Collapse is a Process

Look, I’m a systems guy.  I think in systems terms.  You should as well.

Why?

Because we’re entering a period of time when the major systems that have supported humanity are going to fail.

Or, put more accurately: they are already failing.

As just one example, our monetary system delivers outsized gains to the already stupendously-wealthy while piling up massive debts on the backs of we citizens, both born and yet-to-be-born.  The US Federal Reserve is the unelected and unaccountable body that is most responsible for have made America’s billionaires nearly $1 trillion ‘richer’ since the pandemic hit.

These next three Fed-related data points are, in a word, obscene.

The first shows that the US Federal Reserve now “owns” more US federal debt than all foreign central banks. The second shows how billionaires are getting grotesquely wealthier from the Fed’s “rescue'” efforts. And the last shows how the Fed’s record-low interest policy has resulted in an explosion in federal debt:

(Source)

(Source)

This is obscene (and infuriating!) to anyone who cares about the future.  Leaving aside the morality issues for a moment, we can at least conclude that the behaviors and values on display are thoroughly unsustainable.

Eventually spending more money than you have ends in ruin.

Speaking of spending what you don’t have, a similar story can be told about ecological overshoot and humanity’s extractive practices —  it’s akin to spending both the entirety of the interest income as well as some principal each year from our environmental trust fund.

There aren’t many resources that one can point to which aren’t in some serious form of either concerning decline or depletion, or both.  Already thousands, if not millions, of people in the American West are considering relocating because of the ever-present danger of disruptive if not life-threatening fires:

The climate refugees are here. They’re Americans.

California, Oregon, and Washington are on fire.

At least 33 people have died in recent days, and more than 5 million acres have been scorched as out-of-control blazes rage across the American West. The 2020 wildfire season in California is already the most destructive in the state’s history — exceeding the record set in 2018, which in turn beat the record set in 2017. Experts agree that rising temperatures from climate change have turned much of the region into dry kindling, ready to spark in an instant.

“This is a climate damn emergency,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom said last week.

Disasters like these displace people. Tens of thousands of fire survivors have been forced to flee their homes, and more than 500,000 — half a million — Oregonians have been warned they might soon be ordered to leave. In the meantime, many evacuees are sheltering “in an assortment of RVs, cars, and tents.” Many do not know if their homes will still be standing when they try to return, or where they will go if those houses are indeed destroyed. The fires will eventually end, but for many residents of the region, the disaster is just beginning.

The climate refugee crisis has come to America.

(Source)

I’m less certain that we can pin these fires entirely on climate change, as poor land use and fire suppression practices factor in prominently. But I’m certain that many of the afflicted people will be convinced that wide-scale annual fires are now a permanent feature of the region, and that will cause many to move to ‘safer’ places.

Once that perception is solidly in place, the masses will relocate.  Similarly, we’ll see people abandon coastal areas which are already losing battles to rising sea levels, and other areas where droughts are getting worse and worse.

However you add up the data points, they coalesce into one theme: massive and disruptive change has arrived. 

You can either ignore that reality for a while longer. Or get busy responding.

Man, It’s Hard

The hardest part about detecting collapse lies not with the data – that is clear as a bell ringing on a still morning – but with the emotional difficulty of accepting it (and then acting on it).

There’s a lot of science behind how we humans are wired to accept or reject information based on whether it confirms or refutes, respectively, the belief systems we are already holding.

Nobody desires harder times for themselves. Nobody wants to lose financial ground or leave behind a worse world for their children.

But what we want has nothing to do with the reality of the situation.

What we want is usually based on our preexisting belief systems.  If those are out of alignment with the actual reality of the situation, then our best chances for personal success lie with adjusting our beliefs as rapidly as we can.

While our brains can come up with some clever delaying tactics and can-kicking technologies, the reality is that we’re just another organism on a crowded planet, subject to the same rules as every other life form.

When we have ample resources available to us, we’re peaceful, creative creatures.  We do really cool things, like figure out germ theory and make computer chips.

But what happens when resources are tight, or even insufficient to support daily life?

Then humans act badly towards each other and become tribal, but not in a good way.  We squabble and go to war over dwindling resources.  We do this not because it’s a dominant strategy with a proven track record, we do it because of our inability to wisely recognize the resource limitations in advance and cleverly avoid them.

