How (not to) to Organize a Community

Dire predictions made by authoritative figures can provide the impetus to attempt great things: establish community gardens and farmer's markets, lobby for improved public transportation, bike lanes and sidewalks, promote ride-sharing initiatives, weatherize existing homes and impose more stringent construction standards for new ones, construct of windmill farms and install solar panels on public buildings, promote the use of composting toilets and high-efficiency lighting and so on. In the midst of all this organizational activity neighbors get a chance to meet, perhaps for the first time, and discover a commonality of interests that leads them to form acquaintances and perhaps even friendships. As neighbors get to know each other, they start looking out for each other, improving safety and reducing crime. As the community becomes more tight-knit, it changes in atmosphere and appearance, becoming more fashionable and desirable, attracting better-educated and more prosperous residents while pricing out the undesirable element. News of these vast improvements spreads far and wide, and the community becomes a tourist mecca, complete with food festivals, swank boutiques and pricy bric-à-brac shops and restaurants.

The undesirable element is forced to decamp to a less desirable neighborhood nearby. There, it has no choice but to suffer with high levels of crime, but is typically afraid to ask the police for help, having learned from experience that the police are more likely to harass them then to help them, to arrest them for minor offenses and to round them up and deport them if they happen to be illegal immigrants. They also learn to be careful around members of local gangs and drug dealers. Since official jobs in the neighborhood are scarce, they seek informal, cash-based employment, contributing to an underground economy. Seeking safety in numbers, they self-organize along racial and ethnic lines, and, to promote their common interests, form ethnic mafias that strive to dominate one or more forms of illegal or semi-legal activity. Growing up in a dangerous, violent environment, their children become tough at a young age, and, those that survive, develop excellent situational awareness that allows them to steer clear of dangerous situations and to know when to resort to violence.

When the fossil fuel-based national economy shuts down due to the increasingly well understood local ramifications of the global phenomenon of Peak Oil, both of these communities are harmed, but to different extents and in different ways. Other countries may continue to function for another decade or even longer: these are the countries that have enough oil of their own, as well as those that were far-sighted enough to enter into long-term barter agreements with the few remaining oil producers that still have a surplus of oil for export. But suppose that our two communities are in an English-speaking country, which is likely to be afflicted with the irrational belief that the free market can solve all problems on its own, even problems with the availability of critical supplies such as oil. Just as one would expect, the invisible hand of the market fails to make itself visible, but it is plain to see that fuel is no longer delivered to either of these communities, although in the second one some fuel is likely to still be available on the black market, at prices that very few people can afford. Sooner or later, due to lack of supplies and maintenance at every level, electricity shuts off, water pumping stations cease to function, sewage backs up making bathrooms unusable, garbage trucks no longer collect the garbage, which piles up, breading rats, flies and cockroaches. As sanitary conditions deteriorate, diseases such as cholera, dysentery and typhoid reappear and spread. The medical system requires fuel for the ambulances and running water, electricity and oil-based pharmaceuticals and disposable supplies for the hospitals and clinics to operate. When these are no longer available, the surviving residents are left to care for each other as best they can and, when they fail, to bury their own dead. Along with the other municipal and government services, police departments cease to function. Particularly important installations are guarded by soldiers or by private security, while the population is left to fend for itself.

The effect on the two communities is markedly different. The first community is superficially better prepared, being better equipped for emergencies and perhaps even having laid in emergency supplies of food and water. But being more prosperous at the outset makes a sudden transition to squalor, destitution and chaos much more of a shock. It also makes it a much more desirable target for looters. Used to living in safety and enjoying the protection of a benign and cooperative police department, the residents are not acculturated to the idea of countering violence with violence. Their response is more likely to take the form of a fruitless policy discussion rather than a spontaneous decision to go out and prophylactically bash some heads, causing the remaining heads to think twice. Unaccustomed to operating outside the law and having few connections with the criminal underworld, they are slow to penetrate the black market, which now offers the only way to obtain many necessary items, such as food, cooking fuel and medicines, including the items that had been previously looted from their own stockpiles. Worse yet, they once again become estranged from one another: their acquaintances and friendships were formed within a peaceful, civilized, law-abiding mode of social behavior. When they are forced to turn to scavenging, outright theft and looting, prostitution, black market dealing and consorting with criminals, they can no longer recognize in each other the people they knew before, and the laboriously synthesized community again dissolves into nuclear families. Where neighbors continue to work together, their ties are likely to be weak, based on altruistic conceptions of decency, mutual benefit and on personal sympathies—a far cry from the clear do-or-die imperatives of blood ties or clan or gang allegiance.

The second community is already accustomed to hardship and, not having quite so far to fall, can take the transition to mayhem, destitution and squalor in stride. The prevalence of illegal activity prior to collapse smooths the transition to a black market economy. Already resistant to the idea of relying on police protection, the residents are relieved when the police disappear from the streets, and a great deal of unofficial and illegal activity that previously had to be conducted in secret bursts out into the open. With the police no longer stirring the pot with their invasive arrests and confiscations, local criminal gangs now find themselves operating in a more stable environment and are able to carve up the neighborhood into universally recognized zones of influence, avoiding unnecessary bloodshed. The children, who are already in the habit of roaming the streets in gangs and harassing and mugging strangers, now come to serve as the community's early warning system in case of an organized incursion. (Not that too many people would want to venture into this area in any case, given its fearsome reputation.) Lastly, the prevalence of illegal drug dealing means that it already has a trained cadre of black market dealers who, now that official commerce has collapsed, can diversify away from drugs and branch out into every other kind of commerce. Their connections with the international narcomafia, whose representatives tend to be well organized and heavily armed, may turn out to provide certain benefits, such as an enhanced ability to move people and contraband through the now highly porous national borders. If the narcomafia ties are sufficiently strong, a narcobaron may take the community under his cartel's explicit protection, founding a new aristocracy to replace the now disgraced and powerless former ruling class.

