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Societies that Collapse PDF

229 Pages·2014·0.941 MB·English
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1 Societies that Collapse Essays Dmitry Orlov August 2014 • Boston 2 Other Books by Dmitry Orlov Reinventing Collapse Hold Your Applause! Absolutely Positive The Five Stages of Collapse Communities that Abide 3 Table of Contents Dance of the Marionettes...................................................................5 Perfectly Comfortable........................................................................8 The Wheel of Misfortune.................................................................12 Trained for Success, Bred to be Eaten............................................17 A Modest Health Care Proposal.......................................................20 Shale Gas: The View from Russia....................................................25 Down the Skyscraper.......................................................................30 Sustainable Living as Religious Observance...................................37 Fragility and Collapse: Slowly at first, then all at once.................43 Our Brave Experiment.....................................................................55 Peak Oil Oppositional Disorder:......................................................63 Neurosis or Psychosis?.....................................................................63 Politics of the Unconscious..............................................................70 The Most Interesting Driver in the World.....................................75 Suicidal Services...............................................................................79 Le Vieillard Gros...............................................................................82 In Praise of Anarchy, Part I..............................................................85 In Praise of Anarchy, Part II............................................................89 In Praise of Anarchy, Part III...........................................................97 The Limits of Language..................................................................100 Due to circumstances under control............................................103 Meanwhie in Ireland......................................................................106 The Practice of Anarchy.................................................................109 A Royal Pain in the Ass...................................................................114 Meanwhile in Russia.......................................................................120 Escape from the Merry Christmas Zone.......................................124 The Image of the Enemy................................................................126 4 The Ecology of Hell.........................................................................134 Pray for an Asteroid.......................................................................138 Monkey Trap Nation......................................................................143 Understanding Organizational Stupidity.....................................150 The Rationale behind the Boston Psy-ops....................................157 Meet the Chechens.........................................................................161 Look for loopholes to avoid extinction.........................................165 The Sixth Stage of Collapse............................................................168 The Story of “Er”............................................................................178 Blessed are the Idiots.....................................................................182 In Praise of Nomads........................................................................187 How To Time Collapses..................................................................194 “American” exceptionalism..........................................................202 The Good Life: Mobility, Anonymity, Freedom............................207 Reichstag Fire in Kiev.....................................................................212 The Madness of President Putin....................................................218 Moneybag logic...............................................................................226 5 Dance of the Marionettes It's election season in the U.S., which means that I have the un- welcome task of wading through well-intentioned though off- topic comments devoted to things political: who might be the next president, and whether or not it matters who the next president is (it doesn't). And rather than bear it quietly, I thought I'd say something about it. Electioneering in the U.S. is steadily expanding to fill more and more time and space even as it provides worse and worse results with each election cycle. The Congress is made of some of the least popular people on earth, who are manifestly incapable of achieving anything useful. They do seem quite ready and willing to pass laws that erode human rights and enhance the powers of the police state, but this is because they are paranoid. Perhaps their one point of consensus is that sooner or later their con- stituents will want to open fire on them. Still, the elections provide a spectacle, the media are condi- tioned to lavish attention on the candidates, and the people, be- ing weak-willed, are once again beguiled into thinking that it matters who gets elected. A few years of Obama impersonating Bush should have taught them that it doesn't matter who the Prisoner of the White House is. Likewise, watching the sad spec- tacle of Congress trying to raise the debt limit or to reign in run- away deficit spending should have taught them that this institu- tion is no longer functional. (The U.S. is about to bump up against the debt limit again; does anyone even care?) All of this should have been enough to make it clear to just about everyone that wondering what might be different if, say, Ron Paul got elected president, is like wondering what might be different if the moon were made of a different kind of cheese—your favorite kind, of course. Leaving aside the meaningless question of who the next Fig- urehead in Chief might be, let's look briefly at what is perhaps the most corrupt institution the U.S. has: the Senate. Everyone knows that senate seats are for sale: as soon as a senator gets elected, he starts fundraising, to finance his reelection campaign. Since each state, whether huge or puny, gets two seats, these are 6 variously priced: the two seats for a large, populous state, like California or Texas, are very expensive, while the two seats for the puny State of Potatoho or some such, with its zero million inhabitants, are more reasonably priced. Since the senators themselves decide nothing and are simply mouthpieces to the moneyed interests which buy their seats, and since this is a very divided country, they are unable to achieve compromise, making the Senate completely useless as a deliberative body. Let's face it: the senators are just marionettes controlled by gi- ant bags of money. Their seats are definitely for sale, all of them, all the time. But then an odd thing happened about a month ago: the