During such times, the elites have a noted tendency to cling ever more tightly to their relative advantage rather than yield any of towards the common good:

“People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage.”

— John Kenneth Galbraith

That’s what’s underway right now.  Economic oxygen is in short supply and the elites are busy hoovering up for themselves a gigantically-larger share of that dwindling air (see billionaire headline above) even as tens of millions of their fellow citizens find themselves increasingly financially strangled.

On the political side, the only true political commitment I can detect (and it’s equal in both US political parties) is to defend the status quo.  In other words, they are committed to keeping the causes of our problems fixed firmly in place.

As this all progresses, most will experience the changes as a series of shocks, perhaps coming at too rapid of a pace for some to absorb and so it will become overwhelming to them.  The emotional costs involved will make it all very hard to accept, for myself included (even though I consider myself a very fast adjuster).

As our systems continue to fail, shrink, or even collapse, the pace of the changes will continue to be emotionally shocking.  I wish it wasn’t so. Frustratingly, it didn’t have to be this way.

How To Get Ahead

The ‘prediction’ that stems from all this is not really a prediction at all but rather a simple extrapolation: things are going to continue on their current trajectories.   Collapse is underway — and it’s a process, not an event.

To protect their relative advantage, the elites will pretend the problems are difficult to address and resist dealing with them.

This means the future will consist of a larger wealth gap, greater social and political tensions, more violence, less nutritious food, fewer insects and other species, more climate change, and a hard date with future resource scarcity.  And I mean hard.

None of which is actually all that unique in the human experience. Nor is it something to be necessarily feared.

As a species we’ve faced plenty of difficult times in the past and gotten through them. But some do manage to get through them better than others.  That will be equally true this time, too.

How does one ‘get ahead’ during hard times? I have a formula for success.  It works really well for me and I want to share it with you.

Fair warning: not everyone is going to like it.

Ready?  Here it is.

Work hard.  Keep at it.  Be lucky.

Work Hard

I know I lost some people right here at this step.  Based on watching people around me my whole life I understand that I am in the top percentage of people who get things done.  I thrive on challenges and so I set the bar high for myself.

This helps to explain all the degrees I have, which include a PhD (Duke), an MBA (Cornell), a BS (Lewis & Clark College) and an AA (Simon’s Rock College).

It explains why the past owners of the house in which Evie and I live may not recognize it only part-way through our first year of owning it.  Every single day, without exception, there are projects being done here.

An important facet of this step is also working intelligently.  As a minor example, when I am off in search of a tool from the basement, I also ask if anything needs to be brought there, and if there’s anything else I could retrieve, saving potential future steps.

As a larger example, I will research the living hell out of a project before I begin, usually finding that somebody has already taken the learning lumps and posted something very educational on Youtube.

I recently bought a sawmill, a Norwood HD36.  It arrived in about 30 boxes as literally several hundred disassembled components.  I read and I watched other people assembling theirs.  I studied the assembly guide carefully re-reading anything that wasn’t 100% clear until it became 100% clear.

The sawmill started right up on the first try, I got the very delicate saw band adjustment/tensioning process right on the first try, and the very first log cut true as did the next twelve.  I never once called the company’s 1-800 helpline which probably makes me a bell-curve outlier.

This is how I learn – by doing.  So I do a lot of it.

2020 has seen a lot of firsts for me; first time cutting logs into lumber, first time having cows, first time having pigs, first time being the sponsor of a real estate syndication, first time owning a tractor with a bucket attachment, first time building soil at scale, and the first time plumbing a gravity fed spring line.

Along the way lots of second, third, … n^th times doing other things like framing walls, mudding, insulation, roofing, building a pole barn, digging a new garden space, installing fencing, painting, moving, organizing a new household, and starting new business entities.

Add it all up and we get the phrase ‘work hard.’  By the way, I don’t consider it hard work.  The ordering of those two words means everything to one’s level of motivation.

It’s likely that my work output is actually normal/average for past eras where people had to work a lot harder simply to survive. Perhaps everyone is wired for this level of work output but haven’t had the right circumstances to discover the satisfaction that comes from creating with one’s mind and hands.

