ENDINGS - how Man will survive or fail

So what are we to do in the meantime, while we wait for collapse, followed by good things? It's no use wasting your energy, running yourself ragged and ageing prematurely, so get plenty of rest, and try to live a slow and measured life. One of the ways industrial society dominates us is through the use of the factory whistle: few of us work in factories, but we are still expected to work a shift. If you can avoid doing that, you will be ahead. Maintain your freedom to decide what to do at each moment, so that you can do each thing at the most opportune time. Specifically try to give yourself as many options as you can, so that if any one thing doesn't seem to be working out, you can switch to another. The future is unpredictable, so try to plan so as to be able to change your plans at any time. Learn to ignore all the people who earn their money by telling you lies. Thanks to them, the world is full of very bad ideas that are accepted as conventional wisdom, so watch out for them and come to your own conclusions. Lastly, people who lack a sense of humour are going to be in for a very hard time, and can drag down those around them. Plus, they are just not that funny. So avoid people who aren't funny, and look for those who can laugh at the world no matter what happens.

Dmitri Orlov, Definancialisation, Deglobalisation, Relocalisation, talk June 16, 2009, Dublin

For those who believe that your survival probabilities and living standards during and after our

Societal Collapse will be optimized through some type of preparation, you might consider one of

the following strategies.

target.

• •- Educate Yourself: learn where and how to secure, produce, obtain, and/or create sufficient

life sustaining necessities—clean water, food, energy, shelter, and clothing—to last for the

remainder of your life, in the complete absence of any output from our industrial mosaic. The

upside to survival awareness is that you will be self-sufficient; the downside is that you will be

competing for dwindling supplies of remaining resources with 300+ million desperate and

hungry Americans—at least for the short term.

• -Store Provisions: stock sufficient life sustaining necessities to enable your survival for at

least several months. The upside to a resource storehouse is that it will provide a buffer

during the onset of difficult times; the downside is that some of the 300+ million desperate

and hungry Americans will almost certainly find you and your storehouse, and attempt to

remove its contents by force.

• -Arm Yourself: stockpile guns and other weapons in order to protect yourself from the 300+

million desperate and hungry Americans. The upside to armaments is that you will be able to

defend yourself; the downside is that you will eventually run out of bullets, encounter

somebody with a bigger gun, or sleep.

•- “Relocalize” into a Self-sufficient Community: this is the group living strategy employed

by those who expect a “fizz” type collapse and post-collapse scenario. The upside is that you

and your self-sufficient companions will be capable of obtaining and producing your life

sustaining necessities for an indefinite period of time; the downside is that those lacking such

capabilities will find you, and your community will be an easy.

• - Erect a Compound: this is the group living strategy employed by those who expect a “pop”

type collapse and post-collapse scenario. The upside is that you and your trustworthy

companions will be temporarily self-sufficient; the downside is that you will be subject to

attack both from the outside, by the 300+ million desperate and hungry Americans, and from

the inside, by your trustworthy companions.

•  -Stay Mobile: travel, scavenge, and maintain a low profile during the collapse until the initial

major die-off from thirst and starvation, which should occur within the first month or so in a

“pop” collapse scenario. The upside is that you will be a moving target, more difficult to hit

than a stationary target; the downside is that you may still succumb to the initial die-off, due

to a lack of sufficient remaining resources, or to the second major die-off resulting from

disease epidemics spread by initial die-off victims.

Cris Calston in On American Sustainability, Anatomy of a Societal Collapse, 2009

In four respects Today stands in contrast to Yesterday (about 1750 – Today). First, the future has regained some of the inscrutability it possessed during the Distant Past (up to about 1750). Second, the marriage of science and technology has revealed dangerous and dehumanizing consequences that were only intuitively glimpsed, not yet experienced, by our forbears of Yesterday. Third, the new socioeconomic order proved to be less trustworthy than when it appeared during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. And last, the political spirit of liberation and self-determination has gradually lost its inspirational innocence. Hence the anxiety that is so palpable an aspect of Today, is sharp in contrast with both the resignation of the Distant Past and the optimism of Yesterday.

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During this long, slow, and often errant march I think we can gain strength by reflecting on the Distant Past. For countless millennia humanity found courage to persist, the inspiration to produce extraordinary works of art, the will to create remarkable civilizations, the strength to endure miseries, and the appetite to savor triumphs, all without the support of the vision of a living future that would be superior to the past. There is no reason why the same resilience should not support humankind if it now sets its sights on the Distant Tomorrow of our imagination.

It is enough that we can see the future as containing such imaginable possibilities. Openness and potential, without assurance of outcomes, are substitutes for Yesterday’s bright hope for Progress and our consolations for Today’s more knowing anxieties. These words may reflect easily trivialized sentiments, but I put them forward at the conclusion of this very short, extremely long survey of how the future has appeared and now appears, as a salutation to my fellow voyagers who wonder, along with myself, what humankind can accomplish.

Robert Heilbroner in Visons of The Future, 1995

As a way of inducing reflection I frequently ask people to write their own epitaphs. This exercise in summarizing their lives in a few words inevitably produces puzzlement and often results in som humorous and self-denigrating responses. Among them: “He read a lot of magazines,” “She started slowly, then backed off.” “I told you I was sick,” and “I’m glad it is over.” I encourage more thought about this and people begin to identify those aspects of their lives of which they are proud, their roles as parents, spouses, people of faith.

I actually think this exercise should be incorporated into every written will. At the point when people are contemplating their deaths, why not suggest that they add a paragraph that reads “And for my epitaph I would like the following….”?