Community organizing is quite wonderful, and can provide some of us with a perfectly pleasant way to while away our remaining happy days. As a useful side effect, it can provide individuals with valuable training, but it does next to nothing to prepare the community for collapse. A safe and congenial environment for you and your children is obviously very nice, much better than trying to survive among social predators. But humanity is not immune to the laws of nature, and in nature one can usually observe that the fewer are the wolves, the lamer, fatter and more numerous are the sheep. The central problem with community organizing is that the sort of community that stands a chance post-collapse is simply unacceptable pre-collapse: it is illegal, it is uncomfortable, and it is unsafe. No reasonable person would want any part of it. Perhaps the best one can do is to gather all the unreasonable people together: the outcasts, misfits, eccentrics and sketchy characters with checkered pasts and nothing better to do. Give them the resources to provide for their own welfare and keep them entertained. Keep the operation low-key and under the radar, and put up some plausible and benign public façade, or your nascent community will be discovered, shut down and dispersed by the pre-collapse officialdom. And if through some indescribable process all of these undesirable, unreasonable people manage to amalgamate and self-organize into some sort of improvised community, then you win. Or maybe they win and you lose. Either way, you would deserve credit for attempting to do something unusual: something that might have actually worked.

There may be a few people who would be willing to tackle such an assignment. If they are serious about it, they will stay well hidden, and we will never know how many of them have succeeded, because we will only learn of their existence when they fail. As for the rest of us, who are itching to do something useful within the confines of existing legal framework and economic reality, there is just one path: the path of emergency preparation, with the added twist that the emergency in question has to be accepted as permanent. Community emergency preparation is about the only type of officially sanctioned activity that may allow us to prepare for collapse.

The first and obvious part of preparing for the permanent emergency is to construct systems that will allow some, ideally most, of the population to survive in the long run without access to transportation fuels, or to any of the technology that comes to a standstill when starved of transportation fuels. The second, equally important part involves laying in sufficient emergency supplies of food, medicine, cooking fuel, temporary shelter for displaced persons, and so on, to allow some, ideally most, of the population to survive in the short run, while the transition to non-fossil-fuel-based existence is taking place. Yet another task is to organize streamlined, military-style control structures that can step in to maintain order and to provide security.

But the most important element of preparing for the permanent emergency is to devise a plan to force through a swift and thorough change of the rules by which society operates. Under emergency conditions, the current rules, laws and regulations will amount to an essentially lethal set of unachievable mandates and unreasonable restrictions, and attempting to comply with them or to enforce them is bound to lead to an appalling spike in mortality. The current way of changing the rules involves lobbying, deliberation, legislation and litigation—time-consuming, expensive activities for which there will be neither the time nor the resources. There are no non-destructive ways to decomplexify complex systems, and while systems that have physical parts fall apart by themselves, the legal framework is a system that, even in an undead state, can perpetuate itself by enslaving minds with false expectations and hopes. By default, the procedure for those who wish to survive will be to universally ignore the old rules, but this is bound to cause mayhem and much loss of life. The best case scenario is that the old rules are consigned to oblivion quickly and decisively. The public at large will not be the major impediment to making the necessary changes. Rather, it will be the vested interests at every level—the political class, the financial elite, professional associations, property and business owners and, last but not least, the lawyers—who will try to block them at every turn. They will not release their grip on society voluntarily. There is just one institution with enough power to oppose them, and that is the US military. It would be most helpful if enough high-caliber military types with lots of stars on their epaulets could step up and lay down the new law: henceforth anyone who wants to litigate their orders will do so before a military tribunal. It is heartening to see that many of the world's militaries, the Pentagon included, have recently woken up to the reality of Peak Oil, and are taking steps to prepare for it, while our craven and feckless politicians and businessmen continue to wallow in denial. Clearly, many Americans would rather not live under military rule, but then beggars can't be choosers, and, in any case, the alternative is bound to be even worse. The United States has not been invaded since 1812, but in its short history it has managed to invade other countries over 30 times. It should not come as a surprise, then, if the United States wraps up its existence by invading itself.

When taking part in community organizing activities, if your envisioned community is to survive the transition to a non-fossil-fuel-based existence, it is important to keep in mind a vital distinction: is this community going to operate under the old rules or under the new rules. The old rules will not work, but the new ones might, depending on what they are. You might want to give the new rules some thought ahead of time, perhaps even test them out, as part of your community's permanent emergency preparation program.

A Specter Is Haunting America

“A specter is haunting Europe,” Karl Marx once wrote. He wrote these words on the eve of revolutionary outbreaks that began in Italy and France in 1848 and soon engulfed much of the Continent. Unbeknownst to most Americans, Europe is again engulfed in revolt, which threatens to spread. The financial crisis that started in the USA and swept the globe, along with the sovereign debt crisis that was inflicted upon the European Union as a result, has ignited the passions of strangled and enslaved masses everywhere. People have recognized their enslavement and have put a finger on their slave-masters. The largely capitalist regimes are no less affected than are the socialist, communist, or theocratic ones, for they all have the same owner.

