The Doomer Report

Doom and the Dark Side of Cosmic Fecundity

2011-07-19T15:21:00.001-07:00

The Cosmic Dance of Shiva, supreme Hindu god of destruction and creation

Like many in the blogosphere, I have expended considerable mental energy in recent years studying and fretting over the various "doomer" scenarios that threaten humanity in the 21st century. There was a time when I found the apparent facts utterly depressing and was convinced that there was no light at the end of the tunnel for mankind – that the future offered nothing but total collapse and devolution. But some time during the past six months or so, and particularly with my recent turn to the “dark side”, I have come to view the doomer issues quite differently. Since making the Dark Energy my ally, I no longer dread the Apocalypse, but see in it a deep truth and a powerful avatar of progress. As strange as it may sound, I now welcome peak oil, climate change, ecological disruptions, natural and man-made disasters and all the strife and struggle that they imply.

How can I make such a callous statement? The answer should be obvious to any objective thinker: through strife and struggle life evolves and man achieves progress and greatness. Civilization was born out of the hardships that followed the last ice age; the Classical Age arose from the ashes of the Bronze Age Collapse; the European Renaissance followed the disastrous 14th century; the conquest of the New World made possible the wealthiest and most progressive empire yet seen; world-transforming technologies like computers, nuclear energy and jet airplanes emerged from the cauldron of the last World War; the moon shot grew out of the power struggle known as the Cold War. And now, after decades of relative stagnation, the wheel is set to turn again. So while I don’t dispute the reality of the doomer prognostications, I don’t dread this doom, but welcome it as the birth pangs of a new age.

This is a perspective that anyone conditioned by the "progressive" Judeo-Christian values of Western civilization will have a very hard time coming to grips with. It truly is a worldview that is "beyond good and evil" in the traditional sense, one which I suspect is, at least in elite circles, becoming the conventional wisdom. My sense is that the wealthy and powerful enjoy their status for good reason: they understand the dark nature of this world better than most, and use that knowledge to their advantage. I also suspect that these elites know better than most that doom is coming, and are making preparations to exploit it as we speak. The doom that we face, the potential culling of populations and collapse of civilizations, is to the illuminated just another manifestation of Howard Bloom’s “Lucifer Principle,” of the sort that has driven human progress from the beginning:

"The nature scientists uncover has crafted our viler impulses into us: in fact, these impulses are a part of the process she uses to create. Lucifer is the dark side of cosmic fecundity, the cutting blade of the sculptor's knife. Nature does not abhor evil; she embraces it. With it she moved the human world to greater heights of organization, intricacy, and power." –Howard Bloom, The Lucifer Principle

So I suspect the conspiracy theories have more than a grain of truth, and there really is a Luciferian elite drawing up plans for a New World Order and/or a Satanic Singularity at this very moment. And I expect they will succeed.

Another expression of this principle can be found in Hinduism, that most ancient and wise of all religious traditions. For the Hindus understand the cyclical nature of all things, and worship a deity who embodies the eternal cycles of destruction and creation: Shiva, whose cosmic dance of Tandava has apparently begun again.

The two most common forms of Shiva's dance are the Lasya (the gentle form of dance), associated with the creation of the world, and the Tandava (the violent and dangerous dance), associated with the destruction of weary worldviews – weary perspectives & lifestyles. In essence, the Lasya and the Tandava are just two aspects of Shiva's nature; for he destroys in order to create, tearing down to build again.

Whatever the nature of this approaching Eschaton, I choose to see it as the darkness before a new dawn. I choose to believe that apocalypse is the necessary evil that will tear down our weary worldviews, end the Judeo-Christian Aeon and make way for an Aeon of Nietzschean, cosmic civilization. So when you hear a garden-variety doomer wringing his hands about all the cataclysms about to befall a greedy, evil and selfish mankind, just smile and say to this simplistic soul, still stuck spiritually in the old Aeon: "Yes, of course mankind is greedy, evil and selfish, and of course the cataclysms are coming. And I wouldn’t have it any other way."

"Without strife, your victory has no meaning.
Without strife, you do not advance.
Without strife, there is only stagnation."
–Sith Master Uthar Wynn

"Only this have I learned so far, that man needs what is most evil in him for what is best in him – that whatever is most evil is his best power and the hardest stone for the highest creator; and that man must become better and more evil." –Friedrich Nietzsche

"In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love – they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock." –Harry Lime, The Third Man

A Vision of The End

2011-06-13T14:02:00.000-07:00

Gaze with me into the mirrors of your Multiversal mind, and see one possible future coming into view...

This is not the world your mythmakers promised you — no Disneyland of techno-prosperity and consumer capitalism for all. No, this world is racked by holy wars and ethnic conflicts, Malthusian catastrophes, refugee invasions, eco-anarchy and Millennial insanity. Do you see it? There, in the frontview mirror? Do you see the chaos approaching in the twilight of this, the darkest of all ages?

The chaos is descending fastest across the lands of God-drunk Islam. Thirsty Yemen is falling to the soldiers of martyred bin Laden; modernity is in on the run in flood-ravaged Pakistan; hungry Egypt marches to the tune of the mystic Muslim Brotherhood. The bombs are dropping everywhere, from Tripoli to Waziristan; the drones martyr ten, but a hundred more take their place. The enemy takes all losses, yet no victory is in sight. And all across the Western world, no one knows why we fight.

The West, for all its weaponry, is a disarmed and defenseless civilization. Bereft of a deeply rooted culture, lacking spiritual strength, absent even the language to comprehend the epochal developments which engulf it, its decadent citizens retreat ever further into their Matrix of distractions.

But one day soon, all of that will shatter. One day soon, like the Roman citizenry of old, they will awake to find that barbarians have overrun their outposts, put their Legionnaires to the sword, broken through their gilded gates and are pillaging their temples.

There is no Iron Curtain this time, falling across Europe from the East. Today a wall of chaos surges up from the South like a fecund beast. The ramparts of Fortress Europa cannot hold it back; the rot of godless centuries has breached your citadels at last. You have no soldiers for the battlements because your cathedrals and hospitals are tombs. Your gods are all dead, and leave you to your doom. You are a spent race, with no fight left in your souls. Mohammedan holy warriors will roll across your lands, raping your women and plundering your treasures like the Saracens of old.

The Final War of this age has already begun, and before the drama is done, every weapon of mass destruction will fly, and millions upon millions must surely die. Cities and civilizations will conflagrate in atomic hellfire; whole races will be decimated by super-virus bio-sorcery; Final Solutions will be executed entirely by machine.

The Samson Option will be activated in Israel, as the walls come tumbling down. The holy places at Mecca and Jerusalem will vaporize, Arabia and Persia will turn to glass. The armies will gather at Armageddon, and all believers will know that Judgment Day has come at last.

Everything combustible will burn. All that has been created shall be destroyed. But in every end is a new beginning, and in every darkness the promise of a new dawn. So it ever was; so it shall ever be. Until The End.

The Eternal Specter of Fascism

2011-01-01T14:14:00.001-08:00

Since I’ve recently been accused of being a fascist (and not for the first time), I did a little self-reflection and concluded that, yes, I probably am that. And so, I suspect, are you, if you are honest with yourself and possess any degree of self-awareness. Allow me to explain...

Ever since adolescence I have been acutely aware that our glorious species is, for the most part, a vast troop of self-deluding monkeys who, despite our overgrown neocortexes, are still largely driven by hundred million year old lizard brain impulses. Perhaps I had an advantage over others in perceiving this fact, in that for medical reasons I did not hit puberty until I was 21 and a junior in college – an age at which I was presumably a bit more self-aware than most adolescents. During my accelerated transformation from boy to man, the change in consciousness which testosterone triggered in me made my true nature frighteningly clear, and by extension, I understood the frightening nature of all men.

Modern civilizations have created an elaborate apparatus to moderate, harness and control our primal energies, but it remains a rather thin layer atop a dark sea of prehuman imperatives. Sigmund Freud called this sea the “Id”, which is in a constant battle with the ego and super-ego for cognitive control. Aldous Huxley pointed out that every human being is both Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, owing to our brain’s evolutionary trifurcation into the lower reptilian and limbic complexes and the higher neocortex. Each of us is in a very real physiological sense a split personality, and our conscious, rational mind is just one of these personalities, scarcely aware of what the other ones are doing.

What does all this have to do with fascism? Everything! For what is politics, after all, but an expression of collective human psychology? Using Huxley’s Jekyll and Hyde model, what we might call “rational liberalism” is essentially the political expression of our cerebral Dr. Jekyll minds. This part of ourselves finds political expression in the ideals of the Enlightenment, in notions of democracy, equality, the rule of law and progress. It is the politics of such modern cerebral rationalists as David Brin and Barack Obama.

On the other hand, our reptilian Mr. Hyde minds express themselves politically in war, racism, slavery, xenophobia and genocide – all the old evils that the progressives have been so hard at work trying to eradicate in recent centuries. The poster child for modern reptilian politics is, of course, Adolph Hitler. Notice an interesting correlation here: just as our reptilian brains are much older than our cerebral brains, so too are the political institutions of war and tribalism much older than our recent regime of democracy and the rule of law. Progressive politics, like the cerebral cortex, is a thin layer that sits atop a deep ocean of violent and regressive political instincts.

That this political layer is very thin should be obvious from recent historical examples. The outbreak of fascism and Nazism in the 1930’s in the heart of Europe – home of the most advanced civilizations in the world at the time – was nothing more than a resurfacing of our reptilian impulses en masse. War, eugenics, racism and genocide became state policy in many places for a decade or more, giving us a brief glimpse of what Mr. Hyde politics looks like in a 20^th century setting. The results were devastating for everyone involved, but the reptilian fascists were eventually defeated. The cerebral progressives breathed a huge sigh of relief, then set about creating institutions which would ensure that such an outbreak never again plagued mankind.

What I find both amusing and disturbing is to hear modern progressives trying to dismiss the phenomenon of 20th century fascism with smug moralization or shallow rationalization. By doing so, they are trivializing what is a very deep and seductive tendency within us all. Human beings did not get where we are today merely by cooperating with our fellow man for the common good; we are the heirs of a legacy of tribal genocide, conquest and rape that stretches back to the dawn of proto-humanity. This is who we are, at the deepest psychological level. When you strip away our liberal conditioning, each of us has an inner fascist looking for any opportunity to break free and start cracking heads with a femur club. There is no changing this fact, short of re-engineering ourselves chemically or genetically. In an evolutionary sense it may even be a losing battle, in that the fascist thugs will probably always out-breed the progressive nerds.

Liberals today are therefore engaged in a never ending campaign to contain our fascist impulses via the powerful indoctrination tools of mass media, education and popular culture. So our world grows ever more artificial and engineered, a Brave New World of electronic soma administered from birth to neuter the beast called man. But if this Matrix should ever fail – as it did in the 1930's and as it is threatening to do today in the face of economic collapse, climate change, peak oil and other Malthusian afflictions – then the fascists who are currently languishing in the prisons of politically correct civilization will take advantage of the chaos to break their chains, and like Tamerlane and Genghis Khan of old, they will rampage across the earth, leaving razed cities, piles of skulls and impregnated women in their wake.

