Let me frame this clearly: the dominant species is killing the planet. We are obsessed with political trivia and the defense of fantastic constructs like banks, while ignoring the biological and human holocaust we are unleashing on every side. Children starve, nuclear weapons slumber in their silos, and the ultra-rich buy second yachts.
The wrongness, when you stop to think about it, is palpable. But the individualistic logic of material accumulation persuades us that all action outside of putting one foot in front of the other on the path to destruction is, in some sense, just not what people do. We continue to walk. We are enslaved by bad stories. And if you stop playing the game as it is framed, you will become homeless or broken, because the money must flow or there is no reason for you existing.
What the fuck are we doing?
Money is a unitized packet of violence. You can tell this because there are many actions you can perform if you have money, like taking an object from a shop, which will incite violence if you do not have money. The money itself comes from destructive and coercive practices almost without exception. The economy is murder.
“How can you expect fairness or decency on a planet of sleeping people?” (G.I. Gurdjieff). (see)
Now, all I can say is “watch the part of you that takes this in, but won’t act differently because of it.”
That’s Satan. I don’t mean that literally, but it’s as good a concept as any for that part of human nature which simply refuses to change even in the face of overwhelming evidence that we are destroying each-other and the world.
Just stop and look at it. You see it when you light a cigarette. You see it when you want to buy a nicer car. You see it when you make excuses, particularly for our political leadership. It’s every Catholic tithing money to an organization which makes NAMBLA look like amateurs. It’s every Democrat ignoring Guantanamo Bay now that Obama is in charge of it. It’s every Republican pretending that Obama made the national debt.
Everywhere around you is the Black Iron Prison. We just sort of keep on going.
I dug my heels in hard. I’ve tried to say “stop, this is insane.” I’ve packaged it as policy. I’ve built it as technology. I’ve tried to avoid any kind of mass movement. They never seem to achieve their goals.
I want you to consider the possibility that the culture you are living in is sick, literally mentally ill. We know it can happen to people. We know it can happen to groups, like cults.
Here we are, sane, free people in the Cult of Late State Nuclear Capitalism, watching as our insane culture destroys the planet that supports us all.
When you think of it as mass mental illness, perhaps built of many individual madnesses combined in a whole-more-than-the-sum-of-its-parts you can see it all with a horrific clarity.
We are killing the world we live on.
We will not stop, because doing so might make us poorer.
What you are seeing is a confluence of evolutionary ratchet behavior with complex systems, producing vast mass pathologies which don’t seem to have any origination point. Little things within us, magnified by social effects, turn our collective organizations like churches, markets and governments into monsters.
This is what we’re looking at, folks. Individual transformation to the point where we can have sane groups is Not Likely. Reforming the groups without changing the people seems equally hopeless.
All I’ve got for you is “classify it as madness, and stop participating as soon as possible.”
For me, that looked like abandoning ideas of “success” and working as hard as I could on the root problems, for free.
For years, my primary spiritual practice was Achalanatha, who in Buddhism is rendered as a protector of the right of women to become enlightened, although I was trained in a Hindu lineage, where such a right is not even conceivably questionable, by an extraordinarily ferocious female teacher, a Grandmother from Hell if you will.
Anyway, this is an aside. If you look at the face of that particular deity, it is the face of implacable rage. I’ve worn that face in places you would not believe. I have been, at times, the embodiment of the Wrath of God, or at least as close as 20 years of spiritual practice can get you in a pinch, which is close enough for government work.
So I know how to get angry, and yet retain the cutting edge of my intellect in the midst of rage. It’s a very, very scary combination, and not something that I unleash for less than 1% mortality, generally speaking. It’s a weapon of last resort.
I’m angry. I’m angry enough to kill, if it would solve the world’s problems. That’s a problem, and its a fact. The problem is there is no target. I’m angry enough to kill, but I’m mentally clear enough to know that it will not and cannot help. I don’t know if Gandhi was angry and had resolve, or simply did not metabolize anger into violence, or was not angry, but nothing makes my real state of spiritual development as clear to me as my disposition towards violence. Carrying such anger is a spiritual function, perhaps someone has to do it, but the very high, very clear people do not; ergo I am not one such. Yet even as I look at the economic genocide and the ecocidal nature of the civilization we are in, I do not go Derrick Jensen.
I want to explain why not. Right now, violence won’t solve anything. The threat of violence might compel change or protect green shoots of change in some instances, but we don’t have problems which can be solved at gun point. We have global problems, and nobody has a big enough gun. It may well be that the Gandhian insight is that violence is never the answer, but if that’s the case, I have not realized it for myself yet. All I know is that right now violence is going to be intensely counter-productive, and we should not commit it. It may well be that I’ll always feel that way, because the situation will simply never be right, and that would be an engineering approximation to Gandhi’s insight.
I am on the side of peace, even wrong, unjust peace, for the time being.
I don’t know if that will ever change. Perhaps if I lived in a genocide zone, and it was outside my door. Perhaps if there was a revolution who’s values I completely believed in as a genuine, deep, permanent solution to the problems of industrialization and ultratechnology. There are a lot of perhapses. But right now, and for the foreseeable future, I remain a murderously angry man of peace.
It’s not an easy position to hold, but if anybody is looking for a navigational steer, particularly in the context of possible large scale political violence in America in response to (for example) perceived electoral fraud or Constitutional challenge, that’s my steer.
No violence that cannot be committed with a completely clear head, evaluating the costs and benefits in a fair-minded manner. Practically speaking, that may become a very close approximation to no violence, ever if one is mentally clear enough.
I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.
You don’t have to be a good person to practice non-violence. You just have to refuse to pick up the gun when the opportunity to become that kind of a part of history is passed to you. As Timothy Leary once said, when asked about Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign
“It should be ‘Just Say No Thank You’! It’s terrible how they don’t teach good manners any more!”
We need a global cooperative solution, not the ecological and social justice versions of Baader-Meinhoff, urban guerillas playing into reactionary hands. We need to design a feasible one-planet lifestyle for everybody (see), and until that is designed, prototyped and implemented on a fairly wide scale, no amount of kicking against “the system” is any more than sawing off the branch we are all sitting on: it’s stupid and dumb, and could destroy the resources we need for a global cooperative resolution to our world’s problems.
I’m speaking more about concrete politics, rather than my more abstractprevious work, because I sense than in the next year (or, given my typical prescience, later this decade) these kinds of issues are going to matter. I want you to know that I’ve been giving them deep thought now, and this is my conclusion.
Violence which will not solve the problem is stupid, needless killing.
Right now, no path exists by which violence can solve the problem.
Therefor, and possibly always, violence remains stupid and needless.
(*refer to that link if you want to understand why I term Gandhi “Emperor” – it is partly humorous)
In “Living in a Changing World” I suggested a workshop where I’d spend a week basically trying to transfer everything I know about infrastructure-centric crisis response; an ultra-deep dive for people who had come through Permaculture or Transitions or other kinds of risk management education, and wanted something which took that kind of thinking and applied it to fast moving big problems.
I’d now like to suggest the other approach, going in mob handed. At the limit, a Mob Handed workshop would have eight people teaching together with different skills and different perspectives, to give an over-all well-rounded perspective on all sides of the current crisis, and more importantly, our personal future responses.
where you can take a look at the possible schedule, write up what you would teach as part of that group, or indicate you’d be interested in coming if this course is run.
