It Could Happen Here - Collapse Ft. Andrew

Episode Date: March 1, 2024

Andrew and Garrison discuss theories of collapse and different responses to notions of doom.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. Hello, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, and good night. I'm Andrew Sage, and I run the YouTube channel Andrewism. But this is not Andrewism. This is It Could Happen Here Today I'm with Garrison yet again and we are tackling really the genesis of this podcast everyone's favorite subject collapse oh wow yeah you know'm just a light topic for your morning or evening commute. I mean, if it's 2024 and you don't know what collapse is,

allow me to illuminate. Also, why are you listening to this podcast? It is ostensibly about collapse. Indeed. In essence, collapse is the significant loss of an established level of complexity towards a much simpler state it can occur differently within many areas orderly or chaotically and be willing or unwilling it's not necessarily imply human extinction or a singular global event although the longer the duration the more resembles a decline instead of a collapse.

So collapse is really a lot of things happen all at once. People typically say, you know, you're talking about the climate, talking about resources and the decline of resources, talking about mass extinction, talking about societal unrest and breakdown and inequality and truly pick your poison rather we're talking about you know the f increase in global energy demands the gradually slow transition to renewables the destabilization of our food and water systems there's no one cause but several compounding pressures as pablo servine and rafael Rafael Stevens aptly summarize, To maintain itself and avoid financial disorder and social unrest, our industrial capitalist civilization is forced to accelerate, to become more complex and to consume ever more energy.

Its dazzling expansion has been nurtured by the exceptional availability, though this will not last long, of fossil fuels that are very energy efficient, coupled with a growth economy and highly unstable levels of debt. But the growth of our industrial civilization, today constrained by due physical and economic limits, has reached a phase of decreasing returns. Technology which has long served to push these limits back is less and less able to ensure this acceleration and locks in this unsustainable trajectory by preventing the development of new alternatives sounds familiar at the same time the sciences of complexity are discovering that beyond certain thresholds complex systems including economies and ecosystems suddenly switch to new and unpredictable states of equilibrium

and may even collapse. We are more and more aware that we have crossed certain boundaries that guarantee the stability of our living conditions as a society and as a species. The global climate system and many of the planet's ecosystems and major biochemical cycles have left the zone of stability that we were familiar with heralding a time of sudden large-scale disruptions, which in turn will destabilize industrial societies, the rest of humankind, and even other species. Yes, I agree. In terms of the hows of collapse, you know, it might be slow, it might be quick, it might be happening now already, or maybe just really kicking off seriously in the near future today we'll really be talking about the sort of different ways of

conceptualizing collapse different frame devices we can use and addressing the variety of responses that people have to collapse in a future episode i want to take a look at, I suppose, a more, this could be like the pessimistic episode, in a sense. And the next one will be a bit more, you know, how not to spiral into despair. Yeah, how to have a good understanding of the reality of our crumbling systems, but not just be a doomer who stays inside and scrolls all the time and is just depressed. Well, but thankfully you have more options than just being a doomer. And we're going to get into all of those responses very soon. There are quite a few interesting ones. Alrighty.

First of all, we need to talk about some different ways of conceptualizing collapse. For example, we have Dmitri Orlov's Five Stages, which is like a rollercoaster of chaos, with each stage more intense than the last. First, we have stage one, financial collapse. Everyone losing faith in business as usual. Financial institutions going belly up, savings vanish, financial freefall, say goodbye to your

savings account loans pensions basically what went down in argentina back in 2001 sounds familiar yeah yes yes next we have commercial collapse now it's not just about money it's about losing faith in the market shall provide commodities end up being hoarded shopping centers are closing for business and we might even bring back barter and then boom we have the next stage political collapse trust in the government will take care of you crumbles governments try to maintain order with curfews and martial law, but local corruption takes over services. The roads, unmaintained. The rubbish, piling up.

Orlov actually makes a really bold claim here, and that is that the US might be on the track of these stages. I know that sounds like a really radical claim to make. I feel like everyone listening to this has a decent understanding that these things aren't just switches that are either on or off. This is like a sliding scale, and

the US is a decent ways on this scale already. I mean, that's what the first five episodes of the second season of this show was really I mean, that's what the first five episodes of the second season of this show was really all about, specifically in terms of the climate and how it's not like everything all falls apart at once.