Thankfully I don’t have to fight past a limiting belief system such as “I hate work” which I know works against some people.  But after watching three teenaged boys try to out-compete each other to see who could be the most slothful on the job here the other day, I can see where our culture might be working against us here.

Keep At It

Working hard gets things started, but being persistent gets them finished. Sometimes life gives us easy gains, but most of the time we have to grind out the yardage by simply keeping our legs moving.

I owe a lot to being persistent, and if I had to choose between them, I’d keep persistence over all my other traits.

If you look at our property in five years it will be a magical assembly of systems, buildings and plantings. Someday somebody will ask me how that came to be and I’ll answer, “by doing the next thing.”   That’s it.  That’s the magic right there.  Just do the next thing.  Life is but a series of small things.  Over time they add up to big things.

Every single day, literally, since 2006 when I first started blogging about the housing crisis that was on the way, I have spent time reading and researching various things on the internet.  My daily average is about 8-10 hours of reading.

I have also written nearly every day and done so for years.  Most recently I researched, assembled and produced 132 videos on the Coronavirus since January, each 30-50 minutes in length.

On top of that an extensive two part piece every other week (such as this one), Off the Cuff and Featured Voices podcasts, site comments, and various interviews on other people’s channels such as with Craig Hemke and Mike Maloney.

How do I do all this?  Persistence.  Just keep the legs moving.

It’s that simple.  And that hard.  Every successful small businessperson has the same tale to tell. We’re all part of the tribe that understands that persistence is a major key to success. 

My next big plan is to design and then cut all the lumber for a pretty big barn.  Right now we have a small stack of lumber from early saw mill operations and learning.

With persistence we will have several stacks.  Then even larger stacks.  Then, finally, enough to build a large barn.

Luck!

I owe a lot to luck.

There wasn’t an oncoming truck that day when the craptastic car in which I was a passenger spun across the oncoming two lanes that icy winter night in 1983.  I got lucky.  Obviously that story could have ended differently.

I didn’t get cancer as a 23-year-old, and I wasn’t sleeping too deeply in a drunken stupor when my house caught fire.  None of my kids were born with a major life-long disability that would require my constant care.

I’m gratefully aware of how random chance deals us all different hands and that so far mine have all been winners.

Further I was born into a generation that had massively better opportunities than those coming of age today.  I had nothing to do with that luck of the draw, but I did benefit from it immensely.

I’ve been very lucky in life.  But I’ve also managed to stack the odds in my favor.  You can too.

Chance favors the prepared mind.

~Louis Pasteur

One way I’ve stacked the deck is to be aware of how not to get injured. I avoided contact sports at a young age because I didn’t want the later damage – something my 58-year-old self is congratulating my younger self for avoiding.  I’ve taken plenty of risks (rock climbing for many years, skiing fast, etc.) but they’ve been calculated risks.  I made sure I knew my limits and pushed slightly past them, but never too far past them.

I’ve learned to trust my instincts, such as when Evie and I went on a tear to find a place last summer that has landed us here in Eden just months ahead of a literal horde of city escapees seeking the same.

It’s not just a US phenomenon either as this very recent record smashing sale in rural Ireland suggests:

(Source)

It wasn’t entirely luck either that I knew instantly the value of the property we were getting.  Lots of hard work went into being able to recognize it, as well as knowing how to cobble the deal together.

So stacking the deck in one’s favor is definitely ‘a thing’ and one that I practice regularly.  For me it happens best when I am ‘in the flow’ and have lots and lots of information all fresh in my mind.  Being 100% in the game of life vastly increases one’s chances of ‘being lucky.’

As they say, I’d rather be lucky than good.  But sometimes they go hand in hand.

Adopting A Systems View

Working hard, persistence and loading the dice of chance in my favor are the tactics I employ.  They work as well as they do for me because I take a top-down, systems-oriented view of things.   This is what works for me and I fully recognize that there are many other ways to approach life and learning.

Perhaps a definition is in order.  Systems thinking involves looking at the whole and understanding that all the parts inter-react and relate to each other.

For example, one cannot fully understand the human heart as an organ, and really grasp everything about the heart, without also studying the rest of the much larger human body, of which the heart is a part.  The part informs the whole and the whole informs the part.