“Barbarism is the natural state of mankind. Civilization is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must always ultimately triumph.” –Robert E. Howard, Beyond the Black River

Imagining the Eco-Matrix

2010-11-24T11:24:00.000-08:00

My friends, this may be my final sermon here at TDR, my ultimate attempt to explain why anyone concerned with the fate of humanity and our planetary biosphere should be in favor of continuing our civilization’s technological push forward, rather than wishing for its collapse. Ready?

The key point is this: continued technological progress will enable us to transition to a post-industrial age — to reduce our global ecological footprint by localizing manufacturing, harnessing eco-friendly energy sources and moving more of our activity into “virtual reality”. To see this, let’s try to imagine a different world: the world of the “Eco-Matrix”...

Imagine a world where you work from home rather than driving a CO2-spewing vehicle through traffic to an office. Imagine spending most of your time in a dwelling powered by off-grid solar energy stored in super-efficient batteries. Imagine growing fresh, healthy food year round in indoor vertical gardens, using fiber optic lighting optimized for plant growth and plants genetically engineered for lower-power light spectra. Imagine making items you need with desktop manufacturing units ("3D printers"), using designs downloaded freely from the Matrix, rather than having them shipped from China. Imagine being able to experience any adventure imaginable via your fiber optic conduit to the Matrix, rather than going out into the world and consuming things. Imagine economic and political systems that function more like the peer-to-peer internet and less like a centralized industrial state. Imagine all knowledge, all culture and billions of potential friends at your fingertips. Ready or not, this is the world we are moving into!

People in the industrialized world are already spending much of their time in the mentally created worlds of social networks, the blogosphere, massively multiplayer role-playing games and infinite free digital entertainment on demand — the Matrix is becoming their reality. Green energy technologies and 3D printing are being aggressively pursued worldwide (see examples here and here), and seem certain to catch on in a big way as they ride the exponential development curve. A good example of the new paradigm in action is google, which is both creating the architecture of the Matrix and developing the green technologies to power it. Another is the work of John Robb, who discusses ideas for resilient, network-centric communities at his brilliant blog, Global Guerrillas. Bright people like these, who presumably care as much about planetary life as anyone, are going to be the leaders of the future world of the Eco-Matrix.

The other key point, which I hope I have made abundantly clear on this blog, is this: the alternative to the Eco-Matrix which many doomers seem to favor — total industrial collapse — would be much, much worse for humanity and the biosphere by almost any conceivable measure. Try to imagine the horror industrial collapse would entail. Imagine the wilderness stripped bare of fauna and flora in a Malthusian struggle for survival. Imagine global famine, rampant disease, unspeakable crimes, bodies piled high in bonfires and cities burned to the ground. Imagine apocalyptic resource wars, barbaric tribal conflicts and a return to medieval religious ignorance. Imagine an end to all progress, science and civilization for a thousand years or more. This is what the sudden end of the industrial age would mean — it is a true apocalypse.

Terence McKenna said: "It is the imagination that argues for the Divine Spark within human beings. It is literally a descent of the World's Soul into all of us." Imagination is my greatest gift, and what the World’s Soul is telling me is that there is no alternative: we must keep pushing forward, to make what Terence called a "forward escape" to the world of the Eco-Matrix. If you don’t believe me, use your own “Divine Spark” to explore these questions and tell me what you see.

Even more than imagination, though, facing the future requires faith — faith that human beings are more than animals, faith that we have come this far for a reason, and faith that if we listen to our higher selves and imagine a better world, we can bring that world into existence.

Morning of the Magicians: Magical Thinking for a New Age

2010-10-30T05:10:00.000-07:00

"I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more surprising than anything I can imagine. Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose." --J. B. S. Haldane

Rationalists of a certain literal, materialistic mindset look at the world’s current state and its future trajectory, crunch the numbers and conclude that, with a high probability, we’re all doomed. It’s an understandable conclusion, too, if you project current capabilities and priorities linearly into the future. But what is missing from their equations — from their entire worldview, in fact — is the element of what I’ll call, for lack of a better word, "magic".

Magic is the discovery of fire, the development of language, the evolution of consciousness, the invention of religion, civilization, science and technology. Magic is the unforeseen game changer, the quantum leap in human powers, the singularity in human affairs which renders all previous predictions absurd. Magic is the force that drives us onward and upward, individually and collectively, to a destiny which is, for all practical purposes, infinite in all directions. Call it genius, divine inspiration or the hand of God if you prefer, but magic is exactly what must save us now, in our moment of great crisis.

Doomers call this magical thinking; they speak mockingly of "pixie dust and unicorn farts" when anyone dares to suggest that humanity will invent a way out of its "peak everything" predicament without vast suffering and loss of power. But magical thoughts are what we should be thinking, for humans are, above all else, the magic-wielding animals. Aleister Crowley defined magic as "the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will", and bending the world to our will is what we do, far better than any other creatures in the known universe. The doomer tries to place an arbitrary upper bound on human meddling — "recognize your limits", they say, "find your place in the natural order", "don’t be greedy" — but what they’re really saying is we should reign in our magic powers — the one indispensable survival tool without which we truly are doomed.

Crowley said it well almost eighty years ago, at a similar moment of global crisis:

"We are in the middle of a world crisis. It is a very good world crisis — better than any crisis we have had before — and there is no man alive with an intellect big enough to grasp the threads of the problems which confront the world today. There are two ways out of that. Either consult a superior intelligence, which Magick shows you the way of doing, or you can develop your own mind, for it has a faculty which is as superior to the intellect as the intellect is superior to the emotions.

All magical operations require a very elaborate training of one kind or another, but I think the only way out is that we have got to put men in charge of this planet who are really more than men. We must get back to the times of the prophets or we must make ourselves prophets. And we must look at world problems from a standpoint which is entirely alien to that existing at present."

A few months after Crowley’s speech a man many consider to be a black magician and prophet of evil took the reigns of power in Germany, so we should be careful what we wish for. But the election of Barack Obama had a similar air of magic to it, as an improbable candidate rose from obscurity to cast a spell on an entire nation with his mesmerizing, messianic persona. As we again enter a period of escalating crisis and uncertainty, it seems that history is repeating itself and the magicians are being called upon to take over where less gifted leaders have failed.

But it will take more than oratory enchanters to solve our problems this time; we need wizards in the tradition of physicist-alchemist Isaac Newton, mystic-inventor Nikola Tesla, visionary polymath Buckminster Fuller and occultist-rocket scientist Jack Parsons. We need geniuses of science and invention who can produce the "energy miracles" that arch-mage Bill Gates recently called for, devise new methods of agriculture, new modes of industry and new forms of community. It may even take a prophet, like the mythical Moses, Viracocha and Lao-Tzu of previous ages, to inspire us to make the changes in our worldviews necessary for life in a new age. You could be one of these wizards, as could your child, or the girl next door. For wherever there are humans, there is magic, and wherever there is magic, there is hope. So while some say it’s almost midnight for mankind, I say it’s really the morning of the magicians.

Road Warriors: Nomadic Neo-Barbarians of the New Dark Age

2010-03-20T20:19:00.000-07:00

In my last post I gave some practical tips for aspiring Neo-Barbarians that were focused on fortifying your homestead against Imperial interlopers and marauding bandits. In this installment I’d like to present another option for would-be Neo-Barbs which may turn out to be an even more appropriate (and fun) adaptation to the 21st century milieu of climate chaos, resource scarcity and global guerrilla-dom: hitting the road.

I expect this century to mark the beginning of a new Migration Period like the one that reset the ancient world starting in the 4th century A.D. As discussed in my review of Catastrophe: An Investigation into the Origins of Modern Civilization, this previous era of mass migrations and barbarian invasions was driven by climate changes and Imperial collapses that look all too familiar to anyone with their eyes open in our time. History demonstrates repeatedly that when civilizations fail and climate destabilizes, people flee the cities and hostile environments en masse in search of greener pastures. Remember too that for hundreds of thousands of years nomadic hunter-gathering was the only game in town; it's the one mode of human life with the proven ability to survive the climate chaos that was the norm on this planet up until the last ten thousand years.

What cultural forms will the new nomads take as the Industrial Age winds down and the global reboot accelerates? Here are a few possibilities that seem like reasonable extrapolations from current trends.

Road Warriors

Coming soon to a highway near you?

The film Road Warrior may have seemed like comic book science fiction when it was released in 1983, but go back and watch it again and tell me if it still looks so outlandish. I found its depiction of post-Apocalypse Australia pretty spooky — I don’t know about you, but I have no trouble imagining mobile, heavily armed bands of latter-day Mongols rolling across the crumbling ruins of the North American highway system, piled into fortified RV’s, riding in the backs of pickups sporting 50 caliber machine guns, on souped-up choppers or even on horseback. These will be the pure barbarian warbands of the new Dark Age, violent highwaymen who prey upon anyone brave enough to take to the roads. As in the Mad Max movies, gasoline will be the new gold, and the most successful of these gangs will be the most lethal, led perhaps by unemployed military veterans who find lucrative new uses for their combat skills on the home front. Road Warriors will fight pitched battles with rival gangs and the remains of organized authority for control of oil refineries, wells and petrol stations. Other vital supplies will be obtained by looting any lightly guarded truck convoys, stores or farms they happen to come across.

We can get a little preview of the Road Warrior lifestyle from some of the more violent North American biker gangs, like the Mexican mafia affiliated one that recently bombed a police station in southern California. Urban gangs can also be expected to get in on the action once there is nothing left to loot in the burned-out cities. In response to this possibility, groups like Project Exodus in rural Louisiana are already forming heavily armed posses, complete with machine gun-equipped "war wagons", to combat the homegrown terrorist chaos they apparently think is imminent. Of course in more anarchic parts of the world like Somalia, Road Warriors are already non-fiction.

Eco-Nomads

For the less violent nomads among you, those more inclined to be Deadheads than Hell’s Angels, forming eco-caravans may be an attractive option. These mobile communities will settle in hospitable areas for a season or two, tending their herds and practicing guerrilla gardening wherever soil, water and climate conditions permit. They will be equipped with many green technologies scavenged from the industrial economy, such as solar panels and wind generators, which will provide well water and off-grid electronic conveniences in even the most remote locations. They’ll be well provisioned with heirloom seeds, bulk foods, livestock and ammunition, both for their own use and to barter with other nomads they encounter on their travels.

Yurts: the nomad McMansions? The Mongols once built history’s largest empire from portable huts like these!

These new wagon trains are already starting to form in places like the American southwest, where outlaw RV communities migrate to the sunny climes and live totally off-grid year round. As climate changes and socioeconomic shifts intensify, these eco-nomads will have little difficulty folding up their solar panels and rambling on to more hospitable regions. Unfortunately, they will also be popular targets for the Road Warriors, so when the time comes they’ll have to circle their wagons Old West-style and employ their sizable defensive arsenal to fend off the marauders. Road Warrior was quite realistic in this regard in my opinion — sieges like the one Lord Humungus and his barbarian band laid upon the settlers will be a common scene in the post-industrial wasteland coming soon to the real world near you.

Sea Peoples / Neo-Vikings / Pirates

During the Bronze Age Collapse circa 1200 B.C., the so-called "Sea Peoples" were the scourge of the eastern Mediterranean, attacking coastal cities with impunity and preying upon ships of the Egyptian, Greek and Syrian kingdoms. Some even blame these seafaring raiders for the collapse of Mycenaean civilization, but they may have been more a symptom of the widespread disorder than the cause. And of course the Vikings terrorized the coasts of the British Isles and Northern Europe for several centuries during the last Dark Age, plundering the softer settled folk in grand barbarian style.

