Post Peak Government
Greetings
Crashwatcher (below) takes a look at life after peak oil: He wonders whether those of us who assume a "World Made By Hand" future may be a bit naive. He suggest that the "powers that Be" are already setting up the framework for the next stage. The next "9/11" moment comes, they'll be ready to implement it. He calls this the "Turn key Tyranny"
Often, those of us aware of peak oil and energyconsider, perhaps wishfully, the decent side of oil production curve as ushering in a return to an energy poorer, but simpler, more localized lifestyle, analogous to what existed in 18th or 19th century.Jim Kunstler’s the World Made By Hand series of novels, the Archdruid’s green wizard project or the transition town movement are some examples that readily come to my mind.In the face of ongoing slow energy decent, however, we have continuing revelations about a global surveillance system that Snowden’s interview and document releases have shone a latest fresh light on.
Dave Pollard (below) takes a look at Orlov's 5 Stages of Collapse. He admits that his earlier views on the transition to a more sustainable society were somewhat naive:
And that the future will be somewhat more challengingMy hope was always that as the first three Stages of collapse played out, government would be mostly a passive and inept player, a victim rather than an actor. But if the ruling group installs worldwide the kinds of corporatist totalitarian regimes I describe above, I fear they may strenuously act to suppress or prevent many or all of the coping/resilience mechanisms we hope to employ (shown in the right-hand column of the table above) to reduce the suffering of collapse and start to transition to a much more modest post-civilization society. Specifically, they will work to obfuscate what is really happening in the world, thwart attempts to create self-sufficient local communities (free of the ruling group’s authority), and prevent us from creating a sustainable sharing economy, growing and gifting healthy, organic local food, living off-grid, living in “non-standard” housing, looking after our own health and education, and weaning ourselves off “employment”, money and socially- and ecologically-destructive goods. What we see as taking responsibility for our own well-being in the face of cascading crises, the ruling group will inevitably see as threatening all the levers of control of wealth and power they rely on keeping.
"So while we’re struggling to cope with a plethora of economic, energy and ecological crises — market and currency collapses, loss of our life’s savings, massive unemployment, deflation and hyperinflation, interest rate spikes and credit cutoffs, underwater mortgages, oil and water shortages and rationing, energy and food price spikes, blackouts and brownouts, pandemic diseases, droughts, famines, floods, fires, storms, massive influxes of refugees, collapsing bridges and other infrastructure failures, and the loss of essential services — we’re also going to be struggling against a ruling group that is using all the wealth and power at their disposal to prevent us from taking sensible, local, independent, personal and community-based steps to reduce the suffering all these crises will create. They will try with all their might to make independence from the crumbling systems they oversee, illegal, even seditious. While we’re studying up on coping and resilience, we’d better study up on how to deal with this additional challenge too."
Turnkey Tyranny and Energy Decent
"The greatest fear that I have regarding the outcome for America of these disclosures is that nothing will change. People will see in the media all of these disclosures. They'll know the lengths that the government is going to grant themselves powers unilaterally to create greater control over American society and global society. But they won't be willing to take the risks necessary to stand up and fight to change things to force their representatives to actually take a stand in their interests."
"And the months ahead, the years ahead it's only going to get worse until eventually there will be a time where policies will change because the only thing that restricts the activities of the surveillance state are policy. Even our agreements with other sovereign governments, we consider that to be a stipulation of policy rather then a stipulation of law. And because of that a new leader will be elected, they'll find the switch, say that 'Because of the crisis, because of the dangers we face in the world, some new and unpredicted threat, we need more authority, we need more power.' And there will be nothing the people can do at that point to oppose it. And it will be turnkey tyranny."
Edward Snowden, theguardian interview video of Edward Snowden; 2013/jun/09and Interview Transcript
Often, those of us aware of peak oil and energyconsider, perhaps wishfully, the decent side of oil production curve as ushering in a return to an energy poorer, but simpler, more localized lifestyle, analogous to what existed in 18th or 19th century.
Jim Kunstler’s the World Made By Hand series of novels, the Archdruid’s green wizard project or the transition town movement are some examples that readily come to my mind.
In the face of ongoing slow energy decent, however, we have continuing revelations about a global surveillance system that Snowden’s interview and document releases have shone a latest fresh light on.
The Present State of the Police State
Perhaps you have been living on the dark-side of the moon, chained to a desk, or only watching mainstream media news, and so you have no idea of what I am talking about?
Here’s an extended summary of some recommenced articles or podcasts showing the length and breath of the present global surveillance system.
A good place to start is that June 9 2013 Guardian’s interview of Snowden, the Booz Allen Hamilton employee working as a contractor at an NSA installation in Hawaii, and, already referenced above:
NSA and intelligence community in general is focused on getting intelligence wherever it can by any means possible. It believes, on the grounds of sort of a self-certification, that they serve the national interest. Originally we saw that focus very narrowly tailored as foreign intelligence gathered overseas.