It's that these systems that we've grown to rely on will slowly crumble away until they've become basically nothing. Or they've just become like corporate puppets or they've just become like, they're not actually real anymore in any kind of impactful way and i mean we saw a little bit of this during covet how many systems that we uh relied on just weren't really around anymore or weren't we're not actually reliable exactly and you see this whenever like whenever

there's a massive amount of wildfires that takes over a whole region and it displaces hundreds of thousands of people, usually the response to that is not the government's going to come in and save everybody. It's a whole bunch of really poor anarchists set up a series of tents to give people food and to get people organized to find places to sleep. And that's the actual response to these crumbling institutions. It's not just like, you know, Falloutout new vegas we're living in the apocalypse immediately it's it's it's a lot

more uh fuzzy yeah yeah and in a sense i kind of get the people who wish it was a bit more straightforward and simple you know because if it's like if it was like bit more straightforward and simple. You know, because if it's like, if it was like a major event, right? Like if it was an alien invasion that just happened, I think it's a lot easier for people to conceptualize something like that and respond to it. And I just mobilize all your efforts and all your focus is on solving this issue

because it's right in front of your face. When you're talking about about geological timescales and multiple decades of slowly breakdown and you have all these election cycles and you have all these tipping points the scientists are telling you about and then someday, eventually eventually it's raining during the dry season and dry during the rainy season and there's no snow in january and all that jazz onward to social collapse this is where according to all, faith in your people will take care of you disintegrates. Civil wars brew, depopulation becomes a thing, clans take over, like a post-apocalyptic drama unfolding. And then the grand finale is cultural collapse, which is a loss of faith in the goodness of humanity.

And as a result of that loss of faith kindness generosity empathy all falls out the window i completely disagree i think with all of the solution here i think that these times of crisis can often bring out the best in people of course we also do see the worst in people but i don't think he'll ever reach a point where the the bad of people's behavior so vastly outweighs the good to the point where people just completely lose faith in our capacity for mutual aid and that kind of thing there is of course a bonus stage that all of throws in which is ecological collapse where rebooting society in an exhausted environment it's like good luck with that you know it's very difficult to do it becomes a sort of a well that we end up trapped in

so that's one way of understanding collapse and there's also c.s hollings four phase model of ecological change and according to him all systems go through cycles of four phases. A phase of growth, where the system accumulates matter and energy. A phase of conservation, where the system becomes more and more interconnected, rigid and therefore vulnerable. A phase of collapse or loosening. And then a phase of rapid reorganization, leading to another phase of growth in often very different conditions.

lead into another phase of growth in often very different conditions this is more of a i suppose optimistic i mean i read it as kind of optimistic because it recognizes that you know something like things break down and that's it like even in death there's like a life and there's like a rebirth and then is of course the conditions that rebirth will be different but it's not like things completely come to an end it's just that the conditions that growth and healing might be kick-started with would be very different from the ones that were there the conditions that were there originally another authors of views on this subject a guy named john michael grayer once said that quote the difference between my view and that of many others in the collapse field is that a lot of them assume that the first wave of crisis will be followed by total collapse and i argue that it'll be followed by muddying through and partial recovery,

then by renewed crisis and so on. Thus I don't think it's actually that useful to have a single metric for what counts as collapse because collapse is a process, not an event. The collapse of industrial civilization has been underway for quite some time now and will still be a going concern for longer than any of us will be alive. And then there's David Korowicz's sort of choose-your-own-adventure style collapse, where we have sort of three options that we could go down. There's one of linear decline, there's one of oscillating decline, and there's one of systemic collapse. First up, we have linear decline, which is optimistic in a sense. It's assuming everything will respond proportionally to its causes.

So, for instance, if oil consumption goes down, GDP follows suit. It's a very gradual and controlled decline, which gives us time to transition to renewable energy and to change our ways. It's kind of a dream scenario for some deep growth enthusiasts or some of those who champion a transition to a greener future we kind of want it to be a slow collapse not a rapid collapse because it gives us time to respond and adjust accordingly of course the other side of that the catch is that when it is that slow it also sort of gives an excuse for inaction an excuse for delaying and putting off and procrastinating on the changes that are necessary a more realistic scenario according to to corwiss is oscillating decline where you have economic

activity bouncing between peaks of recovery and recession but with an overall downward trend it's almost like an oil price roller coaster where the higher prices lead to recession then a dip in prices sparks better growth but with each cycle the system loses a bit more of its mojo for lack of a better word. The debts pile up, the investment possibilities dwindle, and it's kind of like the catabolic collapse idea that John Michael Greer came up with. It's not too fast, and so in a sense it still gives society some room to adapt.