On the heels of 2009 civil unrest that had swept through Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, Bulgaria, Montenegro, Poland, Germany, Hungary, Greece, Portugal, Russia and the Czech Republic in response to diverse austerity measures implemented by the ruling elites, a full-force revolt has broken out in France. Much like the political protests following the Iranian elections in 2009, months of protests and street demonstrations across France have taken a more violent turn, and signs of an armed insurrection continue to mount. Across the Atlantic, even the Canadians have taken their eyes off the puck long enough to become enraged, staging protests at the G-20 meeting in Toronto that would make a Frenchman proud, protests that have prompted one of the tamest looking of political beasts to bare its tyrannical fangs.

The American middle/working class is still preoccupied with gazing at the shadows cast upon the walls of its cave/prison, preferring to go on believing what they are told by their owners and handlers: that all will be right with their little world, provided they keep their head down and work hard (at trying to find a job). Political hucksters like Obama reassuringly tell us that “Yes We Can” survive this crisis and go on begging for a piece of the American Dream. The man behind the curtain is imploring them to go on ignoring what is before their eyes. He tells us that their world is intact and will continue to prosper. And they dutifully listen, and willfully refuse to see. But the disillusioned among us can no longer ignore the mountain of evidence to the contrary that is before us. This show is coming to an end, and it promises to be an inglorious one. The wave of extinction, peak oil, peak water, economic and financial crises worldwide, political unrest abroad that is about to spread to the homeland—are these not signs of imminent collapse?

But even our European brothers do not understand the magnitude of this seismic event. It is neither a fiscal nor an economic problem. It is not a matter of having the wrong political leadership, nor is it the result of confused or misguided personal priorities. It is a crack in the dome of the theater of the Spectacle that began with the advent of human history, of civilization itself. It is the endgame of the human evolutionary dead end that has pathologically sought artifices of manipulation and control at all costs.

As Thomas Hobbes proleptically though unwittingly stated centuries ago, this will be a “Warre of all against all.” But this will not be the war that he mistakenly assumed would have occurred among our pre-civilized ancestors had it not been for our constituting the social contract. Rather, it is a war resulting from that very contract, grounded in cold and calculating thinking, and from the momentum it imparted to civilization for these last six thousand years of recorded history.

The specter Marx was referring to was Communism: his contention was that it would and should be the final stage in the dialectical movement of history to a civil but classless society. He was mistaken: the communist experiment failed. The real ghostly apparition that is haunting us now is a natural reflection of the fundamental lethality of industrial civilization itself and the systems of hierarchy and domination it has devised and perfected, all based upon the power of the syllogism. This is the logic of objective science, the principle of our legal systems, the rationality behind our social contracts, the anonymity of our civil politics, and the narrative framework of history itself. It is this logic that binds us to the hierarchies that have worked to empty the world of all its resources and life, of all its significance, replacing them with impersonal systems that vainly attempt to control and manage all affairs, human or natural.

It is the inevitable culmination of six thousand years of unnatural, human history that began with the first urban empires emerging in and around Mesopotamia's once fertile Fertile Crescent. People can still perceive this basic lethality, though many of them have become empty parts of emptying hierarchical institutions—an emptiness expressed most baldly in the following formulation: If A is a B, and B is a C, then A must be a C. Whether to control nature or our fellow humans, in this view we are all interchangeable commodities within a single logic of control, a composite of test scores, job functions, marketable fashions and other objective criteria. Herein lies the reason for our emptiness and our sense of alienation from one another, from nature and from our own natures. In seeking to compensate for this emptiness, we have sought to acquire other commodities to make us feel whole again—televisions, cars, laptops and other gadgets. But flashy cars and widescreen televisions will not save us.

America is the most rationally conceived of all modern, civilized societies. We have more science and technology, more lawyers and laws, more prisons and prisoners, more military bases—in short, more and larger systems of domination than any other country on the planet. We also have more lawyers, more money managers and swindlers, more rat race, more mental illness and more lone gunmen acting out against whatever they perceive as an injustice in their world. And yet we keep marching straight ahead to the precipice. We are a nation of rule-followers, not a community of free persons—and we are committed to the syllogism as no other. There is no dignity in our enslavement; we have become the emptiest of souls.

What is haunting the globe today is the specter of primitive anarchy, a feral tendency buried deep within the marrow and musculature of every animal. The human species is no exception, and it too possesses a powerful instinct to escape death. We have an irrepressible will to survive the artfully, coldly created hierarchical systems of domination that are now failing. It is anarchic in the truest sense of the word: it seeks to be leaderless not merely in a political sense, but to be free from the tyrannical hegemony imposed by the civilizing logic of syllogistic reasoning itself. It seeks to make each person, each interaction, each moment unique, unclassifiable, open to will and chance. It seeks freedom in the polysemy of the senses, of the physical body—not the body politic. This specter is not imaginary: it is real, and it is upon us. It is now everywhere and has a will of its own. It can no longer be brought under control, through force or through reason, and there will be no escaping it. It is not interested in you; it is coming after who you think you are.

OPEC Will Never Run Out Of Oil

Through an accident of plate tectonics and other developments over geological time, most of the world's remaining recoverable oil is situated around the Persian Gulf. This is unfortunate for us because we will thus never have a reasonable, universally agreed-upon estimate of the amount of oil left to produce. Let me explain.

Why talk about oil reserves at this point? Well, it seems that some Persian Gulf nations are now in a pissing contest over who has the most recoverable oil. Let's start with Kuwait—

KUWAIT CITY (AFP) – Kuwait has added at least 12 billion barrels of crude oil to its reserves, which are estimated at over 100 billion barrels, following a comprehensive study, a newspaper reported on Thursday.