Now increasingly we see that it's happening domestically and to do that they, the NSA specifically, targets the communications of everyone. It ingests them by default. It collects them in its system and it filters them and it analyses them and it measures them and it stores them for periods of time simply because that's the easiest, most efficient, and most valuable way to achieve these ends. So while they may be intending to target someone associated with a foreign government or someone they suspect of terrorism, they're collecting you're communications to do so."
Any analyst at any time can target anyone, any selector, anywhere. Where those communications will be picked up depends on the range of the sensor networks and the authorities that analyst is empowered with. Not all analysts have the ability to target everything. But I sitting at my desk certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone from you or your accountant to a Federal judge to even the President if I had a personal e-mail.
Also there is this June 7, 2013 Democracy Now interview of the Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald, who with the aid of Laura Poitras, interviewed Edwards in Hong Kong:
There are top-secret NSA documents that very excitingly describe—excitedly describe, boast about even, how they have created this new program called the PRISM program that actually has been in existence since 2007, that enables them direct access into the servers of all of the major Internet companies which people around the world, hundreds of millions, use to communicate with one another. You mentioned all of those—all those names. And what makes it so extraordinary is that in 2008 the Congress enacted a new law that essentially said that except for conversations involving American citizens talking to one another on U.S. soil, the NSA no longer needs a warrant to grab, eavesdrop on, intercept whatever communications they want.
Those NSA documents released by Snowden correspond to a 41-page training presentation for senior intelligence analysts for the NSA or their contractors. What was actually released by the Guardian and Washington Post on June 6 2013 were 4 of those 41 pages. The released pages broadly outline how NSA’s (and apparently Britain’s GCHQ and other partners) access to the central servers of Internet companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc... enables, for the past several years, NSA’s access emails, documents, audio and video chats, photographs, documents and connection logs (i.e., metadata). On June 29 2013, the Post released a few more slides, with redactions and annotations added, to protect the guilty, and to ease the public’s mind that total surveillance and the permanent storage of all of your personal communications isn’t that bad after all.
Lest you think that the surveillance state is somehow only limited to the USA’s traditional enemies, we have Snowden’s interview in the South China Morning Post revealing that the NSA’s tapping of communications to and from Hong Kong and mainland China for many year.
And, we now also have this recent series of Spiegel articles from Laura Poitras et al., reporting on further information provided by Snowden:
Snowden's NSA documents contain more than one or two scandals. They are a kind of digital snapshot of the world's most powerful intelligence agency's work over a period of around a decade. SPIEGEL has seen and reviewed a series of documents from the archive.
The documents prove that Germany played a central role in the NSA's global surveillance network -- and how the Germans have also become targets of US attacks. Each month, the US intelligence service saves data from around half a billion communications connections from Germany.
No one is safe from this mass spying -- at least almost no one. Only one handpicked group of nations is excluded -- countries that the NSA has defined as close friends, or "2nd party," as one internal document indicates. They include theUK, Australia, Canada and
You should not be sanguine if your among the so-called handpicked excluded groups of UK,Australia, Canada and
In fact, the US, UK, Canada, Australia
As pointed out in the Spiegel articles, these agencies and others now share their gathered information to create a global matrix of “boundless surveillance:”
What is most important about the documents is that they reveal the possibility of the absolute surveillance of a country's people and foreign citizens without any kind of effective controls or supervision. Among the intelligence agencies in the Western world, there appears to be a division of duties and at times extensive cooperation. And it appears that the principle that foreign intelligence agencies do not monitor the citizens of their own country, or that they only do so on the basis of individual court decisions, is obsolete in this world of globalized communication and surveillance.Britain's GCHQ intelligence agency can spy on anyone but British nationals, the NSA can conduct surveillance on anyone but Americans, and Germany's BND foreign intelligence agency can spy on anyone but Germans. That's how a matrix is created of boundless surveillance in which each partner aids in a division of roles.
Lest you think that “boundless surveillance” only refers to the collection of metadata, let’s go to this June 17 2013 interview of Russ Tice at Boiling Frogs (from 8:00 to 11:00 minutes):
No one in the main stream press wants to ask this question: is the NSA collecting the content of phone calls and emails and Skype sessions and all these other communications, and storing them in-mass?
And I saw a little over a month ago; I was watching CNN and there was, as a matter of fact, a fellow Marylander gal, Erin Burnet who was on and she had an FBI guy on there. Tim Clemente I think his name was. And he came out and said that the FBI has the ability to go back in time and look at the content of communications. And this via an intelligence agency that deals with that deals with national security.
Well, you know, that had my red flag go up, because back in the day when I talked with Keith Olbermann NSA did not have that capability, not because they didn’t want it, but because they didn’t have the processing capability and literally they didn’t have the electrons, the power, the infrastructure at Fort Meade to run that sort of thing. And they didn’t have the storage capability to store all that information. Imagine this conversation that we re having now and all the other conversations around domestically in this country. That is a lot talking going on. So that is why they were being judicious about that and going after, back then, the metadata. And that is what we know from Snowden’s initial release.