Today we’re seeing a resurgence of piracy in places like the Horn of Africa and the Malacca Straits that continues unabated despite a significant naval presence by the industrial powers. Sea Barbarians haven’t yet re-emerged in a big way in traditional haunts like the Barbary Coast, the Caribbean and Northern Europe, but that’s probably just a matter of time. When you start to hear of major acts of piracy or coastal raiding in these regions, consider it a strong indication that the new Dark Age has begun in earnest. Most of North America isn’t particularly well suited to piracy, but up here in my neck of the woods in the Pacific Northwest there are some excellent opportunities for Sea Barbarians along the Strait of Juan de Fuca and throughout the Puget Sound, as well as some great potential hideouts along the Inside Passage of British Columbia. If things get bad enough I might even hoist the black flag and start trawling for booty myself — it sure beats the hell out of standing in soup lines or waiting for the zombies to arrive!

Sea Nomads

One can also imagine a less aggressive brand of Sea People who will travel in fleets of sailing ships for security. These fleets might travel long distances down coasts or across blue water in search of safe and hospitable lands to settle post-Collapse. I can easily envision "doomer fleets" full of Dmitry Orlov-types sailing to places like the Pacific coast of Central America, where a relatively idyllic life far from shipping lanes and population centers might still be possible. If the "mutant zombie bikers" find you, unload your AK-47’s and RPG’s and simply head out to sea. There would again be the problem that the Sea Nomads will be tempting targets for the Pirates; safety in numbers, remoteness and a good arsenal are your best defenses here.

Dmitry Orlov has written insightfully about his life aboard a sailboat, and his ideas for creating viable seagoing communities post-Collapse. A surprising number of people already live some version of the Sea Nomad lifestyle, but they are constrained by the relative lawfulness of the high seas and the strict enforcement of national borders that still prevails. When those things break down, as they undoubtedly will fairly soon, these folks will be able to get much more adventurous. The Vikings who settled in Greenland and the Polynesians who colonized the South Pacific islands certainly weren’t worried about customs officials when they headed out to sea, and neither will the Sea Nomads!

New Aboriginals

Some intrepid folks will want to really get back to basics as industrial civilization collapses, via nomadic hunter-gathering in the Outback. Like the Australian natives on their walkabouts, these New Aboriginals will bring back the sacred hunts, vision quests and seasonal migrations that prevailed for tens of thousands of years throughout the world, and which persist to this day among a few old school traditionalists. I can easily imagine primitive survivalist groups like Tom Brown Jr.’s Tracker School becoming the nexus for the New Aboriginals in North America. Brown has written of the skills passed down to him by one of the last true American aboriginals, an Apache he calls "Grandfather", who was able to travel across the continent at will, living off the land and making contact with far-flung tribal communities. This noble nomadic lifestyle, while much more difficult now that America has been systematically stripped of its former natural abundance, may still be possible in the many remote wilderness areas that still exist throughout the continent.

These are just a few ideas for Neo-Barbarians who want to go mobile in the new Dark Age. I haven’t mentioned the Hobo Hordes, New Oakies, Neo Gypsies or New Bedouin, but I’m sure you can fill in those blanks yourself. There is something so natural and appealing about the nomadic lifestyle for human beings that it shouldn’t take too much more collapsing before folks start walking away from their dead-end sedentary dystopias en masse to seek their fortunes on the road.

”My life fades. The vision dims. All that remains are memories. I remember a time of chaos. Ruined dreams. This wasted land. But most of all, I remember The Road Warrior. The man we called "Max". To understand who he was, you have to go back to another time, when the world was powered by the black fuel, and the desert sprouted great cities of pipe and steel. Gone now, swept away. For reasons long forgotten, two mighty warrior tribes went to war and touched off a blaze which engulfed them all. Without fuel, they were nothing. They built a house of straw. The thundering machines sputtered and stopped. Their leaders talked and talked and talked. But nothing could stem the avalanche. Their world crumbled. The cities exploded. A whirlwind of looting, a firestorm of fear. Men began to feed on men. On the roads it was a white line nightmare. Only those mobile enough to scavenge, brutal enough to pillage would survive. The gangs took over the highways, ready to wage war for a tank of juice. And in this maelstrom of decay, ordinary men were battered and smashed. Men like Max. The warrior Max. In the roar of an engine, he lost everything. And became a shell of a man, a burnt out, desolate man, a man haunted by the demons of his past, a man who wandered out into the wasteland. And it was here, in this blighted place, that he learned to live again...”

Are You a Neo-Barbarian?

2010-02-10T12:22:00.000-08:00

Mongol General: Hao! Dai ye! We won again! This is good, but what is best in life?
Mongol: The open steppe, fleet horse, falcons at your wrist, and the wind in your hair.
Mongol General: Wrong! Conan! What is best in life?
Conan: To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women.
Mongol General: That is good! That is good.

Lately I've become obsessed with visions of a coming Dark Age, and of the kinds of men who will thrive amidst the collapse of the old order. Clearly it won't be the power-possessors of today, the technocrats, financiers and lawyers who have created this Byzantine system of soul-destroying bureaucracy from the safety of their office cubicles. No, the new bosses will be men who lead in a much more visceral way, with sword rather than pen, from the front lines of battle in accordance with the ancient barbarian's creed.

This power shift is already underway in places like Pakistan, where the Western-backed regime is in full retreat before a resurgent sword of Islam. Soon, I expect the West to follow suit, returning to barbarism out of sheer self-preservation. Sarah Palin is a leading harbinger of this trend, with her recent announcement to an excited crowd that America needs a commander-in-chief, not a lawyer. I'm reminded of the lyrics of that old song: "the first one now, will later be last, for the times they are a-changin'" — somehow though, I don't think these are the kinds of changes Bobby D had in mind.

As we begin our descent from the absurd peak of societal complexity that has brought us fuzzy toilet seat covers from China and full body scans at airports, I'd like to begin sketching the outlines of a new cultural movement — one which should grow exponentially as we enter the Great Simplification. The barriers to entry into this tribe are quite low; the only real requirement is that you lose your civilized conditioning. Are you ready to join the Neo-Barbarian horde?

Practical Tips for the Prepared Neo-Barbarian:

The prepared barbarian is proactive in his dealings with the Empire

Remember the scene in the first "Conan" movie where Conan and the Wizard fortify their lair for the arrival of Thulsa Doom’s henchmen? This is the mode you want to go into now: pure barbarian cunning and survival tactics. Here are some practical steps neo-barbarians can take right now to prepare for the coming Dark Age:

buy a gun and ammo while it’s still legal
buy another gun and more ammo
buy a sword or large machete and keep it strapped to your body at all times in case bandits or Imperial thugs surprise you at close range
dig a moat around your property and stock it with piranhas and alligators
buy the biggest, meanest, scariest-looking dogs you can find. I'm partial to the mastiff breeds, especially Bull, French and Neopolitan.

This Bullmastiff embodies the barbarian spirit — make these dogs of war your allies!
Buy the largest supply of non-perishable food you can afford — this, for example. Spend your fiat currency now while it’s still worth something, because, as the old Cree saying goes, "you can’t eat money!"
Install a wood stove in your home and buy an assortment of axes. If there are no trees in your neighborhood, chop up abandoned box stores and tanning salons and convert them to firewood.
If you can, find a cave somewhere in the wilderness and very quietly move in. Be sure to cover your tracks to make it difficult for feds and zombies to find you. If there are no caves in your area, dig one &mdash with enough hard work, you could even start a Troglodyte community that will last for centuries, like this one in northwestern Iran:

A perfectly respectable cave home in Persia that has stood for 700 years — the neo-barbarian prefers a troglodyte village to a McMansion subdivision!

Neo-Barbarian Politics:

The new barbarian does not engage in nuanced political discourse; he operates by instinct, threatening and attacking anyone who disagrees with him. Anyone in a suit and tie making fancy promises from faraway capitals is almost certainly a corrupt Imperial servant, and should be given the Arminius treatment if his forces come calling:

The Roman legions were peerless in the field, so the Germans attacked them in the woods. The Germans skirmished, harassed, and ambushed over three days, slowly weakening the Romans. Bad tactics, adverse weather, poor leadership, unfavorable terrain, and simple treachery undid Roman advantages in technology, training, and discipline. The Roman units maintained their cohesion but, worn down, were finally overwhelmed by superior numbers. Those taken prisoner were buried alive, crucified, or offered as live sacrifices to the German gods. Three legions disappeared in the Teutoburg forest. Arminius, the German commander, had the heads of Romans nailed to the trees as a warning to Rome. Roman power never again extended beyond the Rhine.

The perceptive neo-Barbarian knows instinctively that the reign of the soul-dead bureaucrats is ending, that this rather dreadful "revenge of the nerds" chapter of human history is coming to a close, and the next chapter will be titled: "the thugs strike back". In other words, the neo-Barbarian recognizes the coming collapse as a once-in-a-millenium opportunity to convert his animal vitality into worldly wealth and power.

The eminent socialist theorist Rosa Luxemburg once warned that "the choice before humanity is socialism or barbarism", and I couldn't agree more. I certainly know which side I'm putting my money on...

"He did not care any more... life and death... the same. Only that the crowd would be there to greet him with howls of lust and fury. He began to realize his sense of worth... he mattered. In time, his victories could not easily be counted... he was taken to the east, a great prize, where the war masters would teach him the deepest secrets. Language and writing were also made available, the poetry of Khitai, the philosophy of Sung; and he also came to know the pleasures of women, when he was bred to the finest stock. But, always, there remained the discipline of steel."

Further Reading for the Informed Neo-Barbarian:

Rich neo-barbarians preparing for financial collapse:
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/how-to-invest-for-the-debt-bomb-explosion-2010-02-09?pagenumber=2

"The truth is Insiders in the "Happy Conspiracy" elite will follow Biggs' ultra-simple investment strategy: Make massive amounts of money fast using short-term strategies, spout lip service about the "public good." But always act in your own self-interests first, preparing for when anarchy spreads worldwide in an economic pandemic."

Excellent discussion of the military challenge of fighting modern barbarians:
http://www.nps.edu/Academics/Centers/CTIW/files/Fighting%20Barbarians.pdf

Strategic thinking re: the new Dark Age — there are some serious doomers advising the U.S. government!
From The New Middle Ages To A New Dark Age: The Decline Of The State And U.S. Strategy

If Socialism Fails: The Spectre of 21st Century Barbarism
http://readingfromtheleft.com/PDF/CJ-Barbarism.pdf

A bold manifesto for the high-tech, 21st century neo-barbarian:
New Barbarian Manifesto

A highbrow history of modern barbarism:
http://students.ou.edu/K/Andrew.A.Kierig-1/barbarism.pdf

Great article about the coming Neomedievalism:
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/04/15/the_next_big_thing_neomedievalism

Good fighting, happy trails and good luck in the new Dark Age!

Doomer Book Reviews: Wolf and Iron and Catastrophe

2010-02-05T13:58:00.000-08:00

Doomers, especially those of the survivalist, zombie-fearing variety, are sometimes accused of being adolescent gun nuts who have read too many post-apocalyptic science fiction novels and watched too many "Mad Max" movies. All I can say to these accusations is: guilty as charged. For me, such "doomer porn" is one of the few redeeming aspects of our otherwise disposable popular culture. This genre gives us a variety of entertaining and informative previews of what life might be like in the post-progressive world that is bearing down upon us now like a bat out of hell. In an effort to explore some of these possible futures, and as a service to my fellow doomers, I'm going to start reviewing books that I find particularly insightful or prophetic.