ousted Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich was sentenced to 14 years in prison for allegedly attempting to sell the senate seat that was vacated when Obama was elected president. It seems like a stiff penalty for something that is a routine, daily occur- rence, does it not? It is especially odd since other miscreants who actually caused serious damage, like former senator Jon Corzine, who looted investors' accounts to cover his gambling debts in the futures market, are still at large. What set Blagojevich apart is that he violated a taboo. Just like any normal criminal syndicate, the U.S. Senate has rules by which the members preserve their positions and keep each other in check. As with a criminal syndi- cate, these rules have nothing to do with serving the public in- terest. One of these rules is that it is not allowed to sell a senate seat if it is unoccupied. Essentially, senators get to sell senate seats, governors don't. It is a tribal taboo: “Of course we can have sex with our underage daughters—we all do it—but not when they are menstruating! We are all good decent God-fearing Troglodytes!” Rod Blagojevich is the exception that proves the rule: senate seats are for sale. It stands to reason, then, that the way to influence this politi- cal system, in its current advanced state of degeneracy, is not through the political process, which is just a pro forma activity that determines nothing. Armed with the understanding that it doesn't matter who gets elected, we should ignore the elections altogether. To get the government to respond, it is far more ef- fective to organize around issues, pool resources, and hire lobby- ists. As for the rest of us, who do not have the means to hire lobby- ists, there are still a few things we can do: we can starve the sys- 7 tem by withholding resources from it, and we can bleed the system by extracting payments from it. If we are clever, we can also find ways to frustrate the system by artificially generating complexity. The system has been gamed to our disadvantage. We are not going to win by playing along. But we all win whenever we refuse to play the game. If you simply can't resist the temptation to play the game, don't play it to win. Play it strictly for the entertainment value. Ignore the front-runners and focus on all the amusing types that have zero probability of being elected. Encourage them, give them airtime and attention. And if anybody wonders why their candidacy matters, use the opportunity to explain to them why none of these political marionettes matter at all. 8 Perfectly Comfortable I don't particularly like cars. I don't like the way they smell, on the inside or the outside. I don't like the feeling of being trapped in a sheet metal-and-vinyl box, my body slowly warping to the shape of a bucket seat. I don't enjoy the visually unexciting and inhospitable environment of highways or the boredom of spend- ing hours gazing at asphalt markings and highway signs. I particularly dislike the insect-like behavior that cars provoke in people, reducing their behavioral repertoire to that of ants who follow each other around, their heads in close proximity to the previous insect's rear end. Nor do I enjoy having a mechanical dependent that I have to feed and house all the time, even though I rarely have need of it. I do sometimes need to use a car, and then I rent one or use one from a car-sharing service that charges by the hour. The most enjoyable parts of that exercise are when I pick it up and when I drop it off. Cars end up costing me a few hundred dollars each year, which is a few hundred dol- lars more than I would like to spend on them. I do like bicycles. They are about the most ingenious form of transportation humans have been able to invent so far. I espe- cially like mine, which I bought second-hand, from a friend, for something like $150. That was about 20 years ago. It still has a lot of the original parts: frame, fork, chain rings and cranks, bottom bracket and hubs. The spokes and rims were replaced once; the cables twice; the freewheel and chain five or six times; the tires a dozen times or more; I've lost count of the inner tubes, which don't last long thanks to all the broken glass on the road from cars smashing into each other. Over time, I've upgraded various bits. Nice titanium brake levers from a used parts bin at a local bicycle school set me back $10. One of the down-tube shift lever mechanisms fell apart (it was partly made of plastic), and I replaced it with an all-metal one from a nearby bin at the same establishment. The original rear derailleur was by Suntour, which no longer exists, and so I replaced it with a Shimano part, for $60, I recall. Ruinous ex- pense, that! (The front derailleur is still the original Suntour.) 9 The frame is made of very high quality chrome-molybdenum alloy of a sort rarely encountered today. Chrome and molybde- num prices have gone up by a lot since then, and steelmakers have found new ways to cut corners. It survived a ride up and down the East Coast aboard a sailboat, exposed to the elements, without a problem. It looks like a beat-up, rusty old road bike— not something bicycle thieves normally find interesting—and that's exactly how a bicycle should be made to look even when it is new. I ride something like 7km just about every weekday of the year. Sometimes I ride quite a bit farther, spending half a day meandering through the countryside or along the coast. I've rid- den as much as 160 km in one day; that was a bit tiring. I rarely take the shortest path, preferring meandering bike paths that go through parks and along the river. I do ride through traffic quite a bit of the time, and have developed a style for keeping safe. I pay minimal attention to traffic signals and lights (they wouldn't be needed if it weren't for cars) and mostly just pay attention to the movements of cars. (Traffic lights are sometimes useful in predicting the behavior of cars, but not reliably, and not so much in Boston.) I also tend to take up a full lane whenever a bicycle lane is not available (cars are not a prioritized form of trans- portation, to my mind). A person who is in a hurry, here in Bos- ton, would get there sooner by riding a bicycle. I understand that this annoys certain drivers quite a lot, raising their blood pres- sure. Perhaps the elevated blood pressure will, in due course, get them off the road, along with their cars, freeing up the space for more bicycles. In the summer, my riding attire consists of a tank top, shorts, and flip-flops. I've tried various combinations of pedals with toe clips, clipless pedals and bicycle shoes with cleats, and eventually settled on the most basic pedals available and flip-flops. I've also experimented with padded bicycling shorts and jerseys made of Lycra, and found them too confining. Also, I just couldn't get over the feeling that I shouldn't wear such outfits, no more than I should be going around in tights and a tutu, and so I went back to wearing hiking shorts. But it can be a fine show when Ballets Russes comes rolling through town. When it rains, I put on a Gore-Tex bicycle jacket that evaporates the sweat while keeping 10

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