So I contacted...this is over a month ago, I contacted one of my main sources at NSA, and we had a meeting .... He wasn’t quite sure if it was everything then, so we had to, he had to, do some investigating, .... I just got the confirmation this past Saturday, that yes, it is everything.
NSA is copying every domestic communication in this country, word-for-word content, in every phone conversation, like the one we are having now. Every email, everything. They are collecting everything in bulk, and they are putting it in data bases.
And, ultimately in that facility out there in Utah is already online. And they haven’t even said that. But they are putting stuff there now, even though they are supposedly not going to open that thing up until later on this fall. That thing is sort of like the Death Star, in Star Wars. They said it was only half-way done, or whatever, but it had the capability to blow up some other Alderaan or something. But that Death Star in Utah is already starting to function to store every communication in this country—word-for-word content.
Among other security positions, Tice was a former NSA intelligence analyst, who in 2005-06 blew the whistle on unlawful and unconstitutional wiretaps on American citizens and further raised public awareness of domestic spying via the ECHELON system.
By the way, you can find a transcript of that CNN interview of Clemente here, where Clemente said:
BURNETT: Tim, is there any way, obviously, there is a voice mail they can try to get the phone companies to give that up at this point. It's not a voice mail. It's just a conversation. There's no way they actually can find out what happened, right, unless she tells them?
CLEMENTE: No, there is a way. We certainly have ways in national security investigations to find out exactly what was said in that conversation. It's not necessarily something that the FBI is going to want to present in court, but it may help lead the investigation and/or lead to questioning of her. We certainly can find that out.
Could it be that the FBI would not want to present this in court because they know it’s obtained illegally?
Lest you think that the NSA and its counter-parts in other countries are working alone, consider this, also from Poitras’s Spiegel article:
According to the documents seen by SPIEGEL, a particularly valuable partner is a company which is active in the US and has access to information that crisscrossesAmerica. At the same time, this company, by virtue of its contacts, offers "unique access to other telecoms and (Internet service providers)." The company is "aggressively involved in shaping traffic to run signals of interest past our monitors," according to a secret NSA document. The cooperation has existed since 1985, the documents say.
Apparently, it's not an isolated case, either. A further document clearly demonstrates the compliance of a number of different companies. There are "alliances with over 80 major global corporations supporting both missions," according to a paper that is marked top secret. In NSA jargon, "both missions" refers to defending networks in the US, on the one hand, and monitoring networks abroad, on the other. The companies involved include telecommunications firms, producers of network infrastructure, software companies and security firms.
The Official Response
Here’s a few more quotes from that Democracy Now interview of Greenwald, illustrating the USgovernment official’s responses to these leaks:
AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, on Thursday, Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein told reporters in the Senate gallery that the government’s top-secret court order to obtain phone records on millions of Americans is, quote, "lawful."
....
GLENN GREENWALD: Well, first of all, the fact that something is lawful doesn’t mean that it isn’t dangerous or tyrannical or wrong. You can enact laws that endorse tyrannical behavior. And there’s no question, if you look at what the government has done, from the PATRIOT Act, the Protect America Act, the Military Commissions Act and the FISA Amendments Act, that’s exactly what the war on terror has been about.
But I would just defer to two senators who are her colleagues, who are named Ron Wyden and Mark Udall. They have—are good Democrats. They have spent two years now running around trying to get people to listen to them as they’ve been saying, "Look, what the Obama administration is doing in interpreting the PATRIOT Act is so radical and so distorted and warped that Americans will be stunned to learn" — that’s their words — "what is being done in the name of these legal theories, these secret legal theories, in terms of the powers the Obama administration has claimed for itself in how it can spy on Americans."
When the PATRIOT Act was enacted—and you can go back and look at the debates, as I’ve done this week—nobody thought, even opponents of the PATRIOT Act, that it would ever be used to enable the government to gather up everybody’s telephone records and communication records without regard to whether they’ve done anything wrong.
.....
AMY GOODMAN: On Thursday, Glenn, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said he stood by what he told Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregonin March, when he said that the National Security Agency does "not wittingly" collect data on millions of Americans. Let’s go to that exchange.
....
GLENN GREENWALD: OK. So, we know that to be a lie, not a misleading statement, not something that was sort of parsed in a way that really was a little bit deceitful, but an outright lie. They collect—they collect data and records about the communications activities and other behavioral activities of millions of Americans all the time. That’s what that program is that we exposed on Wednesday. They go to the FISA court every three months, and they get an order compelling telephone companies to turn over the records, that he just denied they collect, with regard to the conversations of every single American who uses these companies to communicate with one another. The same is true for what they’re doing on the Internet with the PRISM program. The same is true for what the NSA does in all sorts of ways.