And the last model that Corvus has is the systemic collapse model, which sees our civilization as a super complex system with all these intertwined feedback loops. And so by crossing these invisible changeover points and dealing with small disruptions, it could end up leading to unpredictable changes. It's like a roller coaster without a clear track Non-linear, cumulative, and potentially brutal. You know, it's like no kind of safety approval was passed on this rollercoaster whatsoever. It's a death trap, and there's no telling where the cart will veer off course. Really, the how of collapse depends on who you ask, but with all these models, there do seem to be a couple clear points. Best articulated again by Savine and Stevens. 1. The physical growth of our societies will come to a halt in the near future.

2. We have irreversibly damaged the entire Earth system, at least on the geological scale of human beings. 3. We are moving towards a very unstable non-linear future where major disruptions will be the norm and four we're now potentially subject to global systemic collapses prospects look bleak to me they look extra bleak when you consider that some people are still stuck on the is climate change real ha ha ha global warming and yet it's cold ha ha ha level of discourse but for those who are made aware of the issues i've noticed people adopt a range of responses hi i'm ed zitron host of the better podcast, and we're kicking off our second season

digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong though, I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to god things can change if we're loud enough.

So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh.

And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez.

At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story,

as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Gianna Parente. And I'm Jimei Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, or wherever you get your podcasts. Yay, I can finally buy a new phone. But you also have a lot of questions like, how should I be investing this money? I mean, how much do I save? And what about my 401k? Well, we're talking with finance expert Vivian Tu, aka Your Rich BFF, to break it all down. I always get roasted on the internet when I say this out loud, but I'm like,

every single year you need to be asking for a raise of somewhere between 10 to 15%. I'm not saying you're going to get 15% every single year, but if you ask for 10 to 15 and you end up getting eight, that is actually a true raise. Listen to this week's episode of Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I think one of the first responses that I see to collapse is slumber right they catch like a whiff of what's going on and decide to just turn over and go back to sleep to purposefully embrace ignorance disregard new information and shun any understanding of what's going on perhaps you know they're guarding their

fragile sanity which is understandable but people sleeping but we need to face these issues is a disaster waiting to happen these issues are not going anywhere and we really need people to have the courage and the boldness to face them instead of turning over and going back to sleep similarly to that response we have the denial response where people face with this reality reject it consciously and construct their own or they search for information that comforts them rather than exposes them to the truth they construct a media bubble that shields them or a social circle that can protect them and reaffirm their core beliefs everyone is capable of denying reality but it's become quite prevalent in the age of technology where we can easily shut

out any truths that make us uncomfortable. And then there's apathy. Like slumber and denial, people respond with apathy to protect themselves in some way. After all, if nothing really matters, there's no need to try, no need to think, no need to bother. It's easier to just disconnect. As humans, I think we have a really tough time responding to non-immediate threats. It's been said, as I said earlier, that no, climate change isn't happening too quick. It's happening too slowly.

It's not obvious enough. And because it's not obvious enough, it's very easy for this next response to be made manifest. That is preoccupation. Of course, this is more of a fault of the system. But people these days are real busy. Not everyone can afford to invest in exploring and understanding the world's problems, even if the threat is so existential that their office busy work or retail servitude would ultimately amount to nothing.

But I'm not talking about those people when I talk about preoccupation. I'm talking about the people who respond to the issues of the world by purposefully distracting themselves with busy work. Constructing a convenient excuse to not challenge the structures that they are under or maintain. Like running away from the predicaments of collapse. But the predicaments of collapse catches up to all of us, sooner or later. And on the flip side of the people who busy themselves with busy work are the people who dive into mindless consumerism which is coupled with apathy to some extent if nothing matters and everything's falling apart you might as well just indulge consume distract yourself with games