Wolf and Iron, by Gordon R. Dickson

Wolf and Iron, written in 1990 by Gordon R. Dickson, tells the story of "Jeebee" Walther, a social scientist who foresees an impending global financial collapse that will lead to a new Dark Age. Walther is a kind of proto-peak oiler — a math nerd turned survivalist who embodies most of the better traits of your high quality, modern doomer. Applying the new science of "Quantitative Sociodymamics", or QSD (reminiscent of Asimov’s "Psychohistory"), Walther and a handful of other scientists see the signs of the coming Dark Age in their data and take steps to preserve themselves and their knowledge for future generations. For thinking man's survivalists like myself, this premise is pure intellectual candy.

Dickson’s description of the financial crisis that leads to the cascading collapse of civilization sounds eerily like what is happening right now:

The world’s currencies had been interlocked, interdependent. This much had been widely understood by those in the money markets since the nineteen-fifties. Also, therefore were the economies of the world’s nations.

It required only one domino to fall under the right conditions, to set a whole ranked row behind it tumbling. It fell with the collapse of a single obscure bank. The run on this by mobs of people for money it did not have, drew in its creditors. Other banks began to tumble. The panic spread and governments intervened with funds to shore them up—only to find even their funds inadequate for this, as defaults became universal. The world economic web drew the collapse from nation to nation. Central governments fell: and the process of the world splitting into smaller and smaller self-sufficient pieces began.

The next stage in Dickson’s collapse scenario sounds very much like the drop down the Olduvai Cliff predicted by Richard Duncan:

Phone systems were the first to die. Then electric services. Then transportation, with furnaces grown cold and refrigerators, like air conditioners, stilled for lack of fuel. Food ceased to reach the cities from outside. Supplies from anywhere else had become nonexistent; and people had begun to fight for what the stores still held; or to take what they had not and needed. It was the nineteenth century again.

What follows is a Hobbesian struggle of all against all, reminiscent of the "Die Off" scenarios envisioned by Hansonian uber-doomers:

So cities became battlefields and stood now as silent, ravaged testaments to the dead left by riot and revolution. Isolated communities developed into small, primitive self-fortified territories. And the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were abroad once more—heraldic symbols of the new order.

So it had become a time of bloodletting, of a paring down and reshaping of the population—the pattern that QSD predicted would optimize the restoration of social order in those with the QSD patterns for survival under fang-and-claw conditions. A new medievalism was upon the globe. The iron years had come again; and those who were best fitted to the immediate task of survival were those to whom ethics, conscience, and anything else beyond the pure pragmatism of physical power, were excess baggage.

So there you have it: the doomer version of the near future in a few paragraphs. Taking this as its backdrop, Wolf and Iron tells the story of Walther’s journey across a Dark Age America with a wolf he develops a telepathic connection to. The story drags on and loses my interest in places, but I found the overall picture painted by Dickson fairly believable. As someone who is part mathematical systems theorist, part survivalist and part animal empath, I found the main character almost spookily familiar. All in all, if the post-Collapse world turns out to resemble Wolf and Iron more than Catastrophe (see below), then I say "bring it on".

Catastrophe: An Investigation into the Origins of Modern Civilization, by David Keys

As an avid student of doomerology and collapsitarian studies (good luck finding those on the curriculum of your local university!), I have been reading voraciously about past periods of apocalyptic change in search of historical precedents for our own time. My latest read along these lines is a very interesting one: Catastrophe: An Investigation into the Origins of Modern Civilization, by David Keys.

For pure doomer porn, it doesn’t get much better than these accounts of life in the Mad Max world of 6th and 7th century Europe following the collapse of the Roman Empire. This period truly had it all: barbarian invasions, migrating hordes, civil wars, revolutions, anarchy, bubonic plague, famine, drought, devastating natural disasters and a violent new religion exploding out of the Arabian peninsula. Life in this Hobbesian milieu may have been nasty, brutish and short, but it certainly wasn't boring!

What makes these accounts so fascinating is how easily they could become previews of our future as we begin the slide toward what looks to be the next great Dark Age. Events that we associate today only with the darkest corners of the Third World once ravaged the heart of Europe, and may once again plague the Western world if our civilization cannot somehow reinvent itself. As a cautionary tale it is quite sobering, and something every armchair doomer should read. After reading these horrific accounts, perhaps those of you who welcome the collapse of our civilization as the beginning of some great adventure will be a bit more circumspect. The eyewitness accounts of priests who saw cities burned to the ground, countryside consumed by banditry and bodies piled high from plague and barbarian atrocities, remind us that there is very little about a civilization’s collapse that is pleasant for even the most adventurous among us.

One of the more disturbing aspects of the book for me was the account of the fatalism that began to grip the Romans as their Empire crumbled around them. Here is how Keys describes the destruction of Jerusalem by the Persians in 614, as witnessed by the Roman cleric Antiochus Strategus:

What was happening to the empire was beginning to be seen as God’s will. Describing the scene as the Persian army moved in for the kill, Antiochus revealed the depths of Roman fatalism, which had by now reached almost apocalyptic levels.

"And as we knew not God nor observed His commandments, God delivered us into the hands of our enemies. The Lord has given over this Holy City to the enemy," he wrote. “The Persians perceived that God had forsaken the Christians and that they had no helper,” so with “increased wrath” they began to build in a circuit around the city great wooden towers on which they placed catapults.

“The struggle lasted 20 days, shooting their catapults with such force that on the 21st day they broke down the city wall. At this, the evil enemy entered the city in great fury, like angry wild beasts and enraged serpents. The men defending the walls fled to hid in caverns, conduits and cisterns to save themselves; and the people fled in crowds to the churches and their altars there they were slaughtered.

For the enemy entered in great wrath, gnashing their teeth in violent fury; like evil beasts they roared, like lions they bellowed, like ferocious serpents they hissed, and slew all they found. Like mad dogs they tore with their teeth the flesh of the faithful, respecting no one, neither man nor woman, neither young nor old, neither child nor baby, neither priest nor monk, neither virgin nor widow. They destroyed persons of every age, slaughtering them like animals, cut them to pieces, mowed many down like cabbages, so that every individual had to drain the full cup of bitterness.”

Would the capital suffer the same fate as Jerusalem? Again the Romans saw what they believed to be their impending doom as the will of God — a punishment from on high for the conduct of their empire... A group of Roman magnates sent a letter across the Bosphorus to the Persian king in which they virtually trembled with guilt and fear.

"Attacked by you as a reward for our sins, the affairs of the Romans have reached this sorry state of weakness," they wrote. They abjectly begged that "your most great majesty, your most peace-loving majesty" — referred to by the Romans in less awkward times as "the Hated of God" — might make peace "by the Grace of God" as soon as possible. "We also beseech your gentleness that you hold our most pious Emperor Heraclius as a true son of yours, for he is ready in all things to concede to Your Serenity due reverence and duty."

This, then, was the spirit at the end of the last great Western empire. And I see this attitude of surrender beginning to set in today, as educated Westerners call for the rolling back of the Empire, abandon dreams of manned space flight and give up on the possibility of saving civilization from impending climate catastrophe. Perhaps the widespread adoption of this mindset, even more than the crushing defeats which will accompany it, will mark the true beginning of the next Dark Age.

Keys’ rather speculative thesis is that the global upheavals of the 6th and 7th centuries were catalyzed by a huge volcanic eruption in 535 which blotted out the sun for a period of eighteen months. This cataclysmic event, which Keys theorizes occurred on the island of Java, led to a period of climate chaos, famine, migration and war on every continent which lasted for a century and marked the beginning of the Dark Ages.

As a student of doomerology, I find Keys’ thesis fascinating and disturbing. For if it is correct, then the collapse of civilizations on a global scale is not without historical precedent. A single catastrophic event may have tipped the world into chaos 1500 years ago, at a time when human societies were far less interconnected than they are today. This would be an ominous lesson for our time, as we enter an era of climate chaos potentially much more devastating than the one Keys describes. As Joseph Tainter observed in his celebrated book The Collapse of Complex Societies, our current civilization, with its peer polities of financial dependency, globalized production and international aid, is so interconnected that it will collapse not as individual empires, but globally as one entity. If this is true, and if the global Collapse goes down anything like it did in the 6th century, then all I can say to my Archdruid friend John Michael Greer is this: Long Descent my ass!

Even if you reject Keys’ larger thesis, Catastrophe is fascinating reading as an account of what civilizational collapses actually look like, and as a glimpse into an apocalyptic period of history that is largely ignored by our modern education. It’s as if the Western mind has a giant blind spot, an unwillingness to look back into its own dark past and confront the reality of its descent into barbarism. When I was in school, we learned about the classical Greek and Roman civilizations, then we all but skipped a thousand years of history and went straight to the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Yet it is the Dark Age between these periods that I find more interesting, since it speaks to aspects of human nature that we are so intent upon denying today that it makes us mentally ill. Studying this period will give you some perspective on current events, as news of Taliban terrorism in Afghanistan, ethnic cleansing in the Sudan and gang violence the world over echoes the tribal barbarity of that era. By ignoring this part of our heritage for so long — imagining ourselves to live at the perpetually progressing "end of history" — we moderns have psychologically disarmed ourselves and become dangerously vulnerable to the darker forces of human nature that are re-emerging all around us. If you would like to re-arm yourself, read Catastrophe, and steel yourself for the post-progressive world that may be just around the corner.

A White-Knuckle Ride, For Sure

2010-01-23T17:28:00.001-08:00

If you find yourself deep in the dungeons of doomer despair, wracked by fear, uncertainty and doubt, consumed by nihilism or contemplating suicide, consider these words of hope passed down by the late, great psychedelic prophet and herald of the Psingularity, Terence McKenna:

"We can never go back to the game-dotted plains of archaic Africa. That’s gone — it’s all gone. The only way out is forward — it’s called a forward escape... It is a message of hope, without which I think people are going to be very challenged. Because things are going to get worse, apparently much worse. History is turning into a white-knuckle ride, for sure, and without the faith in some kind of transcendental phase transition, I think there’s a tendency to despair and to panic and to nihilism. And religion has failed...

I think that we are on the brink of the adventure for which we left the trees, and left the African plain. But it’s not a sure thing. It rests in our hands, as it always has. Remember, that in the last million years, nine times the ice has moved south from the poles, miles high, pushing before it our ancestors — people wrapped in skins, naked as jaybirds, marginal as can be, no antibiotics, no global weather forecasting, no nothin'. And they didn't drop the ball, they survived, they took care of their children and their elderly, they passed the skills and the technologies and the insights and the songs down the long stream of time. Can we do any less? We, who have in our hands the power to shape the planet for good or evil; we, who can communicate with each other globally in a moment. It would be a pretty sad commentary on the notion of cultural progress and intelligence if they could keep the faith, and we can't.

So it all went for this. It will all be made clear in the lifetime of most of us. So I ... invite you to keep the faith, invite you to explore the edges, and to make of yourself a vessel, a conduit for the world-transforming logos that is trying to speak to all of us, to create a sane and viable and celebratory world for our children — and their children."