And let’s not forget this tidbit from the President:
BARACK OBAMA: So point number one: if you’re a U.S. person then NSA is notlistening to your phone calls and it’s not targeting your e-mails unless it’s getting an individualized court order. That’s the existing rule.
There are two programs that were revealed by Mr. Snowden -- allegedly, since there’s a criminal investigation taking place and that caused all the ruckus. Program number one called the 2015 program. What that does is it gets data from the service providers -- like a Verizon -- in bulk. And basically you have call pairs. You have my telephone number connecting with your telephone number. There are no names, there’s no content in that database. All it is, is the number pairs, when those calls took place, how long they took place. So that database is sitting there.
Obama is a sharp lawyer and politician, so you need to parse these statements very carefully and keep in might that this interview was shortly after Snowden’s initial disclosers which refer to the collection of metadata, and, about the same time as Russ Tice’s disclosure that all content is being recorded. It is probably true that the NSA is not “listening in” on all phone calls or reading emails, in real time as they occur, without a court order—besides that would be the job of the FBI. And, it is probably also true that your emails are specifically “targeted.”
Rather, the NSA and its counterparts are recording all communications of everyone, metadata and content, for later analysis. The Obama might be able to argue that therefore you are not being targeted. But I would argue that this means that everyone is targeted. And, the President Obama’s statement that there no names or content in any of the NSA’s databases is highly likely to be false.
Here’s some more of the US government’s response:
"In response to your question about access to the guardian.co.uk website, the army is filtering some access to press coverage and online content about the NSA leaks," said Gordon Van Vleet, a Netcom public affairs officer.
"The Department of Defense routinely takes preventative 'network hygiene' measures to mitigate unauthorized disclosures of classified information onto DoD unclassified networks."
The army stressed its actions were automatic and would not affect computers outside military facilities.
"The department does not determine what sites its personnel can choose to visit while on a DoD system, but instead relies on automated filters that restrict access based on content concerns or malware threats," said Van Vleet. "The DoD is also not going to block websites from the American public in general, and to do so would violate our highest-held principle of upholding and defending the constitution and respecting civil liberties and privacy."
Similar measures were taken by the army after the Guardian and other newspapers published leaked State Department cables obtained via WikiLeaks.
“This is a theater-wide block,” reads a page that loads when troops in Afghanistanusing the Defense Department’s non-classified internet protocol (NIPR) network attempt to access the Guardian online.
“There are many reasons why this site might be blocked. It may be blocked for your protection, the protection of DoD assets or blocked based on Usfor-A [US forces command-Afghanistan] information systems security policy enclosure 18, Centcom regulation 25-206, joint ethics regulation (JER) 5500.7 or DAA directives,” the routed site reads.
Usfor-A is the US component to the Nato command in Afghanistan known as Isaf. It is unclear if the block on the Guardian’s website applies to non-American personnel in Afghanistan, but if they use the DoD’s networks to get online, non-American service members would not be able to access the Guardian website either.
I don’t find it very comforting that the decision to block the Guardian websites is being done by a computer automated filter instead of a human being. I find it interesting that the Washington Post is apparently not blocked—perhaps because its content is already controlled by the DoD it real time? And, I wonder if Spiegel will get automatically blocked as well, in view of the series of articles by Laura Poitras et al., published a few days ago. If they don’t perhaps because it was already vetted before release?
The present threat
The NSA and it foreign counterparts have created a communication time machine that will allow them to go back to trace and listen in conversations that occurred in the past.
The opportunities for present abuse are enormous.
To give you some idea of what this could involve, here’s a Corbett Report interview of Sibel Edmonds discussing how in the past the FBI illegally acquires and stored permanently private information and uses this to gain leverage over politicians and judges:
The people promoted in the White House or presented as viable candidates are hand selected by the establishment ... Republican and Democrats ... no matter how you pick its going to be our guy. That is the reality to the US’s election and presidency today and the same is true with the lower level House and Senate representatives.
(from 20:00-21:00)
you use this information, when the time comes to protect the FBI, to protect the Justice Department. and protect whoever is the President. The FBI servers the President and the President serves the establishment. So basically you are protecting the establishment by using this information as blackmail method on these elected officials.
(from 27:00-28:00)
the judges that were squeaky clean, the judge candidates, they were discarded immediately, and the ones, the federal court judge candidates, that had the highest number of irregularities whether there sexual orientation, sexual life or who they are calling if they cheated on their tax, if they hired a baby sitter who was not a US citizen, and illegal immigrant etc... Those were the ones that were selected as the most viable candidates.
(from 43:00-44:00)
I think that it is obvious that the NSA’s “communication time machine” can be used to similarly target virtually anyone in the future. The communication history of politicians, judges, corporate executives, public officials, anyone, could be pulled up and reviewed to find something embarrassing that they might want to hide, and then, hold this information above them, to protect the establishment: the president the NSA, the FBI, CIA, DHS etc.... And, of course, this applies not only to individuals and establishment in the USA, but anyone, anywhere. Anyone with access to this kind of information in their country can become a tyrant—a turn-key tyrant, as Snowden says.