music party and drugs and drinking it's like slumber except you're aware of the reality and just plug in your ears to just dance. But at least for those that plug their ears, they don't face what I've called overwhelmment. Some people respond by trying to wrap their minds around the depth and complexity of collapse to the point of obsession and just kind of end up losing their minds altogether there i don't think there is any human mind that can completely consume and comprehend every minute problem we face i think that's why we are a social species because we can we can we can kind of distribute that understanding of all the various problems so that no one person has to handle

all of it we really are going to need to come together to understand collapse because as individuals to deal with something so complex, abstract far flung and frightening it's

it's frankly, subjecting yourself to that is almost a form of self-torture or self-flagellation. And what we need is the opposite. We need people building each other up and healing our communities and coming together

so we can solve this crisis. Of course, there is such a thing as being too caught up in that sort of hope um and a trap that a lot of people fall naturally into because in a sense we are biologically predisposed towards optimism. We tend to hold on to hope in some future outcome they'll just work out. And it's sort of a blind hope because it can't adjust to the ever-shifting reality. It strips us of our ability to see clearly and to take realistic and necessary action. We give up our agency and leave things in the hands of the leaders and the experts. We stay passive. We waste time, precious time that can be spent on real harm

reduction, just going with the flow. We prevent the necessary conversations with the blind hope when we fixate so much on whether we can fix it or how we can fix it without considering what we need to do if we can't fix it you know what happens then blind hope manifests in a few different forms but i think whatever form it comes into it ultimately and it ultimately and inevitably leads to disappointment waiting forever for a future that won't come that exists solely in one's mind irrespective of reality it's quite frankly a form of denial that it takes a bit of a journey to move towards a greater level of emotional maturity to handle the tough conversations and let go of the false hopes like the idea that we'll somehow reverse all the

damage our planet has been dealt with scot-free but once we have done that and once we have strengthened our resolve and strengthened our ability to process and to engage with the reality of what's happening we can take action with knowledge that no, our leader is not going to do anything substantially enough and no, this moves far beyond reform. It really is a hard pill to swallow, but if you can take it, you'll be better off to resist. We really don't need blind hope and resistance. I think hope hope is important i'm distinguishing it from hope blind hope however is a distraction and sort of connected to the blind hope conversation are the people who respond to this crisis with the obsession with individual change

people who believe with a few tweaks here and there, that we can continue our perpetual growth. We just have to switch to veganism or recycle or carpool every once in a while. And that that individual level action on a large enough scale would resolve the crisis. They place a lot of stock and blame on individuals entirely, and they don't engage with the wider structures of society. A lot of liberals, of course, fall into this camp.

And speaking of liberals, we see a very pernicious trend of progress worship as another response to collapse. The author Dennis Meadows actually points out a curious trend over the past four decades. There's a constant shift in justifying why we shouldn't change our behavior. Back in the 70s, critics were saying there are no limits. Anyone who thinks there are limits, they just don't get it. In the 80s, they're saying, oh, actually, there are limits, but know anyone who thinks they're limits they just don't get it in the 80s they're saying oh actually there are limits but they're very far away we have nothing

to worry about nothing to lose sleep over and then into the 90s the limits are no longer at are no longer as distant and then the supporters of growth they chiming in with oh well you know the limits are close but no worries you know the markets and technology will swoop in and fix everything and then you reach in the 2000s and it becomes clear that the tech and the markets might not cut it and the narrative spins again regardless of whether or not the market or tech can cut it we still need to push for growth because that's the golden ticket to the resources we need to tackle our problems it's basically a game of justification hopscotch it's almost a cult of progress that any and all growth is good that no matter the consequences of on our finite earth we can just

expand and expand eternally a lot of the responses I get to my discussions of degrowth or post-growth or whatever, it's like, yeah, but you can't do that because then the GDP wouldn't grow and wouldn't elevate people's standard of living. It's not fair that global social people... Wait, Andrew, are you a Malthusian? Nothing of the sort, Nothing of the sort. Nothing of the sort. But I think that we should not be falling into this trap of being like,

oh, well, you know, it's not fair that these rich countries, they got to reach that level of development. And then we have to like, and then what we're going to step in and stop other countries from doing so. And it's not that, I mean, I'm speaking from a not-rich country. What I'm saying is that the, what I say to these people is that the path of development these rich countries took is not sustainable.

