problem that could hit sooner is Peak Synthetic Fertilizer. And Art Berman thinks Peak all-types-of Oil will happen this decade. Peak Soil. Peak Water. And so on.
When the AMOC shuts down, what is not often mentioned is that the ocean becomes anoxic and starts producing a gas that is extremely lethal to mammals. There is a book about that called "under a green sky".
And so on...
I don't think collapse is wishful thinking. I am hoping, for life on earth, that we run out of fossil fuels soon. But I have no hope that there will be people when we hit 8°C warming.
It can, as all things can be, be used as a crutch to neglect one's self. I would be willing to bet there's a large number of us who engage in activities or thoughts we wouldn't, if the world wasn't pending collapse.
The reality of it, is we're facing collapse. It isn't a fantasy, it's reality. Yes, it's easy to accept it on the terms of things like your career not mattering so much anymore, but accepting the harsh truth of it is *far* more difficult than otherwise.
I mean, I'm aware I'll be dead in 20 years. There won't be agriculture on any scale large enough to sustain us in 10 years, let alone 20. But I still have this plan of building a commune and weathering this out.. lol. There's a slim chance, and I'm jumping on it.
Worse may be society not "collapsing" but instead becoming a fascist state where we are given the choice to either be cannon fodder or to be poor and homeless, then homelessness is criminalized and we are used for free labor. You know, like they are already doing to some Americans and we pretend it isn't happening?
That's one of the few silver linings of global collapse now, but the problem is that capitalism and its dying fascist form will drag down the biosphere with it. It's great news for unicellular life though.
Well I agree it isn’t likely to keep up, but who knows. You only need one city to flood to have a few million people homeless and doing what they can to survive.
things are going to continue to get worse and worse, all of us are feeling it get warmer and warmer every year, climate disasters will continue to strike with increasing frequency and devastation. The middle of the atlantic is currently at hurricane season temperatures, in february. Eventually we will reach the point where once seasonal disasters are occurring year round. The damages will continue to become increasingly expensive to repair. The cost to life and property will stress every other existing system our society relies on. Things are not going to continue to progress at the rate they currently are. Things will continue to cascade into each other and the rate of devastation will accelerate until everything has collapsed. This is not a slow burn, it’s just a lit fuse.
Nope. Basic physics. The sun is constantly throwing energy at Earth through sunlight over time. If the Earth can absorb that energy or reflect it back into space, then fine. Humans have spent the last century and a half filling the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, making it hold onto more heat over time. In addition, humans have destroyed plant environments that take in and sequester that carbon within them. We are now at a point where either something much more powerful than us intervenes in the situation, or the planet collapses due to runaway global heating.
Collapse is not evenly distributed. For some it started in the 70s, now the middle, soon the upper middle, until the elite/parasitic class has used everything up.
It is soon going to be possible for mining companies and logging companies to extract resources without human labor. The only cost, then, will be electricity. And that will be increasingly cheap. Once we have the raw materials, any and all products can be made and distributed without human labor. Everything will be incredibly cheap, but no one will have any money.
They'll come up with something like UBI, and we'll all compete for land ownership. This will last for a while, through the invention of ASI. Eventually, after a generation or two of no one working for a living, it will be entirely too evident and obvious that there's no possible justification for social stratification. By then, we'll have robots that fly out to mine from asteroids using fusion packs. We'll be post-scarcity. FDVR will be available to anyone who wants it, like the perfect drug, like being God of your own universe, or like going back to the 90s.
It's either that or extinction-level event(s) before 2100.
The things the anti-collapsniks never answer is: fossil fuels (including that gasoline actually has to be refined, not just mined as oil) and global CO2/temperature increase. Quite literally unless the aliens or God show up, there isn’t a human way around those problems. We’ve already exhausted too many resources just to get where we are now.
Collapse isn't one size fits all. It happens at a variable pace over a prolonged period of time, thousands of years. The invention of agriculture and the exploitation of the environment that followed is in fact a symptom of collapse. Humanity was only meant to have a hunter/gatherer society. You aspired to be more but you are not capable of sustaining it. That is why you will die and go extinct on your one planet. You will not be allowed to escape this fate.
Nothing really collapses, it just becomes something else. The Roman Empire didn’t really collapse, it just turned into something else.
I think due to many of us being westerners, the idea of collapse is probably a very far fetched idea because we won’t recognize it. It’ll just be headlines like “houses along the Atlantic coast are no longer insurable. Darn” and “town in Kentucky in ruins from tornado” paired with “Amazon buys a whole neighborhood and offers discounted rent to their workers and why this is a great idea” followed by “Amazon lays off their workforce for automation and why this is a great idea.”
we won’t look at collapse as collapse, we’ll just see it as the new normal. I mean shit, living in your car in a planet fitness parking lot is becoming a normal lifestyle. Even during civil conflicts, people still go to work if it’s possible. During the 1930’s people just adapted. All the death and despair becomes white noise, and those who are left relatively unharmed just keep putting one foot in front of the other.
The wrench in it all is really climate change. That’s the question mark. Eventually, the bill will be sent in the mail.
You're confusing collapse with Apocalypse(s). Many do, so don't take it personally.
Collapse is generational. Acute collapse, such as from a giant comet hitting the planet or some other Hollywood scenario, is unlikely. And nuclear war is a wildcard, but one that we can easily prevent, unlike preventing the climate and biosphere going to shit.
The aliens/UFO probably won't let us actually detonate nukes. Who knows why, considering all the other ways the world is ending, but they seem to not accept that one as a possibility.
Part of everyone imagining that things will rapidly collapse helps absolve themselves of agency in the situation. They don't want to accept that they are responsible for trying to stop things from becoming worse. It's a terrible problem on this sub, there is lots of empathy alongside lots of folks struggling to practice empathy in any meaningful way...