This little sermon leaves me speechless and brings tears to my eyes. The words of the prophet McKenna make me want to emulate the fervor of the early apostles of Jesus or the companions of Mohammed and spread his message far and wide. We're all going to need religion soon enough — have you considered McKennaism?

Dr. Doomlove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Collapse

2010-01-18T20:00:00.000-08:00

Well folks, I seem to have turned some kind of psychological corner as I look to the doomful future, and I have to tell you it feels very good. There will be no more wringing of hands from me, no more crying over injustice or bemoaning our predicament or cursing the stupidity of my fellow man. From here on out, self-preservation is the name of the game. As the saying goes, I feel much better now that I’ve abandoned all hope. I understand now the wisdom of uber-mind John von Neumann’s advice to Richard Feynman: "you don’t have to be responsible for the world you’re in." The fact that I was born into an insoluble, epic global mess doesn’t mean I'm obligated to clean it up.

The upshot of this revelation is that my thinking has taken a turn toward the Strangelovian. It’s clear that billions will die in the coming climate and resource catastrophes, but my odds of survival are quite good and getting better all the time. My working plan is to extract what wealth I can out of this dying system while that's still an option, as I prepare to bug out to somewhere with good long-term prospects for livability. So I’m going into hyper-capitalist mode, trying to accumulate resources which will, I hope, enable me to set up a comfortable doomstead somewhere remote from the coming tribulations.

12000 acres in pristine Patagonia — can anyone spare $12 million?

I have no doubt that folks like Ted Turner and George Bush, with their vast ranches in South America, and Bill Gates and the google boys with their properties in Greenland, are doing exactly this on a much grander scale. Imagine the “doomsteads of the rich and famous” that must exist around the planet — bailout billions can supply the off-grid estates of Wall Street take-the-money-and-runners in high style for decades to come. Of course this is mostly speculation; no sane member of the elite would dare make such preparations public for fear of the howling mob. I may not be a PTB, but I think I understand how their minds work.

A luxury doomstead built on top of an Atlas missile silo in upstate New York &mdash priced to sell at $2.3 million!

A glimpse into this mindset is provided by Morgan Stanley investment guru Barton Biggs, who in a recent interview warned of a potential breakdown of civilization:

"Is what’s happening now in Dubai and Greece, for example, a canary in the coal mine? In Greece, there is real chaos and anarchy, with mobs on the street. If Dubai goes down the drain, there’s going to be serious trouble, because they have a million or so imported workers from third-world countries. They are working their butts off, and they have been cheated for years, in terms of what they are paid and their food allowances. There are going to be real problems there.

You can make the case that it is not inconceivable that the barbarians could be at the gate in Europe, Japan and the US. It’s one chance in ten that’s going to happen but, as a person with wealth, you must ask what type of insurance to take out against that...

It sounds simplistic, but there’s nothing the matter with having some kind of self-sufficient farm that is not close to the big cities. It sounds almost stupid, but it sure paid off in occupied Europe during World War II. I don’t think periods of anarchy are going to last a long time in countries like the US. But could we have four or five months of anarchy? I think there’s one chance in ten that could happen."

In his 2008 book Wealth, War and Wisdom, Biggs suggested building polar cities as refuges from global warming, and recommended that investors have self-sufficient safe havens “well-stocked with seed, fertilizer, canned food, wine, medicine, clothes, etc.” Like any good investment guru, Mr. Biggs has seen the future and is warning the investor class to prepare.

Designs for polar refuges &mdash note that Svalbard is a long way from Port au Prince!

For those of us of more modest means, how does one prepare for such a breakdown? Building resilient communities where you live is the most common answer, and for most people this is probably the best option. But I have more of a Daniel Boone mentality, and would prefer to be at a safe distance from the erratic behavior of millions of matrix folks whose world has suddenly crumbled. Dmitry Orlov’s idea of riding out collapse in a boat is interesting, but it seems to me you’d be fighting a lot of entropy just trying to keep your vessel seaworthy as global supply chains go down. I would prefer an off-grid residence in Canada, or perhaps some place in South America, where I can, in a worst-case scenario, live off a ten year supply of freeze-dried food. A ranch in Patagonia looks rather pleasant, but at the moment I don't have twelve million dollars, so I guess it’s time to stop my doom-mongering and give the capitalist roulette wheel one last spin.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see many people’s thinking shift into escape mode rather soon, as the sheer number of Haiti-style disaster areas around the planet becomes unmanageable and the First World finds itself inundated with desperate refugees. How long before those who still have wealth begin to flee toward the poles, where they’ll be able to watch it all come down in Wagnerian style? (The Collapse will of course be televised and well-attended by concerned celebrities, for as long as the media matrix stays operational). This could turn into a case of “white flight” on a global scale — the thinking will be: let Gaia cull the population and clean up the mess we’ve made, and after the apocalypse we can re-emerge and rebuild a livable world for our kind. Before this happens though, the aboriginals may try to take bloody revenge upon the northern peoples, who, with some justification, will be blamed for bringing this cataclysm upon mankind. I’m not a big proponent of Race War, but it’s not inconceivable that this is what we’ll be facing if the bottleneck starts to squeeze and humanity finds itself in a crude Darwinian struggle for survival.

"There would be no shocking memories, and the prevailing emotion will be one of nostalgia for those left behind, combined with a spirit of bold curiosity for the adventure ahead!"

As I ponder these possibilities in my Strangelovian state of mind, my reaction to the “polar doomsteading” idea of people like Mr. Biggs is similar to the Russian ambassador’s response to Dr. Strangelove’s plan to survive a nuclear war: “I must confess, you have an astonishingly good idea there, Doctor.”

An Undeniable Climate of Doom

2010-01-13T15:18:00.000-08:00

Well folks, I've taken a long break from doom-mongering in an effort to save my sanity, but I seem to have failed. Like Michael Corleone's return to crime in Godfather III, the doomer bubble has pulled me back in. The truth of our approaching doom is coming from every direction now, from the faces of people I pass on the street to the words of men in the highest ivory towers and halls of power. In such a climate, embracing your inner doomer is the fastest path to sanity and survival. By abandoning hope now, you still have a chance of gaining first mover advantage over a world that is showing unmistakable signs of waking up.

I've been paying a lot of attention to the climate doomsayers recently, and have realized that even if we somehow avoid energy collapse it appears that large scale environmental disruptions are already baked in to the planetary pie. I take particular heed of the warnings of James Lovelock, the visionary 91 year old founder of the Gaia theory — a man too old to have an agenda other than speaking the inconvenient truth. According to Lovelock, our climate has three stable regimes: ice age, the current temperate age, and a warm age. Lovelock is convinced that the planet has passed a tipping point and will transition to 5 degrees celsius warmer temperatures by the end of this century, no matter what we do. This will produce catastrophic sea level rise, crop failures, disease and desertification which will drive humanity toward the poles and reduce the population to perhaps one billion.

James Lovelock says climate catastrophe will be fun!

Meanwhile, the always dramatic Ted Turner is warning that if drastic actions aren't taken to curb global warming, civilization will crumble in a few decades and we'll be roasting each other over spits for dinner. While Lovelock is very credible, Turner is mostly comical. I can understand why some accuse him of being part of a diabolical conspiracy to depopulate the planet, but the mere fact that a billionaire is talking like an off-the-charts doomer is disturbing in itself.

When the super-rich turn doomer it's time to run for the hills!

Understandably, ordinary people in the northern hemisphere remain skeptical of abstract forecasts of doom when their immediate concern is staying warm amidst record cold. Until some undeniable climate catastrophe hits us flush in the face, public opinion will remain divided and our leaders will continue to jet around the world to glamorous global warming conferences making grave pronouncements, convincing no one but themselves that they are making a difference. This activity is at least more humane than the practice of the ancient Mayan priest-kings — whose solution to environmental catastrophe was to sacrifice ever more citizens in the bloodiest possible fashion — but it will probably prove no more effective.

In the Third World, where doom lurks ever closer, current events give us a disturbing glimpse of our probable future. In Bangladesh, climate change is already creating refugees; in response the Indian government is building a 2500 mile barrier fence to completely encircle the nation of 160 million in an effort to keep them out. In the South Pacific, crops are already being destroyed by encroaching sea water and the first waves of refugees are relocating to places like New Zealand and Canada. But as this wave turns into a tsunami, how much longer will the ever tolerant West welcome these climate refugees? My guess is about as long as our affluence lasts, which means not long at all now.

If there's one industry that should boom in an Age of Doom it's the barrier fence business. Look for these to go up everywhere along the fault lines of the first and third worlds in the next few decades — the fences in Israel, Bangladesh and the American southwest are just a warm up for the massive fortress-building that is sure to ensue as millions pour out of failed, flooded, ecologically overshot states. I think of this process as entropy blowback — the outsourced problems of the first world finally have nowhere to go in a globalized world except back across our borders. The result will be wars, immigration crises, crime and collapse at home; barrier fences can only prolong the inevitable.

There is an interesting note of optimism amidst Lovelock's apocalyptic predictions. He claims that we are in a period like the late 1930's, full of forebodings of doom but which will actually turn out to be exciting and fun once the shit finally hits the fan. He gives one piece of advice in particular that every doomer should take to heart:

"Enjoy life while you can. Because if you're lucky it's going to be 20 years before it hits the fan."

I like Lovelock's idea that climate doom could be our finest hour — an opportunity to discover the heroism and purpose we all seek, but which is so absent from modern life. As the safety nets of our civilization start to come down in the coming years, a great adventure will begin — a trial by fire that will determine who is fit to live in a world no longer fit for living in.

Leaving the Doomer Camp

2009-05-13T18:00:00.000-07:00

Well folks, I think I've gone about as far as I can go down the doomer path without losing what little remains of my sanity. Taken to its extreme, doomerism becomes little more than a nihilistic death wish, at which point suicide becomes the obvious solution. To avoid this fate, I'll be posting on my other blog, thesingularitarian.blogspot.com, and thinking more creative thoughts about possible futures for humanity on this planet and beyond. I've summarized my thoughts on doomerism vs. Singularitarianism there, and hope other recovering doomers will join me in exploring more constructive visions of life in a future that is uncertain but still infinite in all directions.

Apocalypse Soon: Are the Four Horsemen About to Ride?

2009-04-28T23:40:00.000-07:00

There is a growing consensus among people who pay attention to reality (e.g. biologists, climate scientists, geologists, agriculture and energy experts, etc.) that the human species is facing an epic population bottleneck some time in this century, perhaps even in the next few decades. This bottleneck -- or "die-off", as we doomers like to call it -- may begin in some parts of the world within the next few years as global food and capital supplies tighten, but the really apocalyptic scenarios probably won't play out for some time yet. Nevertheless, for those of you who expect to be around for at least another two or three decades, it's never too early to start preparing for what is shaping up to be the mother of all peaks -- the Peak of Human Population.

Historically, die-offs have been caused by the big three of human mortality: pestilence, war and famine. If we add a fourth, “death”, to encompass natural disasters and the combined effects of the other three, we have the “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” prophecied in the Book of Revelation. As we follow the increasingly dire news coming out of every corner of the globe, these Four provide useful metrics for gauging our approach to the looming Malthusian tribulations. Let’s see where they stand as of the Spring ‘09:

Has the First Horseman already left the stable?

