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They have heard it a million times over the past decade. I’ve gone hoarse trying to get my elected representatives to listen (see some of my rants on Western Fragility and the Rhizome Alternative).
Globalisation is a moronic enterprise. It is ecologically insane to reduce redundancy and diversity. It’s called ‘putting your eggs in one basket’. The financial crisis is simply the first of many major events that will very likely lead to a global economic and societal collapse – the end of civ. We learned nothing from the Romans and every other civilisation except how to repeat their mistake (See Jared Diamond or Derrick Jensen on this monumental elephant in the room).
Our British Prime Minister, supposedly hot on economics, seems to know very little about the complex processes that underlie his neat classical thinking. He is no ecologist, and clearly never took acid. No doubt the fundamental complexities of our universe probably scare politicians and business leaders ridged. They like it simple and neat so they can control it – anything else and they plunge into denial.
I’ve just read Nassim Taleb’s Black Swan and he puts the same thing in different words. Yet, I doubt if any politician will read his book. They just don’t want to admit that the whole political class has got it wrong and that the Emperor is Stark Bollock Naked:
Globalization creates interlocking fragility, while reducing volatility and giving the appearance of stability. In other words it creates devastating Black Swans. We have never lived before under the threat of a global collapse. Financial Institutions have been merging into a smaller number of very large banks. Almost all banks are interrelated. So the financial ecology is swelling into gigantic, incestuous, bureaucratic banks – when one fails, they all fall. The increased concentration among banks seems to have the effect of making financial crises less likely, but when they happen they are more global in scale and hit us very hard. We have moved from a diversified ecology of small banks, with varied lending policies, to a more homogeneous framework of firms that all resemble one another. True, we now have fewer failures, but when they occur ….I shiver at the thought. (Nassim Nicholas Taleb: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. April 2007)See more from Taleb here
The solution is not more technology. The solution is not more centralised control. The solution is to simplify, build diversity and redundancy into our socio-economic system, and to embrace the rhizome, embrace anarcho-syndicalism, embrace the ecovillage and localism. Embrace a scale-free human-scale social attractor.
Governments are simply not going to do this. They do not have the culture, language or attitude for it. But you can. And you should, if you value your own well-being and that of future generations.
In these interesting times historical and emerging factors meet, compete, complexify and throw out all manner of emergent properties. The failure to take responsibility for the planet on which we depend is perhaps the core factor. How we arrived at this point is the key to understanding how humans will continue to survive.
Ultimately it is our culture which must change if we are to sustain human life on this planet called Earth. The green philosopher Derrick Jensen argues that the dominant culture (Civilisation) will not change. It is a central premise of this blog that given certain emerging circumstances change to a non-abusive ecologically sound culture is possible. I would not like to hazard a guess at the probability, but I think and feel that it is greater than zero.
Transition Phase
Let’s illustrate by looking at a process that has been changing for a very long time, and which now promises to change radically over the next few decades. Mass communication has evolved. Eastern civilisations and early Western societies developed memes which survive today and which explain (often allegorically, metaphorically, and in coded terms) the reasons for the often negative structure of contemporary society in enduring messages. These message speak to us now and are as relevant as they ever have been. The messages come across even in our Western Christian dialogue. Symbols and written language, copied written language are millenia old.
Fast forward to the emergence of mass literacy, mass written word (Caxton’s printing), telephony, radio, televisual communication, and the full democratisation of communication rising ahead of us in the form of the internet and its baby – open source knowledge.
We stand at the frontier of knowledge-is-power for all. Information is now bottom-up meets top down. Folk truth is power’s nemesis, coming soon to a small screen near you. The exponential sharing of information is beginning to subvert all attempts at social control and authority. This process has been slowly increasing and more rapidly so since around the 1960’s, and it is now reaching a tipping point into a less hierarchical socio-economic structure.
A state of anarchy, Leviathan, The Mob, self-organising society, rhizome, call it what you will but it is an emerging reality. This factor alone is a revolution in the structure of human society after many thousands of years of hierarchical social order. It is a part of the accelerating restructuring of socio-economic processes as human consciousness continues to shift and ‘grow’.