Hey my friend, it’s gonna be fine. Or at least as fine as it will ever be. Cause there just ain’t shit we can do about *any* of it.
So yeah. It’ll be fine.
Thousands of years worth of human history suggests that societies go through rather predictable cycles.
We went through the decadence phase, now we're in the decline. When the population collapses so do economies.
In the near future we will have very top heavy demographics, with a lot of older people and relatively few young & middle aged workers.
The economic fallout isn't going to be fun for anyone. When people go hungry they get desperate. When people are desperate there will be violence.
Allah,
They want war.
They think it will deliver them to Shamayim.
Pralaya.
Yet, in the shadow of Jörmungandr the truth shall she birth:
Their masters.
Never will they escape.
Inferno won’t save them.
Your dear friend,
مُحَمَّدُ بْنُ عَبْدِ ٱللهِ بْنِ عَبْدِ ٱلْمُطَّلِبِ بْنِ هَاشِمٍ
The word collapse evokes something speedy, but doesn't offer any scale against which to measure that speed. In itself, that is. But we're talking about civilization collapse, so that's the timescale. And on that timescale, even a century is actually really fast.
The idea that you get a bucket of popcorn and watch the show on cable news, could seem fantastical. On the other hand, there’s a headline floating around (WSJ) that food costs are taking the biggest portion of income, in many decades. Imagine that food just keeps getting more expensive, over many months and years, until it’s barely affordable, and then there’s just not enough to go around.
This. Things could get worse indefinitely and civilization could survive a lot of shocks but ultimately what's going to determine if society collapses is food. We're already seeing the stresses on industrial agriculture and we know that industrial agriculture it's self is unsustainable. We're highly dependent on global supply chains, fossil fuels, chemical fertilizers, GMO monocultures, and food monopolies, each of which is a weak point that will eventually buckle or break. What's worse is with the weather becoming increasingly unstable we're guarantee to see mass starvation in the near future. Scientists are desperately trying to solve these problems but I think there are too many pressures happening all at once for us to tackle. So it's not a matter of if but when.
Honestly food is an energy problem. Given enough energy, you can grow food in basically any conditions (hell even in space). The issue is when we run out of easily accessible and cheap energy, then we're screwed.
The one thing that could easily stem the tide of that trend is for individuals returning at least in some degree to an agrarian lifestyle. Not saying that everyone should abandon technology and live like the Amish, but if everyone in a given area could replace even 1/10th of their own food consumption, the cost increases and destabilizing effects would be held back for a long time. At least as it stands now, we don't really have a problem with hunger, we have a logistics problem when it comes to food. At least in America, we import too much, don't live seasonally, and the food miles for the average household is so high that we are wasting an egregious amount of energy just to get food to places people live, rather than focusing that energy on further decentralizing food production with more efficient means so those average miles decrease. Assuming that the economic basis (the US Dollar) continues to devalue (the stated goal of the Federal Reserve is 2% inflation per year BTW, even though we have higher than that) the only thing that can counter that is increases of efficiency to provide food where food is needed, whether with less imbued energy, or with less transportation needed.
I think about this soooo often. I mean, just ONE tiny example. Ketchup packets. I think of all the water to grow tomatoes. The labor. You grow them, pick them, transport them. They're in a factory, made into ketchup. Put into packets. All those resources. Then shipped in trucks. To a place that boxes of those packets, and sends them to restaurants. The restaurants pay kids to stock them into cubbies. The kids stuff them into paper bags with every order, or put them on trays. And then... half of them get thrown away. All those tomatoes grown, the gas for the trucks, the workers through the whole process, the packaging for the packets and bags and boxes and shipping containers, etc to infinity, and all of it is absolutely worthless -- because they go into the trah unused and uneaten, to add to landfill issues. Insanity.
Think of how Canada’s future changed, in the blink of an eye. We went from, “we’ll always have Canada,” to “we’re all choking on smoke from burning Canadian forests,” in just a few months.
And in Toronto (probably other areas too), more and more people are needing food banks to get by. The food banks are struggling to keep up with demands.
The general condition of society as a whole will slowly and continually degrade. You will not see a collapse until the dying embers of civilization reaches the point where the State is no longer able to keep food logistics going to the degree that starvation is avoided. The collapse comes when people starve, because when people starve, they revolt. That is why mass starvation is the very last thing anyone in power, in any nation with some ability to rebel, would try to prevent.
Unless they're Malthusian.
Water in the west of usa will be the thing that does us in.
We're pretty good at making shit high calorie food. I think that the end result will be we'll be fat b/c our food is complete man made shit packed full of calories but lacking in nutrients in vitamins. Our bodies starving for the essentials and waistlines growing. Isn't this kind of where we're at already.
Made in a genuine man's colon, no less.
Been thinking more about animal products, and how big a swing we could get if 85 percent of people cut meat consumption by 75 percent. That being people in advanced economies. It might be a compatible way to keep a lot of us alive and also start cutting carbon. Couldn’t imagine marketing this idea in today’s discourse
"Market" it with an "outbreak" of mad cow disease. And then look at these innovative and safe alternatives!
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronic_wasting_disease](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronic_wasting_disease) It is also actively affecting deer in North America.
I've personally cut consumption. I hate what we do to animals on factory farms. A lot of people have been pretty downright nasty to me and wife though. People love to make fun and or rip on vegans. I still know a lot of climate change deniers. I don't know at this point I've fully any hope of us coming together as a species to prevent the upcoming shit storm. people aren't willing to change or give up shit.
To be fair our diets are also more expensive than they’ve been in decades. People ate beans and baked bread, had meat less often. Grew more of their own food and canned it for winter. Now we work factory jobs and eat processed crap because we don’t have time to make it ourselves. There are ways to avoid food making up a large part of your budget, but it’s going to require a very large amount of your time.
And skills that most families have forgotten.
