JHK
Executive Summary
- The 3 fundamental activities society will need to prioritize in order to manage our contracting economy & resources
- How food production will need to evolve if we are to continue to feed ourselves in the future
- How pursuing "growth" is wasting us precious time and energy
- Mandatory transition will be needed across all sectors: transportation, health care, urban planning, manufacturing, trade, etc..
If you have not yet read Part I: Growth is Obsolete, available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.
The problem of growth in its current context is first a problem of language, but do not make the mistake of supposing that this is just a semantic argument. Language is the human animal's primary tool-kit for accomplishing anything in groups, whether it is hunting bison or putting a spacecraft on the moon. If you use the wrong tool you are likely to mismanage the task. Now the primary task facing humans in this moment of history is managing contraction and our goal should be to manage it in a way that minimizes the potential for hardship and suffering. It must be obvious, then, that "growth" in the broad sense that we use the term is not conducive to facilitate "contraction" in the broad sense. The promiscuous use of the word "growth" in our economic debates only confuses us and paralyzes our ability to construct a coherent narrative about what is happening in the world and how we might enter a plausible future which extraordinary events are now shaping.
Three Fundamental Activities
I propose that we substitute the term "activity" for "growth" in our public debates over how our economy can function in the face of the manifold crises of population overshoot, climate change, peak cheap oil, and capital scarcity. There are an endless number of purposeful activities we can undertake to address these large problems that do not connote growth. The three fundamental categories of these activities can be stated with precision, namely:
- re-localizing
- downscaling, and
- de-complexifying.
The quality in common with all of them is indeed the opposite of growth. Yet they all imply a range of positive actions that we can undertake as communities to make new arrangements for the human project to continue in a favorable way.
I will describe the particulars in a moment, but first the point must be made that…
Getting to a Future That Has a Future
PREVIEWExecutive Summary
- The 3 fundamental activities society will need to prioritize in order to manage our contracting economy & resources
- How food production will need to evolve if we are to continue to feed ourselves in the future
- How pursuing "growth" is wasting us precious time and energy
- Mandatory transition will be needed across all sectors: transportation, health care, urban planning, manufacturing, trade, etc..
If you have not yet read Part I: Growth is Obsolete, available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.
The problem of growth in its current context is first a problem of language, but do not make the mistake of supposing that this is just a semantic argument. Language is the human animal's primary tool-kit for accomplishing anything in groups, whether it is hunting bison or putting a spacecraft on the moon. If you use the wrong tool you are likely to mismanage the task. Now the primary task facing humans in this moment of history is managing contraction and our goal should be to manage it in a way that minimizes the potential for hardship and suffering. It must be obvious, then, that "growth" in the broad sense that we use the term is not conducive to facilitate "contraction" in the broad sense. The promiscuous use of the word "growth" in our economic debates only confuses us and paralyzes our ability to construct a coherent narrative about what is happening in the world and how we might enter a plausible future which extraordinary events are now shaping.
Three Fundamental Activities
I propose that we substitute the term "activity" for "growth" in our public debates over how our economy can function in the face of the manifold crises of population overshoot, climate change, peak cheap oil, and capital scarcity. There are an endless number of purposeful activities we can undertake to address these large problems that do not connote growth. The three fundamental categories of these activities can be stated with precision, namely:
- re-localizing
- downscaling, and
- de-complexifying.
The quality in common with all of them is indeed the opposite of growth. Yet they all imply a range of positive actions that we can undertake as communities to make new arrangements for the human project to continue in a favorable way.
I will describe the particulars in a moment, but first the point must be made that…
Executive Summary
- Ready or not, the forces underlying the Long Emergency will force a return to the 'real' (vs the virtual)
- What regions and town/city models will fare best in this future?
- The age of the car is over: how will we transport goods and ourselves?
- Which skills will be in greatest demand?
- How to prepare ourselves emotionally for becoming less techno-dependent
If you have not yet read Part I: Returning to the 'Real' available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.
A Return To the 'Real'
John Maynard Keynes famously remarked, “In the long run we are all dead.” Which leaves the short to intermediate run, which is a lot. Start with the proposition that we’ll be compelled to reconnect our lives to biophysical reality, that is, nature. The techno-industrial adventure was about the exhilaration of overcoming natural limits — and the grandiosity in thinking that we could de-link permanently and put something synthetic and supposedly just-as-good in nature’s place. In the process, we de-natured ourselves and unplugged from the satisfactions found in being part of something wondrous and whole and larger than ourselves. We don’t have to reinvent the sacred. It has been there all along. We just ignored and disregarded it for about a century, and now we have to rebuild the social and logistical infrastructure for it. That job will be easier than keeping the interstate highway system in repair.