It is literally doom and a sore. Yes. The entire population cannot strive for the level of consumption that Americans strive for. Do I think the development needs to take place? Absolutely. But not on the trajectory, not following in the footsteps of these rich countries, this global north and its legacy of decimating the world.

Places like India, places like the Caribbean, places like india places like the caribbean places like places in africa you know we do need to you know improve housing and improve access to water and improve uh access to education all these different things but chasing after this sort of careless economic growth narrative and path is just going to accelerate all of our destruction i agree with the need for reparations from global north to global south that will allow us to reach the level of uh we could reach the quality of life um that i think every human should have access to but i don't think that that is the same thing as saying that oh, you know, every country should have their own equivalent of Britain and the U.S.'s industrial revolution. And who cares that that ship has sailed, that window of opportunity has passed. Yeah, and I think going back to your series of episodes on cults, when you're talking about the cult of progress, I think that

gets thrown out as a very trendy term, but I think it has a lot of truth in it for this specific reason. In order to maintain the type of progress that is necessary to sustain this, at this current point, what seems to be a very unsustainable method of interacting with the planet you have to rely on growth as this thing that you can't actually like predict it's act it's you can't actually predict a real end point for it you have to only assume and only hope that it will get there it's it's this that's why there's this real sense of accelerationism throughout these whole industries because people know that if we continue just doing this way the planet will not be functional at least for us um in like a hundred years uh probably

you know in much less time as well but the reason why they're all continuing is that they have the people have it have this idea in their heads that if we just if we just keep accelerating if if we keep going we have to go faster and faster and faster because we'll find something along the way that will magically fix the problem well if the only way to fix the problem is to continue accelerating and we'll find this thing that doesn't currently exist but we'll find like this like supernatural device or discovery that allows us to kind of fix the little problem we've made for ourselves and it is a very like religious belief that if if we just keep going we'll like get some like deep this some like some like deep insight. We've reached the point where

people are literally looking to the heavens, like almost in a supernatural sense, to find a solution. They're like, oh, well, we'll just be able to keep on going because asteroid mining, we'll just go and settle in other planets and that'll continue our expansion endlessly and we can just keep on going.

You also see this with people developing AI. They're like, if we get an AI smart enough, it'll be able to tell us how to fix our problem. And it is a deeply spiritual drive. It is a very cultish drive. We have to keep going, even though we are currently dooming ourselves by continuing.

We have to continue, because that's the only way that we'll get us out of this problem. It's like, we can only dig deeper. we've gone so far into the center of the earth just it's faster yeah on the road it's faster to dig out the other way than actually try to turn around and fill the hole again it is a very cultish spiritual drive to like continue this to continue and like explicitly like accelerate development because we've realized we've done something that's uh from our current point of view almost irreparable but there's this there is this belief that if we owe that the only way to fix it is is if we keep going then we'll somehow

stumble across the magical the magical thing that will fix our problem. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech

from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field. And I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts.

Check out betteroffline.com. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez. Elian.

Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well.

Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Gianna Parenti. And I'm Jimei Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, the early career podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. One of the most exciting things about having your first real job is that first real paycheck. You're probably thinking, yay, I can finally

buy a new phone. But you also have a lot of questions like, how should I be investing this money? I mean, how much do I save? And what about my 401k? Well, we're talking with finance expert Vivian Toot, aka Your Rich BFF, to break it all down. I always get roasted on the internet when I say this out loud, but I'm like, every single year, you need to be asking for a raise of somewhere between 10 to 15%. I'm not saying you're going to get 15% every single year, but if you ask for 10 to 15 and you end up getting eight, that is actually a true raise. Listen to this week's episode of Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I want to talk specifically about the sort of, I mean, I know there are other people in the world who also have this response, people in the global south who will also have this response but i see a lot of americans responding to my like degrowth advocacy whatever saying well what about the global south you know i mean never mind i live in the global south uh what about the global south

and what really gets me about it is just how it's almost like a way of comforting themselves. Sure. It's using the struggles of marginalized people to not interrogate your own role in the continuing destruction and systemic oppression that produces this great economic and difference in quality of life because it's like you have to then you'll have to confront the fact that maybe your lifestyle and the privilege some of the lifestyle and privileges you enjoyed really should not be enjoyed by anyone ever like maybe that level of thing was never sustainable in the first place and we could have done with less and and i know it's

i really i really hate having this kind of conversation on the internet because i think it's very difficult to get into the level of nuance as necessary because then you know people will say oh well i'm from a working class background i have from this and that i've also faced a lot of deprivation i get all. But then there are other things where I'm like, you know, can we live in a world where everyone has access to Amazon one-day shipping, two-day shipping?