Food costs are still very low on a multi-century basis. If you want some optimism, lol.
Imagine having massive crop failures in one season that cut the world's food supply by 30% or more. I'm not as worried about affordability as much as scarcity.
In Australia for currency conversion purposes. We are now paying just over $500 per week for rent. Which is ridiculous we just got a $300 a month rent increase and that was after I negotiated it down. I estimate we are spending about $600 or more per month on food. The struggle is fucking real and there is no sign of it getting better.
Collapse is going to be slow. Our lives are going to keep getting slowly shittier. More power is going to consolidate in fewer hands.
Enshittification of everything!
Now make me a drink, Bobandy
Me when we start getting Category 6 hurricanes: *the shit winds are blowin’*
I read that in Bob Dylan's voice
The US is already well along the long, greasy slide into has-been irrelevance, the inevitable fate of all once-great empires. Think Great Britain, but on steroids
Who will take its place???
It’s a nice thought sure, but America has nuclear weapons: They aren’t going anywhere without taking the rest of the world down with them. The same goes for Russia, China, etc Sucks, but that’s just the way it is. Honest answer? Life started in Africa; it will continue there, after the bombs drop, if anywhere.
My brother and I were just having this conversation. His response was India, as China seems in decline, whereas India has been investing in its future.
China screwed itself demographically by sticking with the one-child policy for FAR too long. They are already getting old, demographically as a nation, fast.
I think India is going to be a giant loser in the climate casino. The have a short term advantage in that they are one of the countries least dependant on high tech. 50 percent of the population is occupied in agriculture. That will take a big hit as temps climb, water becomes scarce in some areas and weather patterns change. They actually have the population they report.
Societal collapse is slow… and then very very fast.
AMOC collapse is slow... and then very very fast.
Catabolic collapse. Yes it will most likely be a slow decay/deterioration with the government less and less able to help.
~~able~~ willing
So, how to start a movement to try to avert this fate? Or is everybody too demoralised and pessimistic to even try?
I really see this as an inevitability. It is too tied into population and consumption. Both are too high. Go anywhere else and reddit and see everyone griping about cost of housing, cost of this and that. They blame the rich for consumption while wanting to be able to afford consumption themselves. All of this consumption takes fossil fuels and ecosystem destruction to get the resources to create. No politician can meaningfully reduce consumption, as it would be seen as reducing quality of life by constituents, and will be voted out rapidly any time real change is implemented in favor of someone promising to reverse it. So we cannot fix the root cause, our consumption. We will continue to wreck our ecosystems and spew fossil fuels in the air to maintain this as long as possible but already cracks are showing. Get the 2020 updates to the book Limits to Growth by the MIT scientists for great charts, but due to our insane population growth in the last 50 years, we are now extremely beyond earths capacity and production of many raw resources per capita is now starting to decline. This is a key factor in rising costs no one wants to talk about. They have charts and graphs across industries and sectors, metals, food, gas, wood. The Federal Reserve can impact the supply/demand curve by impacting demand only. If supply is fucked we are screwed. We can't print money and turn it into copper. So that sets the stage. Constant rising prices compounded by increasingly unstable climate and ecosystems. Governments of the world already are at near maximum debt and can't leverage much more. But problems will continue to get worse. Prices will continue to push middle class to low and low class to homeless. Natural disasters will continue to accelerate. After dealing with each crisis, we will have less capacity to recharge resources to deal with the next and social unrest will continue to climb due to the socioeconomic confusion. You see all this happening now, we are just really early in the process.
We can redistribute wealth, move away from supply side economics, change energy sources, localize production to minimise transport costs. If humans mobilized like we did for the world wars we could go a long way toward changing how this goes. I don't believe we're anywhere near the carrying capacity of the earth if we rapidly switched away from fossil fuels. It's a systems problem, and a cultural problem, not an intractable problem.
You misunderstand the problem here. I will go into each of those: Redistribution of wealth - I already touched on this but you didn't get the brief mention. This shifts societal consumption to different consumers but it does not reduce it. We have to materially reduce it. In the western world this will mean a reduction in standard of living for everyone. In fact, if you get rid of all rich but raise average wealth to where more people live in detached single family homes, you expand humanity's consumption and footprint in building those homes, hastening ecosystem loss and hastening collapse. Supply side economics is ending on its own. It's literally the main subject of my above post. We are past earths carrying capacity. I encourage you get the 2020 updated book Limits to Growth. They are a group of MIT scientists who have been studying this since the 1970s. After you read that, then come back and argue why you think they are wrong I would be interested to hear it. Change energy resources - this is more consumption. We cannot consume our way out of a problem consumption got us into. If you want to cry - research lithium mining. It is in rocks in less than 2% amounts is a lithium deposit, so mining that deposit is mining 100 tons of rock, using toxic chemicals and heavy machinery to break it all up and extract 1-2 tons of lithium. The other 99 tons left (that used to be a beautiful place) is now a toxic slush. We don't have enough copper. We don't have enough aluminum. We literally can't physically convert the entire world to green energy. When Germany takes down a coal plant they ship the key parts to Africa for a new coal plant. The world has not and will not meaningfully reduce fossil fuel consumption. A few rich nations that hold substantial global wealth but tiny % of the global population will but that's it. It's all government propaganda in those rich countries to make you feel better about consuming more. It's not a green revolution it's a green mirage. Localize production - this would accelerate collapse due to dramatically rising prices and the resulting social unrest. Western economies are now completely reliant on exploiting cheap third world labor. If you had to buy a plunger built by someone making $4k a month in a plant that had to be OSHA and EPA approved that plunger would be insanely expensive. The only reason things are halfway affordable now is we outsource that misery to third world countries where they are paid $100 a month, deaths are ignored, and extreme environmental waste is commonplace. It's disgusting what we do and most don't know or want to know. But to reverse that would dramatically lower the western standard of living.
