"Collapse Now and Avoid the Rush"

Living with Collapse https://t.co/8pVClEVKOc (via https://t.co/WyvZg9FxaN) pic.twitter.com/SA9UvejQAE

— Post Carbon Institute (@postcarbon) October 15, 2020

Living with Collapse by Erik Assadourian (Resilience)

The Future is Rural

Resilience: The Future of Food: Getting Beyond the Energy Blindness of Techno-Utopianism

And a review of Collapse Now and Avoid the Rush by John Michael Greer.

CFPUP Summit 2017

John Michael Greer

on why the peak oil movement failed.

John Michael Greer: The End of Ordinary Politics

"What happened was that corporate interests in this country, aided and abetted by a bipartisan consensus in government and cheered on by the great majority of the salary class, stripped the US economy of living wage jobs by offshoring most of America’s industrial economy, on the one hand, and flooding the domestic job market with millions of legal and illegal immigrants on the other."

Related:
Pam Martens and Russ Martens: Hedge Funds are Part of a Tricky Money Maneuver to Put Hillary in the White House
Mike Whitney, The “Gig Economy”; Another Vicious Attack on Ordinary Working Slobs

Mechanization and Unemployment

From The Era of Dissolution:

Roosevelt’s policies didn’t get rid of the broader economic dysfunction the 1929 crash had kickstarted. That was inherent in the industrial system itself, and remains a massive issue today, though its effects were papered over for a while by a series of temporary military, political, and economic factors that briefly enabled the United States to prosper at the expense of the rest of the world. The basic issue is simply that replacing human labor with machines powered by fossil fuel results in unemployment, and no law of nature or economics requires that new jobs can be found or created to replace the ones that are eliminated by mechanization. The history of the industrial age has been powerfully shaped by a whole series of attempts to ignore, evade, or paper over that relentless arithmetic.

Until 1940, the Roosevelt administration had no more luck with that project than the governments of most other nations. It wasn’t until the Second World War made the lesson inescapable that anyone realized that the only way to provide full employment in an industrial society was to produce far more goods than consumers could consume, and let the military and a variety of other gimmicks take up the slack. That was a temporary gimmick, due to stark limitations in the resource base needed to support the mass production of useless goods, but in 1940, and even more so in 1950, few people recognized that and fewer cared. It’s our bad luck to be living at the time when that particular bill is coming due.

Maybe Pope Francis Should Meet Chris Martenson

Francis urges Greek bishops not to lose hope in the future

Greece Exposes The Global Economy's Achilles Heel by Chris Martenson (Resilience)

Related:
Charts showing the long-term GDP-energy tie by Gail Tverberg (Resilience)
After the Peak by Richard Heinberg (Resilience)

William Catton (He passed away this week.)
Thanks, Bill. by Richard Heinberg (Resilience)
JMG: As Night Closes In

JMG on the Extraenvironmentalist Again

Plus Chris Martenson: Episode #81 // Falling Empires (Resilience)

John Michael Greer on the C-Realm Podcast

The Myth of Progress

John Michael Greer's Latest Book

Post by New Society Publishers.

Poverty and Spiritual Poverty

Post by Post Carbon Institute.

Energy crunch: The end of business as usual for fossil fuels?
The Age of Diminishing Returns

John Michael Greer: The End of Employment

Extraenvironmentalist Interview with John Michael Greer

Episode #72 // Green Wizardry - hi/lo

Nicole Foss on the Extraenvironmentalist

Episode 70: Downloading Responsibility (hi/lo) (Resilience)

The episode also features Laurence Boomert and John Michael Greer.

More from Greer on Carson and Catabolic Collapse

The Future is a Foreign Country (Resilience)

Greer and Carson

City of the Future: Catabolic Ephemeralization? Carson Versus Greer

Related:
Top 10 Policies for a Steady-State Economy by Herman Daly

An Interesting Contrast Regarding Time and History

John Michael Greer: What Actually Happens and Vox Day: Mailvox: time-preferences and civilization

Related:
Augustinian History: As Understood by Kirk and Dawson by Brad Birzer

John Michael Greer on the KunstlerCast

KunstlerCast #217: The God of Progress is Dead - mp3

Related:
The Real Reason the Economy Is Broken (and Will Stay That Way) by Chris Martenson

John Michael Greer on the Negative Consequences of Relocalization

From last week, there should be a new post later tdoay - We Don't Live In Neverland.