Expect to be living a far less mediated existence, being more directly in touch with the patterns afforded by nature, the sun and moon, the seasons, the temperature, the sensations, the tastes and textures, the pains and pleasures. For the generation used to sensing absolutely everything through the tiny portal of a five-inch smart phone screen, this may come as a startling psychological shock, greater than the psychedelic drugs of the hippie days were to the Boomers. By the way, nobody should expect that the national electric grid will survive indefinitely, or that every locality will be able to generate its own electricity without the long commercial chains of mining, advanced metallurgy, and the manufacture of modular machinery.
Where to Live?
One of the first questions for people to answer for themselves, especially in a period of demographic turmoil, is what place do I feel okay about being in and how do I set my roots in it? …
The Future of Living
PREVIEWExecutive Summary
- Ready or not, the forces underlying the Long Emergency will force a return to the 'real' (vs the virtual)
- What regions and town/city models will fare best in this future?
- The age of the car is over: how will we transport goods and ourselves?
- Which skills will be in greatest demand?
- How to prepare ourselves emotionally for becoming less techno-dependent
If you have not yet read Part I: Returning to the 'Real' available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.
A Return To the 'Real'
John Maynard Keynes famously remarked, “In the long run we are all dead.” Which leaves the short to intermediate run, which is a lot. Start with the proposition that we’ll be compelled to reconnect our lives to biophysical reality, that is, nature. The techno-industrial adventure was about the exhilaration of overcoming natural limits — and the grandiosity in thinking that we could de-link permanently and put something synthetic and supposedly just-as-good in nature’s place. In the process, we de-natured ourselves and unplugged from the satisfactions found in being part of something wondrous and whole and larger than ourselves. We don’t have to reinvent the sacred. It has been there all along. We just ignored and disregarded it for about a century, and now we have to rebuild the social and logistical infrastructure for it. That job will be easier than keeping the interstate highway system in repair.
Expect to be living a far less mediated existence, being more directly in touch with the patterns afforded by nature, the sun and moon, the seasons, the temperature, the sensations, the tastes and textures, the pains and pleasures. For the generation used to sensing absolutely everything through the tiny portal of a five-inch smart phone screen, this may come as a startling psychological shock, greater than the psychedelic drugs of the hippie days were to the Boomers. By the way, nobody should expect that the national electric grid will survive indefinitely, or that every locality will be able to generate its own electricity without the long commercial chains of mining, advanced metallurgy, and the manufacture of modular machinery.
Where to Live?
One of the first questions for people to answer for themselves, especially in a period of demographic turmoil, is what place do I feel okay about being in and how do I set my roots in it? …
Executive Summary
- The end of plentiful resources will challenge many deeply held social beliefs
- Downscaling and re-localization will be the dominant economic trends
- What this will mean for “work”
- What this will mean for lifestyles
- What this will mean for social relationships
If you have not yet read Part I: Class, Race, Hierarchy, and Social Relations in The Long Emergency, available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.
I’d also argue that the recent historical saeculum — the climax decades of turbo-industrialism post World War Two — produced extremely anomalous social and economic conditions that have torqued our expectations in highly unrealistic directions. Chief among these was the assumption that the economic equations of the late 20th century would persist indefinitely; that there would always be more of everything, including cheap fossil fuels and monetary credit to support our activities. Now, as we encounter the onrushing reality of no-longer-cheap energy, our expectations for technological rescue become ever more detached from reality. On the money side of things, we vainly try to offset the impairments of capital formation with pervasive accounting fraud, asset price manipulation, and market interventions, all of which only worsen the impairments of capital formation. In short, the principal arrangements of modern economies are headed for an inflection point, probably sooner rather than later, where we can expect critical systems to founder — banking, agriculture, trade, transportation — and thus for social conditions to enter a flux of change as well.