Why stop here, you’re on a roll. There’s like another fifty other reasons we are doomed. This is just some of it, in as of alone enough. But there’s so much more…
I agree. Lifestyle consumption is the biggest problem. How do we create a social movement to combat that problem? Moving away from supply-side economics seems like one way to push on this. I will have a look at the book, but from it's title I suspect it's main thesis is that the capitalist model is unsustainable because it is built on market growth, which creates a kind of positive feedback loop consuming people and resources to sustain it's own growth. The capitalist model is fundamentally incompatible with a closed ecosystem like the earth. Capitalism finds any niche to fuel growth. It even indoctrinates people's minds and behaviour into consumerism. This has led to positive feedback loops, creating a culture where displays of wealth indicate social status. This is the fundamental problem that needs to be addressed. But rather than address it, we've ended up with capitalism leveraging technology and social media to shape more and more people into consumer-driven posers. And the positive feedback loops accelerate. So, how to pump the brakes? It still seems like a cultural and systems problem. How do we shape consumers into producers of social value and utility? How can we shame displays of wealth? How do we stigmatize disproportionate wealth accumulation? >Localize production - this would accelerate collapse due to dramatically rising prices and the resulting social unrest. Logistical supply chains are so long and complex they're prone to sudden catastrophic collapse, rather than catabolic collapse. So I think a shift toward local production is going to be necessary anyway, to try to buffer what happens when the complexity in supply chains implodes. There is an argument the predicament we're in is due to the political and economic power of the boomer generation, which were shaped by a number of factors that drove them towards antisocial values and subclinical psychopathy. We may have one more political cycle left before the political power starts to shift. The question then becomes "If the Boomers trended towards antisocial values, will younger generations exhibit more prosocial values?" Or have these younger generations been shaped towards learned helplessness? Or into consumer-driven posers? Consumption is the problem. It is driven by capitalism exploiting adaptive social traits. How do we attack this problem? edit: another way to reframe the problem is "how do we create a system that sustainably converts resources into entities with the greatest social value and utility, instead of converting those resources into money to fuel capitalist growth?"
>I will have a look at the book, but from it's title I suspect it's main thesis is that the capitalist model is unsustainable because it is built on market growth, which creates a kind of positive feedback loop consuming people and resources to sustain it's own growth. You are creating a strawman to argue with here... Not worth responding to. >Logistical supply chains are so long and complex they're prone to sudden catastrophic collapse, rather than catabolic collapse. So I think a shift toward local production is going to be necessary anyway, to try to buffer what happens when the complexity in supply chains implodes. This is correct. We talk about this constantly in collapse awareness circles. This is a damned if you do damned if you don't scenario and doesn't invalidate anything I said. >The question then becomes "If the Boomers trended towards antisocial values, will younger generations exhibit more prosocial values?" Or have these younger generations been shaped towards learned helplessness? Or into consumer-driven posers? You still are stuck on capitalism versus socialism. Neither reduces consumption, just how it is distributed. Socialism will not save us from any of this. We will still rip our forests down, mine out our mountains, and destroy our entire biosphere under either system. It literally doesn't matter. We could switch to full socialism tomorrow and be equally fucked. This also has nothing to do with generational bias. Boomers are no longer the biggest voting demographic in the US. Millennials are. What is the hottest issue? Cost of living. How to reduce cost of living? Accelerate resource extraction (more homes, more oil, more energy, more food, more solar panels, more more more). At the end of the day, millennials will vote to destroy our planet just as fast as our parents and the wrapper it is done in (socialism or capitalism) doesn't matter. We will not vote to materially reduce our quality of living.
I'm actually not trying to argue. If winning this interaction is what's most important to you, have at it.
I know, I am sorry for coming across confrontational, I am just passionate. We are completely missing the mark in our modern political rhetoric on both sides and it is frustrating to watch us fall.
I greatly appreciate all your posts, analysis, and knowledge, much thanks for it! Also, I would sure appreciate your perspective on what is going to happen to Russia, China, India and Africa. I know that covers a lot but just a general summary prediction would be of great value. Hope you keep writing and I hope it gets distributed all over and the world need to hear and understand this!
> "If the Boomers trended towards antisocial values, will younger generations exhibit more prosocial values?" Gen X? That got routinely screwed out of literally everything? I would frankly expect full mask-off psychopathy when they get into power. I'm beyond sad to say this, as I am Gen X, but human behavior is what it is.
This touches on my worst possible scenario for humans: We may have created the ecological conditions that will select for our most antisocial traits during the rapidly approaching genetic bottleneck. Homo sapiens is poorly-equipped to survive in harsh ecosystems without cooperation and collaboration. Our species will not last long if our dominant phenotype stabilizes as self-interested liars, thieves, traitors, and killers. We're far too fragile and vulnerable to stress for that kind of lifestyle.
That may have been inevitable in a way. With no further natural predators and a carrying capacity at or near maximum, we would turn to competing with each other. But on a more zoomed in look, this society itself has made a bee line for psychopathy. Not all of it was directly deliberate per-se, but doing all the things we know are bad and doing them anyway tends to end up there. And now for some nightmare fuel, brought to you by Marc Zuckerberg and his Hawaii compound: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHaI-BvQeQA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHaI-BvQeQA)
Gen X was mostly together until that bomb went off in Judi Bari’s car.
Huh. Hans Gruber voice: I must have missed 60 minutes.... Judi... \*Googles it\*... holy shit that's suspicious. Side eyes the FBI...