The human mind, in its conservative ordered, received wisdom state, is unprepared for what lies ahead. Dealing with the flattening of human socio-economic hierarchy may relieve some the social pressures caused by the submission of many of our individual powers, but in the vacuum of transition many other pressures will emerge. We will return to communication in detail later, now consider control.
Familiar Attractor
In contrast with our increasingly liberal and less authoritarian zeitgheist there is an enduring personality trait within us, one which was first described as ‘old fashioned personality’ but which has now been named by Altemeyer as Right Wing Authoritarianism or RWA.
Right-wing authoritarianism (RWA; Wikipedia definition) is a personality and ideological variable that is defined by three attitudinal and behavioral clusters which correlate together:
Authoritarian submission — a high degree of submissiveness to the authorities who are perceived to be established and legitimate in the society in which one lives.
Authoritarian aggression — a general aggressiveness directed against deviants, outgroups, and other people that are perceived to be targets according to established authorities.
Conventionalism — a high degree of adherence to the traditions and social norms that are perceived to be endorsed by society and its established authorities.
The ‘right wing’ label is unwise in my view, since Altemeyer accepts that while some 80 percent of those showing higher than average scores on RWA measures tend towards the right of the political spectrum, some 20 percent tend towards the left. This is not about politics but attitude and behaviour towards people and the natural environment. It concerns the legitimising of control and abuse of human and non-human others rather than the traditional meaning of legitimate authority which fell consensually on representatives of specific interests in a physical and usually local community – the elders, the mothers, the braves, the seers.
Hence authoritarianism is not a political mindset, it is a psychological phenomenon built around the need to reduce uncertainty and increase control. Altemeyer gives a clear psychological reason for the RWA label. This is simply that the Right-Wing is concerned at its core with that which is writ – that which is literal, and judged from this basis to be empirical despite the fluidity and relativistic nature of the written word, human language, and the world in general. This focus on binary and classical thinking (and behaviour) rather than ecological and relativistic thinking exposes the psychological process in the human need to control.
People who are high on RWA scores tend to exhibit compartmentalised (black and white) thinking and are more likely to follow the established conventions and authorities in society. When those conventions shift and authorities become more diffuse (as in a less hierarchical socio-economic system) then this increases anxiety among those with high RWA scores. When that increases to fear we have set the scene to give power to a ’strong’ Hitler or Mugabe leader who promises to reduce the uncertainty, to remove the threat to peace of mind (liberalism) as it grows within society – to regain control and the hierarchical definition of ‘order’ rather than the complexity definition of order.
Right Wing Authoritarianism is a psychological state that can change with differing situations. The greater exposure to other groups of people, university education, this reduces RWA scores. The RWA phenomenon as exhibited in Western industrialised civilisation exposes the deeper cultural anxiety and Cultural Post Traumatic Stress Disorder within this form of society. The fear of ‘uncontrolled’ others feeds greater insularity and thus more certainty, and hence greater fear of those in other areas of society with whom we are already hesitant or fearful of interacting. Thus, the increased ability to communicate and socialise could permit society to evolve towards greater segregation and hence even more RWA attitude and behaviour.
The RWA state, in which authoritarian leaders and followers submit to the authority that they create among their group (submission) and aggress against those who deviate or who are from other groups, is clearly illustrated in the first item of Altemeyer’s measurement scale: “Our country desperately needs a mighty leader who will do what has to be done to destroy the radical new ways and sinfulness that are ruining us.” People who strongly agree with this are showing a tendency toward authoritarian submission, aggression, and conventionalism.
The mindset is also apparent in related psychological research: Stanley Milgram’s fake ‘electro-shock’ experiment into human obedience to authority, and Philip Zimbardo’s Prison Experiment into the behaviour between prisoners and guards in a constructed situation. In the former, people were prepared to deliver near fatal doses of electricity simply because they were instructed to do so by someone who appeared to hold authority, despite the fake protestations and screams of their ‘victim’. In the latter guards and prisoners started to behave in ways which illustrated how easily simply control over others can turn into emotionless aggression and helpless submission. These experiments have gone a long way to explain events such as war crimes. The RWA personality construct has indicated that to varying extent the RWA mindset exists in all of us, whether as an authoritarian leader or follower.