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Gordon Livingston in Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart, 2004

If the people of the Middle East continue on their present path, the suicide bomber may become a metaphor for the whole region, and there will be no escape from a downward spiral of hate and spite, rage and self-pity, poverty and oppression, culminating sooner or later in yet another alien domination; perhaps from a new Europe reverting to old ways, perhaps from a resurgent Russia, perhaps from some new, expanding superpower in the East. If they can abandon grievance and victimhood, settle their differences, and join their talents, energies, and resources in a common creative endeavour, then they can once again make the middle East, in modern times as it was in antiquity and in the Middle Ages, a major center of civilization. For the time being, the choice is their own.

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One can only hope that, in time, the cause of freedom will triumph once againe as it has already triumphed over the Nazis and the Communists. If it does not, the outlokk for the Islamic world, and perhaps for the West, will be grim.

Bernhard Lewis in What went wrong? 2002

I now have had the opportunity to vaguely see the scale of my hourglass, my “ending” so to speak,
I take this revelation as an opportunity to thank some of those who have inspired me in relation to endings.vox.com.

First I thank all those eminent thinkers and writers who made the enterprise “endings” possible by investigating the future of Man and making efforts to prolong our survival.

Thanks to Herbert G posthumely for opening my eyes back in 1992.

Thanks to Albert B, whom I never met, for his endeavours to explain the world the principle of a flat earth.

Thanks to Jack A for telling me so convincingly why the only road to peace is paved with banning of big families, or more precisely in the terms of Jack, OCPF – one child per family.

Thanks to David D for his tireless providing of information on the human predicament.

Thanks to Manfred W for explaining to me social entropy and smart resignation.

Thanks to Steve K for urging me to separate between the possible, the impossible and the inevitable.

Best regards

Reiel

endings@online.no

A global free market was a project that was destined to fail. In this, as in much else, it resembles that other twentieth century experiment in utopian social engineering, Marxian socialism. Each was convinced that human progress must have a single civilization as its goal. Each denied that a modern economy can come in many varieties. Each was ready to exact a large price in suffering from humanity in order to impose its single vision on the world. Each has run aground on vital human needs.

If we take history as our guide, we must expect that the global free market will shortly belong to an irrecoverable past. Like other twentieth-century utopias, global laissez-faire –together with its casualties – will be swallowed in to the memory hope of history.

John Gray in False Dawn, 1998

All this has a moral for our tale and provides a proper ending to it. In much of the West, and especially in our country, government is today much criticized and denounced. There is often good reason for the antipathy: governments can be – and perhaps always are – bureaucratic, slow-moving, inefficient, and irritating. They are not repositories of unsullied virtue, exemplary foresight, stirring vision.

What they are however, is the only means by which a body of people can provide itself with what it cannot obtain elsewhere: foreign policy and defense, law and order, the provision of public capital, and – crucial for our purpose – a counterforce against the unwanted effects that emerge from the private sector. That counterforce may not always be effective – there are plenty of unsolved problems in capitalism – but it is the only such capacity that exists.

In a word, no complex society can exist without government. That is why the public sector is as much a part of a capitalist order as is the private sector, which could not longer exist if government were somewhere to disappear. We should not forget, moreover, that he functions of government under capitalism are not only to provide defense and public capital and law and justice, but also to act as a kind of gyroscope or a steering mechanism when the nation needs a balancing counterweight or a hand on the steering wheel. (Where is the Invisible Hand of Adam Smith? Ed. comments) There will assuredly be such situations in the years ahead, as globalization and then global warming become even more insistent problems that require powerful guiding and containing forces.

Here, as so often, economic analysis goes just so far. In the end, large-scale changes require not just an adaptive revolutionary capitalism, but the elusive contribution of things that lie outside that framework, such as collective temper of peoples and the wisdom or folly of their leaders. Hence it seems proper to end this book with the admonition that we must come to understand our subject, not to achieve a Good Society, but to prepare ourselves for the really difficult problems that we will still face after economics is understood.

Robert Heilbroner and Lester Thurow in Economics Explained, 1982/1998

Thus I come again to the only prediction I have allowed myself to make, and that I must now iterate one last time. The twenty-first century capitalism will be dominated by a spectrum of capitalisms, some successful, some not. The crucial question for Americans, and perhaps for the world as a whole, is where our own nation will be located along that spectrum. I have preciously spoken of “slightly imaginary Sweden” as one end of a range of capitalist societies. I now add that it is equally possible to speak of not-so-imaginary America as another. In the context of twentieth-century realities, Sweden proved to be unworkable. In the context of twenty-first century realities, America may prove to be the same, unless it changes mightily.

A last word seems necessary. I am not so foolhardy as to believe that a framework of uncertain analysis and personal vision will enable us to circumvent Kliuchevsky’s admonition (“History teaches nothing, but only punishes for not learning its lessons.”) Perhaps history’s punishments are its lessons. Nonetheless, it is my hope that some grasp of what the twenty-first century holds in store for capitalism may enable us to avoid at least some of the punishment we will otherwise have to endure.

Robert Heilbroner in 21^st Century Capitalism, 1993

The research on the reasons for population growth shows that human populations under conditions of regional limits of sustainability have the ability to limit breeding rates. Thus there are potential conditions for limiting the biological breeding rates through governmental rules.

There is however in the long view a deficiency in the limiting process, presumably due to cognitive deficiencies and societal factors influenced thereby. Indications therefore are:

-          delay in accommodating the rules of the society to the real development of the society

-          maintaining the intraspecific competition, e.g. between different “nations”

-          comprehensive, at least latent refusal in the society of family planning by contraception

-          enduring development for solving population growth/limits of sustainability by extending the limits of sustainability, instead of attacking global population growth.

Helmut M Knoflacher in Bevölkerungswachstum (Population Growth) – zwischen Erbe und Erkenntnis (German), in Rupert Riedl et al (Ed.): Die Ursachen des Wachstums (The Reasons for Growth) 1996.