The future threat
I don’t think that the NSA is listening in on all global communications in real time at present.
Not because they don’t want to, but because they simply don’t have the resources to do so. It’s the same resource problem that Tice discussed and why the NSA would initially focus on metadata.
At present, at some point, it may still take a human being to watch. listen and read the previously recorded communications, and use this to build a profile for an individual and for interactions between groups of individuals, that is, a social network profile, and then interpret the resulting profiles as triggering a national threat, or, not. Well maybe just a threat to the establishment is sufficient to put you on a “person of interest” list.
Global spying programs such as Stellar Wind, are designed to take this profile building and analysis out of hand and minds of humans and automate in this using algorithms that can be programmed into the processors of NSA’s computers. In a 2012 MIT talk, NSA whistleblower Willam Binney, discusses some of the details of such automated systems here, or, you can listen to it here. Binney’s efforts to bring the illegalities of these programs to the attention to the government, and the personal consequences to him, starts at about 55 min in this 29c3 talk.
When these programs are in place the NSA will have near-real time dynamic content reading, analysis and profiling of all global communications. As Binney points out in his talks a computer program may target you as a “threat,” without any human intervention.
We are well on our way.
Energy decent to the recue?
I have long thought that energy decent will cause, or at least be concurrent, with economic decline, and, that economic decline will result is a great deal of political discord. I see the protests and civil disobedience in Europe, Brazil the Middle East and Africa as on-going examples of this.
If the hope is that such discord will cause changes within the establishment, then I think you can see what an uphill effort this will be.
When the general public becomes too poor to own a computer, cell phone or have access to the internet, perhaps the scope of the global surveillance system will be reduced?
Maybe.
But, the government could simply introduce or expand the hand out of free cell phones to the poor, as presently done in Nigeria, California and els
Could declining energy availability itself cut back the global surveillance network?
Maybe, but, if it does, then this is going to take a long time, I think.
Maybe, but, if it does, then this is going to take a long time, I think.
In his interview, Russ Tice mentioned the “Death Star” in Utah, which is actually referring to the NSA’s Date Center in Bluffdale Utah. You can see this facility in Poitras’ documentary “The Program” and some of NSA whistleblower William Binney’s discussion of the Stellar wind programhere.
In The State of Surveillance, (54 min) Steve Gibson, mentions that the Bluffdale Data Center will use up to about 65 MW of power supplied from its own power relay station. That number seems to be confirmed in this Salt Lake Tribune article.
That’s enough to power a small town of 30,000-50,000 people, but certainly not enough to pose a problem for the establishment to deliver now or in the foreseeable future. The natural-gas-firedLake Side
And, it is safe to say that the power necessary to support and expand, this, and similar Data Centers throughout the world, will not be subject to financial sequestration or restrictions.
I expect that this and other data centers would be last customers to be power-limited, even if this meant people in living in surrounding towns going without any power at all. Of course, power blackouts or rolling black-outs in those towns will also limit the flow of communications data into the "Death Star". To effectively survail everyone, everyone has to be on the power and telecommunications grid.
The Future Police State
So what would a near-future state of the police state look like with energy decent?
Here’s what Binney said when was asked where he sees all this going 5 years, 10 years, from now:
It is going to be a totalitarian state. We will have an imperial President, a dictator.
Unless we do something.
You know everybody in Congress stood up an took an oath to defend the constitution. The are all violating that oath. So every time you see one, you need to say what are you doing with this privacy stuff; you are violating your oath by supporting this kind of activity.
William Benney – The Government is Profiling You (113 minutes)
How about a large percentage of the population living a 18th or 19th century energy poor lifestyle, but, with high-tech government-issued smart phones and free internet so that their thoughts and interactions can be tracked for threats? Eventually, this stragety will be rendered increasingly ineffective at real time monitoring as the power grid becomes intermitant.
How about a small percentage of the population living a energy-rich, networked, lifestyle, with total allegiance to maintaining the establishment. Of course, this elite group would be under intense, automated, continuous monitoring. If any of the elite were to publish something online that the NSA’s computer’s deem to threaten the establishment, well, these publications could simply be automatically blocked.
Welcome to 1984.
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Will the Collapse of Civilization Begin With Global Corporatist Totalitarianism?