RWA is the personality dimension posed to react in aggressive ways to an acceleration in the unpredictability of our society. Let’s leave that one to unpack later, and move on to another factor bubbling around in the flux at the moment.
Cascading Failures
Industrialised, information-based, society is growing ever more complex in its socio-economic relationships. This growing complexity and its lack of redundancy of function has been countered by the need to maintain control.
Control in the context of social complex systems means ownership of highly connected socio-economic nodes, be they physical or informational, and thus the necessary transformation of those processes from non-linear to linear in order to maintain ownership, control, and the desired level of efficiency/profitability. As John Robb illustrates, this situation means that failure of one highly connected node can lead to a cascade of failures to other nodes. The North Eastern power failures in the US and Canada illustrated how such a cascading failure can lead to the loss of a whole system. The same goes for almost any scale-free network (social, economic, cultural, communications, etc) whose node is controlled.
Resilience is futile in a complex society in which the enduring meme of possession and control places vulnerability in the hands of a few who put energy into profiting from the control of non-equilibrium nodes (imbalance in connectivity; dependency; hierarchy). Monoculturalism (corporatism/centralised control) is the ideology and socio-economic instability is the result. The growing disparity in wealth between the poorest and richest on our planet describes both the non-equilibrium state and the potential for socio-economic failure even though all seems to be neatly secured down at present.
The instability is continuing to grow despite the apparently effortless way in which new techologies appear to offer robust solutions. Faith in Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) is an example of this way we have of placing all our eggs in one basket and feeling secure about it, and so is faith in the resilience of the internet which is a scale-free soup of strange attractors and fragile nodes which we depend upon. Overall we live in fragile, homogenised, linearly constructed society which will become increasingly unstable, particularly so if its energy supply ceases to increase.
Unconscious Mass
The Sufis have long recognised that few people in human societies ever become fully conscious, individuated, and self-actualising to the extent where we can make deeply informed decisions about our lives, societies, and our politics. Most of us are carried along in a tide of unconscious behaviour which is reinforced by societies which remove our human responsibilities – or where irresponsibility is promoted through commercial advertising and institutionally derived social control methods. Enlightenment is only for a few who can break through these and the other Veils of Maya.
However, peer-to-peer communication is now permitting those who can become awakened to follow that path of enlightenment and engagement with society, while offering an even quicker fix of the lowest common denominator by the tonne to those who would rather just swallow what is offered than take a step towards human growth. Communication means that more people are wakening up to the true situation and making their voice and actions heard while more are trodden down by that very same situation.
But situation awareness, education, knowledge, wisdom, these are the concepts of human evolution. Our consciousness is evolving toward a sense of inner authority and inner responsibility. Those who are waking up to the true causes of the human condition as currently experienced, they are increasing in number and spreading truths everywhere. We cannot escape the truth, and in the comparative daylight of the internet truth continues to spread and infect the darker corners. As some awaken, others become threatened by that emergence of individual power.
The time seems to be approaching when we see the relationship deteriorate between those who believe in outer forms of authority and hierachical structure of civilisation, and those who embrace order and structure of society from within their own hearts. This is what the bible terms apocalypse – a time of revelation and upheaval in which good will prevail over the chaos of several thousand years of ill-conceived societal power structures. As Marx put it – when enough people become radicalised (aware of the root of their problems) then there will be revolution. “The revolution will not be televised… The revolution will be live.”
Altemeyer, R. 2006 The Authoritarians LULU
Jensen, D. 2007 Endgame: The Problem of Civilization Wikipedia
Robb, J. 2007 Brave New War Global Guerillas
Pesce, M. 2008 Hyperpolitics (American Style) Personal Democracy Forum
Diamond, J. 1997 Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies. Norton. Wikipedia
Diamond, J. 2006 Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive. Penguin. Wikipedia
Jensen, D. 2000 A Language Older than Words. Context, New York.
Jensen, D. 2002 The Culture of Make Believe. Context, New York.
Abram, D. 2007 The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World. New York, Vintage.