There are more points that can be made in favor of relocalization schemes, and you can find them rehashed endlessly on pro-relocalization websites all over the internet. For our present purposes, though, this fast tour of the upside will do, because each of these arguments comes with its own downside, which by and large you won’t find mentioned anywhere on those same websites.

The downside to the first argument? When you step out of the global economy, you cut yourself off from the imperial wealth pump that provides people in America with the kind of abundance they take for granted, and the lifestyles that are available in the absence of that wealth pump are far more restricted, and far more impoverished, than most would-be relocalizers like to think. Peasant cultures around the world are by and large cultures of poverty, and there’s a good reason for that: by the time you, your family, and the other people of your village have provided food on the table, thatch on the roof, a few necessary possessions, and enough of the local equivalent of cash to cover payments to the powers that be, whether those happen to be feudal magnates or the local property tax collector, you’ve just accounted for every minute of labor you can squeeze out of a day.

That’s the rock on which the back-to-the-land movement of the Sixties broke; the life of a full-time peasant farmer scratching a living out of the soil is viable, and it may even be rewarding, but it’s not the kind of life that the pampered youth of the Baby Boom era was willing to put up with for more than a fairly brief interval. It may well be that economic relocalization is still the best available option for dealing with the ongoing unraveling of the industrial economy—in fact, I’d agree that this is the case—but I wonder how many of its proponents have grappled with the fact that what they’re proposing may amount to no more than a way to starve with dignity while many others are starving without it.

How many people, especially SWPLs and those who share their values, would balk at voluntary simplicity even if it's the right, green thing to do and will preserve a future for our children, etc.? Who can overcome their "addiction" to consumerism? How many women would be interested in a man making that pitch to them, before they're attracted to him? They love their shoes and purses too much.

The downside to the second argument is subtler, but in some ways even more revealing. The best way to grasp it is to imagine two relocalization projects, one in Massachusetts and the other in South Carolina. The people in both groups are enthusiastic about the prospect of regaining their personal autonomy from the faceless institutions of a centralized society, and just as eager to to bring back home to their own communities the power to make choices and pursue a better future. Now ask yourself this: what will these two groups do if they get that power? And what will the people in Massachusetts think about what the people in South Carolina will do once they get that power?

I’ve conducted a modest experiment of sorts along these lines, by reminding relocalization fans in blue states what people in red states are likely to do with the renewed local autonomy the people in the blue states want for themselves, and vice versa. Every so often, to be sure, I run across someone—more often on the red side of the line than on the blue one—whose response amounts to “let ‘em do what they want, so long as they let us do what we want.” Far more often, though, people on either side are horrified to realize that their opposite numbers on the other side of America’s widening cultural divide would use relocalization to enact their own ideals in their own communities.

If we admit that the Platonic role of philosopher-king, to rule over one's own group, is a burden, then why strive to rule over another? (Unless one attempts to justify conquest because the other community is some sort of "existential threat.") This is what it is to "mind one's business" at the political level. If you do not belong to some group, why would you wish to interfere in their affairs, or take responsibility for them, if they do not want you to? As some in the comments section point out, there may be some migration as people discover that they do not share a common culture with those around them and decide that they want to live with people who have the same or similar beliefs and values.

Looking Ahead to the New Year

James Howard Kunstler, FORECAST 2013: CONTRACTION, CONTAGION, AND CONTRADICTION
John Michael Greer, Into an Unknown Country
Rob Hopkins, Welcome back, and a vision for 2013

The Archdruid Report: The Beginning of the World

The Archdruid Report: The Beginning of the World: Last Friday was, as I’m sure most of my readers noticed, an ordinary day. Here in the north central Appalachians, it was chilly but not un...