Citing well-informed oil sources, Al-Jarida daily said the new oil was found in Greater Burgan, the world's second largest oilfield after Ghawar in Saudi Arabia, with reserves estimated at close to 70 billion barrels.

The sources told the paper that more reserves have been discovered at a number of other reservoirs following a comprehensive study, which will boost the Gulf state's reserves - the credibility of which has been questioned in the past.

I'll get to Kuwait's "credibility" in a moment. Calculating oil reserves is a very complicated business. There is always a great deal of uncertainty. I'm going to give you a grossly simplified "everything you need to know" explanation. First, there is an estimate of the original oil in place (OOIP). And then there is how much of that oil you expect to recover—this is called the recovery factor R. If we multiply these two terms, we get a number, usually measured in billion of barrels, representing a country's "proved" reserves. (I am really oversimplifying here, but it doesn't matter.) Let's call this number PR.

The PR term can be calcuated over time t by the following formula:

PR_t = ( new discoveries_t ) plus ( reserves additions_t ) minus ( oil produced_t )

Kuwaits say they have discovered some new oil "pools" in Greater Burgan. Reserves additions come from the application of new technology which allows the producer country to increase its recovery factor R.

OK, now let's look at recent developments—

According to OPEC data, Kuwait holds the world's fifth largest crude reserves at 101.5 billion barrels after Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Iran and Iraq [without the 12 billion to be added]

On October 4, neighboring Iraq announced a sharp rise of its crude reserves from 115 billion barrels to 143.1 billion barrels, overtaking Iran, OPEC's third largest member, in terms of reserves.

But a week later, Tehran also boosted its crude reserves, citing new discoveries, to 150.3 billion barrels from 138 billion barrels, reclaiming third place.

What's this? Are they just making this stuff up? And the answer is yes, they are. These reserves increases are called "political" in the sense that OPEC production quotas are based on a member's reserve base. But here's the kicker: OPEC reserves never go down, they either go up or stay the same.

From the EIA AEO 2006 edition. In 2006, OPEC claimed between 700 and 800 billion barrels.

For example, Saudi Arabia's proved reserves have been about 265 billion barrels (give or take a few billion) for years and years now. Miraculously, the amount of oil the Saudis discover or add as now technically recoverable just about equals the amount they produce year in and year out. No matter how much oil they produce, there's always at least that much left to produce! They accomplish this sleight-of-hand by raising their general recovery factor R. That number now stands at 70%, whereas the worldwide average is about 35%.

Thus we might reasonably conclude from the "official" numbers that the amount of oil left to produce in the Persian Gulf is effectively infinite. With these latest "additions" by Kuwait, Iraq and Iran, OPEC now has over 1,000,000,000,000 (trillion) barrels left to produce according to Ali Al-Naimi, Saudi Arabia's oil minister—

OPEC member countries now hold over 1 trillion barrels of crude oil reserves, having already produced 400 billion barrels since the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries was founded 50 years ago, Saudi Arabian oil minister Ali Naimi said Tuesday.

"When it was founded, the members of the organization had around 300 billion barrels of oil reserves and in the last 50 years, has produced over 400 billion barrels," Naimi told a symposium marking the group's 50th anniversary.

"[OPEC] still has more than 1 trillion barrels, which places it in a unique position in terms of reserves to continue supplying petroleum to the world for several long years and to exploit these reserves for the benefit of future generations," he added.

It's quite amazing—Ali al-Naimi is bragging about OPEC's fraudulent reserves accounting! Seriously, Homo sapiens is about 200,000 years old in the fossil record. Is this the best we can do?

And what about those suspect Kuwaiti additions? Remember, the official OPEC data says they have 101.5 billion barrels left to produce plus another 12 billion more coming from new oil pools discovered at Greater Burgan—

Industry newsletter Petroleum Intelligence Weekly (PIW) however said in January 2006 that Kuwait's oil reserves stood at 48 billion barrels only, based on internal records seen by the newsletter.

The PIW report also claimed that Kuwait's fully proven reserves amounted to only 24.2 billion barrels.

At the time, Kuwaiti oil officials said the report was inaccurate and that it failed to take into account undeveloped reservoirs.

Who are you going to believe? Now, we could laugh all this off as a bad joke if it weren't for one niggling detail. These new bogus reserves from Iraq, Iran and Kuwait will very likely be added to the official totals used by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), the Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA), and the semi-official numbers compiled yearly by British Petroleum and the Oil & Gas Journal. WTF! Yes, it's true—each of these sources simply adds to their global proved reserves tallies whatever numbers OPEC gives them. And the numbers OPEC gives them are not subject to independent audit. OPEC is free to use any estimate they want for each member nation.

So the next time these Persian Gulf countries don't answer the IEA's call on OPEC to produce more oil to prevent the price from getting into the stratosphere, as it did in mid-2008, you should remember that it's not for lack of oil—they've got over a trillion barrels now! And I'm sure there's more to come. OPEC will never run out of oil.

And you thought the global economy was screwed up.

The Rise and Fall of America

Alexander Tytler (1747-1813) was a Scottish-born English lawyer and historian. Reportedly, Tytler was critical of democracies, pointing to the history of democracies such as Athens and its flaws, cycles, and ultimate failures. Although the authenticity of his following quote is often disputed, the words have eerie relevance today:

A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government.

A democracy will continue to exist up until the time voters discover they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by dictatorship.

The average age of the world's greatest civilizations from the beginning of history has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, these nations always progressed through the following sequence:

• From bondage to spiritual faith;

• From spiritual faith to great courage;

• From courage to liberty;

• From liberty to abundance;

• From abundance to complacency;

• From complacency to apathy;

• From apathy to dependence;

• From dependence back to bondage.