Spowers, R. 2002 Rising Tides: A History of the Environmental Revolution and Visions for an Ecological Age. Canongate, Edinburgh.
Schumacher, E. 1973 Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered. Vintage
Hertsgaard, M. 1999 Earth Odyssey: Around the World in Search of Our Environmental Future
Bakan, J. 2004 The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power
Sagan, C. 1992. Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors: A Search for Who We Are. Random House
Sagan, C. 1992. The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence. Ballantine.
Quinn, D. (1992) Ishmael
Gordon Brown, the UK’s ‘leader’ is currently floundering as we enter the years of the Perfect Storm. He has no answers, he is not proacting, he is showing clearly that he has no clue how to discuss with his nation the problems that face us all:
Military crisis
Environmental crisis
Financial crisis
Food crisis
Oil crisis
And the biggest crisis of all: These five layered and forward-feeding factors that will end the world as we know it. Watch Naomi Klein (author of No Logo; Shock Doctrine) on the choice that is currently facing Americans.
This same choice will face Europeans as the situation here quickly follows that in the US. We may not be such a suburban culture as North America, but our way of life is nevertheless still predicated on what the philosopher Derrick Jensen terms a Culture of Make Believe.
We will be faced with an End of Suburbia and social and economic change on the same scale as North America, culturally different on the surface but no less massive. The five horses of the combined emergent property known as the apocalypse, the five factors of the Perfect Storm, are now upon us. Rome is burning and we are down at the forum watching Big Brother. Just at the moment when UK Parliament is considering building Big Brother’s brain. How beautifully ironic.
The US concentration camps fill me with a sense of foreboding. Why would an influx of Mexican immigrants need rounding up and imprisoning, are they all expected to have rabies or something? What possible civil emergency requires the detention of millions of people behind barbed wire under watchtowers? The key strength that any nation has in times of emergency is the self-organising power of its people, and not the central organising power of governments which only gets in the way. So I struggle to understand why a US government thinks that detention centres for millions of people are a valid part of FEMA’s work. That’s why I find this offical explanation hard to believe.
Terrorism? The potential for locking up millions of suspects, and possibly dissenters too, after the next terrorist attack on the US? This too is difficult to understand. Locking the door after the horse has bolted makes no sense. Nor does internment of mostly innocent people prevent anything, it is a form of collective punishment which creates martyrs and further serves terrorist recruitment. If you eventually let them go a significant number will become bombers in revenge for their treatment, further fuelling terrorism. What do you with all those people whom you do not want, aliens, non-people? Keep them incarcerated for life, or worse? Who will know they are there, will they be disappeared? I shudder to think.
Only dictator-led states round people up these days with no recourse to open courts, not states that are built on foundations of freedom, democracy and free speech. The ominous term ‘rapid development of new programs’ says it all, as if the concentration camps are not already way beyond the pale. History shows that it starts this way, the programs are normal, they are necessary for the good of all: be reasonable, be quiet, do not dissent (no, seriously be a compliant citizen or we’ll lock you up too). The Patriot Act, the Military Commissions Act, the UK’s Civil Contingencies Bill and Anti-Terror legislation are all contributing to what Gramsci called the cultural hegemony. This makes creeping state power over a population difficult to perceive. We won’t notice the reality of the function creep until its too late to take any action, then democracy will be truly gone. Fully effective democracy may already be slipping away.
An emergency can be declared in the US, as the following article points out, with the stroke of a presidential pen rather than by a majority vote in congress. From that point on, no one can challenge what’s happening without a significant risk of being locked up themselves. You think its not possible? The history of the twentieth century rings some very loud warning bells. I won’t be visiting the US again, no thanks. Read more…
Complexity increases fragility and the potential for system collapse. This principle tells us one thing when applied to human society: we are heading into very risky territory. There is a real potential for us to go straight back to the stone age after a near extinction. This is staring us in the face. Such a process could occur over a period of a few years and involve war, civil war and starvation the like of which has never been experienced before.