This is a bit more flexible and open than these kinds of approaches typically are, but what I see is that I’m constantly moving in a multi-skilled environment and being blown away by the depth of knowledge that other specialists have in their core areas. A chance to sit down for a week and get people’s deepest realizations and best perspectives right across that entire field of expertise would be very valuable to me personally, and perhaps for a lot of other people.
Seed of the idea came to me when I was teaching part of the Permaculture course at Cloughjordan yesterday. Made a couple of tweets.
Right, who wants to help me figure out a Collapse Course where I take all this stuff and teach it? When? Where? Who? Need perspective.
“Living in a changing world” type emphasis, economic geography roots, politics-on orientation, relentless adaptation for realistic hope.
I’ve got the content, I can hold an audience, but I have no idea how to get bums on seats, logistics and legalities. Do you have that part?
I realized yesterday that I enjoy teaching and I’m good at it. The organizations are moving too slowly. I have a good feeling about this.
There are quite a few discussions about teaching some of my material as a part of other activities right now – @Dougald and I have ongoing discussions that, among others. I am definitely very open to teaching as a component of other courses and activities.
What I realized yesterday is that the infrastructure-centric way of seeing the world, and seeing collapse risks, is actually much slower to acquire than I think of it as being. With a well-prepared group it still seems to take about an hour to see the first edge of “ohhh….” form, where the vision begins to shift. And then there’s threat modeling, and the social thermometer and half a dozen other fundamental models which I live inside, most of which actually take about half a day to really grok, if not longer.
So what I’m thinking about is actually something like a one week residential intensive, probably at Cloughjordan, in which we actually deep dive on those models and seeing the world, and do the psychological work of adapting to the world which can be seen from this much clearer, much more physical perspective. I don’t expect this to be easy, but I think that for people who are already well-prepared by Transitions, Permaculture, risk management or serious politics, it could be a chance to rapidly sharpen their perspective in the areas which become critical in fast-adaptation times.
And, let me stress, not instead of teaching in other places, but as a sort of “masterclass” where, by the end of the week, everybody involved ought to be able to practically apply the toolkit to solve their problems, and the problems of the people in their communities.
Syllabus might look something like Day One
AM serious, deep introductions, and an overview of the course
PM the Social Thermometer – understanding how people change in tough times
Day Two
AM global economic geography – how the other half lives, what it’s like to be poor
PM drivers of change – what’s broken in ways which directly affects us
Day Three
AM simple critical infrastructure maps – theory and threat modeling
PM simple critical infrastructure maps – practice and running scenario
Day Four
AM individual, group, organization and state – where to fight your battles
PM the psychology of fear – how to handle the pressure of knowing
Day Five
AM the hope response – how have humans survived this long? how do we continue to do so?
PM wind-down
Given the intensity of the material, I suspect the format would be something like:
* two hours of actual tuition
* one hour of discussion
* one hour of reflection, write up, personal conversations between students, Q&A on technical points
The goal would be to create a level of understanding of the material and the models which will allow people to apply them to mitigate risks in the real world using the Gupta State Failure Management Archive toolkit. There’s an enormous amount of other material which is directly relevant to this terrain – practical experience from people who have lived through these kinds of times in their own countries, specialist knowledge in areas like policing, technical know-how for matters like water filtration or first aid. All that material is outside the bounds of what I have in mind for this course, which is simply deep-dive to master my material and models. People doing that are going to do other kinds of thinking and training too.
I think there’s an enormous amount of room for a much more general course which includes the whole spectrum of material at a more general level, and I hope very much to be included in teams doing that kind of education in the near future
I also suspect that a course like this is going to need at least one, and more likely two facilitators – one handling logistics and practicalities, the other handling the depth work as people’s understanding of themselves and their world shifts.
So, anyway, that’s as good a representation as I have right now for what I had in mind. Thoughts?
V>
PS: compare resilience designer which is a more gradual, evolutionary path towards resilience, and assumes a much less deep-dive approach.
I had a hard Dark Mountain. Not an unenjoyable one, but for me it was more about failure than success, which may be an interesting precedent. I don’t fail easily, but there is a time and place for everything.
I was doing The Sacred bit, at least part of it, in dialogue with Dougald. There was heavy expectation that I’d perform The Miracle, a repeat performance of the 10 minute laser beam which I dropped at Uncivilisation 2010.
We had an hour and a half, and I failed to deliver. What happened was modest, even pedestrian, certainly by comparison, valid but discursive and academic. The Rock did not come, and the Mothership did not descend, compared to the expectation of pyrotechnic display set up by last year.
Later, I also seriously lost my temper to a hexayurt full of people, an intense experience of being an outcast in my own home-space, of watching others react to failing. I had a hard dark mountain this year.
This, to me, was the humbling realization of limit. without enough space and room to do what is transcendent and immanent, I gave myself permission to be human, to fail and to muddle through. I was the center which did not hold, and it was fine.
Without the confidence to command, I fell back on the desire to teach, rather than embracing the radical experience of being out of my depth in the waters around me. I would not even have known that this option, which I failed to inhabit, was there if it wasn’t for Bembo Davies, whom I met at the first Uncivilisation, and who’s become rather a mentor to me. But, anyway, rather than defining a response in a hermetically sealed ten minute framework, in which the goal was to deliver an opening, I was faced with an opportunity to create and then conclude on behalf of the community. And it did not happen. I muddled.
All I can conclude is that the failure of our myths is the point of the experience, and I have experienced this first hand, and done my part to add to it.
Where do we go forwards from here, together, is uncertain. The Utopian Pressure to be perfectly all-inclusive, balanced and universalist will continue to shape and sculpt Uncivilisation and Dark Mountain to a wide variety of concerns, and the community will strive and struggle as sensibly as it is able with those very flaws in our own personalities and cultures. Eventually the Far Right may come calling and we will discover what indeed is a bridge too far in inclusion in strength and learning, rather than allowing them in with weak pseudo-egalitarianism.
There was not a despondent heart in the festival, however, many were sad and scared, perhaps, but free of the stuckness of fixed grief from too-long held false hopes and ghostly fears.
In no way, shape or form can we afford to believe that we can “fix” things, that is the job of Transition Towns and perhaps the Green Party. To learn how to hold the truth, together in community, without changing our minds about what is true simply to make ourselves or others more comfortable seems, to me, to be Dark Mountain’s most easily expressed purpose.
What I discovered is that I can do this for me, but I cannot do this for all of us. Perhaps no-one can. That was my Dark Mountain.
What was yours?
Now, a note on The Politics. This year’s festival was marked by the emergence of Uncivilisation and Dark Mountain as things of sufficient established value to have people beginning to struggle for self-expression in that context, rather than simply expressing themselves. It’s gone from being a Project, a collection of people, to being a Place or a Scene and perhaps, in some people’s opinions, a movement. But that Dark Mountain is now a Place or a Scene is without a doubt true and new.
My own agendas are all in the 2010 talk. I said what I had to say there as well as its ever likely to be said by me, this side of the revolution
But, as the skirmishing begins, and different value systems seek and even struggle to define how the Our House of Dark Mountain is to be inhabited, let me make four observations.
(1) What do we have in common with, and what do we have to learn, from those who are already poor?
(2) How do the Abandoned Battles of prior generations – from Pastoralism to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and similar – relate to our present and our future?