Tytler's Cycle and the U.S.

In looking at American history, we can see Tytler's sequence in action. In 1620, the Pilgrims sailed to America to escape the religious bondage imposed by the Church of England. Their spiritual faith carried them to the new world.

Because of their deep faith, the Pilgrims left England in spite of the high percentage of deaths incurred by earlier American settlements. For example, when Jamestown, Virginia, was founded in 1607, 70 of the 108 settlers died in the first year. The following winter only 60 of 500 new settlers lived. Between 1619 and 1622, the Virginia Company sent 3,600 more settlers to the colony, and over those three years 3,000 would die.

In 1776, the Declaration of Independence was signed. From spiritual faith the new Americans were garnering great courage. By crafting the Declaration of Independence, the colonists knew they were essentially declaring war on the most powerful country in the world -- England.

With the onset of the Revolutionary War, the colonists were moving from courage to liberty, following Tytler's sequence. By demanding their independence and being willing to fight for it, a new democracy was born. This new democracy grew rapidly for nearly 200 years.

Then, in 1933, the U.S. was thrown into the Great Depression and elected Franklin Delano Roosevelt as president. Facing total economic collapse, Roosevelt took the U.S. dollar off the gold standard. At the same time, Germany, also in financial crisis, elected Adolf Hitler as its leader. World War II soon followed.

In 1944, with WWII coming to an end, the Bretton Woods Agreement was signed by the world powers and the U.S. dollar, once again backed by gold, became the reserve currency of the world.

After the war, America passed England, France, and Germany to become the new world power. Having entered the war late, the U.S. emerged as the creditor nation to the world. Our factories weren't bombed and the world owed us money. The U.S. grew rich financing the rebuilding of England, France, Germany, Italy, and Japan. The American democracy was transitioning from liberty to abundance -- maybe too much abundance.

In 1971 President Nixon violated the Bretton Woods Agreement by taking the U.S. dollar off the gold standard because America was spending more than it was producing and the U.S. gold reserves were being depleted.

In 1972 Nixon visited China to open the door for trade. What followed was the biggest economic boom in history -- a boom fueled by the U.S. borrowing money through the sale of bonds to China, one of the world's poorest countries at that time. The sale of these bonds financed a growing U.S. trade deficit. China produced low-cost goods, and we paid for them with money borrowed from the Chinese workers.

American factory production, which had fueled the American boom after WWII, was "shipped" overseas along with high-paying American jobs. America was shifting from abundance to complacency. Rather than produce, we borrowed and printed money to maintain our standard of living.

In 1976 America celebrated its 200th anniversary as a democracy. Rather than produce, we kept borrowing to finance social-welfare programs. Over the next three decades or so, America slid from complacency to apathy.

In 2007 the subprime crisis reared its ugly head. And by 2010, unemployment increased to double-digits, even as the rich got richer. Once-affluent people walked away from homes they could no longer afford. The U.S. moved from apathy to dependence.

Today we're dependent upon China to finance our debt as well as fill our stores with cheap products. At the same time, millions of Americans are becoming dependent upon the government to take care of them. If Tytler is correct, the American democracy is presently moving from dependence back to bondage.

Filling the Void

History reminds us that dictators and despots arise during times of severe economic crisis. Some of the more infamous despots are Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Napoleon. I find it interesting that the U.S. is now dependent upon Chairman Mao's creation, the People's Republic of China, for the things that we buy and the money that we borrow.

To me, this is spooky, foreboding, and ominous. While the Chinese people, as a rule, are good people, my business dealings with Communist Chinese officials have left me disturbed and concerned about the rise of the Chinese Empire. As you know, China doesn't plan on becoming a democracy. With money, factories, a billion people to feed, and a massive military, could they put the free world into bondage?

Although I don't like the way the Chinese do business, I continue to do business in China. I have to. They're the next world power. I cautiously believe that trade, business, and understanding offer better options for world peace and prosperity than isolationism.
Now the Western world must seek to grow stronger financially as China continues to gain power. To do this, our schools need to offer more sophisticated financial education to children of all ages.

This is not the time to be complacent or apathetic. This is the time to think globally. Putting up trade barriers would be disastrous. Instead, it's time our schools train students to be entrepreneurs who export to the world rather than employees looking for jobs that are being exported to low-wage countries.

Please be clear. I don't fear the Chinese. I fear our own growing weakness. Only a weak people can be oppressed. Today, America has too many people looking to the government for financial salvation.In 1620 the Pilgrims fled the spiritual oppression of the Church of England. Today Americans may need to flee the financial oppression of our own government as our democracy dies. If we follow Tytler's cycle for democracy, our financial dependence will lead us to financial bondage.

"In America most people have no conception that anything can really change radically" - Interview with John Michael Greer

Alexander Ac: Do you think that peak oil is a turning point in the history of human development? And can we compare it to anything else?

John Michael Greer: I think so. One of the problems that I see that a lot of people tend to think that whatever is happening at the present moment is the most important thing in human history. The crisis in industrial society, of which peak oil is one of the symptoms, is larger in scale than any previous example but is not different in kind. Most civilizations in the past have outrun their resource base and gone through the process of decline and fall. Ours is simply doing it on a bigger scale than previous civilizations because we have more energy to throw around.

AA: In one of your recent posts you wrote that “peak oil goes mainstream”. Why do you think so, or what do you mean by mainstream?

