Syndicated columnist Mark Morford of the SF Gate has a new, meandering, and overall pointless article about Peak Oil & the collapse of civilization. I guess it’s supposed to be cute or ironic, but it just comes off as kind of irritating. The closing paragraph:
Maybe then it will finally be time to throw in the karmic towel, drink the special Kool-Aid, and let the meek inherit the Earth while the rest of us go to the stars. After all, while I’d actually love to learn to work an organic farm or build a cabin from scratch or learn to distinguish species of trees by examining their leaves and then having sex under their branches, it’s just not much fun anymore when we’re all out of music and wine and coffee and the entire nation becomes, well, Oklahoma. I mean, what kind of joy is that? And where will I park my Audi?
Maybe it’s not just him that’s tired of hearing about it though. The so-called collapse of civilization ranked pretty highly among readers as one of the most played-out conspiracy theories. I wonder how many people are tired of it simply because of the topic itself. But also how many people are tired of it because they feel pretty much helpless in the face of it? If it happened, would you go the way of Mark Morford and drink the poison Kool-Aid as soon as your iPod dies. Or maybe you’re just banking on it not happening in your life time - sometimes that’s how I (selfishly) like to think about it. But really, I think it serves a purpose beyond just instilling panic. It helps you to look at trends and behaviors that we’re all a part of that are destructive or simply not viable in the long run. Maybe they will or won’t lead to total collapse, but they do impact our quality of life, and the quality of the air, water, etc. A lot of times the only way to get people to really sit up and listen is to tell them they’re all gonna die.
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15 Comments
slow-motion collapse may be the best way of looking at it, in other words ‘decay’. i really dont think civilization is going to crash, unless its engineered (i..e not as part of any ‘natural’ cycle or anything). for better or worse, i believe civilization is very adaptible and the worst i personally expect is an economic slump, more unnecessary wars, sporadic terrorist attacks and maybe a flu pandemic. which is bad enough. imo preparing is fine but wishing for a crash is a very juvenile game, considering the massive suffering such a thing would entail. mass death is not a reasonable price to pay for a few wistful ‘back to the land’ fantasies. such luxuries are reserved for those who can afford them.
i’m actually prepared to accept that elites may be trying to engineer a crash, but i find it quaint that people think they’re doing it so that hippies and survivalists can seal themselves off in eco-pods. - more likely they’re doing it (a) to make money and (b) restore corrupt, unaccountable power structures resembling medieval feudalism. and as long as people believe that a crash is somehow ‘inevitable,’ the easier that will make it for them to succeed.
I’ve actually heard claims that under feudalism, people paid only a fraction of the taxes that we pay today. And the idea that today’s power structures are somehow “more” accountable I find very questionable.
As to how the “elites” would benefit from an engineered crash, I think Jeremy so far put the best piece together on that: Running Toward the Bomb.
the extent to which our current power structures are unaccountable, is the extent to which they are coming to resemble feudal aristocracy. what kind of accountability is there under neo-feudalism? noblesse oblige? that’s a laugh.
i’m not saying that feudal power was accountable. i’m merely suggesting that ours is largely unaccountable as well.
my point is just that our ‘democratic republic’ was designed to mitigate the excesses and abuses of power - checks and balances and whatnot. feudalism (and monarchy) were designed (or, evolved) to preserve hierarchy and privilege. lack of accountability in the former system would be a subversion of its original aims, whereas with the older forms, lack of accountability is the natural result.
i mean, lack of accountability in the current system would be a subversion…etc.
I don’t necessarily believe all this, but I might play Devil’s Advocate by saying that feudalism was 100% accountable in one sense. By that, I mean that the land was “owned” by the feudal lords. And as such, they made all the decisions about it. They were not accountable to the serfs, because the serfs owned no property, and were allowed to live on the land by the good graces of the lord. In a sense, they were property (as was also the case with slaves in the US constitution)
Similarly, in the original state laws of the US, the right to vote (accountability) was limited to male property holders exclusively. The representative republic only represented the landed classes. Technically, universal suffrage was not achieved here until 1964 - a mere thirty years ago
The real question seems to be: what is accountabilty? When is it okay to allow others to make decisions for you? What do you do when those decisions don’t reflect what you would do on your own? What if your representative is privy to information you don’t have, and thus necessarily makes a different decision than you would? Do you have any real recourse in a representative system, where you vest your decision-making power in a proxy agent? Once you surrender that power completely, shouldn’t you submit completely to the decision of that representative? The only built-in safeguard in the representative system seems to be that you can choose a new representative. That is our only means of accountability: “We’ll vote the bastard out of office!” Unfortunately, the next representative will confront us with exactly the same issues as outlined above, and our only recourse when he fails us will be to put another in his place.
true enough, feudalism was internally self-consistent. and for a long time it was stable.
as for universal suffrage, i’d call that real progress (which is sometimes mistaken for a myth).
Why is universal suffrage progress? What sense does it make for people who don’t own property to make decisions that affect people who do hold property?
for the common good. the actions and transactions of property-owners also affect those who do not directly participate in them. for example, air pollution affects not only the owners of polluting factories and their business partners.
but enough civ 101, it’s a saturday!
I think this fear is mainly based on the realization that most people have no idea how any of the stuff they depend on works. Thats a truly terrifying and helplesss feeling. Some of the most serene people I’ve ever met have been engineers. (anecdotal evidence sure….). If it all collapsed, who would be able to make a new ipod? How many people could make a computer chip?
I was thinking the other day (on a tangential subject) that maybe alot of what fuels Islamic fundamentalism is that alot of these societies have earned billions of dollars through oil, enabling them to have stuff that they werent part of producing, therefore inspiring a similar type of fear as some apocalypticals seem to have. Perhaps this fear of the end of the world is a fear of losing a support network that one wouldnt know how to replace, even if your life depended on it. Mysterious technology appears magical to those that dont know how it works. Hence the sort of luddite aspect to alot of it, and an emphasis on recyclying and stuff from the other part of the fear network– one wishing to return to a level of technology simpler and seemingly more managable, the other only able to react to systems by working within the confines of that system, not by expanding it or replacing it (ie, create a new cup, instead of conserving the old ones).
Albion: not trying to pick on you. Just think these are interesting questions, which I’ll continue elsewhere.
Why would we need new ipods or computer chips? Maybe they (or the thinking that created them) are the cause of the collapse to begin with…
that’s okay, i think i caught your rhetorical drift. yeah, they’re good questions.
Good point….
Substitute ‘technology that enables human survival’ for ‘ipod’ .
All I’m saying is, its ironic that the phenominal material success of our culture can bring us to take for granted and even to ignore the fact that in order to survive humans must consume some substance outside of their own bodies. Sure we can’t eat ipods but its only cause we have excess food that someone can spend time to come up with technology solely devoted to entertainment.
Ask anyone that ever tried to produced a new product how easy it was. Its not easy! It took mankind thousands of years for example just to domesticate the snap pea.
Only the well fed can scoff at material success.