(3) The engineering. Always the engineering. I’m kicking around terms like CSEG (collapse support education guild, or perhaps collapse survival engineering group) as a follow up to the Gupta State Failure Management Archive but that’s more Green Wizards and Transition Towns than Dark Mountain, unless we have a literary movement with an engineering wing. And if so, what then?
(4) The rhetoric of freedom, control and values sits ill with literature.
I have a feeling that onrushing events may settle many of the issues about The Future of Dark Mountain this year. My take on it is that each of us has our own Dark Mountain to climb, and that we must face it individually, isolated, alone, but together.
Most of the punch-you-in-the-head good stuff is in section two.
I haven’t slept all night, and I don’t feel tired, but I shall sleep well soon.
When?
by jay8085
I’ve never answered when. In 2003 I made the precipitous decision to abandon trying to make money, and to store my wealth in the form of reputation capital. It was the Euro that did it; I looked at history, particularly the bimetallic period, and decided that having two reserve currencies was likely to crash the global economy within 10 years. It took me about five minutes to decide: my subconscious has a whim of iron. That’s not saying that I stopped trying to make a living – had Buttered Side Down actually got clients other than Arup I’d be doing alright, but we were just too early. I had over-estimated institutional readiness to face risks. Ironically Buttered Side Down, with its “historic risk management consultancy” pitch might actually do quite well today, but I’m burned out on that kind of thinking and that kind of push. I was just too early, by about two years.
Bring me a client and I’ll sort them out, of course.
Anyway, I decided the safe place to store my wealth was reputation. I set out to work on the hardest problems I could find, and to place the resulting work into the Public Domain whenever practicable, which has turned out to be almost always. I used my unique psychological makeup to peer into dark corners, and I invented useful things. There are three works above all others: the hexayurt, Simple Critical Infrastructure Maps and CheapID. To a fairly close approximation, those works and their corollaries are my creative output for ten years.
There’s a lot of other stuff, stuff that I made sure went right, like The Economist’s Book of the Year, 2003, “Small is Profitable” which I helped edit, or “Winning the Oil Endgame”, which I sometimes jokingly say prevented America from carpet-bombing the rest of the middle east. But I didn’t create those; I labored in obscurity. They’re unspeakably important, but very specialised.
So back to the question: when?
The answer is, I don’t know, but I think it’s soon. I’m an awful one for signs and portents, and I’m an awful one for being years too early. But I did not leave London years before the riots, I left three months before them. That tells me that I’m no longer years too early, I’m heading towards right-on-time. Right on time is that I’ve spent two years building models for handling state failure, and I dropped the entire package into the public domain weeks ago.
“When?” is a tough question. I moved to Ireland for the food – not the potato stew, but the 6m people on land that supported 8m before the age of oil. I moved here for the culture – you couldn’t get a fascism going here with two Hitlers, four Maos and a cocker-spaniel. 400 years of saying “feck” to central authorities has left cultural scars of breathtaking depth, but those scars are character armor, too. You can’t slide a sheet of paper between two stones here, when you see it.
When is soon, probably. We could keep rolling sixes and spin it out another 22 years, but we’re getting to the point where relatively small system shocks could propagate cracks uncontrollably like a fat man falling through ice on a pond. I can’t tell you when, but I can tell you that the US is in trouble, Europe is in trouble, they’ve printed insane amounts of money and it hasn’t stabilized things, assets are being devalued in complex processes which hide inflation and still there are no new jobs. People kick around terms like “stagflation” but what’s happening is simple and subtle: nothing.
We’re treading water. We’re like a shark that’s stopped swimming. We’re a cartoon character, all flailing legs, hovering above the abyss.
And at the bottom of it are those poor bastards in Africa, in rural India, South America, Asia, eating rice and bugs because there’s nothing else to eat. And you’ve ignored them your entire life as the money poured from “we know not where” into the First World Lifestyle, which squandered the wealth which could have fed and housed every human being on earth on an extractive economy which wastes 40% of the food produced and has a billion fat people, including me.
In many ways, I long for a moral cleansing of the world, but it won’t be by the sword, it’ll be one person at a time, with a spade, growing their own food because the assholes that created the Codex Alimentarius are all out their digging in the dirt too.
Don’t you understand? The oil is poison it’s killing our world one gallon of gas at a time. It’s like we’re force-feeding the world cigarettes and complaining when it coughs and turns blue. The hunger side of it is even worse. The indescribable horror of what’s unfolding in Somalia falls on deaf neurons, not just deaf ears. Didn’t we go through all of this 25 years ago with Live Aid?
Question: when will the economy crash?
Answer: have you looked at Sudan?
Now, who’s going to get up to work in the morning, and pretend that what they’re doing matters?
I know putting a roof over your head is important. I’ve neglected it at times, over-reached, friends have bailed me out, caught me, but hopefully at some point I’ll pay my debts, small as they are, completely. If you’ve got kids, it’s right to put them first, to do what you’ve gotta do, and let the world take care of itself.
But we’re losing it. These narrow windows of self-interest, backed up by armed guards just off the side of your screen, are fighting secret wars to keep capitalism safe, the rich richer, and those dying from poverty far from our front door, but… why, why those secret wars are being lost.
It’s our failure to quickly quash resistance in Iraq and Afghanistan that’s caused this. And I say “ours” advisedly, because unless I’m much mistaken, your country was in there too, come for the terrorism and stay for the oil. An oil well, a good one, produces oil for an extraction cost of $2 or $4 a barrel, and sells at well over $100 – an almost unimaginable return on investment. So much money it pays to drill mile deep holes in mile deep water to get the oil out. An oil well is a fountain of gold, but it poisons the world. And that’s what our whole civilization is – an oil rainbow on a puddle, a shimmering illusion of permanence as we torch the environment for… more plastic crap while other people’s children starve.
I’m sorry. Last person out, turn the lights off.
I haven’t managed to square my actions with the truth.
No, no I can’t. But I think I can do something better.
What can we do about the state of the world?
I think I can draw a line through available data that tells us how to get a future we all can live with, the future we deserve.
I had to tear down most of my mind to get to here, because it requires letting go of our model of how the future is created, and doing something else, and connecting the main evolutionary drives of the human race directly to the machinery which will solve our real problems.
Here’s what we’ve got.
Cheap renewable energy revolution
Ultra-cheap solar power
Konarka and NanoSolar – both offer ultra-cheap solar panel technologies, vastly cheaper than coal. Last time I checked the numbers, NanoSolar had $800m of investment and $4.2 billion dollars of pre-orders. Konarka was talking about a long-term goal of $0.10 per watt production costs (5% of the current silicon cell $2/watt) and NanoSolar was talking about $0.30 a watt somewhat sooner. There’s no clear limit on scaling these technologies once they deliver.
Liquid transportation fuels
Algal Turf Scrubbers – farming the thick slippery green hairy stuff that grows on the bottom of rocks. It grows in sea water. It could be grown on non-crop land, in huge shallow tanks in coastal desert regions. It is a polyculture – grow whatever falls into the tank. It does not require pesticides or genetic engineering to work. The numbers look good enough to provide all the fuel the world needs without breaking anything else. Nothing else is even close.
Processed into biobutanol it will likely run in existing gasoline cars, too.
Biosand filter – saves maybe 5m deaths a year, a plastic bucket filled with algae, sand and gravel to filter water. There are other, similar technologies.
Sulabh toilet – saves about 5m deaths a year. Other toilet designs may suit other regions better, there are many.