As Leonardo put it:

Because I think in systems, I tend to fashion my projects in ways that they feed off of and interact with each other.  The cows relate to the garden which relates to water which relates to the fruit trees which relate to the pigs…

As well my systems view informs my sense of how things are going to turn out in the future which defines what I consider to be useful projects to pursue.

As The Crash Course makes clear, the economy is a complex system which, like the heart example above, we cannot grasp without also studying how it inter-reacts with the larger natural world.  Both the economy and the environment are complex systems, which is another fascinating field of study we’ll just note has been discussed in detail here before (and leave it at that for now).

It’s worth reminding ourselves that complex systems depend on energy flows in order to both achieve and maintain their complexity, which means we have to include an understanding of energy as a system if we wish to deepen our awareness of both the economy and the environment.

A simple way to visualize this is to observe the life forms on earth and note their incredibly varied shapes, strategies and behaviors.  A jellyfish is a ridiculously complex creature that shares practically no behaviors or experiences in common with a mountain marmot which itself is a very different thing from a lily plant.  Each a living creature, but they share almost nothing in common beyond that.

All of the complexity of life on this planet owes 100% of its existence and emergent complexity to energy from the sun. Take the sun away and what would happen to the complexity of life on earth?

Well, if the sun blinked out life on earth would simplify a great deal.  Nearly all of the species would die out in prompt order and nearly every terrestrial and aquatic ecosystem would cease to function.  No photosynthesis = no life.  Subzero surface temperatures = no life on the surface.

I assume that some communities of tube worms living near deep oceanic vents would carry on for a while, as would some archaic bacteria living far below the surface of the earth.  But eventually even those would die out as the Earth’s core cooled down over the eons and the icy temperatures penetrated more deeply.

Eventually the Earth would become just another lifeless orb drifting about in space.  Not terribly interesting and a lot less complex as compared to the explosion of life we see around us today.

As the sun is to Earth’s diversity of species, fossil fuels are to all the stuff you can buy on Amazon.

The sheer number of things you can buy today are an artifact of surplus energy mainly provided by  fossil fuels, which are more properly viewed as tens of millions of years of ancient sunlight which is  being liberated over the span of – oh – say, a couple of hundred years.

In other words, everything you hold dear about your ‘way of life’ is a temporary condition courtesy of surplus energy that is transpiring over the geological blink of an eye.  Maybe it makes sense to begin making other plans.

For me those plans are unfolding as a series of projects around my homestead and the community that Evie and I are actively forming nearby.

It is this larger systems view, the macro view, that is the top-down scaffolding that provides meaning and priority to the many things that are being done.

Conclusion

Being successful is really just a function of working ward, being persistent, and being lucky.  To the extent that we can, Evie and I are using that luck to help other people out.  For example, we have a small extra house that came with the property we bought.

It’s just been fixed up ($$) and has a new bathroom (really needed one where the toilet wasn’t threatening to migrate suddenly to the basement), new flooring, and new paint throughout.

Evie’s daughter Jayde is now living there rent & utility free, as will a couple of other people who wish to learn from us, work the land, tackle projects and be part of whatever is happening here.  I’ve provided the capital, and my expectation is they will figure out how to turn their efforts into some sort of a living.

Maybe cutting lumber or selling eggs, or maple syrup, or providing firewood to locals.  Who knows? All I am asking is that they bring their hard work, a desire to learn, and an entrepreneurial spirit.  I’ll provide training, experience and a solid container from which to sally forth.  I’m foregoing solid rental income and receiving willing and capable hands in return.

They have a chance to learn from me, and I get a chance to mentor them.  It’s a pretty good deal, but only if the right apprentice meets the right mentor.  Then it’s a really sweet deal for both parties.

I think there are millions of baby boomers who could place themselves in a similar circumstance of using their accumulated wealth and wisdom to help young people get started in life.  There’s a model in here somewhere.

As we’re busily, if not urgently, building the systems we think we need to face the future, we’re having a blast, enjoying ourselves, eating together around fires in the fall air, and slowly attracting more and more people to this thing we’re doing, whatever it is.  We think we know, but we really don’t because it is emerging.

So we’ll just see where this goes.  But now I have to go saw some logs.  My therapist, Dr Norwood the sawmill, is calling.