JMG: For the first almost a decade after that start of being a peak oil scene, peak oil movement, it was a very, very fringe activity. There were very few people interested in it, they mostly talked to each other, nobody else wanted to hear about it. In the last couple of years we have started to see some very influential people and organizations taking it very seriously. You have, as a recent example, the German military, the Bundeswehr, doing a study and discovering it, saying: look, this is a serious national security issue. You have various nations starting to take it seriously, it is no longer being brushed up and dismissed, as it used to, that’s what I meant.

AA: I do not know, how deep you are in climate change, and this is also a controversial topic, the climate change. Do you thing, we might compare it to peak oil? There is a controversy among energy experts, in the climate change also, but I would say that in climate change there is something like a consensus, that it is a problem.

JMG: The problem is that climate change does not suffer from economists. Basically, the current economic orthodoxy, neoclassical economics, is incapable of dealing with resource issues. It specifically rules them out, it insists that resources can never be an economic problem. Of course, this is not true. But for whatever reason, they have backed themselves into this corner, as long as people listen to economists. All the predictions you get from the economists, you can be certain they are wrong. When an economist says, this policy will produce this result, he is always wrong. You just assume that. Still, people take them seriously. So we have a problem in the peak oil community, they do not have in climate change, because there is not an entire field of climatology that insists that carbon dioxide cannot possibly happen.

AA: So economists are part of the problem not of the solution.

JMG: Yes, economists are very much part of the problem.

AA: At least, most of them.

JMG: Yes, there are some economists that still have their brains.

AA: Maybe we should change the education of the system... I know you are the author or one of the authors of the catabolic collapse theory.

JMG: Yes, actually I am the creator.

AA: I know, it is difficult, but could you just explain, what is the main point?

JMG: Basically, the real short form of catabolic collapse is that society always depends on certain resources from nature, and it uses those resources to produce capital, by which I do not mean money, but built capital, buildings, educated people, all the different things that the society creates to do its work for it. When the resource basis runs short, basically the only source of resource that you still got is that built capital. So the society, when it pushes over into this state of collapse begins catabolising, begins feeding on its own capital. It begins tearing down buildings to get the raw material inside them, it disposes of its labor force, it cuts it down. In America, for example, our education system has gone down. That is basically stripping a piece of social capital, for temporary benefit. And that is how a society turns from a successful civilization with a lot of complex things, to 200 years later, when it is a bunch of ruins with trees growing out of it.

AA: Is the process self-inforcing?

JMG: Very much so. Once it gets under way, the only way you can break it is if you can reach a level, where the resource base, the resources that are coming in the society, are adequate to sustain the society at that level. Ancient China used to go through this all the time. They built up a mass of resources, they overran their resource base and they collapsed back down. But because the Chinese economy ran on a very stable system of agriculture, there was a floor, below which it would not collapse. Once the costs of maintaining the society dropped down to the level that could be supported by each year’s rice harvest, you were fine. We do not have that good fortune, because we do not depend on rice, we depend on crude oil and we are using it up, so we could go all the way down to zero.

AA: Do we have an alternative to growing society? And collapsing? Do we have stable alternative?

JMG: It is possible for a society to be stable… Basically there are societies that moderate the curve of rise and fall to the point that is very, very modest. Most of them are what we would call primitive societies, because they do not have heavy resource needs. Nobody has ever managed a civilization, an urban society, that does not rise and collapse. It may be possible to do that down the road but we are certainly not going about it the right way.

AA: Relating to collapse, there are 2 directions, 2 opinions about collapse. Are you in favor of , say, gradual decreasing of complexity or you are in favor of sudden collapse, sudden degradation or simplification of society like Nial Fergusson, for instance is the proponent?

JMG: My view is almost exactly half way between these two. What I think is most likely, is an extended period of uneven collapse in which you have a series of crises followed by periods of relative stabilizations… followed by new crises. It’s like the stairs. Instead of just falling straight from the second floor to first floor, we go through a process of sliding down, thump, thump, thump, through a series of crises. The reason why I hold this idea is that historically speaking, this is the way civilizations always go down.

AA: It can take a long time.

JMG: It can take a couple of centuries. It usually takes a couple of centuries, but it is not a steady process. You run into the whole bunch of crises and all kind of catastrophes, as the cities are devastated...

AA: And you can go up for a while.

JMG: Yeah, or you can stabilize, you can reach a steady state or even improve a little bit before the next round of crises hits... So you have that kind of thump thump thump regime.

AA: When there is the final bottom?

JMG: That depends. It is usually a couple of centuries down the road. And where it is, what level it is depends on the resource base you are talking about. Again, China is the example. When it hits the level of sustainability, it is actually not that far down. We are not in that kind of shape because we depend on the resources we are using up so it could go down a very long way.

AA: Thank you. To your writing: Are you writing for masses, for Americans, Europeans, Africans? How should these different people interpret your text? Is it for everybody?

JMG: It is a real challenge. Nobody can actually write for everybody, unless you have lived everywhere in the world. It so happens I only lived in the United States. So, to some extent, I am speaking to the American audience, because that is what I know. I do have readers overseas and I am glad for that, I hope they find it useful. But I really have no idea, how they will take that, with that really different historical experience. In America, one of the problems we face here is that most people have no conception that anything can really change radically. That there could have been a different government or different borders. In Europe it is kind of easy to remember because most people’s grandparents were living under different flag that they once they lived. Ultimately I can only write from what I know but I try to make it useful.

AA: As I came from Europe, do you have any idea why in America everything is bigger? Bigger cars, bigger buildings, everything is bigger...