White Horse (Pestilence):

The First Horseman may already be on the move, galloping out of Mexico City and vectoring in on mega-cities worldwide. If the current swine flu outbreak accelerates, look for borders to close and air travel to shut down, potentially taking several trillion dollars out of a global economy already on life support. Even if we dodge the bullet this time, public health experts agree that it’s just a matter of time before another super plague like the Spanish Flu visits mass death upon our dangerously globalized world.

Red Horse (War):

This sword-wielding rider heralds war, and oh boy is he getting restless in his stable. In addition to the obvious conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, the apocalyptic threats of an Israel-Iran conflagration and nuclear-armed Pakistan falling to the Taliban, we have the new Great Game for resource supremacy in Central Asia, Africa and the Arctic, the always dangerous North Koreans rattling atomic sabers, while the Japanese discuss developing a nuclear arsenal and even the Australians quietly plan for a massive military buildup.

Together these developments look quite ominous, and provide one more disturbing parallel with the 1930’s. It doesn’t take a great deal of imagination to see where these military tensions may be leading: global resource wars, apocalyptic religious conflicts and World War III. The primary difference this time, of course, is that at least nine nations have nuclear weapons, with several more seeking to join the club. Armed for Armageddon, will human civilization even survive another World War? Many leading doomers are understandably pessimistic, including Jay Hanson, who recently predicted global nuclear war within 14 years.

Is this how we will knock down the statues of our global Easter Island?

Black Horse (Famine):

The Third Horseman is now stirring from his slumber after several decades of agricultural growth and historically low levels of world hunger kept him in his stall. Signs of looming food shortages have been appearing worldwide in the past few years in the form of food riots, bans on food exports and rising prices. Global grain stocks are at all-time lows, and have been falling steadily for a decade. Barring several techno-miracles, there is little doubt that this rider will be much busier in the decades ahead as petroleum production winds down and the world’s climate destabilizes. Optimists pin their hopes on genetically modified food crops, which they hope can duplicate the miracle of the Green Revolution that allowed the population to more than double in the past fifty years by eating fossil fuels. But one has to question the sanity of such people, given the rate at which soils are eroding, fresh water is being depleted, oceans are dying and deserts are expanding. Scientists may find a way to stave off the black horse for a little while longer, but it's difficult to see how they can continue to refute Malthus past mid-century in the face of these converging environmental crises.

Pale Horse (Death):

The Fourth Horseman is an all-purpose Reaper, the harbinger of a general die-off that will accompany the three previous afflictions. If we include in his arsenal "beasts of the earth" such as earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes and floods, all of which are expected to increase in frequency in a world thrown out of balance by climate change, we have the last piece of the apocalyptic puzzle. The combined effect is described in the Bible this way:

"And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth." -- Revelation 6:8

So if you believe Biblical prophecy, the Four Horsemen will kill one quarter of mankind during the coming Tribulations. That may sound unpleasant, but it's a fairly rosy forecast compared to the 90%+ figures that are being thrown around by scientists like James Lovelock and Erik Pianka. Other prophetic traditions speak of earthly horrors on a similar scale, slated to begin any day now. The disturbing fact is that the spiritual and scientific outlooks for the near future appear to be converging, and both point to a time of apocalyptic change for which we have few reference points.

Of course a great many people, even within the doomer camp, dismiss these predictions of apocalypse as science fictional fantasies or religious fairy tales. John Michael Greer calls it the “Myth of Apocalypse”, the mirror image of the "Myth of Progress", and offers the alternative model of a Long Descent. But this doesn’t change the fact that apocalypses do happen, and have occurred numerous times in the historical and geological past. When the human population was reduced to perhaps fifteen thousand around 73000 B.C.E. as a result of the Lake Toba super-volcano, surely this near-extinction event would qualify as an apocalypse by any standard. The Black Plague of Medieval Europe killed a third of that continent’s population, and the coming of Europeans to the New World was certainly apocalyptic for the native peoples they encountered there. And today, with the human population nearing 7 billion and most of the complex systems that support it approaching breaking points, how can anyone dismiss the possibility of an apocalypse in our time? A quick glance at a population graph shows that humans have multiplied like yeast in a wine vat since the dawn of the industrial age, and like yeast we can expect to die off catastrophically if we aren’t able to stop consuming our planetary ecosphere at an exponential rate.

The human population explosion: are we nearing the Peak?

All is not hopeless, however. In the wealthiest, most industrialized nations, birth rates have now dropped to sub-replacement levels, perhaps a sign that on some primordial level our problems are self-correcting. This means that the ongoing population explosion is now almost entirely a problem of Third World cultures that are unwilling or unable to control their breeding. Since the First World is massively subsidizing this overpopulation in the form of food, medical and financial aid and liberal immigration policies, one obvious way to curb the problem would be to end these subsidies and let nature take its course. Unfortunately, we are stuck in a humanitarian/religious paradigm that makes such Malthusian prescriptions politically difficult, and will only exacerbate the problems until more drastic measures become necessary. Examples of such measures include genetically modified food that causes sterilization, biological warfare, genocidal conventional wars or even culling by nuclear weapons. These ideas might seem beyond the pale now, but as the Four Horsemen ride out across the land and start claiming the fat citizens of the First World, we can expect every option to be put on the table.

The stresses of Third World population overshoot are already being felt in the form of immigration crises, failed-state terrorism, surging crime and military police actions in places like Somalia, Afghanistan and Mexico. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. As we move closer to the Peak of Human Population in this century, and as the number of failed states and "useless eaters" multiplies, we may find ourselves siding with the Four Horsemen out of sheer self-preservation. For when the citizens of more affluent nations face millions of starving refugees flooding across their borders and an eroding quality of life at home, they may decide that controlled die-off is the best outcome they can hope for on a planet that has come to resemble a giant, yeast-infected wine vat.

There is one more hopeful thought to consider amidst all this talk of imminent death and destruction. Biologists tell us that evolutionary leaps are most likely to occur during population bottlenecks, when genetic drift among a reduced population can produce new species in just a few generations in response to environmental stresses. In the cultural sphere, innovations such as the emergence of agriculture are thought to have occured in response to the cataclysmic climate changes that followed the last Ice Age. Given the environmental stresses that humanity will soon be facing, perhaps this new Apocalypse will bring the revolutionary changes our species appears to need if it is to continue to live and prosper in a world for which our rapacious primate brains and cultures no longer seem particularly well adapted.

Will the coming bottleneck enable the next evolutionary leap?

A New World Order or Global Anarchy?

2009-04-17T21:45:00.001-07:00

As we watch the world unravel into various warring factions, from the supra-national struggle for petro-supremacy on down to sub-state guerrilla, terrorist and criminal insurgencies, I'm starting to come around to the wisdom of the "New World Order" agenda that so many conspiracy theorists like to rant about. According to the tinfoil hatters, the world is secretly being manipulated by an Illuminati of international financiers, European royalty, globalist politicians and other diabolical puppet masters with a master plan to depopulate the planet and bring about one world government. Given the likely alternative, which Robert Kaplan so brilliantly described in his essay The Coming Anarchy, this NWO of global techno-fascism is sounding better and better every day.

Tribal anarchy in Kenya -- a preview of what awaits the entire world?

The inconvenient truth is that the global nature of the world’s problems in the 21st century will require global solutions, which can only be implemented with some kind of supra-national enforcement mechanism – i.e. global governance. Unless you are in the camp that denies the reality of global warming, peak oil, overpopulation, dying oceans, soil erosion, fresh water depletion, et al – i.e. you deny all limits to growth on a finite planet – it is difficult to see how you can avoid the conclusion that a world police force with teeth (not the impotent debating society known as the United Nations) will soon be necessary as these problems become more dire. By "police force with teeth" I mean a government that can forcibly relocate citizens, allocate resources, limit environmental footprints and control reproduction in a way that maximizes human survival and welfare. If the free market can't solve these problems effectively (and all the evidence seems to indicate that it has only made them much worse), and if the alternative is a descent into the Malthusian chaos of resource wars, famine and disease, then the choice would seem to be an easy one. On a more philosophical level, if we take a progressive view of human civilization, doesn’t the case seem rather compelling that global government is the next logical step in the social evolution of our species up from hunter-gatherer tribes?

As chilling and disturbing as the idea of global dictatorship may be, I find the prospect of a descent into Rwanda- or Congo-style slaughter much worse. In the NWO scenario at least, civilization can be maintained in some form, even if many of the freedoms that we now take for granted must be curtailed. In the “machete moshpits” world of Malthusian anarchy that already exists in many parts of the globe, there is neither freedom nor wealth nor justice for anyone – just a grim struggle for survival and a new Dark Age. This is the world that awaits us all, if you believe the likes of Robert Kaplan and Lester Brown, unless some way can be found to impose order on a planet rapidly spinning out of control.

Does one-child China point the way toward the sustainable global society of the future?

One model for what a future global government might look like is provided by the People’s Republic of China, already home to one sixth of the world’s people. In China, where the problems of overpopulation and resource limits have long been central facts of life, harsh measures have been taken to limit population which many people find morally repugnant. But the fact that the PRC, alone among the world’s nations, has been able to take this dramatic step speaks volumes about China’s leadership role in meeting the challenges of a resource limited world. For Americans to call China’s one child policy immoral in a nation of octo-moms says more about the philosophical cul-de-sac we find ourselves in than any moral high ground we may think we inhabit. In the foreign policy arena as well, China demonstrates a clear understanding that access to natural resources such as oil, minerals, water and arable land will trump moral concerns in the negative-sum world of the 21st century. China is willing to do business with virtually any regime, even a genocidal one, if the country has resources they need. Again, we may object to their willingness to violate humanitarian principles in meeting their objectives, but is any nation going to act differently when the choice is between immorality and starvation? For me China’s brutal realpolitik approach to acquiring resources is a preview of the direction every nation must go that can’t control its growth in the coming environment of global scarcity.

What about free market capitalism and Jeffersonian democracy, you ask? Well, that was all well and good for the fledgling America of 1776, when an entire continent had yet to be stripped of its resources, paved over and fully populated. But for the frontierless USA of 2009, and even more so for the overcrowded nations of much of the world, this ideology of infinite growth and libertarianism is an absurd fantasy that must be abandoned. There is simply no physical way, on a planet that has already overshot its sustainable ecological limits several times over, to bring China, India and the rest of the "developing" world to an American standard of living. The current economic collapse is probably nature’s way of telling us this loud and clear – "you must control yourselves" seems to be the overriding message, even if the leaders of the industrialized world still think this is just a temporary setback, the solution to which is "stability, growth, jobs".

As we watch the dream of globalist neo-liberalism go down in flames, we appear to have reached a fork in the road of human civilization. One road leads to global anarchy, resource wars and uncontrolled die-off. Another leads to a New World Order of global socialism, population control and authoritarian stability, modeled perhaps after the PRC. A third road may lead back to the religious feudalism of the Caliphate, Catholicism, Hindu fundamentalism and Buddho-fascism. While none of these paths may sound particularly attractive to those of us who have grown up believing in the myth of progress, if there’s another viable alternative I’d love to know what it is because I'm having a hard time seeing it. And as much as I’d like to think that I can hold my own in the war of all against all, when the proverbial SHTF I’ll probably cast my lot with the New World Order like everyone else and calmly await the arrival of the black helicopters, knowing that it’s the best of a bad set of choices in a world gone mad.

Will you resist a New World Order or welcome it as a refuge from the coming anarchy?

The Death of the West, or a Return to Barbarism?