Energy
Rocket stove – saves maybe 5m deaths a year from breathing cooking fires, and deforestation. Also see wood gasification stoves.
Cheapsolargadgets – primarily lights and cell phone/computer chargers, but other things too. Solar cookers seem to work in some places, not others.
Communications
Meshnetworks – everybody shares everybody’s short range wireless connections to form a global network. Eventually we’ll wish we never invented these, but face them we must.
Cheap android tablet – add a keyboard if you need one. I use a Huawei S7, $150, 3G works as a phone. Five years they’ll be giving them away in cereal packets.
Declassify the real launch vehicles – the SR-71 did officially Mach 4 and 100,000 feet in the 1960s. We have 45 years of technological development since the SR-71 was designed, and the official story is that the now-grounded 1980s technology Space Shuttle is the best we can do. They’re lying. You know it. I know it. We need the real launch vehicles declassified, or at least the bits we need for civilian access to space. Need, not want.
Expand
Push all Genetically Modified Organisms into orbit – biotech companies can still make money up there, it gets the GMOs off the planetary surface, and it provides an economic rationale for investing in cheap launch. And they must go, before there is an awful disaster.
Get the high frontier back – we’re trapped on earth and we’re turning on each other. Blame mammalian or primate psychology, but we don’t like to be in a confined environment with no way to expand to get more resources. It makes our genes restless, then aggressive. It is our will to go, and we are in a secret pitched battle with the secret state for access to space, which is the only place we have to expand into. We need the agencies to declassify a real launch technology, for the benefit of the entire human race. Who’s our Kennedy?
I cannot stress how important this is. People invariably misunderstand this part, but step back, have a think about it. We’ve gone from relatively hard science to speculation about black space programs. Are we still on solid ground? Do they have these things? If so, when will they release them for the benefit of all of humanity?
The New Rights of Man Every Person
Two human principles. Firstly, we do not use force, because we do not have atomic weapons and starting a fight you will lose is stupid. Secondly, the only problem we have here is us and therefore we cannot kill our way to a solution, which means no atomic weapons.
No global jurisdiction – we must acknowledge that the field of human rights has become a gridlock of rights, entitlements, preferences and theology. Rights directly conflict with each-other, as in the right to property directly conflicting with the right to assured access to water. Without a global jurisdiction, no government can enforce any kind of coherent rights doctrine, particularly in the face of borderless problems like terrorism or environmental crisis. Without a global court, our conventional methods for handling the conflicts between two virtues fall apart: we cannot leave it to case law and judges to sort it out.
Geneva for all – our western democracies are backsliding into legalized torture. We all know our governments are torturing, by sending people abroad, by locking them up in black sites, by legally incarcerating them and treating them so badly their minds break. They may be doing this on our behalf, but they are doing it, and we are not standing outside the embassies and the secret police headquarters every day demanding Geneva Convention rights for “terrorists.” And this is really what is about: we’ve lost Geneva. We’ve lost the international rule of law on the battlefield, and we’re sliding backwards into barbarism. Can we all agree on Geneva rights for all prisoners as a responsible starting point? Some may wish to go further, but if we can agree that Geneva rights for all prisoners is a good starting point and we should achieve it first perhaps we can make a unified demand of government to end the barbarism and go back to civilized war. Just one small step. I therefore propose a “Geneva For All” campaign be the first starting point of any political platform that seeks to repair the damage done to our democracies since 9/11.
The minority of one – in an increasingly complex global environment, the hard categories which formed entitlement groups and identities in the early post-Modern period have disintegrated. Transgendered and bisexual people chip away at traditional frameworks of sexual privilege and oppression. Multi-racial individuals dissolve the formerly hard barriers around race. New relationship patterns like polyamory begin to show what a new settlement between human desire and safe-sex technology might look like. Rather than a patchwork of special laws to meet the idealized and mythic special cases, we need to acknowledge that everybody is a special case, a unique and pressurized minority of one struggling to express their humanity through the exercise of their capacities, defended by our collective recognition and defense of their human rights. There is no point in discriminating by race or gender in law because, in the final analysis, these categories have become so fluid as to become legally meaningless in an increasing number of edge-cases. Can a 1/4-Indian sue for racial discrimination? What about a 1/16th Indian? Where’s the line? Similarly for gender or sexuality. Is it worse to call a hetrosexual man, a bisexual man or a gay man “faggot”? What if he is only occasionally gay, or used to be a woman? What then? Legally protect the individual, and not the group, because there are no groups which have real, hard, tangible legal edges any more. We should not be arguing in courts about who is or is not a member of which specially protected group. This is not a legal framework or a call to end protection for minorities, but an observation that the basis for such protection must emanate from the minority of one, not a laundry list of legal special cases.
The religious roots of oppression – Crowley completely dropped the ball on thelema. Thelema is a secret thread. It’s the hard stuff the boys and girls in the back room are doing. It’s where Alan Moore came from. Therefore it’s where Anonymous came from, or at least their iconography. It’s what Kanye West was thinking about when he spent $300,000 on a Horus necklace and made the POWER video, which is about as good a piece of religious art as has been done in a century. It’s what Jack Parsons was running on when he invented the solid rocket motors which fueled the space race and wrote Freedom is a Two-Edged Sword. And, yes, it’s what Jimmy Page and David Bowie were on, for a while. Why am I talking about occult religion? I’m bringing this up to broaden the debate on human rights, and for a reason.
Mainstream jurisprudence in most of the world is a direct descendent from desert monotheisms or other traditions which unify political and spiritual power in the form of God-Kings as in Japan or China. In these traditions, the secure functioning of the State is equivalent to doing God’s will on Earth, and this is Very, Very Important. And these guys, all of them, are destroying the future of humanity. The religious right want to start a jihad with the Muslims. The descendants of Mao will enslave their own for filial-piety-turned communist.
I think that to get effective human rights we’re going to have to go beyond this. Consider, if you will, Liber Oz, which is Crowley’s summary of The Rights of Man. Now this is very simple. It is freedom. It may not be a perfect expression of Freedom, but there’s no doubt that the intention is to express Freedom in a fairly absolute form. There’s no legal system to hassle out what happens when these rights conflict with each other, there’s no sound basis of common law, there’s nothing about the Sacredness of Property as an Extension of the Self. It’s just Freedom. It’s not even Just Freedom. Now, as I said, Crowley screwed this up. In the hands of an English Victorian who’d been educated as a Fundamentalist Christian, it was a bomb. It blew Crowley’s head off, and he never seems to have done justice to the work. Parsons is a more approachable thinker. If you want the most beautiful, subtle form, Alan Moore’s Promethea is staggeringly beautiful. When the time comes to have a renegotiation about the fundamental basis for human rights on this planet, our planet the Earth, I’d like us to start from The Law of Thelema, which is Freedom at the center. But I’m not suggesting I care whether you do it or not: do what thou wilt. We have no basis for a jurisprudence of Freedom, nor do we have any realistic goal of rapid adoption of a Freedom-based legal system. Do not let conventional Anarchism or property-based Libertarianism secularize the Sacredness of the fact you are Free. Rather, ask yourself this: if you had been born on a planet where the received word of god was
“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.”
“Love is the law, love under will.”
how different might your life be?
Ending the nuclear stalemate – right now we are resolving the problems on this planet with violence, and since the invention of the nuclear bomb, neither side can win so we have a global deadlock in which there is no over-riding dominant power to make the rules, but rather a series of destructive warring fiefdoms that are squandering the future of the human race in endless banal competition.