The economic abnormalities of climax turbo-industrial life also produced a range of ideological distortions around questions of social organization, in particular the conflation of technological progress with expanding social equality. The idea was defective in more than one way, but certainly in the sense that technological progress itself was assumed to be limitless. The 20th century cavalcade of wonders — movies, airplanes, radio, atom bombs, heart transplants, computers, etc. — had programmed the public to expect nothing less. This hubristic techno-narcissism was most conspicuous among the techies themselves. No one could imagine the possibility of a time-out from progress, let alone an end of technological dazzle. The idea of ever-greater social leveling was also at odds with the human predilection for status-seeking. And, in fact, technology became both a signifier and an enabler of social status in the computer age for the billionaires who developed it and the young people who used iPhones and Facebook minute-by-minute to jockey for status enhancement. All the while, in the background, peak cheap oil was provoking a concentration of financial wealth in the shenanigans around capital, so the basic gulf between the haves and have-nots only grew deeper and wider…
The New Disposition of Things
PREVIEWExecutive Summary
- The end of plentiful resources will challenge many deeply held social beliefs
- Downscaling and re-localization will be the dominant economic trends
- What this will mean for “work”
- What this will mean for lifestyles
- What this will mean for social relationships
If you have not yet read Part I: Class, Race, Hierarchy, and Social Relations in The Long Emergency, available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.
I’d also argue that the recent historical saeculum — the climax decades of turbo-industrialism post World War Two — produced extremely anomalous social and economic conditions that have torqued our expectations in highly unrealistic directions. Chief among these was the assumption that the economic equations of the late 20th century would persist indefinitely; that there would always be more of everything, including cheap fossil fuels and monetary credit to support our activities. Now, as we encounter the onrushing reality of no-longer-cheap energy, our expectations for technological rescue become ever more detached from reality. On the money side of things, we vainly try to offset the impairments of capital formation with pervasive accounting fraud, asset price manipulation, and market interventions, all of which only worsen the impairments of capital formation. In short, the principal arrangements of modern economies are headed for an inflection point, probably sooner rather than later, where we can expect critical systems to founder — banking, agriculture, trade, transportation — and thus for social conditions to enter a flux of change as well.
The economic abnormalities of climax turbo-industrial life also produced a range of ideological distortions around questions of social organization, in particular the conflation of technological progress with expanding social equality. The idea was defective in more than one way, but certainly in the sense that technological progress itself was assumed to be limitless. The 20th century cavalcade of wonders — movies, airplanes, radio, atom bombs, heart transplants, computers, etc. — had programmed the public to expect nothing less. This hubristic techno-narcissism was most conspicuous among the techies themselves. No one could imagine the possibility of a time-out from progress, let alone an end of technological dazzle. The idea of ever-greater social leveling was also at odds with the human predilection for status-seeking. And, in fact, technology became both a signifier and an enabler of social status in the computer age for the billionaires who developed it and the young people who used iPhones and Facebook minute-by-minute to jockey for status enhancement. All the while, in the background, peak cheap oil was provoking a concentration of financial wealth in the shenanigans around capital, so the basic gulf between the haves and have-nots only grew deeper and wider…
Class, Race, Hierarchy, and Social Relations in ‘The Long Emergency’
Executive Summary
- Dmitry Orlov's recent work shows how sovereign collapse progresses along a well understood trajectory
- Understanding the elements & ramifications of each stage is critical to positioning oneself safely in advance
- The five stages: financial, commercial, political, social & cultural
- The U.S. looks certain to follow this progression – at least partway – in our lifetimes, likely sooner than later. The decisions you make and actions you take now will have outsized repercussions for your future.
If you have not yet read Part I: America the Vulnerable, available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.
Orlov’s Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Experience and American Prospects was a tour de force of political writing with true literary panache. It announced the arrival on the scene of a major thinker – in a period of history that didn’t care much about thinkers (unless they could invent cell-phone apps). After that first book, he published some books of assorted essays, and now he's out with another major statement titled The Five Stages of Collapse: Survivors' Toolkit (New Society Publishers).
This new book assumes that global industrial civilization is on a collapse trajectory, and Orlov doesn’t waste any ink on arguments trying to prove that. Rather, he lays out in detail exactly how the process of civilizational collapse may actually happen. For many readers and observers, the prospect is often conceived in narratives of Hollywood-style apocalyptic melodrama with some kind of sudden chaos driving the story. Orlov avoids that tripe and instead presents a clear declension of proceedings that unfold naturally and comprehensibly in a certain order – like the progressive organ failure that doctors encounter in the intensive care unit.
Orlov calls his method “a taxonomy of collapse.” The point of the book, he writes, is “(n)ot whether collapse will occur, but rather what it looks like, what to expect, and how we should behave should we wish to survive.”