2009-04-07T13:44:00.000-07:00

Muslims protesting British troops on the streets of London -- the Death of the West in a single picture?

When you survey the global situation with an objective eye, one thing that should jump out at you is the fact that the world is still for the most part about warring tribes, advancing or retreating through military, economic, religious and cultural struggle. This is the uncomfortable truth about our species that globalists in the West work so hard to deny: human beings organize themselves around tribes and other primary loyalty groups, and our lasting political structures are defined by what we are willing to fight for, not what we are willing to buy. Almost everyone will fight for family, tribe, religion or homeland; few will fight for abstractions like democracy, free markets, the European Union or the International Monetary Fund. Unfortunately for the governments of the westernized world, this means that motivation and loyalty is always going to be problematic. Our fighters are professional soldiers, not holy warriors; our leaders are technocrats, not mullahs. Pakistan is a case in point: the Taliban have powerful primary loyalties to Islam and tribe driving them, while the regular Pakistani soldiers have military bureaucracy and an IMF-sponsored paycheck. Which side would you put your money on to prevail at this point?

The civilized world has a word for tribal warriors like those who are currently overrunning the Western-backed government of Pakistan: barbarians. The great Arab scholar Ibn Khaldun viewed all of history as cycles of rising and falling of such barbarian tribes. As Wikipedia describes his theory:

Perhaps the most frequently cited observation drawn from Ibn Khaldūn's work is the notion that when a society becomes a great civilization (and, presumably, the dominant culture in its region), its high point is followed by a period of decay. This means that the next cohesive group that conquers the diminished civilization is, by comparison, a group of barbarians. Once the barbarians solidify their control over the conquered society, however, they become attracted to its more refined aspects, such as literacy and arts, and either assimilate into or appropriate such cultural practices. Then, eventually, the former barbarians will be conquered by a new set of barbarians, who will repeat the process.

According to this model then, the future always belongs to the barbarians. In the West, where we have systematically waged war against our barbarians for centuries, we have largely succeeded in creating a population of docile, refined citizens who are ill-equipped to defend themselves against today's barbarian assaults. The last remaining barbarian holdouts in the United States have largely been brought to heel, though the frontier spirit dies hard in rural America, and even in that poster child of urban decay, Detroit. The best illustration of where this civilizing trend leads is modern western Europe, where all military engagement is viewed with distaste and the preference has long been to let America, which still retains some vestiges of barbaric spirit, do the bulk of its fighting. But without a barbaric spirit of its own, Europe is a civilization in obvious decline, its population shrinking, its societies slowly being conquered from within by Islamic and immigrant populations who have not yet been domesticated by European civilization. If current trends continue, it is not difficult to see that Europe will cease to exist as a distinct and powerful civilization some time in the next century. As elsewhere, and in accordance with Khaldun’s theory, Europe will belong to the next wave of barbarians.

Is this the spirit that can save Western civilization?

We therefore come to the rather paradoxical conclusion that in order to save itself, Western civilization may need to become less civilized and more barbaric. The stifling political and legal institutions that have been erected to keep Westerners domesticated may have to come down, or their civilization may fall to barbarians for the same reason Rome's did 1600 years ago: internal decay. This time, however, the conquering barbarians won’t be Germanic tribes, but non-European muslims, who will impose a very different kind of civilization from the one Europeans are accustomed to.

The good news, if you would like to see Western civilization continue in some form, is that such an institutional collapse appears to be exactly what is happening. The existing order, with its pervasive media apparatus and financial leverage, is rapidly going bankrupt, both economically and morally. The globalists who are clinging to power in the Western world by their fingernails, with their empty promises of “stability, growth and jobs” and a “new world order,” must look increasingly delusional to a population that appears to be finally starting to wake up. No doubt a last-ditch effort will be made to prop up the globalist order with stimulus packages and heavy-handed restrictions on the restive citizens of Western nations, but without popular legitimacy and with no means to revive economic growth it seems unlikely that they can succeed where the Communists failed in decades past.

"Stability, Growth, Jobs", or "Desperation, Greed, Fear"?

If I had to make a prediction then, I would guess that a huge upsurge in nationalism and populism is just around the corner as globalism melts down and the worldwide Depression deepens. Immigrants and hostile religious groups may face persecution and expulsion as scapegoats for a globalist order that threatened to sacrifice every culture and religion on the altar of international capitalism. But when the dust settles, and the world has re-localized and re-tribalized, will its citizens be worse off or better? Ex-banker Gordon Brown would have you believe that we are at risk of a “damaging spiral of de-globalization.” But one has to ask: damaging for whom exactly, other than the small class of plutocrats like Brown who have profited so handsomely from globalization's imposition? Will the sweatshop workers, displaced farmers and fishermen-turned-pirates of the Third World mourn globalization’s passing? Will the Westerners who are losing their livelihoods to unchecked outsourcing and immigration mourn its passing? Has our quality of life really improved under globalization, and is our planetary ecosystem any less degraded? The answer to all of these questions, it seems to me, is a resounding no!

The big picture then, in the early spring of 2009, appears to be an imminent worldwide revolt against global capitalism, from Chiapas to China to Pakistan and now finally to the capitals of the Western world. Is the advancing line of control of "tribal areas" in Pakistan a metaphor for a retreating global civilization? Does a Taliban takeover of Pakistan, whose westernized elites are clinging to power by the barest of threads, herald a greater defeat for westernized elites throughout the world? Does the current orgy of plutocratic looting of Western treasuries mark the beginning of an exodus of the global elites from civil society, who will take their ill-gotten gains and run to faraway compounds like rats fleeing a sinking ship? Let's hope so, and if so good riddance to them all. Without these parasites collapse can proceed swiftly, and the people they have plundered will be free to do what they have always done to re-vitalize themselves: return to barbarism.

Is Pakistan a microcosm of the receding "line of control" of Western civilization?

What To Do When Your Civilization Collapses

2009-03-23T14:34:00.000-07:00

Given that we in the industrialized world, and the United States in particular, now appear to be standing on the brink of the greatest civilizational collapse in at least 1600 years, how should one proceed? As I see it there are five viable options, each with its own merits and drawbacks.

1) Party Like There’s No Tomorrow

Crisis? What crisis?

This option is quite natural, and will no doubt be the default choice of a great many. Since partying on is all a lot of us know how to do at this point, why not have one last blow out, a Titanic-sized clusterfuck, an orgy-to-end-all-orgies before the ship splits in two and heads for the ocean floor? The main drawback to this option is that the ship may sink slowly, and no one can party forever, meaning that the hangover will be horrific--at least until your life reaches its merciful conclusion at the hands of the inevitable zombie cannibal hordes.

2) The Amish Option

Move to a small town, get to know your neighbors, start a vegetable garden, create a resilient community, rewind your lifestyle to around 1750. This is a popular choice for many well-meaning people, who have images of some kind of peaceful “power down” to a Renaissance Fair world of blacksmiths, goat farmers and lute players. But who are these people kidding? Anyone with an ounce of understanding of history and human nature knows that civilizational collapses never play out like this, especially not in a civilization as utterly unprepared for post-collapse life as our own. When America goes down, it will almost certainly be a violent, ugly, hellish conflagration, like every riot and Katrina-style disaster you’ve ever seen on TV happening everywhere all the time. Folks like the Amish will be sitting ducks for the desperate zombie hordes who will pour out of urban areas looking for easy targets to loot. This isn’t just a survivalist fantasy I’m afraid, but an obvious fact to anyone with their eyes open. Which brings us to the third option…

3) Run for the Hills!

A perennial favorite of the more fearfully inclined: hole up in a remote cabin or farm stocked with a ten year food supply, stable water source, guns and ammo and sit with your back to the wall awaiting the arrival of the zombie cannibal hordes. This has the added advantage of giving you at least a fighting chance of surviving a real apocalypse, such as nuclear war, supervolcano, 2012 cosmic catastrophe, etc. The problem with this scenario is that a) you’ll eventually run out of supplies b) it could get quite boring and c) to be safe from the marauding hordes and government jackboots you’ll have to go so far into the wilderness that you’ll have a hard time holding out for long unless you have the skills of a true survivalist. There aren’t many Jeremiah Johnsons left, but if you’re one of them, more power to you--the world will one day be your kingdom!

4) The Alaric Option

Has there ever been a better time to storm the capitals of this corrupt and tottering Empire?

This option is for the more ambitious among you, the would-be warlords and barbarian chiefs of the post-industrial world. Take advantage of this once-in-a-millenium opportunity to position yourself as a future Alaric, Attila or Genghis Khan and start organizing your tribe now. Think of the possibilities: coastal raiding, piracy, hijacking, seizing banks, gas stations, oil tankers, Wal-Marts--the possibilities are endless. Why should looting be confined to the bankers in pin-striped suits? Why not grab your piece of the pie now, before it has all been gobbled up by the fat cats? The biggest downside to this option is the danger of being killed or imprisoned by the still-formidable forces of the Empire. The last place you want to be at a time like this is in a FEMA camp or federal detention center. But to quote a Frenchman I've never heard of: "when we conquer without danger, our triumph is without glory." Now, if you’re too cowardly to go for glory, but still crave some kind of action, you can always...

5) Fight for the Empire

Given that socioeconomic collapse, resource wars and die-off are all but inevitable, there should be no shortage of challenging work for people in the military, national security and law enforcement apparatus of the Empire. Certainly the police and national guard will have their hands full maintaining domestic order before long, as the zombiefied masses wake up to the fact that Beverly Hills 90210 isn’t going to be anyone’s future address. On the international front, slaughtering Third-Worlders to keep your neighbors’ SUV’s gassed up isn’t the most pleasant work, but it pays the bills and may even offer some opportunities for plunder. Think of this as your chance to go out in Wagnerian style amidst the coming devastation—fire up “Ride of the Valkyries”, give a hillbilly “Yeeehawww!” and ride the bomb straight down to ground zero.

Whichever option you choose, I can’t really argue with your choice--different strokes for different folks. The only option that isn’t viable is to do nothing and assume that business as usual will continue, or that the insane state of affairs we have come to think of as "normal" will ever return. It’s a new century and a new world, falling apart fast but full of opportunities. Seize the day!

Lessons of the Bronze Age Collapse

2009-03-21T16:13:00.000-07:00

The Destruction of Troy by Jan Brueghel--coming soon to a city near you?

As I look for historic precedents for the imminent collapse of industrial civilization, I am discovering frightening parallels between our time and a surprisingly obscure previous era of apocalyptic change: the Bronze Age collapse of eastern Mediterranean civilization circa 1200 B.C.E. As Wikipedia describes it:

"As part of the Late Bronze Age-Early Iron Age Dark Ages, it was a period associated with the collapse of central authorities, a general depopulation, particularly of highly urban areas, the loss of literacy in Anatolia and the Aegean, and its restriction elsewhere, the disappearance of established patterns of long-distance international trade, increasingly vicious intra-elite struggles for power, and reduced options for the elite if not for the general mass of population."

Let’s see, increasingly vicious intra-elite struggles for power....check! Disappearance of long distance trade....check! Depopulation of urban areas....check! Loss of literacy....check! Collapse of central authorities....check, and given the insolvency of Western governments, soon to be checkmate!