I want you to stop seeing the State as anything more than a garbage collecting utility function. Your nationality should not matter any more than your ethnicity or your religion, it’s a tiny facet of your humanity, not a reason to draw a line on a map and go to war. The myrmidons of the State are trapped by a theology which acknowledges only a single word of god, a single point where the Divine Right of Kings radiates out from. Where these competing groups with nuclear weapons meet, two different conceptions of reality are locked in conflict. The strain this puts on the fabric of the planet, on the very fundamental survival of humanity, threatens us all. We must take our nuclear warriors off duty, and make it clear to them that we will settle our differences without organized violence of the kind that could ever escalate to the use of weapons of mass destruction – or, indeed, military weapons at all. They cannot back down from their status as our guardians, and yet we cannot afford the terrible price of requiring such protection. It is up to the people of earth to dissolve the strains between each-other in an equitable, harmonious way, to make a political peace so strong and so vivid that the nuclear watchmen can hang up their bombs and retire.
They are not keeping us in cages for their amusement – they are keeping us in cages for our protection.
What can I do?
I believe we could lose a couple of billion people this decade. Ten years from now there might not be five billion humans left. A collapsing reserve currency could stop the international food trade dead for two years, and starve hundreds of millions or even a billion people. To this add War, most likely a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan, or god forbid nuclear terrorism against America or Israel, either of which might desecrate much of the world in insane retaliation depending on the manner and nature of the attacks. It could be a rough decade. Everywhere the choice will be “guns or butter” because not every cultural mandate can be carried in lean times of economic contraction. In the good times, at least in America, we had “both/and” thinking, both social programs and military spending. Now we are going to have to choose, and I hope to god the calculus is correct, and we get an America able to play its part in a democratic peace, and not a a yet-more-unbalanced tyrant. Maybe this will happen. Maybe not.
We have to heal the cultural split which opened between civil society and the military during the 1960s, when our defenders became our enemies. I’ve seen these guys up close, and they are excellent people. The leaders of the military-industrial complex that I have met so far are as subtle and thoughtful human beings as humanity has to offer, trapped in an impossible situation by the sudden advent of the nuclear age, where we went from Spear Politics + Rifles to Spear Politics + Nuclear Missiles over the course of 20 years from 1945 to 1965. Culturally, neither we nor they have had time to catch up to the realities of the nuclear age, and now we must give the order to stand down. We must not see the increasing pressure on the shared global environment (including forces like climate change) give rise to a new generation of military tensions which can (and eventually will) escalate into nuclear or worse wars. You can see it between India and Pakistan, you can, if you dare, see it between America and China or even between Russia and Europe. These are all flashpoints that could escalate, and it is our job to bring such a strong peace and such a strong demand for peace, not by harassing our own side’s military, but by making common cause with citizens of other countries to heal the world so that not one person in the world will every believe it is their duty to use a nuclear weapon ever again.
It is our job to do this. Civil society must address the ongoing economic genocide of the poor and the destruction of the biosphere and the massive tensions which exist between countries or governments will inevitably continue the global gridlock, and the gridlock will eventually lead to more war.
When President Obama was elected, he asked the public to push, to keep the pressure up on Washington, to get the radical agenda through. The public then sat back on its ass, and Obama has aged ten years and burned most of his backbone just holding the line against Republican wolves. Lackluster support may have cost us the Leader of the Free World we could have believed in. Anonymous snipes at minor enforcers and structural hypocrites, but thus far has not stepped up to offer up a constructive alternative to the activities of the organizations they are taking down.
All I can say is, find something to do. Figure out what your will is, what you’re here to change, and change it. Our old models, of forming groups with complex structures, are not producing change. The UN has ossified into a shell and does little innovation in most areas. Above all, the climate process is gridlocked, deadlocked and lethal. Get behind somebody who might know what they are doing, and push.
I only have two bits of advice for you. Number one, stop smoking. Number two, stop watching television. I don’t know a single person who watches a lot of TV, not one, because people who have a TV habit cannot keep up.
So back to the question of human rights. We must square the circle: if we are to have Freedom, what do we do about those who want to poison the world with a little dioxin-filled incinerator at the bottom of the garden, or a mercury-leeching gold mine in the Amazon? How do we say no to people with foolish needs? Are we to rely on the power of the State to police what we consider distasteful, yet demand Freedom for ourselves? No, we cannot do this, not yet.
Here’s my advice for you. Do everything you can do to solve the world’s real problems. Look mercilessly at what needs to be done, and with some beneficence at yourself, but get moving. We’ve sat around in consensus circles until the cushions are tired and nothing on remotely the scale required to change the world has happened. While that has been going on, the nerds have been prototyping a new form of human interworking called do-ocracy or open source. This approach has started to out-compete the biggest and smartest of the corporations. It’s spreading into physical plant and distributed manufacturing. But we haven’t figured out how to get leverage on politics, or how to head this awful global trouble off at the pass.
I don’t know whether what I’ve said is going to be meaningful to you or not. It’s very hard to get far enough out to get a truly global perspective, and once you are that far out, there seem to be only two choices: platitudes, or the full, but often incomprehensible, truth.
I am Vinay. I have always erred on the side of the incomprehensible truth. I’m not sure how many of you can hear me, or understand what I have to say. This is a planetary emergency. You have been activated. You’ve been activated since you were born. You just have to remember that you are a fully-empowered agent of human evolution, the planet you were born on is dying, and species-level pathologies formed around the creation of the nuclear weapon, interfacing with deeper scars left by bad religious theology have wedged us into a no-win global political deadlock that could kill us all, along with all future human beings, and every living thing that walks, swims, flies or crawls upon this earth. Go forth.
Put it into high gear. You’ve got nothing to lose, and it’s only the media that’s telling you that you have. Tyler Durden was an optimist. Saul Alinsky wasn’t that radical. John Boyd was a man of peace.
You are the benediction. Go forth and bless the world by getting off your ass, and damn the consequences of stepping out of synch with the culture around you so that you can directly face and address the real problems of the world.
Vinay Gupta
Director, Hexayurt Project
Tuesday August 16th 2011, 8AM from the long side.
We can no longer afford to ignore the sacred
Modern industrial civilisation leaves no space for the sacred narrative. Does it matter? Given the resistance many of us feel towards both institutionalised religion and New Age spirituality, can we find ways of speaking which make room for the return of the sacred? Vinay Gupta belongs to the Indian tradition of the ‘kapalika’, or ‘bearers of the skull bowl’, and the Nath Sampradaya, an ancient yogic sect. He will be in conversation with Dark Mountain co‐founder Dougald Hine.
Here is what I had to say at last year’s Dark Mountain Festival.
As the new world that we’re in, post US sovereign default crisis, Norwegian shootings and London riots settles in, I’m feeling a strong pull to wind up more parts of my life.
For the time being, I’m substantially done with politics. I’ve made all the arguments I need to. I’m not saying that I won’t continue to indulge in politics at a recreational level, but at a fundamental level, I’m done with politics as a method. We know what I had to say on the matter and I might occasionally add to that, but it’s not the way forwards. I had to know, for myself, and now I do. Time to move past it.