The Five Stages of Collapse
As he conceives it, the five stages would tend to play out in sequence based on the breaching of particular boundaries of consensual faith and trust that groups of human beings vest in the institutions and systems they depend on for daily life. These boundaries run from the least personal (e.g. trust in banks and governments) to the most personal (faith in your local community, neighbors, and kin)…
A Clear Picture of What to Expect
PREVIEWExecutive Summary
- Dmitry Orlov's recent work shows how sovereign collapse progresses along a well understood trajectory
- Understanding the elements & ramifications of each stage is critical to positioning oneself safely in advance
- The five stages: financial, commercial, political, social & cultural
- The U.S. looks certain to follow this progression – at least partway – in our lifetimes, likely sooner than later. The decisions you make and actions you take now will have outsized repercussions for your future.
If you have not yet read Part I: America the Vulnerable, available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.
Orlov’s Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Experience and American Prospects was a tour de force of political writing with true literary panache. It announced the arrival on the scene of a major thinker – in a period of history that didn’t care much about thinkers (unless they could invent cell-phone apps). After that first book, he published some books of assorted essays, and now he's out with another major statement titled The Five Stages of Collapse: Survivors' Toolkit (New Society Publishers).
This new book assumes that global industrial civilization is on a collapse trajectory, and Orlov doesn’t waste any ink on arguments trying to prove that. Rather, he lays out in detail exactly how the process of civilizational collapse may actually happen. For many readers and observers, the prospect is often conceived in narratives of Hollywood-style apocalyptic melodrama with some kind of sudden chaos driving the story. Orlov avoids that tripe and instead presents a clear declension of proceedings that unfold naturally and comprehensibly in a certain order – like the progressive organ failure that doctors encounter in the intensive care unit.
Orlov calls his method “a taxonomy of collapse.” The point of the book, he writes, is “(n)ot whether collapse will occur, but rather what it looks like, what to expect, and how we should behave should we wish to survive.”
The Five Stages of Collapse
As he conceives it, the five stages would tend to play out in sequence based on the breaching of particular boundaries of consensual faith and trust that groups of human beings vest in the institutions and systems they depend on for daily life. These boundaries run from the least personal (e.g. trust in banks and governments) to the most personal (faith in your local community, neighbors, and kin)…
Executive Summary
- The prevailing trends of the next several decades: contraction, down-scaling & re-localization
- How these trends will manifest in commerce, politics, employment & infrastructure
- Those who adapt now will be positioned to thrive
- Act now – ask forgiveness, not permission
If you have not yet read Part I: We've Dug a Pretty Damn Big Hole for Ourselves, available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.
We may never again restore trust in giant institutions ranging from the U.S. government to Harvard University to The New York Times. They have probably squandered their credibility and their legitimacy.
Anyway, the trends now moving human affairs are taking us away from both gigantism and the growth imperative that these things represent. The trends of the present moment in history are contraction, down-scaling, and re-localization.
Managing contraction is the only safe reality-based political response to the situation, and there is no constituency for it – though contraction is emphatically underway whether we like it or not, and it would be advantageous if we could manage our way through it rather than let it become a disorderly rout in which people starve and the rule of law disintegrates altogether.
As for re-localization and downscaling, there is a highly visible, easily identifiable constituency…
Fixing the Mess We’ve Made
PREVIEWExecutive Summary
- The prevailing trends of the next several decades: contraction, down-scaling & re-localization
- How these trends will manifest in commerce, politics, employment & infrastructure
- Those who adapt now will be positioned to thrive
- Act now – ask forgiveness, not permission
If you have not yet read Part I: We've Dug a Pretty Damn Big Hole for Ourselves, available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.
We may never again restore trust in giant institutions ranging from the U.S. government to Harvard University to The New York Times. They have probably squandered their credibility and their legitimacy.
Anyway, the trends now moving human affairs are taking us away from both gigantism and the growth imperative that these things represent. The trends of the present moment in history are contraction, down-scaling, and re-localization.
Managing contraction is the only safe reality-based political response to the situation, and there is no constituency for it – though contraction is emphatically underway whether we like it or not, and it would be advantageous if we could manage our way through it rather than let it become a disorderly rout in which people starve and the rule of law disintegrates altogether.
As for re-localization and downscaling, there is a highly visible, easily identifiable constituency…
Total 22 items
by blaggers