What I find most frightening about the Bronze Age collapse is its sudden and violent nature. Here is how Wikipedia describes events in various regions of the then-civilized world:

Anatolia

Every site important during the preceding Late Bronze Age shows a destruction layer, and it appears that here civilization did not recover to the same level as that of the Hittites for another thousand years. Hattusas, the Hittite capital, was burned and abandoned, and never reoccupied. Karaoglan was burned and the corpses left unburied. Troy was destroyed at least twice, before being abandoned until Roman times.

Greece

None of the Mycenaean palaces of the Late Bronze Age survived, with destruction being heaviest at palaces and fortified sites. Up to 90% of small sites in the Peloponnese were abandoned, suggesting a major depopulation. The End Bronze Age collapse marked the start of what has been called the Greek Dark Ages, which lasted for more than 400 years. Other cities, like Athens, continued to be occupied, but with a more local sphere of influence, limited evidence of trade and an impoverished culture, from which it took centuries to recover.

Levant

All centres along the sea route, now being called Via Maris, from Gaza north were destroyed, and evidence shows Gaza, Ashdod, Ashkelon, Akko, and Jaffa were burned and not reoccupied for up to thirty years. Inland Hazor, Bethel, Beit Shemesh, Eglon, Debir, and other sites were destroyed. Refugees escaping the collapse of coastal centres may have fused with incoming nomadic and Anatolian elements to begin the growth of terraced hillside hamlets in the highlands region, that was associated with the later development of the state of Israel.

Similar accounts tell of destruction in Egypt, Mesopatamia, Syria and Cyprus. There are frequent mentions of attacks by “Sea Peoples”, mysterious seafaring raiders who plundered cities throughout the region and were apparently more than a match for the militaries of the time.

Modern-day "Sea People"?

Now consider some of the proposed causes of the Bronze Age Collapse and their modern parallels:

1) Migration and Raids. Modern parallels: the US immigration crisis, kidnappings in the Southwest, cross-border raids by drug traffickers, etc. Migration is expected to accelerate worldwide as climate change and economic instability drive millions of desperate people from the Third World to the First in the coming years.

2) Drought. Modern parallels: extreme drought in the American Southwest, China, Africa, India, etc. This could be the biggest global killer this century as climate change transforms large regions of the planet into inarable desert.

3) Changes in Warfare.

“new weaponry, furnished to a proto-hoplite model who were able to withstand attacks of massed chariotry, destabilized states that were based upon the use of chariots by the ruling class and precipitated an abrupt social collapse when raiders and/or infantry mercenaries were able to conquer, loot, and burn the cities.”

Modern parallels: The Global Guerillas paradigm that John Robb has written about so insightfully. From 9/11 to Hezbollah to the Somali Pirates to the Mumbai attacks to future nuclear and biological terrorism, technologically empowered non-state actors threaten to tip global civilization into long-term disorder.

4) General Systems Collapse.

"a variety of factors - including population rise, soil degradation, drought, cast bronze weapon and iron production technologies - conceivably could have combined to push the relative price of weaponry compared to arable land to a level that ultimately proved to be beyond the control of traditional warrior aristocracies."

Modern parallels: most of these factors are still present, along with the key natural resource equation of our own age: fossil fuel production. As we enter the post-peak oil world, we can expect to see economic systems based on abundant, cheap petroleum begin to fail en masse. This includes everything from electric power to transportation, manufacturing, agriculture and finance. In fact, some argue that peak oil is the underlying cause of the current financial crisis. While it hasn’t yet brought on a general collapse and loss of control by our modern-day aristocracies, the rumblings are growing louder by the day.

The overall picture then is one of a sudden descent into anarchy around 1200 B.C.E, over an entire region and across national and ethnic lines. While the precise causes are unclear, it seems reasonable to assume that a collapse on this scale was not the result of any one factor, but some combination of environmental, socio-economic, military and technological disruptions that precipitated a cascading systems failure.

When you compare the causes of the Bronze Age collapse with the confluence of catastrophes converging upon modern industrial civilization, it’s difficult to escape the conclusion that we may be facing a similar fate, but this time on a global scale. Will archaeologists of the far future (assuming there are any) uncover a “destruction layer” that covers the entire globe during the early or middle years of the 21st century? Will they excavate the ruins of great ancient cities, such as Los Angeles, London, Paris and Tel Aviv, to find buildings burned and abandoned, full of corpses left unburied? Is the collapse of our own civilization already well underway, and will it culminate in the destruction of cities globally and a Dark Age that lasts for centuries?

Perhaps, but the lessons of the Bronze Age collapse aren’t all negative. For out of this turbulent period came some of the greatest stories in all of recorded history--the era of Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad, and the book of Exodus, with its chronicle of the birth of the kingdom of Israel. Could the death of our civilization give rise to a new Homeric or Biblical age? After Homer came the classical age of ancient Greece, followed by Rome, which of course fell to an apocalypse of its own 1600 years after the Bronze Age collapse. In fact, if we take a cyclical view of these things, it has been almost 1600 years exactly since the sacking of Rome by the Visigoths, so by my calculations another great civilizational collapse is due any day now. Are you ready for the "Industrial Age Collapse"?

Could a new Heroic Age emerge from the ashes of our own?

The Doomer Prophecies: Die-Off and the Olduvai Theory

2009-03-12T12:18:00.000-07:00

The Olduvai Theory -- note that 2012 requires no cosmic catastrophe to be an interesting year!

When I first came across the "Olduvai Theory" and "Die-Off" writings I experienced a kind of dark revelation, perhaps not unlike what others feel when reading the Bible or the Koran for the first time. For me these writings put into rational scientific language what some subconscious but perceptive part of my brain must have long suspected: that techno-industrial civilization is unstable and has no future. Richard Duncan, Jay Hanson, Perry Arnett and many others have given us a sort of gospel of doom, so horrific in its implications that we can’t expect their ideas to ever see the mainstream light of day. After reading these writings you may develop a twitch, join an apocalyptic cult, run for the hills or just read Peak Oil blogs all day; you certainly won’t remain unaffected by them if you have any kind of independent reasoning capacity.

Every self-respecting doomer is familiar with the Olduvai Theory and the Die-Off thesis, but for the uninitiated here’s a quick synopsis. The Olduvai Theory models industrial civilization as a pulse wave that follows the curve of the world’s energy production per capita. By plotting this curve using past and projected energy and population data, Richard Duncan’s model projects a rapid drop-off in standard of living that is due to start…right about now! The upshot of the theory is that our civilization will collapse back to a medieval or even Stone Age level of development within about a century, never to rise again. The Die Off scenarios of doomer guru Jay Hanson are even bleaker. His somewhat more complicated theory is derived from an understanding of hard-wired human behavior and natural energy laws, which in his view lead inevitably to environmental overshoot, conflict over resources and a massive "die-off" of as much as 99% of the human population. Hanson predicts global nuclear war within fourteen years and a century of Malthusian horror, followed by a reversion to the hunter-gatherer mean. Not exactly the “Good News” of the New Testament, now is it?

The first thing to realize about these doomer prophecies is that they are not the work of fringe religious crazies or societal failures holding cardboard signs proclaiming "the end is near." These writers are almost all middle-aged or older Western men who have been highly successful within the belly of the techno-industrial beast: businessmen, engineers, scientists, investors, futurists—in other words, exactly the same class of forward-thinking people who 50 or 60 years ago were leading the charge toward the bright technological future of nuclear rocket cars and interplanetary space colonies. In times of apparent progress and economic growth such doomers could easily be laughed off; in the current environment of economic collapse, when the shining promises of our so-called leaders are being revealed as a tissue of lies, the prophets of doom can no longer be ignored.

As one who was born and raised to be a soldier in the great upward march of progressive civilization, when I started reading the doomer prophecies I felt like a child must feel who was groomed by his tribe to be a warrior, only to be called into a council by the tribal elders upon reaching maturity and told that a cosmic catastrophe was approaching that would wipe out the tribe within twenty years. It’s a devastating feeling to realize that your whole life’s path has been predicated upon unsustainable myths and fantasies. Maybe this is what it feels like to be “born again” for some Christians, except in this case it’s more like being “dead again”. Or perhaps a better metaphor is what Dorothy and friends experienced when the curtain was pulled back on the great Wizard of Oz to reveal a frail old man.

The Oracle of Omaha, or the Wizard of Oz?

However you characterize the experience of doomer revelation, it certainly plays havoc with your personal ambitions and ability to do productive work within the techno-industrial paradigm. The urge to click your heels and escape the Land of Oz can become overwhelming, like some primordial survival instinct calling you back to a much older and more fundamental way of life. For some this urge ends in tragedy or terrorism. For others it is a wake up call that changes their lives in less drastic ways which, if repeated millions of times around the planet, may be the closest thing to a practical solution to our predicament that we have. In fact if we're very lucky, this could turn out to be the lasting value of the doomer prophecies: they may not be self-fulfilling, but self-defeating.

Celebrating Our Doomed Century

2009-02-28T14:52:00.000-08:00

Drive-thrus: not just for cars anymore!

Here’s the prognosis for the 21st century, in case you still haven’t gotten the memo: we’re doomed. By "we" I’m speaking of all those who depend for their physical and mental health on the fruits of technological civilization, the Petroleum Age, the “long boom”, the flat world, global capitalism, dot-communism, industrial agriculture, etc. – in other words, pretty much anyone reading these words. As for the rest, well, most of them were doomed already, so I doubt they’d find the idea particularly interesting.

Toronto 2003: the city of the future?

To paint the picture of our doomed century in a bit more detail: there will be no “limousine liberals”, because there will be no limousines; there will be no “jet set”, because there will be no jets; populations will be on the move worldwide, probably into your neighborhood; your toilet paper will be single-ply at best, your world made by hand, and your food, if you can get it, will come from local sources as it has throughout the saner part of human history. Disease, poverty, famine and war will stalk us all. The great dams separating the first and third worlds will crack and crumble, unleashing floods of desperate humanity in all directions. The only certainty will be widespread death, on a scale never before seen in history. I may be preaching to the choir here, as none of these prognostications will come as revelations to the fire-and-brimstone followers of Peak Oil, Environmental Apocalypse and Socioeconomic Collapse. If so, all I can say to you folks is: can I get an “amen”?

The new Visigoths of our global Rome?

The idea of The Doomer Report is to find ways to celebrate as our civilization circles the drain rather than to despair. If something is inevitable, to paraphrase a former gubernatorial candidate from Texas, you might as well lie back and enjoy it. In that spirit, I invite you to enjoy the doomer-porn on these pages, to discuss the ideas of leading prophets and historians of collapse, to explore new modes of life and new spirituality for the post-progressive era, to feast your eyes on images of apocalypse and unravelling, and above all to realize that with destruction comes renewal, liberation and rebirth. In that sense this blog isn’t about doom-and-gloom at all, but about the profoundly optimistic notion that humanity will endure, perhaps even prosper, but in a world with more resemblance to Land of the Lost than The Jetsons. Once you make the necessary mental adjustments this prospect is not a depressing one—after all Pythagoras, Buddha, Jesus, Chief Seattle and Ghandi managed to live spiritually fulfilling lives without Home Depots, Hummers, high-definition TV’s, cloud computing and lunar colonies. We may have to endure several decades of hell on earth while the current mythology undergoes its final death throes, but I’m confident that the light of a simpler and more satisfying way of life shines back from the end of this tunnel. In any case, fasten your seat belts and prepare for an epic Power Down—we’re in for one hell of an exciting ride.

Middle class life after the industrial bubble?