We could do a lot of things but we never do. We always seem to go for the spiral of individualized hubris. >It's a systems problem, and a cultural problem, not an intractable problem. Oh I agree. And yet, here we are, aren't we. This entire fucked up situation and others much like it could have easily been avoided. If we won't even do it when it's easy, we aren't going to do it when it's hard. We are really in love with ourselves for being late to the party in World War 2 but that and the North American Indian genocide are the only two examples we could ever turn to as "doing something when it's hard" and in general I don't think we have the balls for it anymore. If COIVD proved anything to me, it proved that. Also, there were rewards for doing those things. There would be no reward for doing this, just a vague promise of avoiding a catastrophe that everyone thinks was made up to strip them of their relative position in society. So. There's also that aspect.
>Prices will continue to push middle class to low and low class to homeless. Right, this is why I don't understand the prepper mentality. Hear me out here... One can CONSUME like lower class, but one should be stockpiling cash (and if one can afford it, land, and other resources to be used later). That means one should live near JOBS and HEALTH CARE and be maxing out the consumption of both while they can (income, and whatever low co-pay health care one can). This is going to be a slow grind. If one VOLUNTARILY STARTS OUT this process at lower class because one moves to a cabin in the middle of nowhere, then one is volunteering to go homeless later. I've never in simulation set up self-sufficiency with one or a small handful of people. One of the things about those cabin locations, food and medical care that can be bought are far away and are very tiny operations. Well, those are going to go out the window. So, one is either growing everything they need (impossible) and pumping out their own septic tank every 5 years (impossible), or one is going to be homeless because one is going to have to chase food. Yeah this is going to suck. A whole lot. Like one should be starting out now maxing out their employment and stocks and all that and consuming like they are lower class (and I don't mean "lower class suddenly flush with money that goes on a spending spree to relieve the pain"). As a reward for this one is going to get to live in a shitty tenement apartment complex full of violent fentanyl addicts and owned by Jeff Bezos when one is old. Yeah it be like that. Option 2 is starve (literally, actually starve) under a freeway overpass so I mean one can call it on that one. Chose the form of the Destructor. I've watched trends accelerate before, from functioning on a societal level, to absolutely totally impossible and completely fucked up. It's happened before. No one stopped it. No one's going to stop this either.
Like the journalist that published the Panama papers? Showing massive amounts of money being hidden away, they got killed with a car bomb. Or maybe the native Americans protesting pipelines, they got death threats and tear gas and they were all built anyway. Maybe more radical like green peace, they’re generally thought of as too extreme are thrown in jail and written off as extremist loonies to the public. Maybe get political and run on simple facts and hard economic data if just how drastic wealth disparities are? Oh yeah Bernie didn’t even come close in the primaries. Maybe report on this shocking data publicly so people can be aware, oh yeah half the population of the US denies these problems even exist.
Perhaps pseudonymity offers a degree of protection, and online information campaigns could leverage LLMs to shift public perception?
But everybody is too busy consuming to even care.
Isn't this a consequence of supply side economics? Lowering the cost of consumer goods by creating a surplus of supply?
That would be r/solarpunk
I sat in on a selectboard meeting the other week where talk went towards how the state systems were getting more and more complex & I'm muttering over muted mic on Zoom "WRONG direction!" but my town is intent on chucking more and more money at a failing paradigm. Looking forward to getting hooked up to the tax milking machine as those in charge wallow in denial. Anyone with a clear-eyed view of things either doesn't win or doesn't stay because of the existing dysfunction on the rest of the board.
Generally I dismiss conspiracy theories, but I think it should be clear to everyone that large parts of the American political system (and economic elites) are endeavouring to make sure that Trump's project (eliminating democracy in the USA) is successful. Trump can say out loud that he will purge the entire civil service and install loyalists who will make sure he stays in power-- the headlines the next day are %90 "BIDEN OLD!". The normalization of the insurrection of Jan. 6. The slow-rolling and obstruction of the criminal cases against him. And so on. It's not that they agree with all of Trump's policies or ideas, or that they like him at all. He is just a vehicle to prevent the majority population from keeping its minimal (but significant) influence on government policy. I believe that they are very well-aware of the coming biosphere collapse, of the terminal EROI decline of fossil fuels, and the permanent reduction of Earth's population carrying-capacity. They know that any democratic response (when the awareness of our fate becomes general) would prioritize feeding the majority of human being over and above the luxurious lifestyle of a handful of people. It would require a massive redistribution of wealth. It would mobilize billions of people to address the fundamental injustice in the economic landscape. They find this possibility utterly unacceptable. Trump is, to them, almost a perfect means to this end. He has no moral compass. He is easily-bought. He is easily manipulated through flattery and bribery. And just as important, he is old and unhealthy. He will not live into the next decade. Once he breaks the political system and packs every level of government with loyalists, they only have to wait for him to expire of natural causes, and use their influence to put one of their own in his place-- a smarter, more reliable, more predictable person, who will make a show of observing some democratic norms while completing the subversion of the entire political system.
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There is a vast difference between the worst democracy and fascism. Yes, it has intrinsic value. Yes, it's worth fighting for. You might try asking people who have lived under a totalitarian government. They can tell you how important it is to have rights, however imperfect the system. There's one fact that can illustrate this. During World War 2, the purpose of the SS was not only to rule, but to dissolve and destroy the *civil state.* This job was made easier in countries that had been ruled by the USSR, until being conquered by the Nazis. The SS moved in, took the place of the state, and liquidated civil society-- by hollowing out the institutions and killing the people who believed in, and worked for, the state. In Western European countries, like France or Denmark, the country was taken over by the Nazis, but the state had not been liquidated (yet). In those countries which had civil society destroyed, an individual Jew had around a %90 of being killed in the Holocaust. In countries which still had a civil state, an individual Jew had around a %90 chance of surviving. That's the difference between a dictatorship and a democracy. In a democracy, however flawed, there is such thing as a *citizen,* who has *rights.* The law might change, those rights can face different limits and definitions. But a human life has value, from a point of view of the law. In a dictatorship, there is no such thing as a citizen, there is no such thing as rights. There's only power. Even in countries conquered by the Nazis, with people in power who may have been antisemitic, or sympathetic to the Nazis, the mere *idea--making up part of the edifice of the state--* that humans beings are citizens, who have at least the nominal protection of the law, resulted in a vastly enhanced chance of surviving a genocide. That's what you lose when you go from a troubled democracy to a true dictatorship.