JMG: Oh yeah, the reason is very simple. Because the United States has a global empire right now. We have garrisons of troops in one hundred forty countries right now. That maintains a state of affairs in which roughly 25 % of all the world’s energy and about 33 % of all of its industrial products come here. That does not happen because the people in other parts of the world do not want them, it happens because we have an empire and because we have slanted the economic playfield. One hundred years ago when Britain had the global empire, London was the place that had the gargantuan this and that.

AA: It was a centre.

JMG: Exactly. It just so happens that now it is America and hundred years from now it will be somewhere else.

AA: Maybe China?

JMG: Probably China. The Chinese are playing their cards very well. They have experience with empires. They have done the thing several times. And we are playing ours very badly.

AA: But They won’t have the energy that was accessible for us. Than you have to grow up on something else?

JMG: No, the thing is, it is worth remembering that Great Britain managed the largest empire in the history of the world on a small fraction of the energy per capita that Unites States has. And Spain had a very, very big empire before them where the most advanced technology they had was the wooden sailing ship and they had no fossil fuels at all. So you can actually have a fairly large global empire, think Genghis Khan with horses – with the really simple technologies. I do not think the Chinese will be all the way back to sailing ships but they could be like British Empire or even much below that, like the British empire in the 18th Century.

AA: Do you see a peaceful transition or it will be very, very rough? It is a very broad question...

JMG: In theory it could be a peaceful transition. It has never happened. Either of the two transitions we are facing here in America. We are facing the end of our empire. That never happens peacefully. The only case in the history when it did not involve the complete devastation of the imperial country was the end of the British empire, and that had those 2 little world wars which were about who was going to take over. And it turned out to be America. It could have been Russia, it could have been Germany. And the decline of the civilization in the broader picture, that always involves violence.

AA: They just do not let it quietly...

JMG: Nobody is just going to say: It was enough for us, we had a grand time, we will take our troops back home, we are going to decrease our standard of living by 40, 50 percent... no we are fine, really… It would be nice but it does not happen that way.

AA: I do not want to go too much into politics, but if you were a politician, and you know all what you know, would it be right to tell people, let's say you are like Obama or somebody, should they tell people how it is or should they try to solve it behind, without the knowledge of the people. How do you think the masses would react if you tell them: here is peak oil, here is all this...

JMG: You could probably tell the American people a very, very sanitized cleaned up overly positive version, but you could not tell them the truth.

AA: Is it not possible?

JMG: They would never believe it and you would be out of office so fast that it would not be funny. If you want to live to the next election, as long as elections are won by telling people what they want to hear, that is democracy in miniature, the most they could do is to say: we are facing an energy crisis and we are going to work really hard to solve it. To explain that it will never be solved, that it cannot be solved, this is the end of an age, and we are all going to be a lot poorer than we have been... nobody is going to hear that. Very very few people.

AA: It will be good for Nature that we are not going to put all that pollution.

JMG: Oh Yeah, very much so.

AA: A deceased Czech philosopher Milan Machovec, who also wrote the book Philosophy face to face of extinction, to a certain extent praised the original Celtic tradition as something, which has the distance from centrist social hierarchy and laid emphasis on family stability. He did not consider this tradition as the solution to current ecological crises. What do you as an archdruid think about the attempts to create the mystic Celtic origin of Czech and Moravian inhabitants, could it be beneficial?

JMG: That is a heck of a good question. I have not read Machovec, I do not know if his work has been translated into English... I should say first of all, the modern druid tradition is not directly descended from the traditions of ancient Celts, those were extinct. What we have in druidry has been pieced back together starting in the 18th Century. What the Celts did or did not teach is mostly guesswork at this point. I have heard about the idea that Czech people and so on have Celtic ancestors; I know there were Celts in that area... Would it be beneficial? I have not the least idea, I would have to spend a bunch of time in the Czech Republic, hang out with people to get an idea, would it be useful, would it be destructive... It is always risky to put a lot of energy into way back when, to spend your time thinking about what people used to be, what we are descended from... I mean in your particular area most people have reason to remember that it can go in very ugly directions... I would say rather it would be very beneficial if the people in the Czech Republic and Moravia and so on would look at where they are now and who they are now... To say, here is the environment we have, here is the country that we live in, how can we make it something that is a little more focused on nature that is a little more sustainable... I mean, small countries have some huge advantages in this situation, compared to big ones. You have got big possibilities here if you are going to accept diminished standard of living and not buying to sort of over the top.

AA: Great. Here is another long one. You belong to the minority of those who are afraid that massive political mobilization leaving to an exchange of politicial power elite could in reality worsen the situation in deindustrializing society after the peak oil. But people, at least in the traditional western cultural cycles, seem to always believe in salvation and new beginning. Sigmund Freud even concluded that unconscious knows not negative categories so people in fact believe in their own eternity. What is your opinion on this Freud version and why do you think that people in the peak oil community probably do not fall into this drawer.

JMG: I think, peak oil can be thought as something negative or as a positive existential, that s all right. I have no idea, whether Freud was right or not...

AA: People always want to hear something positive.

JMG: Yes, but I do not think that is the case that the unconscious mind cannot grasp negative categories. As Jung pointed out, one of the contents of the unconscious is the shadow projection of all your personal negative things and it definitely manifests when you are doing certain kinds of psychotherapy. So I do not think that Freud got that one right... In terms of the peak oil scene. Peak oil is an event, it is not an absence of something. It has various echoes in a lot of ways of thinking about the future.

AA: Some people in the Czech republic, in spite that they have a possibility to read the text, where you step away from the idea of Christian apocalypse, call you a doomer. What could be a reason and what would you respond?