Filed under: Preparing for Civilization's End — Dave Pollard @ 21:48
| STAGE | WHAT COLLAPSES | SIGNS OF COLLAPSE | E.G. OF CULTURE AT THIS STAGE | COPING/RESILIENCE MECHANISMS |
| 1. Financial Collapse | banks, currencies, the value of savings & assets | bank failures/rescues, stock/housing market collapses | Iceland during 2008 crisis | eliminating and repudiating debts, using community currencies, let the banks fail |
| 2. Commercial Collapse | credit availability, trade, businesses, tax revenues, industrial food & energy systems | corporations become criminal, rampant corruption, regulatory mechanisms fail, trade and supply chains seize up | Russia after collapse of USSR | building self-sufficient communities, local self-employment and essential supplies, creating a Gift/Sharing Economy |
| 3. Political Collapse | law & order, regulatory enforcement, safety nets, power grid & other infrastructure (including health, education, water and emergency response systems and the Internet), nation states | citizen unrest, surveillance society, scapegoating, rise in totalitarian governments, war and despotism | Afghanistan & Pakistan | creating local, direct (non-representative) democratic or egalitarian anarchistic institutions |
| 4.-5. Social Collapse and the Disintegration of Humanity | community: social institutions, trust, social cohesion, faith, cooperation; and then humanity, kindness and compassion | permanent refugee cultures, disintegration of health care and waste management, endemic diseases, alienation, anomie, inurement, fighting violence with violence, hero worship, personal disintegration | Ik tribe of E. Africa | few or none |
I‘ve just finished reading Dmitry Orlov’s new book The Five Stages of Collapse. It made me realize that I have probably been making two fundamental errors in my thinking about how our civilization culture will collapse, and what we should do to become more resilient in the face of that collapse (taking steps like learning new personal and collective capacities, and re-learning how to create communities). My two errors were the failure to recognize:
- The Need to Stop Collapse at Stage 3: I have been thinking that there is only one type of collapse, one ‘end game’, though there are many different scenarios about how it will play out. Dmitry’s book made me realize that while financial, commercial and political collapse are inevitable, social collapse is not. What’s more, if we are able to halt collapse at the end of the third (political) stage, before social collapse occurs, life after collapse could be quite bearable, and more healthy, joyful and sustainable than life in our current culture. But if we slide into social collapse, all bets are off — life for what’s left of humanity could be, well,inhuman.
- How the Corpocracy May Aggravate Collapse: I have been going on the assumption that, during the Long Emergency that will end in the collapse of civilization culture and, if we are diligent and lucky, a much smaller but better human presence on the planet, we will have to cope with a cascading series of economic, energy and ecological crises. But now I realize that the Corpocracy — the executives of the world’s most power nation-states and the world’s most powerful corporations — have seen the writing on the wall and are already starting to work together to prevent or at least “manage” (incompetently, because complex systems cannot be “managed”) the first three stages of collapse. Not to save their citizens and customers, mind you, but rather to save themselves. The result could well be near-global corporatist totalitarianism — the ruthless (political and economic) oppression of the majority in order to hoard resources and protect the interests of a powerful, coordinated minority. And perhaps this fourth type of crisis might be the one we have to deal with first. Perhaps, in fact, it’s already upon us and it took the likes of Julian Assange, Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden to wake us up to it.
But let me take a step back and start with a brief overview of The Five Stages of Collapse. I’ve indicated the qualities of each of the five stages in the table above. While Dmitry calls the fifth stage “Cultural Collapse”, my sense is that all five stages are components of a cultural collapse (our now-global culture being ‘civilization’ culture), so I’ve taken the liberty of re-naming the fifth stage the Disintegration of Humanity stage, and grouped it with the fourth stage Social Collapse because I think they inevitably occur together in rapid succession. Dmitry says “it is probably worth everyone’s while to dig in their heels at Stage 3″, and that’s an understatement.
If you look at the Signs of Collapse in the table above, it is not hard to conclude that the first three stages — Financial, Commercial, and Political Collapse — are already upon us, and we just haven’t recognized them yet. And total system collapse can take a long time — decades in fact — and occur so gradually that we can’t see the forest (collapses) for the trees (constituent and precipitating crises).
Stage 1 Financial Collapse, he writes, is an inevitable consequence of usury — the lending of money at interest — though because our savings, government services, the food industry and international trade all depend on it, elimination of usury would be “an act of economic suicide for any Western nation”. Our globalized financial house of cards has a fatal design flaw. Dmitry explains:
Usury [is] best viewed as a form of systemic, institutionalized violence, … a form of extortion: whenever you have two groups, one that has all the money and another that has none but needs it to live, the former can extort payments from the latter for temporary use of the money… [But] lending at any rate of interest above zero eventually leads to a deflationary collapse followed by a quick but painful bout of hyperinflation… A national default is inevitable if a country’s sovereign debt is very high [often, in struggling nations, due to loans incurred by corrupt leaders who squirrel the money away in personal offshore banks] but its economy is dwindling… Forcing that country to pay a “risk premium” [high interest rate] brings the day of default that much closer [and brings] about the very thing it is supposed to mitigate against.
