The Inevitable Societal Collapse of the USA and How to Prepare and Cope

Just a few days ago, Dmitri Olrov, author of Reinventing Collapse, a book describing and offering suggestions on downgearing American society to pre-20th century proto-anarchic conditions in the eventual and devastating effects of Peak Oil, has given a rather lengthy talk offering his view on the current stimulus plan, his idea that it is just stemming the inevitable, and offering a vision on how Americans could cope with the prospects of life after, but not transcending, petroleum.

Here is the full transcription of his talk.

And here are some excerpts, since the entire thing would probably be tl;dr for one post:

Quote:

. . . If there is one thing that I would like to claim as my own, it is the comparative theory of superpower collapse. For now, it remains just a theory, although it is currently being quite thoroughly tested. The theory states that the United States and the Soviet Union will have collapsed for the same reasons, namely: a severe and chronic shortfall in the production of crude oil (that magic addictive elixir of industrial economies), a severe and worsening foreign trade deficit, a runaway military budget, and ballooning foreign debt. I call this particular list of ingredients "The Superpower Collapse Soup." Other factors, such as the inability to provide an acceptable quality of life for its citizens, or a systemically corrupt political system incapable of reform, are certainly not helpful, but they do not automatically lead to collapse, because they do not put the country on a collision course with reality. Please don't be too concerned, though, because, as I mentioned, this is just a theory. My theory.

I've been working on this theory since about 1995, when it occurred to me that the US is retracing the same trajectory as the USSR. As so often is the case, having this realization was largely a matter of being in the right place at the right time. The two most important methods of solving problems are: 1. by knowing the solution ahead of time, and 2. by guessing it correctly. I learned this in engineering school – from a certain professor. I am not that good at guesswork, but I do sometimes know the answer ahead of time . . .

. . . But this talk is about something else, something other than making dire predictions and then acting all smug when they come true. You see, there is nothing more useless than predictions, once they have come true. It’s like looking at last year’s amazingly successful stock picks: what are you going to do about them this year? What we need are examples of things that have been shown to work in the strange, unfamiliar, post-collapse environment that we are all likely to have to confront. Stuart Brand proposed the title for the talk – “Social Collapse Best Practices” – and I thought that it was an excellent idea. Although the term “best practices” has been diluted over time to sometimes mean little more than “good ideas,” initially it stood for the process of abstracting useful techniques from examples of what has worked in the past and applying them to new situations, in order to control risk and to increase the chances of securing a positive outcome. It’s a way of skipping a lot of trial and error and deliberation and experimentation, and to just go with what works . . .

. . . But let’s take it apart. Starting from the very general, what are the current macroeconomic objectives, if you listen to the hot air coming out of Washington at the moment? First: growth, of course! Getting the economy going. We learned nothing from the last huge spike in commodity prices, so let’s just try it again. That calls for economic stimulus, a.k.a. printing money. Let’s see how high the prices go up this time. Maybe this time around we will achieve hyperinflation. Second: Stabilizing financial institutions: getting banks lending – that’s important too. You see, we are just not in enough debt yet, that’s our problem. We need more debt, and quickly! Third: jobs! We need to create jobs. Low-wage jobs, of course, to replace all the high-wage manufacturing jobs we’ve been shedding for decades now, and replacing them with low-wage service sector jobs, mainly ones without any job security or benefits. Right now, a lot of people could slow down the rate at which they are sinking further into debt if they quit their jobs. That is, their job is a net loss for them as individuals as well as for the economy as a whole. But, of course, we need much more of that, and quickly! . . .

. . . Food. Shelter. Transportation. Security. When it comes to supplying these survival necessities, the Soviet example offers many valuable lessons. As I already mentioned, in a collapse many economic negatives become positives, and vice versa. Let us consider each one of these in turn . . .

Various things can be discussed on this alone, whether it is the validity of using the Soviet example as a model for how the United States may collapse, the degree to which you think society will downgrade to better maintain a modicum of exitence, or even if society will able to cope at all in the way Orlov imagines it will have to.

Or you can just call him a doomssayer crank, which may or may not be within forum guidelines.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

You've missed the essence of what Orlov is explaining, in that, in the face of rapidly diminishing resources, the biggest issue would not be whether the government would provide the basic benefits in a first world society or how upheld universal rights are, but rather can the population even survive and how would they survive when they find that the energy infrastructure that a first world society, government, and economy is built and run on for the past 50 or so years is no longer sustainable, with the alternatives too costly and energy intensive to establish in time to create a relatively stable transition.

It is not so much whether one will be able to afford medical care without draining your funds, but whether one will be able to not starve when the cultivation and distribution systems have broken down. Is it important that gays have the right to the benefits of marriage or the community is able to protect their assets in light of opportunistic latter-day warlords?

What Orlov "warns" of is that the current issues that we're trying to correct would end up being a costly error that would serve to hasten our descent into collapse a vulnerable and unprepared society.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

If it hasn't been apparent by now, I should state that I do not subscribe to Orlov's perspective on the future, I simply use his views as springboards towards whatever points are being discussed.

Like Helloween, I do have faith in the idea that the tools we have now will continue to improve the lot of our lives, maintaining the flow of progress, at whatever speed it takes. However, being employed in the petroleum and natural gas industry, I have a more tempered view towards the eventual transition from fossil fuels to cleaner energy, in that I view the current use of fossil fuels as more a waste of resources that would be better put towards other uses than producing energy (whether for electricty or transport), as opposed to something more ominous as the addiction label would make it to be. While current developments in green tech have shown vast improvement and potential in becoming a significant component to our energy, scaling it upwards may take more time, so one possible path is to look into nuclear energy, which also has been progressing in development towards safer and more efficient methods.

On the other subject, I personally do not see the urban/suburban relationship future as an either/or, since I am probably one of the few post-college youth who finds suburban living more to their liking than denser landscapes. The biggest problem that may well be on its way to be solved without much action is the further expansion away from community centers that lead to the explosion of suburbia in the previous decades. Now that the housing collapse and economic downtown has more than guaranteed new expansion would be untenable, the next step would be to begin constructing the social communities and centers of society in existing suburban developments, creating township-like entities that would ease the burdens of a central metropolitan center. Thus, as hinted by Helloween with the rooftop solar panels, there would probably be the need to massively retrofit existing infrastructure to adapt to future needs, therefore ensuring greater communitarian development without the mass exodus that Orlov suggest would happen.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.