Concentric Circles of Collapse
I recently watched the Leonardo DiCaprio documentary The 11th Hour, and it reminded me of the bigger arenas of failure going on the world, the many Russian nesting dolls of catastrophe. These multiple phenomena include global warming, disappearing biodiversity, desertification and deforestation, etc. But what it essentially comes down to is too many of us living in the wrong way on the planet. If there were a lot less people, we could afford to live recklessly. We might even be able to support the current population, if we lived much lighter. But we can't get away with both: too many people living in an ecologically damaging way.
But as the economy continues to tank, it becomes harder to keep sight of those concentric circles of collapse. How can anyone concentrate on greenhouse gases and rain forests when their paychecks and pensions are melting away before their eyes? But it is in this panicky period most of all that we need to keep the proper perspective on our problems. Without an understanding of how our obsolete social form lies at the center of wider financial and ecological conditions, we are left flailing around and grasping at narratives that don't make sense. So we've got John McCain spinning his Establishment Maverick crap, somehow expecting people to believe that everything can be okay if we just keep fighting a war, keep not taxing the rich, and keep defunding studies of migratory caribou. And less ridiculous, but certainly substantially delusional in its own right, we have Obama's plan to retax the rich to pay for national health care, green energy initiatives, continued bloated military spending, and magical stimulus programs. On talk radio, we get virulent garbage, like blaming those deadbeat defaulters for borrowing money that they had no intention of ever paying back. Somehow, these poor folk were able to bring the entire economy to its knees, with the help of those commie Dems in Congress who forced the poor lending institutions to give out money they didn't want to -- boo-hoo. Without an understanding of how our present crises are interlocked and are actually produced by our way of living, we lurch back and forth from one incomplete explanation to another.
Going back to the title of this post, let's envision a set of concentric circles:
The center of this set is our social form itself, the One Person-one Job/One Family-One Dwelling complex. This is the core from which all of the outer circles radiate. The outer circles are all of the other manifestations of collapse which we see around us: empty and vacuous consumer culture, degraded local economies, national political bankruptcy, international political strife, and ecological catastrophe at the outermost ring. But the driver of the whole thing is that social form at the center, the living pattern that creates too much consumption, not enough local knowledge, and self-destructive patterns of behavior. Our current social form creates the wrong kinds of people, by not providing appropriate levels of contact with nature, truly valuable labor, and other people. The psychic and economic disruptions that ensue are in turn generators of wider failures, like rampant jingoism and intolerant fundamentalist religion. The whole resulting macro-system becomes a mindless creator of people and stuff, with no thought as to how much of the natural world and the human spirit are sacrificed in the process.
At the end of DiCaprio's documentary, a gallery of eco-stars give their hopeful visions of the future: green design, sustainable economies, renewable energy, and the wonderful new jobs that will result in crafting this new world. Similar paeans to a New Green Age are visible in general lefty rhetoric like Obama's. But as I watch these visionaries wax forth, I just cannot see the path from A to G (for Green) without a fundamental reorganization of the basic social form. The current system has made too many individuals and families utterly powerless, living paycheck to paycheck. These folks are either going to be left behind by the wondrous new green economy, or else massively subsidized by the rich to get all of their old debt cleared away and new job skills put in place. I just don't see that massive redistribution happening, especially as general American investment capital is now drying up fast. And even if there was a huge transfer of wealth from the rich to everyone else, via a government stimulus package of debt relief and job training, I still believe that the American Algorithm would unravel, as the general ratios of labor to income to consumption just do not add up, in their current form.
But if the main social form, the center of the concentric pattern, were to become more collective, amazing changes could be quickly radiated out to the outer spheres of collapse. Things that prove impossible for individuals acting alone or in nuclear families would suddenly become doable with the scaling power of community as the driver. Functions that are currently purchased on the open market could be brought in house, freeing up community members to undertake their own job re-training. Upgrades to green and appropriate household technology that are out of reach for families living paycheck to paycheck would become affordable to a collective body that pools its financial resources. And older and elderly people facing dire retirement-money straits would have a more dignified future laid out for them in a cooperative community.
The collective social form must replace the current nuclear-family/full-employment/economic-growth matrix. Only a larger community social form can provide a secure home base from which to drive rapid and real social and economic change, which is the only way to avoid the ultimate challenge of full-scale ecological meltdown.
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