Reinventing Collapse

Reading for your new future.

There are a lot of you who are … traumatized … catastrophizing … and that’s understandable. The rules based world you knew, the one that survived four years of insults from 2017 - 2021, is well and truly gone. I see a lot of prognostication from various “thought leader” types based on the assumption that this latest change is another temporary departure from the comfortable post Cold War “normal”.

My personal experiences tell me this optimism is misplaced.

You’re all going to come to share at least some of my understanding of the world. Let’s get started in the typical fashion, with some recommended reading.

Attention Conservation Notice:

The system has never worked for me, not as a “fussy” infant in a state orphanage growing inside a too small half body cast, not as a late fifties adult somewhere in the Bay Area sprawl, and pretty much nowhere in between. There are a very few things in this world that ARE rules - combustion, gravity, don’t start shit with Canadian geese - and the rest of the so called “rules” are just human conventions one can often circumvent, or just outright ignore. Prepare to shake your head and /or rub your eyes.

Background:

I was a healthy, active thirty nine year old with a growing telecom engineering company. I staggered off the west side of the Sandias, in the summer of 2007, a few months after turning forty, dangerously dehydrated after altitude sickness turned me back a thousand feet short of the crest. The Lyme that had been grasping got a solid hold on me and I haven’t felt right since.

My ex-wife had relapsed around the turn of the century, after thirteen years of sobriety, and we’d been divorced five years. With me no longer lurking, any brakes on her addiction were gone. I’ve seen my children a grand total of thirty minutes since then, one surprise visit in 2010.

I wound up on the couch at my mom’s house, and being restless but unable to stay awake for more than a couple hours at a time, I started digging into climate change and peak oil …

Having had the experience of being utterly dispossessed after a rough start in life, I was entirely prepared to accept that things could change dramatically, traumatically, and in a manner utterly out of my control.

Recommended Reading:

The very best reading on this situation is Dmitry Orlov.

Reinventing Collapse, a comparison of the Soviet collapse and current U.S. conditions, has been very helpful to me. There have been times where the people around me were mystified by what was happening, but I was already past it, having read that book. Executive summary - the Soviets never lost the discipline of backyard gardens, there were few cars, and nobody had a mortgage. If things go sideways badly our bottom is a lot further down than theirs.

The Five Stages of Collapse came out in 2013 but I didn’t read it until 2023. The fundamental thesis is placing five aspects of society on a continuum, and accepting that we will never return to the top, and need to chart a course so we avoid the absolute bottoms. This is the one I’m going to reread first.

The End of the World is Just the Beginning is my first Peter Zeihan book and it addresses what a post globalism world will do. His focus is national, not personal, and he aims to explore what’s likely more than what has been lost. The grim find in here is that without the U.S. enforced freedom of the seas, oil becomes harder to get, and coal makes a comeback.

Mother Nature’s Plan:

Are you sitting? Swallow that last sip of whatever you’re drinking, then we can look at this flaky leftist rag, Business Insider.

Our ability to complete complex, strategic tasks could drop 50% by 2100

Carbon dioxide acts as an anesthetic. Our current emissions rate means we’ll lose around 20% - 25% of cognitive capacity across the whole of our species, and indoor work will get hit twice as hard.

This isn’t just us, it’s already been affecting fish, and if the CO2 burst we’ve set in motion takes out most of mammalia, I’d like to introduce you to your successor, the naked mole rat. They’re one of the few species evolved to keep their wits about them in high CO2 concentrations. Once the coast is clear they’ll emerge from their burrows and speciate wildly in an empty world.

Conclusion:

The 2024 U.S. election offered a choice of (R)eality or (R)eligion. We’ve set aside reason and science for magical thinking and conspiracy theories.

When we get our asses kicked next year by another round of hurricanes, it is NOT global warming, it’s god’s punishment for abortion, or immigrants, or Sodomites. The solution to problems in the near term are going to involve purges. You already saw kids in cages during the first Trump administration, now I suggest you bone up on those early post Cold War years. The dissolution of Yugoslavia came first, adding “rape camp” to our lexicon, and then came Rwanda.

The one vaguely less negative thing I can offer is that you are not in a movie, nor watching a movie, this is real life. You can’t just flip a light on to illuminate things, you’ve got to wait for the sunrise. The only story arc that exists is you, what you experience, how you interpret it. If you try to take the whole of what you see of the world and make it one coherent narrative, you will fail.

You’re seeing dozens of major threads and there is no director to craft a neat ending, or a cliff hanger with promise of a sequel. Things come and go, they trail off without a satisfactory ending, and if you’re online everything is extremely malleable. Russia’s assault on objective reality has been successful, and nothing is going to stay put. If you’re not keeping a timeline of events, you are de facto a pawn in that game.

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Sucks, doesn’t it? But I did say right at the start that optimism would be misplaced …

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