The Cheat Code for Preventing and/or Surviving the coming Collapse (Part 1)

Utopias are often just premature truths.

Alphonse de Lamartine

The Bad News

I haven’t looked into any concrete stats on this, but my sense is that there is growing popular suspicion that something very big is coming to and end. We might not know what that ‘something’ is, exactly (Civilization? Industrialism? Capitalism?), but with every passing season, the lurking shadow of collapse is taking shape like a cargo ship emerging from the dense fog.

As I write, in mid-September, we have just emerged from the hottest summer on record. June, July, and August all set records as the hottest respective months individually, with July 2023 as the hottest month ever recorded (2016 is still the hottest year on record, but we’ve got a little time left to make a run at it).

This global heating is causing more frequent and larger global effects, disastrous symptoms with which we are all becoming familiar: massive and ongoing wildfires, now spreading around the globe (Canada, Europe, Maui, Australia, California); torrential rains and flooding, also expanding (China, India, South Korea, and many areas in the US); the ratcheting up of crop failures around the world, with scientists now saying that this is an underestimated variable in current climate models; Insurance companies starting to pull out of areas where serial catastrophes make coverage impossible to justify; stronger storms, more hurricanes, widening tornado zones, etc…. etc…

If we dig a bit deeper into the bad news, the hits just keep on coming: biodiversity loss is accelerating (28% of all species facing extinction, another 33% on their way), largely driven by our food system, which needs to continuously disrupt natural habitats to create agri-space, especially for cattle (global meat consumption has doubled since 1990); coral reef and crustacean die-off, as the oceans heat up and acidify; topsoil loss, now expected to hit 90% by 2050, as unsustainable agricultural practices continue; disappearing fresh water (more of it falls from the sky, but all at once, and then floods away), with demand expected to outpace supply by 40% in 2030; the proliferation of microplastics and ‘forever-chemicals,’ which studies now show are all over the food chain, including our own bodies (microplastics are set to triple by 2060); deforestation and general land degradation (UN estimates that 75% of land environments and 67% of marine environments have been detrimentally affected by human activity, with less than 3% of the land still having ‘ecological integrity’); phosphorus and nitrogen runoff expanding oceanic dead zones year after year; aerosol loading from fossil fuel consumption, which could ironically make global heating worse, should carbon emissions ever actually start to go down.

Put all these things together, and it’s fairly obvious that our consumer industrial civilization is just not sustainable. There’s too many of us — too much activity, too much impact. It doesn’t much matter which particular part or party is to blame, and in what ratios. We’re past that point now, and when the whole thing goes down, we all go down together. Of course, some places will be slammed much worse than other places. And there will be massive injustices and atrocities, as nations and peoples clash over diminishing resources and degraded environments. But for the immediate present, those things don’t matter, as we need to get some kind of macro-solution in place right now. If we don’t do that, then meting out responsibility and blame will be moot. The bottom line is that our system is unsustainable, and unsustainable things collapse. Judgment cometh, and that right soon.

Dissonance

So collapse is coming. But as social primates, with storytelling brains that crave cohesion, connection, and continuity, we really don’t have a way to truly contemplate or conceptualize the wholesale disintegration of our way of life. Macro-collapse doesn’t match up with the more personal narratives of our lifecycle as individuals: birth and childhood, adulthood and career advancement, child-bearing and rearing, equity-building through accumulation and ownership, retirement and old age, dying and death. On a deeper level, collapse also doesn’t resonate with our broader economic, political, and cultural projects: the goodness of perpetual economic growth, the desirability and dignity of full employment, the pursuit of social justice, the expansion of technological mastery of nature, the expansion of legal rights and economic opportunity to marginalized and oppressed peoples, etc.

So a gulf of cognitive dissonance has opened up, stark and obvious for many, but lurking in the subconscious of all. We know that a colossal reckoning of some kind is coming, but we don’t really know what to do about it, or what it will look like. So we retreat deeper into our distractions and our ideologies, oblivious or in denial of how these avoidance strategies don’t ever connect back up with our ecological realities, where the chickens are coming home to roost.