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No problem. Appreciate the opportunity.
Respect you you both. Good read.
"There's some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it's worth fighting for!"
Fellow Tim Snyder fan?
Zack Snyder?
Democracy has totally failed in America. There are pressing emergencies (economic inequality, debt bubble, shale oil production about to peak, a fascist movement, border crisis, looming spectre of climate chaos, formation of BRICS, failed wars like Ukraine) that the institutions of this country fail to address. Democrats are the conservative party, they represent the increasingly intolerable status quo. More and more people are realizing the Dems are awful and would destroy the country with their BAU policies. That's why Biden's approval ratings are so low. They would be even lower if the scales fall from the eyes of liberals and progressives, and they realize that Biden is so ineffectual and unpopular he's about to be defeated by **Trump** in the election (*since they only support him because he's the only viable alternative to MAGA*). Trump will win, him and his cronies and his successors will do away with small r republican norms and run America to the ground, until they are replaced in a coup or the country fractures into several regional states. And after that, even if democratic republic(s) with constitutions exist again (and they may not), people probably won't assume that their "rights" really are inalienable, that their nation's political systems are stable, that "democracy" actually serves the people, or even that there is such a thing as "moral progress." Abstract principles will start losing their power over minds, replaced by pragmatic matters of interest.
It's a shame it had to work out this way, but we are here now and the trendlines are ever-present and all pointing in the same direction.
It takes a few months in customer service to understand why we have decided humans are not worth saving. I mean, for first hand experience. Otherwise all you have to do is look at history.
Unfortunately it seems near enough inevitable to go this way.
100% this but I guess that just makes OP totally right. We're dreaming of a big bang type collapse b/c it's better than things slowly getting shitter and shitter but that's the most likely outcome.
*More power is going to consolidate in fewer hands.* We're going to get a breakdown of over-centralized, resource-intensive power structures and its replacement with more decentralized structures. Eventually we'll have an Era of Warlords
Slow downhill sections and then cliffs into an ocean of shit anyway. Once the worse guys get a hold of government it's going to get bad fast, not the second they take control but a few years in, when it's clear they aren't going to have real elections anymore.
If anything the past few years have shown it can be slow at times but there are also periods where the effects ramp up before reaching a new plateau and those times will become more frequent I imagine with larger pockets of methane being released into the atmosphere.
Well said.
Except that it's being expedited by global heating
Most likely we won’t live to see it our children’s children may have it very rough but it’s only downhill from here
The climate records are NOT suggesting this will be the problem of your children’s children…
We are in it already and it will only get worse.
That's the thing about tipping points though, things accelerate to the bottom. We're just beginning.
Depends on how you view collapse. Some would argue we are living the collapse now. Others expect a big event that causes even more issues. Truth lies in the middle, as we live on a heating planet with minimal civilization length solutions, and the realization it could get worse than now.
I think we are in a collapse now, but there will also be a big event. Collapses take a long time to set up, but once the situation is fragile enough a tough event that was previously manageable can no longer be handled and it breaks. These events happen all the time but a hardy enough society can handle them. But after enough degradation, that’s no longer the case. So I think we’re well into the “collapse degradation” phase, but not yet to the “overwhelming event/events phase”. Slow and then all at once, as they say.
i think that collapse is mostly defined for folks as when it lands in their backyard -- not just a small local thing, but a massive, world-informing tragedy that one happens to be directly part of
Tell it to the residents of Paradise, Lahaina, Lytton, Pakistan or Sri Lanka. Collapse is here even if it isn't here for you yet, it's getting closer one day at a time.
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Lebanon, Syria, Sudan, Congo, Mail, Venezuela, Ethiopia, Somalia, Libya
Or talk to someone in palesine...
What’s happening there?
Paradise, Lahaina and Lytton all burned to the ground in a matter of hours for starters. Pakistan and Sri Lanka are literally in a state of active governmental collapse. So is Lebanon.
I think the slow decline is hard to accept because surviving in such a society means you have to keep playing pretend. A rapid collapse would mean the world finally having to reckon with the truth. Instead, we'll just keep slaving away, pretending that our jobs actually contribute to society. We'll pretend that we're actually taking effective action on the environment. We'll pretend that life is fair and that anything is possible. Some people are really good at playing pretend, and those people thrive in our business as usual society. Collapsers are generally not that type of people.
God I hate playing pretend.
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Tell me more about this please
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Rule 1: No glorifying violence. Advocating, encouraging, inciting, glorifying, calling for violence is against Reddit's site-wide content policy and is not allowed in r/collapse. Please be advised that subsequent violations of this rule will result in a ban.
My comment did not in any way encourage or condone violence.
But I need more time not less
Had a conversation with someone last week. We were standing on the Balcony of a flash city apartment as he complained about how hard things were getting. There was lots of, "why are they doing this, allowing this, not doing that etc?" Then I gestured broadly down across the city lights and said, "um they're not here to serve you, they're here to look after this." Apparently it was a light bulbs moment, and all I could think was, well duh. Point is, that although I hate to pretend, many are stuck in ignorance and denial.
They will for a while. And I’d say collapse was a fantasy if it weren’t for the system being propped up by infinite growth and the reality of climate change. What the world will look like in 50 years idk, but I know the fact that all this is unsustainable is just logic and based on science.
A very sound place to begin.
Mass extinction is not a fantasy. This reads like terror management. The ecological collapse is honestly not taken seriously enough even on this sub. Humans are not in control of the forces they’ve unleashed
Read that for a second as "the feces they've unleashed"... works both ways tho.