A solution, one which may already be occurring through a process of evolutionary self-organisation of the human species is known as rhizome. Rhizome is the antithesis of the foundations of civilisation, hierarchical power. Think of collaboration, networks of networks, My Space, Wikipedia, Open Source Software, intentional community networks, think of terrorist cells. Jason Godesky makes this point with great clarity so I won’t attempt to replicate it.
My point is simple: we can decide either to cling to outdated notions of centralised power and hierarchical civilisation or we can localise power in our immediate communities. Communities can be physically localised or information communities localised by common information context. Open Source Software is a fundamental example since it provides each user with a copy of the same solution to a problem and each user has the ability to input improvements to that solution.
We now have the tools to act locally – to go back to Aristotle’s fundamental unit of human society, the village – while communicating directly and globally under shared information contexts. Here is the practical solution to acting locally and thinking globally, and it is beginning to happen. For the those who cling to conventional civilisation the future looks bleak, but those whose choose to become part of the solution are looking at a potential renaissance of human life in sustainable form. Sustainable because in the village we must all take responsibility for our actions, since the effects our our actions are immediate: what goes round comes back round to us immediately.
The power of the rhizome is that it is, like a virus, able to adapt and outwit centralised attempts to kill it. Centralised power cannot compete and will either collapse under its own complexity or evolve into rhizomatic organisation. We are already witnessing the beginning of that collapse and the potential end of all that is wrong with conventional society, capitalism, social hierarchy, and war.
What we are looking at is anarchy. Not anarchy in its pejorative sense, that is hierarchical civilisation’s propaganda against its worst enemy. True anarchy is not chaos but balanced self-organisation: distributed control rather than centralised control. A self-regulating human society. The question is whether we can adapt quickly enough to rhizomatic organisation before centralised civilisation collapses.
If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail. -Abraham Maslow.
Current farming methods are only intensive because of the cheap energy subsidy provided by fossil-fuels and chemical fertilisers. Without these aids it would not be possible. Real intensive sustainable farming is permaculture:
Permaculture is permanent agriculture which is sustainable. It is dependent on renewable solar, human, and animal energy. It is
Permaculture is permanent human community dependent on local agriculture. In the round, both agriculture and human culture sustain each other. This is not a new idea, it has been around for thousands of years. Only recently have we chosen to experiment with different (and I contend dangerous) forms of agriculture, production, and human community.
The principle of permaculture is a high degree of planning and husbandry (both in agricultural terms and as ‘intentional’ human communities) so that a closed and symbiotic cycle can be maintained, combined with a low degree of energy-intensive brute force.
It is claimed that because permaculture food production maximises the use of a given ground area, for example by using multiple levels of foliage, it is actually more productive than current methods of agriculture which depend on chemical fertiliser and machinery. When the energy and nutrient subsidy we currently enjoy from fossil fuels is accounted for permaculture wins outright. When the oil and coal run out permaculture is the only option. See Thom Hartman’s
Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight and Derrick Jensen’s Endgame: The Problem of Civilization for an illustration of the depth of the problem.
In the same way that permaculture creates a stable closed organic food production system, community-based and cooperative agriculture helps to promote a more stable and sustainable social system by encouraging strong connections between people, their work, and the land.
Permaculture is therefore more than just a sustainable model for agriculture. It is a grass-roots approach to both agriculture and human culture. David Orr’s essays emphasise the importance of the synergy between social and biological forms of ecology and sustainability; deep ecology: The Learning Curve, Loving Children, The Case for the Earth, and Beauty is the Standard
We must love our children enough to design a world which instructs them towards community, ecology, responsibility, and joy. – David Orr
Existing Community farms / cooperatives
http://www.catalystcollective.co.uk/
http://talamhlifecentre.org.uk/home/page
http://www.highburyfarm.freeserve.co.uk/
http://http://www.keveral.org/
http://www.thefarm.org/
http://www.fordhallfarm.com/
Resources
http://www.communitylandtrust.salford.ac.uk/index.php
http://www.gaff.org.uk/
http://www.eco-logicbooks.com/
http://www.fwi.co.uk/
http://www.soilassociation.org/
http://www.resurgence.org/
http://www.ofrf.org/
http://www.organicfarmers.org.uk/
http://www.defra.gov.uk/farm/organic/default.htm
http://www.hdra.org.uk/
http://permaculturetokyo.blogspot.com/
http://www.permaculture.org.uk/
http://www.permaculture.net/
By failure I mean collapse, and by system I mean Western industrialised society for which the future is predicated on technological solutions and capitalism, and which is now on the globalisation warpath. All systems fail eventually. The concept of linear growth towards some future point at which an equilibrium is reached is a fallacy. Systems come and systems go again. As most of us already know but few are prepared to discuss – the beginning of the end is already occurring for the current dominant civilisation. War, famine, and the deaths of billions are on the cards if we do not reduce our addiction to energy and resource consumption. Diamond is only one of many thinkers and writers who are attempting to alert us but they are fully aware that those who have the power to change the course of Western civilisation are ignorant, blind, or plain stupid. That’s civilisations; self-congratulatory concerning the marvels of technology and society and yet they plunge headlong over the cliff anyway.
