Societies that Collapse

229 Pages·2014·0.941 MB·English

by  Dmitry Orlov

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