Because of this disconnect and dissonance, our resulting sociocultural projects are increasingly delusional. And in an age that is hyper-saturated with entertainment products of all kinds, sophisticated consumers (not smart or wise people, necessarily, just sophisticated AS consumers) are growing to understand that they are being duped and strung along by infomercial hawkers posing as leaders. On the ‘conservative’ side, there is a broad campaign to create a Handmaid’s Tale society, with both the symptoms of ecological collapse and the achievements of social progress theatrically presented as the moral and spiritual outcome of Sin, as a falling away from America’s imagined idyllic baseline of white, male-directed, Christian-infused theocracy/autocracy. In the other camp, liberals are pushing for an impossible upgrading of our current arrangements, along greener and more-inclusive lines, because the problem is not really with the system itself, but with the specific kinds of energy input, with the consumption habits of individuals and families, and with the avenues of opportunity-access to marginalized groups.

For those not really convinced by the conservative and liberal options detailed above, the remaining courses available run through the bleak landscapes of cynicism, despair, free-floating fear (of AI, of floods, of unforeseen medical emergencies, of layoffs), or just self-imposed and semi-blissful ignorance.

We’re not just talking about increased cognitive dissonance itself. The growing mismatch between the coming freight train of collapse vs. the practicality of the solutions appearing on political-cultural menus results in the radicalization and intensification of what I call the PIC (Polarization Industrial Complex). This ramping up of polarization happens because, as things get worse, with no actual, substantive change delivered by our leaders, we get angrier and angrier, and the main target of that ire is the ‘other side.’ Thus, demonization escalates, information siloing intensifies, and things drift closer to open mass conflict and violence. But ironically, underneath this weaponized polarization is a silent, tacit, underground mover: agreement that there is no overall problem with the underlying household mechanics of industrial civilization. There are stark disagreements on who should be let into the party, and how to generate the most swag for the gift bags; but both sides agree on the fundamental goodness of the basic social units of the individual, the couple (however constituted), and the family. The warring sides cannot see that it is this micro-household itself that creates the non-sustainability and destruction of our consumer industrial civilization. If the household, as it is currently constituted, is not seen as a problem, then it cannot be transcended, and things will surely collapse.

Where and How?

The main issue, the thing that enhances our sense of helplessness in the face of impending doom, is a missing Point of Application. People just can’t see any other concrete, realistic way to live, other than individualized careerism and couple-bonded domiciles (what I describe in earlier posts as the One-Person/One Job-One Family/One Dwelling system). When people have these structural blinders on, political purpose is whittled down to, “What can government do to make my little micro-household better off?” This is not a bad question, but it can’t be the only question, or even the main one. And as the evolution of technology-driven capitalism results in top-heavy plutocracies in place around the world, economic precariousness for most people makes that whittled-down political task all but impossible to achieve (two-thirds of US households live paycheck-to-paycheck, in the biggest economy in history).

With our political path choked off by polarization and economic insecurity, we just cannot envision any scenario where our politics, our economy, and our culture could actually work together to tackle the challenges of a collapsing civilization: How can we rapidly and significantly reduce our ecological destruction? How can we heal the damage we’ve already done? How can we serve the needs of humans and the needs of the planet at the same time? How can we get past international conflict and competition to reach a point where all nations work together to back away from planetary ecocide, while ensuring that the current global non-winners have a fair chance to develop themselves in a just and collaborative international system?

Currently, there is no point of application for taking on these challenges. It is hard to imagine any of our present institutions being up to tackling even a single one of these problems. As Billie Jean King remarked, “You can’t be it, if you don’t see it.” If there are no working models out there, then there is nothing tangible or real to strive for, and we’re left squirming around in the sticky webs of our obsolete political and cultural fever-dreams, stressed out and stretched to the breaking point, devoid of hope.

The Gordian knot of the micro-household must be cut, exposed for its central role in the destructive nature of our consumer industrial system. But this can’t be done by attacking the family, or by denigrating homeownership, or by shaming people for their profligate overconsumption. Direct attacks just make people angry, and they then entrench themselves deeper, cutting off any dialogue that might have happened.

Instead, a different model of the household should be built, to concretely demonstrate a workable alternative to our current arrangements, and to provide an actual off-ramp from our collapsing civilization. These model households would serve a dual purpose: they would demonstrate a way to immediately reduce ecological impact, in hopes of staving off collapse; but they would also serve as a viable example of how to survive collapse, if it actually happens.

Next Time: Part 2 — Utopistics: Life in a Bigger Home Base

Originally published at http://entropolitanblog.com on September 16, 2023.