I’m also substantially done with deep theoretical work on extreme risk management. Artifacts like Disastr, my nuclear contingency work (also applies to very big earthquakes etc.) are useful, but further work in this direction is not where I need to focus right now. This stuff is very, very expensive to produce psychologically, and I’ve done enough of it for now. Maybe when the work done so far is absorbed or used it will be time to go further, but for now it’s time to let it go.
The long term development work, like Winning the Long Peace is more important than ever, although I’m not sure that anybody’s listening to that right now, but it’s a thread I’ll carefully keep alive for the future. CheapID continues to be the crown jewels, but it may well be 15 years before that matters. Long-term storage. I should upload that to Archive.org properly at some point too. So enough of shutting things down and mothballing ideas, on to what’s new!
This little beauty is ResilienceDesigner.com which is my attempt to describe a set of four or five interlocking careers or specialisms which could help people move from fragility to deep resilience over a period of years. It’s very ambitious, early-stage work, basically trying to frame a new industry. This PDF as a three page analysis of where I think the action is, although it’s pretty self-evident from the diagram if you know the field.
I continue to work on The Future We Deserve. If you want to understand why that’s such a process, read a dozen of the pieces (they’re only 500 words each, the length of a Rolling Stone epic) and see what it does to your mind. I’m not sure humans were made for this kind of conceptual density. Getting the right book out of those materials is the hardest thing I’ve ever done.
I was asked today to think about gear lists for the London situation, and about framing the risks of being in London period. I’m not sure if this will be popular, but it needs to be said:
You are very likely in less danger staying at home in London than doing almost anything else, including driving out of the city.
Now, let me justify that. The death toll from the riots so far appears to be zero. Although there are a ton of injuries, the vast majority of the have been sustained by rioters and police, the actual fighters. Ordinary citizens are therefore by-and-large very, very safe and likely to continue to be so, barring mitigating circumstances like being in a building which is set on fire and having to leave in a damn hurry. So let us consider an analytical framework, the Six Ways to Die.
* too hot
* too cold
* hunger
* thirst
* illness
* injury
Now let’s remove the ones which don’t apply
* injury
If you are concerned that you are in danger in London, stay away from danger. If you are comfortable and safe at home and likely to remain so, stay at home. If not, please go and visit some friends out of town and wait for the danger to pass. You are safe.
Now, that said, let us compare-and-contrast with a post I made a couple of days ago on the US news site, Reddit. Now, why am I advising them about a wide variety of serious health risks, including combat psychology, and only suggesting that people stay at home or head out of town for a few days in London? The difference is the threat model.
The PostCollapse folks on Reddit are modeling something known as TEOTWAWKI – the end of the world as we know it. Instead of a single, coherent threat model like “there are riots all over London” they have an indistinct, constantly shifting universal existential threat framed by a combination of real-and-legitimate US risks and Mad Max movies. In that kind of mindset the issue isn’t as simple as assessing a risk and then making an educated guess about safe courses of action, rather the need is to peer into the nature of risk and learn how to make these educated guesses for one’s self and one’s family years, or often decades, in advance of their arrival. In short, the open-ended constantly-shifting nature of the Survivalist’s threat scenario is more a meditation on the nature of life than a realistic planning strategy.
Yet as such a mediation, it has value.
Conclusion: Stay at Home
If you want to know how to prepare, it is very simple. In nearly all scenarios, the ability so sit at home and do nothing for a month will keep you safe. In the trade, this is called Shelter in Place. It applies to nearly all terrorist scenarios with the possible exception of dirty bombs. It manages a large class of acts of war. It addresses fatal disease, urban unrest and most political violence.
Go home. Stay home. Wait for the coast to clear.
What do you need to use this strategy?
* Most importantly, a 3 month pre-order of any medications you might need, including birth control pills, insulin, antipsychotics etc. Even trivia like antihistamines. It’s only a few quid to do this in most cases, and you should do it while you can.
* Then there is food. Even a half-assed food shopping run can sort you out the basics. Remember to buy things you can eat cold, in a pinch, or make backup plans for cooking like laying in a gas stove and gas (a small risk in its own right.)
* Toilet paper. No, really.
Things like water and a wind up or solar charger to charge your phone are the next level of crisis up, where basic services like water and the cell phone network go down. No we have moved from the simple question of “how to stay at home and wait for things to blow over” into “how to survive once essential services start to be affected.”
This second question is where the bulk of my work lies – how do we approach a situation where the problem is not random rioters looting stores, but people using mortars on critical infrastructure and triballing opposing tribes power substations and electrical feeds. But we are a long, long way from there, and it’s not terrain that needs to be directly addressed at this juncture.
If you are a Londoner, please get together what you need to spend a month at home. Put it in some boxes in a corner. Clearly label it. Then the next time riots happen, or if these riots go on off-and-on for ages, you won’t need to go outside when you don’t feel comfortable and safe, and you’ll have taken one less potential victim (or rioter!) off the streets. You may want to extend this advice to other parts of the country too.
Getting Into More Depth
If you are interested in the next level of failures, where critical infrastructure issues pile on top of civil disorder or passing shocks like a bad flu scare, you need to start using the full Six Ways To Die model, called Simple Critical Infrastructure Maps. You need to make the SCIM-INAM chart for your life, and fill in all the appropriate boxes, so you have a really clear understanding of your critical infrastructure related risk, and your potential responses to it. Get ready to make a serious investment in time, gear and training if you want to do a comprehensively good job at this level of concern. It’s not easy. You may have to move house. You may have to arm yourself. You may, indeed, have to become a survivalist.
But that day is not today.
Yes, there is a risk of Serious Difficulty, up-to-and-including the failure of the State itself, rule of law, governance at its most fundamental levels, and everything else. Even in that condition, however, I do not believe in a loss of civic order lasting more than weeks or very occasionally a few months is possible. There are very rare counter-examples, but they generally-speaking involve a war zone where the supply chains for both combatant sides come from well-funded nation states duking it out. In situations where somebody can gain the upper hand militarily, typically pretty soon they go back to creating order.
Unexpected Travel
Finally, let us consider that oldest of staples, the Bug Out Bag. Here I will admit to substantial geekery, and I’ll show you mine.
LifeSystems survival whistle for being found. Adventure Medical Kits Heat Sheet an enormously superior, dirt cheap, double adult size reflective insulator. A generic foam camping mat for sitting and sleeping on. Generic polypropylene underwear often sold very cheaply in camping shops, tied in a carrier bag to keep them dry.
Some kind of hat, preferably waterproof. A wind-up torch and usually a backup LED light too
A lighter and a few sheets of newspaper, and perhaps some dry twigs.
A bottle of tea tree oil.
Food and water I’d take out of the kitchen on the way out, I don’t keep them packed. You should, though. A two liter soda bottle filled with water and some cans of tuna is just fine.
I keep meaning to add some chlorine bleach for water purification in a small container to the kit.
A roll of toilet paper.
Two small bottles of hand sanitizer. Any special stuff you need, like baby food and nappies, or an epipen, or spare glasses. I can’t stress spare glasses strongly enough.
If you’re particularly conscientious, stick spare picture ID in the bag, at least photocopies of your passport, drivers license etc.
You can buy the lot in London for about fifty quid and it’ll see you right through the vast majority of circumstances which require spending unanticipated time out of your home. Note the distinct absence of a knife, a first aid kid, any kind of sophisticated equipment. I haven’t counted stout walking shoes or Suitable Clothing – that’s your stuff, you should have those anyway. This is just the odds-and-ends that you add to traveling clothes to make you comfortable in a wider range of places and times, from frozen train platforms without any news of a train through to a few days in the outdoors if you wind up in some unpleasant corner of history.