Once usury, and its consequence of spiralling, unrepayable debt levels, triggers financial collapse, this can in turn quickly lead to Stage 2 Commercial Collapse (due to lack of credit for commerce and the dependence on infinite amounts of cheap labour, cheap oil, cheap debt and growth) and hence to Stage 3 Political Collapse (due to plunging incomes and consequent plunging tax revenues). It’s never too early to prepare for this, he says, by building viable local communities based on “exclusive circles of trust” and “spontaneous local self-governance”, and shifting their economies from the usury-based global Industrial Growth economy model to a local Gift, Tribute and Barter economy model (tributes being payments based on allegiance, religion or tradition; barter would be done using personal transferrable chits backed by personal commodities and valuables, which, as explained in the book, is more flexible and value-sustaining than direct goods-for-goods trades).
Once Stage 3 Political Collapse has occurred, he says, there is no rebuilding the house of cards, no way to re-establish the unsustainable, complex hydrocarbon- and debt-powered financial and commercial systems that underpin today’s political and economic systems, systems which are in addition now massively dysfunctional due to what Dmitry describes as “the problem of excessive scale”.
Creating viable local communities, he says, with “social cohesion, a common sense of identity and compelling mutual interests, respect and trust”, is very difficult and in many areas may be impossible. A Gift, Tribute and Barter Economy depends on this, and is inherently exclusive. It eschews Trade (exchange of goods/services/money between disinterested strangers). It also eschews Charity (“a degenerate form of gift that cannot be reciprocated; a handout designed to please the benefactor”). Gifts will initially be based substantially on what is relatively abundant in the community — community labour (as in community work bees), community facilities (shared spaces like designated community kitchens and workshops), harvested food surpluses, and outgrown and surplus reusables — to the point they replace the Industrial models of work, rents and retailing entirely.
As Charles Eisenstein has said, as long as the Industrial Growth economy exists, we will have to live with one foot in it and the other in the Gift, Tribute and Barter economy (what is now increasingly being called the “Sharing Economy”). But Dmitry says we need to make the transition as quickly as possible and not “cling” to the old economy:
Gradually at first, but faster and faster, all economic relationships need to be deproletariatized and rehumanized — by dealing with people you actually know, face-to-face; by avoiding the use of money and documents while emphasizing [oral] agreements as a way of cultivating trust and knowing who [not to trust]; and by giving preference to [small, close circles of] family, friends and neighbours while [cutting] out everyone else.
The Mafia and other “organized criminal” groups, he asserts, are forms of alternative governance that emerge when the official governance bodies become dysfunctional (paralyzed by excessive size or excessive centralization, corrupt etc.) As Stage 3 Political Collapse worsens, we need to see such emergent groups for what they are, and evolve community-based mechanisms for security that draw on their valuable characteristics while avoiding their abusive and non-egalitarian ones. Otherwise, he predicts, we’ll be plagued by thieves, extortionists and other criminals from outside our community who do not share our goals or values and seek only to exploit the Stage 3 power vacuum.
It was Dmitry’s chapter on Stage 3 Political Collapse that got me asking the question that is the title of this post. He writes:
The ultimate purpose of the nation-state is to maintain a political [and economic] system that can effect a perfect melding of industry, militarism and commerce; industry supports militarism by supplying it with weapons, militarism supports commerce by conquering new resources and markets, and commerce supports militarism by funding military spending.
It’s hard to read the litany of news of massive government surveillance, political and business corruption, violations of constitutional and international laws and human rights, trumped-up excuses for international “wars”, the use of torture, the cynical support of despots, the interment of whistle-blowers, the bailout and non-punishment of corporate criminals, the set-up and vilification of dissidents, and new laws and rulings that place the rights and privileges of corporations above those of citizens, and not get an uneasy sense that our political and economic leaders (rulers?) are fully aware of the state of Financial, Commercial and Political Collapse and its inevitable worsening, and are working furiously in their own interests, and against ours, to protect themselves from the effects of collapse while throwing us to the lions.
Corporatist Totalitarianism is the creation of a state that disenfranchises the majority and funnels all decision-making, wealth, power and security to an integrated Corporatist few. They do this ostensibly on the basis that this few know better than the masses how to deal with crises, but in fact they know there just isn’t enough of anything left to go around any more. So, like alphas in an overcrowded rat cage, they deem it appropriate to lie, mislead and deny, and to hoard everything they can steal for themselves and let the rest suffer and starve.
A Salon.com reporter recently quoted a Turkish professor of saying about Obama: “He talks like the head of the American Civil Liberties Union, but he acts like Dick Cheney.” Use of killer drones, force-feeding uncharged decade-long prisoners at Guantanamo, xenophobic border hysteria, lawless Grand Juries indefinitely incarcerating innocent people, the ruthless prosecution of Edward Snowden — these are the actions of right-wing extremism, and frighteningly comparable to the actions of leaders of nation-states just before democracy was replaced by brutal totalitarianism in the past around the world.