JMG: My experience here has been totally fascinating. Because there are people who have bought into what I would consider a very inappropriately optimistic idea of the future, and they insist I am a doomer. People who are hard core doomers insist I am a blind optimist. Because we in Western civilization these days tend to be thinking in terms of two and only two categories. It is either total apocalypse or it is progress forever. The fact is I am exactly in between. I am arguing it is not apocalypse, it is not progress, it is ordinary decline, the kind of many civilization encountered before, it is nothing new, this is what happens and we just have to live with it. And that is how I would respond to that. If you are going to insist that anything other than utopia is doom, than you would probably think I am a doomer. But go ask some serious doomers what they think about me anyway...

AA: What do you think is the closest thinker to your ideas, who might be more appropriate for more people?

JMG: The author out there I agree mostly is James Howard Kunstler, author of the “Long emergency”. I have plenty of disagreements with him generally but I love his writing and his version of the future, his long emergency is as close to mine as anything out there.

AA: There is one note, where you express the reserved opinion of Fukuoka system of management. Do you mean application in gardening or in grocery? Some people really think that Fukuoka is one of few possibilities of how can extensive agriculture work without fossil fuels subsidies.

JMG: My opinion of Fukuoka’s work is that it was very, very specific to his ecosystem, to the place where he was working, the specific crops he was doing… It is not something that you can just pick up and put everywhere... He was very much into paying attention to what nature is doing right where you are. It is quite possible that somebody using that principle, rather than trying to copy his methods, could come up with something suitable for other locations. But the problem is most people I know who have read the One straw revolution and things like that simply tried to use his methods and if you do not happen to live in Japan and you are not trying to grow the same crops on same kind of soil, you might not get the same results, in fact you probably won’t.

AA: When you write stories about green wizardry, in spite of all sources and news you assert that it is still needed to carefully observe how does it work in the practice. What is actually the role of intuition in finding the solution to the problem?

JMG: The way I think is the best way to explain that is to remember that the scientific method is a way of testing. It is not a way of coming up with ideas, it is a way of testing them. Intuition generates the ideas. Once you finished using the intuition to come up with some great ideas, than you put the intuition on a shelf and you go and see how it actually works. Because if it does not work, I do not care how marvelous it sounds, it is still a waste of your time. So you need to have a kind of twofold approach, where on the one hand, you write with your intuition running, come up with all kind of ideas and then test them to see what kind of response do you get. Does it work? Does it flop? You will know.

AA: Do you think there are grand ideas ahead?

JMG: Yes, but I do not think there are the grand ideas we want. For example, I do think there are very good reasons to think that there is no better fuels source – everyone want some great fuel source to replace oil.

AA: I agree.

JMG: For reasons related to the laws of thermodynamic, I do not think that is going to happen. There might be some very great ideas how we can live with a lot less energy

AA: No artificial photosynthesis, it was terrible. I am a plant physiologist...

JMG: You are a plant physiologist, you know better. One thing we can know is that artificial photosynthesis that does not have 2 billion years of evolution perfecting it is going to be 2 billion years behind plants.

AA: We cannot even call it arrogance.

JMG: Yeah, I kept a straight face.

AA: There was in the last slide of (the presentation of) Dick Vodra that we should down scale and his next tip was to travel a lot. So I was confused...

JMG: In a way he is right because so much of the money we have now, so many of our resources are going to go away. If you have something you really want to do in life, that is going to involve a lot of money, do it now, when you still got it, because it might not be possible. If you want to sail around the world...

AA: Then you just contribute to the mess.

JMG: Now, that is true. Different people are going to draft their priorities in different way. I do not know that I would recommend flying to Hawaii, unless you really feel that at the end of your life you would feel that you really did not live the life you wanted because you did not get Hawaii.

AA: You have written many books. If you would recommend only one of them, which one would you?

JMG: That would depend on the audience. Because if were peak oil book, then The Long Descent. Because that is the introduction. If it were my writing in general, it would probably be an odd little book that I wrote called “A world full of gods”. Which is a discussion of philosophy of religion from a point of view of polytheist paganism. It is a point of view that received very little discussion last 2000 years and I think it is probably my best book although it hardly sells any at all.

AA: And what about Ecotechnic Future?

JMG: It is a book I think most people get to after The Long Descent, it is a development of the idea of The Long Descent. So I think Long Descent would be a place to start.

AA: The last one: Do you prepare somehow for different future? Or you are already prepared?

JMG: Well...

AA: You are never prepared.

JMG: Yeah, no one is ever prepared for the future. My wife and I moved from Oregon to a small town in the Appalachian mountains in western Maryland. We bought a house, a very inexpensive house with a nice backyard for organic garden which is now producing fruits and vegetables. Both me and my wife have a whole range of skills. We are in the process of improving the energy efficiency of the house. We have figured out we are going to live there for the rest of our lives. As both of us are in the late forties, that is going to be at most forty fifty years. Assume the future happens in anything like what I am expecting, we are not going to see the complete unfolding of the western civilization; that is going to take a couple of centuries. So what we need to do is to be in a position to take care of ourselves and help our friends and neighbors as needed, and also develop some other skills that we can share with other people and teach them. And all of this is the stuff that one way or another I have been doing since I was young... Is it the only thing? There is a range of projects. But yeah I take it very seriously and I am certainly engaged in preparations.

AA: So thank you very much.

Peak Oil Interview: Misconceptions, Replacing Oil, and False Solutions

Peak Oil Interview for the Global Footprint Conference