You know, can we live in a world where everyone owns a car, even if it's an electric car? I think there are certain standards of, I guess, lifestyle or milestones of lifestyle that we've come to accept that I think in retrospect, we will look back and say, wow, that was an aberration of human history, that we were even maintaining that sort of infrastructure, even maintaining that level of consumption.

You know, I'm sure a couple of generations online, people will look back and be like, wow, is he telling me nearly every household had a car and that everybody was just on the roads driving all the time and we built our cities, our infrastructure around vehicles when we knew very early on, when the oil we knew very early on when the oil companies knew very early on that eventually we would run out and we just didn't care i'm kind of all over the place with this but you're gonna say something well i was also gonna mention like in these in these sorts

of discussions it also can be often overlooked that just because you live in the United States or any other kind of big place, that doesn't mean like it's that's not the United States isn't one place. apartment in a downtown like city center versus living on the outskirts of town in like a house that's falling apart right or living on the street or um or living in the middle of utah versus living on the coast like there's or living in uh like uh montana like there's there is such a large difference even for people in the states for, for like, not everyone is able to live in this like very, arguably very unsustainable, very like hyper, hyper modernity way. There is millions of people that are like. Of course, of course. No, I'm not saying that against your point. I'm saying like this is this is also part of

the problem like we have we have tricked ourselves into thinking that if you if you live in the united states that must mean you are like you you are one of the elite few but there is millions of people who are living in like the the like some of the most some of the harshest uh conditions in the world even in the richest country in the world like it is yeah and and degrowth is not coming to take from one's meager lifestyle if one lives in those circumstances you know degrowth is really coming after those on the other end of that spectrum of lifestyle no if any it would any, it would be a greater equalizer between people

living in countries like the United States. It would be an elevation of your standard of living. Yes, as well as looking at, quote-unquote, the global south, or quote-unquote third-world countries. There's this idea of like, I think we've had

someone on this show to talk about this before joey like uh the fourth world like you're you are living in third world conditions but in a first world country um and how all of these all of these types of um these all of these types of systemic inequality and differences in uh like cost of living living conditions they all they all combine together in really gauzy and fuzzy ways even if you live in the united states canada uh england like yeah germany wherever um and it produces this extremely extremely bizarre mishmash of of uh circumstances of circumstance yeah you can you can walk by someone who's driving like a five hundred thousand dollar car meanwhile you are literally being forced to live on the street

like that is yeah that is that is such a bizarre uh dichotomy the few times i've been to the u.s seeing that dichotomy like in real there's something else i mean of course there's an income inequality and there's vast disparities in wealth and churned out as well um you know there are people who you know live on the streets and there are people who you know go to yacht parties every weekend what i want people to recognize is the way that these elites get you to advocate against your own interests is through that sort of and connect you to their cult of progress and get you invested in their cult of progress hook you in is through that sort of temporarily embarrassed millionaire mantra they hook you in by saying yeah they're coming for our stuff eventually you'll get to my level too and then you wouldn't want people to take

your stuff away either you know like my my tech development is gonna rise or gonna bring all of us up you know uh and you shouldn't let these people stop you rather than no well obviously these rich guys gonna get brought down a peg But by bringing them down a peg, everybody will have a better quality of life. But instead of recognizing that, they deceive people with this techno opium. They bring people into this trap of capitalist realism. that either you live in the deprivation of the worst of the worst of people's livelihoods and under capitalism or you live in the excess of the best of the best of people's lives under capitalism and there's nothing beyond those two options and so obviously the degrowth people want you to be living in the former option and you should oppose them because of that another response

i see is that there are a lot of people who are just completely like have complete faith in our leaders who believe that you know once we get just the right people in office things will work out the truth is of course the system corrupts even the best of intentions. Politicians are a class unto themselves, and their actions reflect ultimately their own interests and the interests of their backers. Nation-states, governments, rulers, it's their