What exactly is “Global Corporatist Totalitarianism”? I would argue that it has these attributes:
- the collusion among ‘leaders’ of governments of affluent nations and large global corporations to establish “we know better than you” policies that subordinate the interests of the public to those of the ruling group, and the concentration of wealth and power in that group
- the suspension of all rights and freedoms in the interest of being able to maintain order no matter how bad things may get
- the abandonment by the public of belief in the viability of participative representative democracy, due to constant and egregious abuses of the process by all political parties (once all parties are either controlled or eliminated by the ruling group)
- the control and use of the media to misinform, oppress and terrify citizens to cow them into submission to the ruling group’s authority
- a total surveillance state including the suppression of all dissent (of speech and action) under the guise of fighting “terrorism”
- financial and military support of, and collusion with, despotic leaders in struggling nations, sufficient to allow continued theft and desolation of their land and resources, the wage enslavement of their citizens, their exploitation as consumers of the ruling group’s corporations’ products and its governments’ weapons, and the usurious “lending” of unrepayable and crushing debts to these nations, the proceeds of which are personally appropriated and offshored by the despots as the price of complicity with these atrocities
- the dismantling of all regulations, taxes and organized labour groups that inhibit the unrestricted accumulation of wealth by the ruling group
- the denigration of government as an appropriate agency for any purpose other than “security”, military and commercial imperialism, and fear-and-denial propaganda
If you’ve read The Shock Doctrine, you’ll recognize the growing presence of all of these attributes in our current political and economic systems.
How, while we’re working furiously to prepare ourselves for economic, energy and ecological collapse, do we begin to factor in the need to also prepare ourselves for what is essentially a corporatist coup, nation-state by nation-state, that deprives us of our rights to organize, to free speech, to freedom of association, and to dissent?
My hope was always that as the first three Stages of collapse played out, government would be mostly a passive and inept player, a victim rather than an actor. But if the ruling group installs worldwide the kinds of corporatist totalitarian regimes I describe above, I fear they may strenuously act to suppress or prevent many or all of the coping/resilience mechanisms we hope to employ (shown in the right-hand column of the table above) to reduce the suffering of collapse and start to transition to a much more modest post-civilization society. Specifically, they will work to obfuscate what is really happening in the world, thwart attempts to create self-sufficient local communities (free of the ruling group’s authority), and prevent us from creating a sustainable sharing economy, growing and gifting healthy, organic local food, living off-grid, living in “non-standard” housing, looking after our own health and education, and weaning ourselves off “employment”, money and socially- and ecologically-destructive goods. What we see as taking responsibility for our own well-being in the face of cascading crises, the ruling group will inevitably see as threatening all the levers of control of wealth and power they rely on keeping.
So while we’re struggling to cope with a plethora of economic, energy and ecological crises — market and currency collapses, loss of our life’s savings, massive unemployment, deflation and hyperinflation, interest rate spikes and credit cutoffs, underwater mortgages, oil and water shortages and rationing, energy and food price spikes, blackouts and brownouts, pandemic diseases, droughts, famines, floods, fires, storms, massive influxes of refugees, collapsing bridges and other infrastructure failures, and the loss of essential services — we’re also going to be struggling against a ruling group that is using all the wealth and power at their disposal to prevent us from taking sensible, local, independent, personal and community-based steps to reduce the suffering all these crises will create. They will try with all their might to make independence from the crumbling systems they oversee, illegal, even seditious. While we’re studying up on coping and resilience, we’d better study up on how to deal with this additional challenge too.
So what about trying to halt the collapse of civilization at Stage 3, after Financial, Commercial and Political Collapse, and before we decline into Social Collapse — the collapse of the very communities we need to create to cope effectively with the first three stages?
Dmitry offers up some ideas on how to cope with Stage 4 and 5 collapse, but they seem unconvincing. He argues that even in cultures that have collapsed utterly, it is possible to rebuild faith, and he suggests looking at religions that have successfully built a following in such cultures as possible models. I’m not persuaded. If the Ik people of East Africa he describes at the end of his book are indeed examples of such cultures, it is hard to imagine a way out, or a way forward; such cultures seem mercifully to be destined for extinction.
All the more reason why we have to work, starting now, to deploy the Stage 1, 2 and 3 coping and resilience mechanisms shown in the right column of the table above. We cannot afford to fail to halt the collapse at that stage, if we don’t want to exit the stage of existence on Earth as a species quickly and ignominiously. There is a huge amount of learning and practice to do, and, if and when we give up the folly of believing that Stage 3 collapse can be averted, we have time to do it, starting small, learning from our mistakes, communicating what works and what doesn’t with other communities preparing for collapse. We have lots to learn, too, from those in struggling nations and in impoverished slums and on the streets and on reservations, whose people have been, for the most part, living with cultural collapse all their lives, mostly at Stage 3.
Whether we will do these things, and whether the ruling group will be successful in preventing us from doing so, remains to be seen. It may be a battle fought and won or lost community by community in each nation-state. I expect we’ll be surprised at what emerges, and I believe the surprise will be pleasant, a Darwinian celebration.
After us, the dragons.
posted by Walter @ 2:15 PM
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