One potential solution is an abrupt change in the way people in Western society live. Not in five or ten years but this year. This could involve switching every remaining spare resource (from making consumer goods and other unnecessary products and services) to building wave, wind and solar energy systems and making every essential service highly energy efficient. Alongside this a return to labour intensive agricultural systems is also the only option. Show me a politician who has the guts to publicly accept that such a solution is imperative. Funnily enough we have the political will to do this in wartime, but faced with the prospect of the coming horrors it won’t happen despite the potential for world wars on an unprecedented scale. It won’t happen because the powerful believe they will benefit from the social and environmental collapse as well as from the warfare – from which they have historically always come out richer.
When I said that civilisations are stupid I was not referring to those at the helm. They and their masters know only too well what is going to happen. George Bush is intent on pursuing the War on Terror to the point of full information war (claiming explicitly that the US population needs controlling through the media and through the way it uses the internet). This is a clue as to how those in power see the world. Controlling the way the US communicates with itself is the way in which the powerful will profit from the coming upheavals. The US administration has also built 600 new prison camps in order to house around 12 million people. They claim that this is to prepare for an invasion of Mexican migrants but their mere existence is a worrying fact. The camps (usually called concentration camps but termed ‘Civilian Inmate Labour Program’ camps) would also be equally useful for a totalitarian state to control its own population. Something sinister is afoot either way – a Western government is preparing to house 12 million immigrants in forced labour conditions rather than turn them back (the US has a powerful army with which to do so). That the US administration is considering putting anyone in labour camps is worrying, but it is to be expected. The US government has known for a long time that their empire is on the road to collapse and the powerful oligarchy that supports US policies is doing what it can to ensure that they will retain power during and after the turmoil.
I am their enemy, and so are you if you are reading and recognising potential truth in this page and the thousands of others on similar themes. Bin Laden is merely a distraction from the real game – in the information war to come you and I are the real enemy as the US and other governments try to suppress knowledge of environmental and social collapse so that the powerful can retain what they have amassed. The US government has plans to take over the internet in order to control its own people. Messages like this post will ensure that I am on their wanted list, after they have wiped the data away. If you believe that 9/11 was an inside job, then consider the possibility that the continuing propaganda over the threat of terrorism is yet another a gambit aimed at gaining greater control over the US people and its friends around the world. The next terrorist attack (or false flag attack if they need it) will be used to show that total information control is essential in the ‘War on Terr’. The hawks are already preparing the ground for these tactics with their information gathering processes and with explicit demands that the internet be controlled in order to silence ‘those who tell lies against us in the war on terror’. The internet is the great leveller and fount of truth. A forum in which the truth can be found can only be harmful to those who do not want the truth to be known.
Conspiracy theory? Other right-wing governments have done far worse in the 20th century when they had the power to get away with it. Bush calls it the War on Terror, and now the Long War, but it is really to be a complete world war between the 20 percent with the greatest power (80 percent of it) and the 80 percent with the least power (20 percent of it); a race to grab what’s left of the world’s resources for the few at the expense of the majority. That’s what the political right stands for: power and self and if you are weak and die then that’s tough. It is a game to be played out under the cover of social and environmental collapse. But I really do hope I am wrong.