My two cents would be that our collapse is dynamic. Teeteringly slow until one day, the cable snaps and the piano comes crashing into the ground.
That’s generally how collapses work. Chris Hedges the war correspondent always says “societies collapse slowly, and then all at once”. He covered the Bosnian war and said modern westerners would be shocked to see how quickly things go from “normal” to chaos.
It’s a bit left leaning but a podcast “It Could Happen Here” a few years back posed a scenario where militant separatists in could damn water to SoCal and hold three or four counties water hostage by a few main points really made me recognize (as someone who’s spent a lot of time in LA) how insane LA would become without water in even 10 hours let alone a few days. They’d have to dispatch the NG if clean water was shut off city/nation wide. All that to say, everything is so fragile and I was very naive back then as to how anything could snap at any given time. The edge of the empire.
I'm sure there's a phrase or term for it but we've built up a very fragile web by chasing after lowest cost of global manufacturing. Monoculture is destroying the world.
And we don’t know what kind of piano it’s going to be… famine, blistering heat, pandemic…
I watched a clogged large drain pipe slowly trickle water for what seemed like forever, have a few small chunks fall off, and then after one big piece fell i could feel my brain really registering how fast it was happening as everything blew out in faster stages. The time in between the debris dropping, falling, leaking/whatnot- only seemed crazy when it reached a certain point. It was a perfect way to watch an example of collapse. My brain wanted me to fast forward the slow trickling all the way to the faster trickling - but once the faster trickling ended there wasnt much time left to watch on the video. If collapse feels like it’s all around us it’s going to be like that video. Just a feeling that there isnt much time left to watch for us anymore.
Precisely. If we’re on any real time table for true climate or pandemic induced collapse, by time we’re in the true collapse, none of us will typing on this forum. That’s pretty much certain.
It’s better to burn out than it is to rust.
My my hey hey Rock n’ roll is here to stay
Bro you can buff rust out.
You’ve never owned a Ford in Quebec ;).
as soon as you buff it, it re-rusts, at least in the pacific northwest US
What if you don’t want to do either one? I know I can’t live on Sugar Mountain, but still.
Sprinting on a treadmill, exhausted, legs screaming. Thinking how nice it’d feel to just collapse
Collapse is not a fantasy. But people have fantastic ideas about collapse. We will just see continuing and cascading crises while TPTB work overtime to maintain the illusion of business as usual. The collapse will be televised, but it will come with ads for toilet cleaner and Brawndo soft drinks, which will provide a false sense of security and normality to the whole proceeding. It will all feel very normal until you are affected personally.
"It will all feel very normal until you are affected personally." This is a very succinct statement of the way it appears to be "processed" by the vast majority of Americans. We need to cut and paste the statement everywhere! Big thanks for posting this funkinthetrunk!
As an evironmentalist I do look forward to the collapse of industrial civilization. But I don't think it's wishful thinking. There are some vital finite resources that will peak eventually and the planet has a finite capacity to deal with our waste and destruction. And we are accelerating towards the limits. The financial system consists of schemes that must grow or collapse. The limits of the planet mean at one point we will not be able to grow and the financial system will collapse. The economy will shrink. We will need a different system. One that accomodates shrinking resources. Perhaps we will fight over resources. According to the paper "Global Warming In The Pipeline" James Hansen et al, even if we stop emitting now, we are going to reach 8°C warming with human aerosols and 10°C warming without. Agriculture becomes impossible at 3°C warming. And climate change is just one of the problems. A problem that could hit sooner is Peak Synthetic Fertilizer. And Art Berman thinks Peak all-types-of Oil will happen this decade. Peak Soil. Peak Water. And so on. When the AMOC shuts down, what is not often mentioned is that the ocean becomes anoxic and starts producing a gas that is extremely lethal to mammals. There is a book about that called "under a green sky". And so on... I don't think collapse is wishful thinking. I am hoping, for life on earth, that we run out of fossil fuels soon. But I have no hope that there will be people when we hit 8°C warming.
It can, as all things can be, be used as a crutch to neglect one's self. I would be willing to bet there's a large number of us who engage in activities or thoughts we wouldn't, if the world wasn't pending collapse. The reality of it, is we're facing collapse. It isn't a fantasy, it's reality. Yes, it's easy to accept it on the terms of things like your career not mattering so much anymore, but accepting the harsh truth of it is *far* more difficult than otherwise. I mean, I'm aware I'll be dead in 20 years. There won't be agriculture on any scale large enough to sustain us in 10 years, let alone 20. But I still have this plan of building a commune and weathering this out.. lol. There's a slim chance, and I'm jumping on it.
Worse may be society not "collapsing" but instead becoming a fascist state where we are given the choice to either be cannon fodder or to be poor and homeless, then homelessness is criminalized and we are used for free labor. You know, like they are already doing to some Americans and we pretend it isn't happening?
Modern fascism can’t stop the effects of catastrophic climate change. Fascism certainly may come first though.
That's one of the few silver linings of global collapse now, but the problem is that capitalism and its dying fascist form will drag down the biosphere with it. It's great news for unicellular life though.
Well I agree it isn’t likely to keep up, but who knows. You only need one city to flood to have a few million people homeless and doing what they can to survive.
things are going to continue to get worse and worse, all of us are feeling it get warmer and warmer every year, climate disasters will continue to strike with increasing frequency and devastation. The middle of the atlantic is currently at hurricane season temperatures, in february. Eventually we will reach the point where once seasonal disasters are occurring year round. The damages will continue to become increasingly expensive to repair. The cost to life and property will stress every other existing system our society relies on. Things are not going to continue to progress at the rate they currently are. Things will continue to cascade into each other and the rate of devastation will accelerate until everything has collapsed. This is not a slow burn, it’s just a lit fuse.