There’s a whole complex art to this stuff, but these are the basics. That’s all you need. Even the sleeping bag is bonus. Consider again the Six Ways To Die.
* too hot – reflective blanket, sunny side out
* too cold – thermals, kept dry, the hat and the space blanket
* hunger – the food you brought, but you won’t starve in a week, don’t worry
* thirst – the water, and the chlorine bleach to purify more if you absolutely must
* illness – the hand sanitizer, the chlorine bleach, the tea tree oil, the toilet paper
* injury – nothing but the tea tree oil, for if you get a graze or toothache
The main buffers are for the cold, exposure and the weather, because for us, in our climate, that’s about the only danger there really is. That and the riots!
Conclusion
But let me say, as a final point, that fifty quids worth of odds-and-ends is much, much less warm, comfortable and likely to keep you safe than good old fashioned bricks and mortar.
Stay at home. You’re safer there than anywhere else, particularly the mean, mean streets of London. The perception that one must march into the woods makes no sense at all: they are not hospitable places unless you are rather experienced, and even then it takes considerable equipment to simply wait in some rural place, bothering nobody, until the place has quietened down a bit. It’s not the way for most people, and it’s much, much higher risk, in almost all scenarios, than staying at home.
So if you’re serious about your own safety, make the preparations for staying at home for a month. Think it through, do it right, and then if you have to have a weekend in because they’ve got riot police blockading your doors, at least you won’t run out of red wine.
Stay in a safe place. If you have to travel to reach a genuinely safe place, travel carefully, be prepared, and verify your destination is safe before setting out.
The psychological impulse to pick up and run at the first sign of danger, generally speaking, causes more danger than it averts. If you are going to be traveling during a crisis of any kind, ensure you are traveling towards a known-safe destination, not simply running.
Stock up the house in case there’s more of this, and wait it out. That’s my advice.
You can also download the entire set as a TAR file from Archive.org or try bit Bittorrent version here. At 4.3gb it’s ideal for burning on DVD. Just download the file, decompress (unzip etc. will do it), burn them on to a DVD and pass them out. Such a DVD would be a good starting point for people who want to get oriented to this kind of hard line resilience thinking. Most of the files are videos, and I’ve hotlinked the most important ones below and marked them with a *.
The files are all Public Domain, with one exception as noted below. Please distribute the widely, pass them around, and make the tools available to local community organizers who are trying to make a difference in these challenging times.
cheapid.guptaoption.com.6aug2011tar.gz – web site archive emergency_shelter__The_Hexayurt_in_Haiti__Summer_2010.pdf – basic overview of a tough hexayurt guptaoption.com.6aug2011.tar.gz – web site archive hexayurt.com.6aug2011.tar.gz – web site archive how_to_buy_food_for_disasters__Reykjavik__2008.pdf – simple, very, very easy food shopping – can be improved!
* Modeling_State_Failure_With_SCIM__Greenhouse_Ireland__29Sep2010.m4v (390mb) – hardcore mortality analysis of a failed state scenario Observe_Orient_Decide_Act_OODA_2x2.pdf – Boyd’s OODA loop for organizations On_Designing_Complex_Cooperation_A_Tour_of_The_Gupta_Dimension__Summer2009.mov – organizational theory for non-traditional partnerships, taken from civ/mil cooperation * START_HERE__Dealing_in_Security__Simple_Critical_Infrastructure_Maps__July2010.pdf – speaks for itself. Do start here. This file is CC licensed NON-COMMERCIAL USE, please note that. STAR_TIDES__BIG_OVERVIEW.pdf – appropriate technology and infrastructure theory from STAR-TIDES STAR_TIDES__SMALL_OVERVIEW.pdf – a little more infrastructure theory, from a brochure strategic_complexity_framework_for_dummies.pdf – light relief, but also vital The_Free_City_State_Urban_Governance__The_Really_Free_School_London__Spring2011.mp3 (1) The_Free_City_State_Urban_Governance__The_Really_Free_School_London__Spring2011__warmup_chat.mp3 (2) a new model of municipal governance which helps decentralize the power of the Mayor. * The_Future_We_Deserve__Winchester_School_of_Art__6May2011_1of2.m4v (600mb) – general overview of my work, and our position * The_Future_We_Deserve__Winchester_School_of_Art__6May2011_2of2.m4v (600mb) – second part of the talk, and Q&A The_Future_We_Deserve__Winchester_School_of_Art__6May2011_slides.pdf – slides TheGuptaStateFailureManagementArchive.tar – the tar file which contains all these files * The_Living_City_on_US_Urban_Resilience__Arup_London__Nov2009.mov (100mb) – US Urban Resilience analysis we did for Arup. Focuses on cold weather grid stability and pharmaceutical supply chain management The_Living_City_on_US_Urban_Resilience__Arup_London__Nov2009_slides.pdf – slides The_Reykjavik_Briefing_on_Natural_Disaster__Reykjavik__2008.mov – long range, large scale thinking on natural disasters, including the seeds of what later became SCIM. * Through_the_Looking_Glass__Greenhouse_Ireland__27Sep2010.mp4 (300mb) – how many groups can cooperate to provide essential services in a crisis scenario. introduces the concept of AIAC. Through_the_Looking_Glass__Greenhouse_Ireland__27Sep2010_slides.pdf – slides Time_to_Stop_Pretending__Uncivilisation_Dark_Mountain_Festival__29May2010.mp4 – a little on the global situation Vinay_Gupta_and_Mike_Bennett_Collapsonomics__Uncivilisation_Dark_Mountain_Festival__30May2010.mp3 – a briefing on how pre-existing cultural faultlines can be just as dangerous as geological faultlines vinay.howtolivewiki.com.6aug2011.tar.gz – an archive of this blog, up until yesterday. * why_nothing_works_the_Goat_Rodeo_Index.pdf – on the limits of collaboration when people are not properly aligned at a psychological level
The entire package is many hours of video, containing a plethora of deep models for understanding systems and social resilience, and would probably take a couple of weeks to really get through if you were working on it every day. I will be preparing some simpler starting point materials in due course. The “Dealing in Security” document, however, is precise, general, readable, informative, comprehensive and short. You can safely start there.
There’s a fair bit that could be done to improve this package – it could be presented as an ISO file. For size, videos could be recompressed, and audio quality improved, slides intercut with the footage and so on. The PDFs could be ported into some kind of editable format and so on. Most of all, other material could be added, in the couple of gigs that might save, and we could have a genuinely useful “drop and go” community-level resilience DVD.
That’s going to be a project for somebody else, though. I’ve made my content available, I hope that other people will follow suit, and we can all be as well prepared as possible should there be significant disruptions in essentials services in upcoming years.
((from a post made to the Reddit PostCollapse forum – just kind of a braindump to help some folks out who were just starting to grapple with these problems. Survival Epistemologist!))
SCIM (http://files.howtolivewiki.com/Dealing%20in%20Security%20JULY%202010.pdf) is a model in use by the US military STAR-TIDES project (see http://www.ndu.edu/CTNSP/docUploaded/DH%2070.pdf). It provides a really, really simple and objective model of function in disasters. Here’s the basic model:
INDIVIDUAL SURVIVAL
* too hot
* too cold
* hunger
* thirst
* illness
* injury
GROUP FORMATION
* communications
* transport
* workspace
* resource control
ORGANIZATIONAL FUNCTION
* shared map of reality
* shared plan of action
* shared succession model for replacing leadership
NATION STATE FUNCTION
* list of persons
* map of claimed territories
* effective organizations (police, army, bureaucracies etc.)