job, it's in their job description to maintain structures that ultimately harm humanity, and there's only so much they can do to affect the status quo. Placing our salvation in their hands is an exercise in futility. Investing your future in the confines of electoralism is a waste of time but it also demonstrates how effectively mass media and schooling has broken down and limited our imagination. I like to call that statist realism, the idea that there's no alternative to

this hierarchy of rulers and ruled. That people just need to submit to the wills and whims of others rather than organizing for themselves and their communities. There's of course the response of apocalypse worship, a rather classic response among those who end up obsessing over collapse and honestly the worshippers of the apocalypse also hold to a form of blind hope you know the accelerationists doomsday preppers cultists extreme survivalists zombie video game enthusiasts believers in the end times they all seem to have a whole sort they seem to have a real excitement for collapse or they fix it really heavily on the ideal version of the end of the world like they can't wait for the world to end they embrace the sort of we're all on our own mantra barricade themselves bunker down stockpile

weapons and essentials they gain up for a violent future Because they anticipate That others Will react To the situation similarly to how They intend to react So they're taking like a page from Mad Max And like yeah I'm gonna be

Immortan Joe so I don't end up A thrall of Immortan Joe Yeah I mean if it's not obvious Immortan Joe so I don't end up a thrall of Immortan Joe. Yeah. I mean, if it's not obvious, the people who respond in this way freak me out. You know, those who look at what's going on and instead of resisting or trying to change the circumstances,

they just accept it as things going according to schedule or prophecy or they try to make it worse. I don't know if you've seen Leave the World Behind. Oh my god, yes. Horrible. prophecy or they try to make it worse i don't know if you've seen um leave the world behind oh my god yes horrible yeah that i'm sure you remember that one character and his that prepper and his whole response to the crisis before him complete and utter selfishness which is a betrayal

to his character inspiration in the movie Tremors which showed the correct way to be a prepper which is to actually help the people in your community I actually haven't seen that movie it's my list it is an old

movie about a worm that takes over a small town it's pretty silly but it does a, it is an old movie about a worm that takes over a small town. It's pretty silly, but it does have- Is it a Stephen King movie? I don't think so. No. Okay. It sounds like something Stephen King would write.

It's, it's not really a horror. It's more of like a comedy thriller. Like it's- A comedy. Okay. It's not a comedy, but it is an innately funny situation also because it's like filmed in the eighties or nineties. Like it,

it just, the, the way it's aged just makes it more funny, but it is also a good movie. Um, and, and, uh,

yeah, after, after, after this, I mean, it's, it's kind of like, what if like an earthquake or a tornado hits this small town,

except this is more like adversarial. It's like this, like a worm is like of like, what if an earthquake or a tornado hits this small town? Except this is more adversarial. This worm is causing the town's buildings to cave in because it's digging underground. And we see this fantastic, fantastic prepper character is able to help everybody out because he is prepared for such a scenario how kind of him yes unlike unlike that douchebag and um and leave the world behind yes we'll talk about that movie after

yeah i mean the last response I really wanted to cover was despair, pessimism, seeing the worst, expecting the worst, living in utter defeat, weighing down actual efforts with pessimism, jumping into my comment section to be more in our fate. I mean, according to those in despair, there's nothing that we can do to affect our future. can do to affect our future and in my eyes those on this duma pill are just as misguided as those who are hyped up with blind hopium i think it's okay to admit that we don't know what's gonna happen you know i don't claim to be a prophet i don't think anybody should the ipcc reports for example are a consensus of scientists and their understanding of the situation some scientists are going to be more conservative in their report in their reporting others are a bit more catastrophist but either way i really don't think we need to get into the weeds of just how bad it is or exactly how it's going to happen what matters is that things need to change some way somehow i think it's important to try and understand as much of the situation as you could not to the point of obsession

to take note of how you respond to the issue to look at the various responses i covered and see if you fit into any of those camps and to recognize that the worst case scenario is far from inevitable my advice is really to prepare for the worst in whatever way you can and put hope and build for the best build community build connections Build your skills. Build your strengths. And push in any way that you can in whatever sphere you find yourself for meaningful change. Because, say it with me now, it could happen here. It certainly could. That's it with me now. It could happen here. It certainly could. That's it for me.

I'm on YouTube, Andrewism. I'm on patreon.com slash stdrew. That's it. All power to all the people. Peace. It could happen here is a production of Cool Zone Media.

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