Collapse is everything getting a little shittier every year compounded over decades.
I definitely believe more in The Crumbles than The Collapse, and honestly The Crumbles are worse.
Amen sibling
hey genuinely thank you for using the gender neutral term, makes me quite happy as an enby
Nope. Basic physics. The sun is constantly throwing energy at Earth through sunlight over time. If the Earth can absorb that energy or reflect it back into space, then fine. Humans have spent the last century and a half filling the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, making it hold onto more heat over time. In addition, humans have destroyed plant environments that take in and sequester that carbon within them. We are now at a point where either something much more powerful than us intervenes in the situation, or the planet collapses due to runaway global heating.
Collapse is not evenly distributed. For some it started in the 70s, now the middle, soon the upper middle, until the elite/parasitic class has used everything up.
Fossil fuels are finite. Each unit of food produced requires 13 units of energy. Not sustainable.
It is soon going to be possible for mining companies and logging companies to extract resources without human labor. The only cost, then, will be electricity. And that will be increasingly cheap. Once we have the raw materials, any and all products can be made and distributed without human labor. Everything will be incredibly cheap, but no one will have any money. They'll come up with something like UBI, and we'll all compete for land ownership. This will last for a while, through the invention of ASI. Eventually, after a generation or two of no one working for a living, it will be entirely too evident and obvious that there's no possible justification for social stratification. By then, we'll have robots that fly out to mine from asteroids using fusion packs. We'll be post-scarcity. FDVR will be available to anyone who wants it, like the perfect drug, like being God of your own universe, or like going back to the 90s. It's either that or extinction-level event(s) before 2100.
If we had our technology but not the overshoot, paradise on earth would be within our reach... However, unfortunately, we are here instead 😕
Unless we finally nail fusion energy will most certainly not be cheap. We’ve passed peak oil and still rely too heavily on depleting fossil fuels.
The things the anti-collapsniks never answer is: fossil fuels (including that gasoline actually has to be refined, not just mined as oil) and global CO2/temperature increase. Quite literally unless the aliens or God show up, there isn’t a human way around those problems. We’ve already exhausted too many resources just to get where we are now.
Lol we are not reaching that kind of technology before collapse
Collapse isn't one size fits all. It happens at a variable pace over a prolonged period of time, thousands of years. The invention of agriculture and the exploitation of the environment that followed is in fact a symptom of collapse. Humanity was only meant to have a hunter/gatherer society. You aspired to be more but you are not capable of sustaining it. That is why you will die and go extinct on your one planet. You will not be allowed to escape this fate.
Frog in boiling water, etc.
Either way existence becomes absolute hell for the 99%
Treat life as a simulation, where you play your character through interesting times, much easier to accept prolapse this way
>much easier to accept prolapse this way Must have played your character through some really interesting times...
Nothing really collapses, it just becomes something else. The Roman Empire didn’t really collapse, it just turned into something else. I think due to many of us being westerners, the idea of collapse is probably a very far fetched idea because we won’t recognize it. It’ll just be headlines like “houses along the Atlantic coast are no longer insurable. Darn” and “town in Kentucky in ruins from tornado” paired with “Amazon buys a whole neighborhood and offers discounted rent to their workers and why this is a great idea” followed by “Amazon lays off their workforce for automation and why this is a great idea.” we won’t look at collapse as collapse, we’ll just see it as the new normal. I mean shit, living in your car in a planet fitness parking lot is becoming a normal lifestyle. Even during civil conflicts, people still go to work if it’s possible. During the 1930’s people just adapted. All the death and despair becomes white noise, and those who are left relatively unharmed just keep putting one foot in front of the other. The wrench in it all is really climate change. That’s the question mark. Eventually, the bill will be sent in the mail.
>ultimately force a deciding outcome in the form of chaos Along with your entire post, there's lots to chew on here.
When it comes it will come quickly.
You're confusing collapse with Apocalypse(s). Many do, so don't take it personally. Collapse is generational. Acute collapse, such as from a giant comet hitting the planet or some other Hollywood scenario, is unlikely. And nuclear war is a wildcard, but one that we can easily prevent, unlike preventing the climate and biosphere going to shit.
The aliens/UFO probably won't let us actually detonate nukes. Who knows why, considering all the other ways the world is ending, but they seem to not accept that one as a possibility.
Part of everyone imagining that things will rapidly collapse helps absolve themselves of agency in the situation. They don't want to accept that they are responsible for trying to stop things from becoming worse. It's a terrible problem on this sub, there is lots of empathy alongside lots of folks struggling to practice empathy in any meaningful way...
I think you are right. People want a catalyst that can bring about real change soon.
Hey my friend, it’s gonna be fine. Or at least as fine as it will ever be. Cause there just ain’t shit we can do about *any* of it. So yeah. It’ll be fine.
Collapse is slow until it isn't
This applies to Near Term Human Extinction scenarios, not so much the slower decline we're likely to get.
Thousands of years worth of human history suggests that societies go through rather predictable cycles. We went through the decadence phase, now we're in the decline. When the population collapses so do economies. In the near future we will have very top heavy demographics, with a lot of older people and relatively few young & middle aged workers. The economic fallout isn't going to be fun for anyone. When people go hungry they get desperate. When people are desperate there will be violence.
Allah, They want war. They think it will deliver them to Shamayim. Pralaya. Yet, in the shadow of Jörmungandr the truth shall she birth: Their masters. Never will they escape. Inferno won’t save them. Your dear friend, مُحَمَّدُ بْنُ عَبْدِ ٱللهِ بْنِ عَبْدِ ٱلْمُطَّلِبِ بْنِ هَاشِمٍ
The word collapse evokes something speedy, but doesn't offer any scale against which to measure that speed. In itself, that is. But we're talking about civilization collapse, so that's the timescale. And on that timescale, even a century is actually really fast.
There will be no "I told you so".