* international recognition
* legal jurisdiction
Each one of these services is provided by a complex matrix that you might, for now, call “society.” There’s a more precise term, AIAC (agro-industrial auto-catalysis http://vinay.howtolivewiki.com/blog/other/the-november-plan-finishing-the-future-we-deserve-2082) but that’s an entirely different conversation.
Society can be simply grouped into seven tiers of complexity, namely
* individual
* household
* village / neighbourhood
* town
* region
* country
* world
Something like the fuel supply which provides transportation has a Town level (the gas station), a regional level (the supply depots), and a national/global level which is the pipelines, tankers and terminals which actually process and distribute the fuel.
There are two basic types of crisis:
* point crisis and
* systemic crisis
Point crisis moves the load from your local Town (say) up to the Regional and National levels. New Orleans floods, and support rushes into the area to help from the Federal and State level, for example.
Systemic crisis is much, much more dangerous, because the Regional and National levels just stop being able to provide services as effectively, and suddenly you’re left with what you have locally. What State and Federal resources exist go to the worst-hit areas, but the total size of the potential first responder force – all troops, police, firemen etc. together is about 1% of the total population. Hence you’re expecting to be getting along and getting through with your neighbors, and there’s not much more to be done for it.
Systemic crisis is what leads to collapse: banking, national electrical grids, international oil shipments are probably the most fragile systems, with the internet and telecommunications networks not far behind. However, in most cases systemic crises don’t get back enough to cause massive deathtolls without an authoritarian state response (i.e. China during Mao’s famine, the Ukranian Genocide etc. require the State to step in and prevent people self-organizing a response to keep them alive.)
Three final concepts.
All shared property is managed by the Three Bureaucracies: Ownership, Management and Protection. Take a town water tower. There’s a company that owns it, say the Municipality of Smithville. Then there’s a guy who manages it, who’s hired by the Municipality of Smithville to keep it running, and who also allocates the services (pressure, feed) supplied by the water tower. Then there’s the Police who protect the water tower. That’s three separate groups of people involved – the Town Council, the Water Manager, and the Police force before you can have a municipal water tower.
It’s a hell of a lot simpler to have a barrel on your roof and a hose pipe If you’re going to share anything, you need to explicitly model the Three Bureaucracies – who Owns, who Manages and who Protects. Otherwise it’s easy to wind up with shared property enmeshed in horribly complex implicit social arrangements which fall apart into squabbling and fighting as soon as something goes wrong.
Secondly, violence. Fundamentally violence falls into three broad categories:
* defense
* status fights
* offense
In a defense situation, the goal is to escape or prevent an attacker from entering an area, roughly. Defenders win when the attackers either give up or leave, or when the defenders escape from the attackers. Running is a perfectly effective defense, but in most survival situations people want to stand their ground to protect their supplies and stable living conditions. This is clearly a very general model, but the psychology is what I’m discussing. Defender psychology ends when the threat goes away, and anything which works is just fine. Defenders are not necessarily passive, but the situation resolves when the attacker withdraws or is no longer pursuing.
Status fighting is different. Status fighting includes the concept of winning and proving that one’s side or oneself is in some way better than the person you’re fighting with. Defenders stop taking risks as soon as attackers withdraw. Status fighters will pursue or brag to cement a victory. If two people square off to fight, that’s not an Attack/Defense situation, that’s a Status fight. The message on Status Fights is very, very clear: DO NOT EVER STATUS FIGHT UNLESS YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE AND ACCESS TO A GOOD EMERGENCY ROOM. You have nothing to gain, and it’s very easy to get hurt much more seriously than you expect to if a fight escalates.
Then there is attack. Attack is where you decide you’re going to kill somebody, or force them to do what you want them to do or face violence. In a survival situation attack may become necessary for a variety of terms (for example, breaching a roadblock where people are trying to blockade a road you need to get through.) In an attack, the most important thing is to realize that there is no predictable graduation in violence: if you start a fight, you may wind up killing or having to kill somebody. If you are not prepared to do that, you aren’t mounting an attack, YOU ARE STATUS FIGHTING. If you’re not willing to kill, you are status fighting. Status fighting in an emergency situation will get you killed. Here is why. Most of the real nasty violence we see comes when Person A thinks they are in a status fight, and Person B thinks they are in an Defensive or Offensive situation. We all have sophisticated ways of showing status by violence – highschool skirmishes are not intended to leave anybody disabled or dead, but to rapidly and safely establish a hierarchy. Those reflexes and subtle implicit signaling behaviors have nothing to do with Real Violence, because a Person B, an Attacker or Defender who’s willing to kill is going to stab Person A through the eyeball to get what they want while Person A is still squaring off, yelling and posturing. People who are willing to kill, whether Offensive or Defensive in intention, have an entirely different fight psychology, and nearly everybody who’s in Rambo Mode is not in that psychology – they’re in Status Fight mode, but with guns. Combat psychology is a big area, see “On Killing” for the full chapter and verse if you’re interested. If you’ve a mind to be a fighter, it’s more important to read “On Killing” than to be a good shot.
Finally, you need to understand poverty. 20 million people a year – one third of the people who die every year – die of poverty. The breakdown is roughly:
* 5m from dirty water
* 5m from cooking smoke
* 5m from various kinds of malnutrition, mostly shortened lifespans from poor diet rather than just plain starving to death
* 5m from lack of vaccinations and similar basic medical care
That’s a very crude breakdown, and all of these factors overlap in complex ways. 9m of the 20m who die are children under the age of 5.
A collapse means living in the same conditions as the people who grow your coffee. You have to understand that people are living in collapse or near-collapse conditions all over the world, in fact it may be considered normal or average all over the world. It’s not a new or unique position, it’s just poverty and it’s everywhere already. You have to face this to be able to think accurately about collapse. If you can’t face the poverty problem, you can’t plan accurately because your mind will route around unpleasant facts, and those unpleasant facts are exactly what you need to be thinking about to survive. Your mind must be clear, and that means thinking about the hellish problems of the world, so that you can avoid them. (see my talk at Uncivilization 2010 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkQCy-UrLYw)
Finally, four technologies you should know about, all easy to build and open source.
* the hexayurt (http://hexayurt.com) a very cheap emergency shelter which is somewhere between a tent and a house in basic utility. Think “big shed” but for a few hundred dollars.
* the biosand water filter, which will peel out most of the nasties from water (99%+ of pretty much everything infectious which can make you sick) and is basically a big plastic bucket, a hose and some sand/gravel.
* the rocket stove, which burns wood 3x as efficiently as an open fire and is well suited to general cooking, though perhaps not so good for heating
* the composting toilet, which at its simpler is buckets, sawdust, leaves, straw or paper, and a place to dump waste to rot down over time. Composting toilets appear to be safe, and are a little more complicated than the other two technologies.
I hope that’s a useful overview.
Vinay Gupta Director, Hexayurt Project
PS: a little bleach goes a long way in a disaster. Cleans drinking water, sterlizes medical instruments, washes clothes. If there’s only one thing you can stockpile, it’s simple bleach. Dirt cheap and can save your life. Enjoy.
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