Collapse by 2025---Irrefutable
Posted: Sun 13 Nov 2005, 01:58:57
I've lately started coming to the conclusion that what people say they would do in a collapse scenario is what they would like to do anyway.
--- Pioneers in cubicles; the frontier comes to you ---
The seductive thing about collapse scenarios is that they raise the prospect of a new kind of freedom: a pioneer future, bringing the frontier home. Americans (and possibly Australians?) understand this in their guts; as our histories contain the recent archetypes of the pioneer and the frontier.
The frontier is a place of rugged individualism and collectivity-by-necessity. It is home to a life that is just beyond the reach of the industrial economy. It is a somewhat-liberated zone, where the lawful order is not quite established.
That past has a powerful resonance for the cubicle-bound denizens of a declining empire. The primary difference is that the historic frontier is a place at the leading edge of growth, whereas the present condition is one at the leading edge of decay. There is good reason to want to trade the sense of decline for the sense of potential.
Today you can be a pioneer just by staying where you are, as the boundaries of civilization are set to retreat. One might envision it as a movie of historic maps run backward; the shrinking and disappearance of cities, the receding gray line of steel and concrete dwindling back ultimately to its origins, almost as if the Western states and then the Southern were disappearing one by one as the Union shrinks back to the original thirteen colonies. One could almost envision transcontinental telephone and telegraph lines being wound back onto their cable drums, and the steel rails of the Iron Horse being pried loose from the westward ground and shipped back to Eastern mills from whence they came.
This blending of the past and the future is seductive. Think of sitting around the cowboy campfire, with strong coffee from an ancient percolator, a notebook computer in your lap, the stars in the night sky above, and the howling of distant mobs, rather than coyotes, somewhere off in the darkness. But every seduction has its downside; the bitter that goes with the sweet.
--- What you see out there is yourself ---
The Rorschach test was the classic "inkblot" test from the seemingly ancient past when psychiatry was as much an art as a science, new and still searching for the links between body, mind, and spirit.
Gazing at the almost-random splotches, you could daydream like a child seeing castles in clouds, and the good doctor would note the patterns of your fantasies and make educated inferences about your deeper nature. Today it seems quaint.
And today we have the Decline and Fall as the canvas for our daydreams, the screen upon which we project all including our deepest desires.
--- Reflections in the digital mirrors ---
If the lights go out...
If the economy breaks...
If the raging mobs are rioting...
When we move to the farm or forest...
When we rebuild the cities (or raze them)...
How to build, how to trade, how to fight, how to govern...
And most pointedly, how to treat others.
Listen closely when people talk about what they *would* do under this or that scenario. It may have much to say about what they wish, more than anything, they could do right now.
--- Pioneers in cubicles; the frontier comes to you ---
The seductive thing about collapse scenarios is that they raise the prospect of a new kind of freedom: a pioneer future, bringing the frontier home. Americans (and possibly Australians?) understand this in their guts; as our histories contain the recent archetypes of the pioneer and the frontier.
The frontier is a place of rugged individualism and collectivity-by-necessity. It is home to a life that is just beyond the reach of the industrial economy. It is a somewhat-liberated zone, where the lawful order is not quite established.
That past has a powerful resonance for the cubicle-bound denizens of a declining empire. The primary difference is that the historic frontier is a place at the leading edge of growth, whereas the present condition is one at the leading edge of decay. There is good reason to want to trade the sense of decline for the sense of potential.
Today you can be a pioneer just by staying where you are, as the boundaries of civilization are set to retreat. One might envision it as a movie of historic maps run backward; the shrinking and disappearance of cities, the receding gray line of steel and concrete dwindling back ultimately to its origins, almost as if the Western states and then the Southern were disappearing one by one as the Union shrinks back to the original thirteen colonies. One could almost envision transcontinental telephone and telegraph lines being wound back onto their cable drums, and the steel rails of the Iron Horse being pried loose from the westward ground and shipped back to Eastern mills from whence they came.
This blending of the past and the future is seductive. Think of sitting around the cowboy campfire, with strong coffee from an ancient percolator, a notebook computer in your lap, the stars in the night sky above, and the howling of distant mobs, rather than coyotes, somewhere off in the darkness. But every seduction has its downside; the bitter that goes with the sweet.
--- What you see out there is yourself ---
The Rorschach test was the classic "inkblot" test from the seemingly ancient past when psychiatry was as much an art as a science, new and still searching for the links between body, mind, and spirit.
Gazing at the almost-random splotches, you could daydream like a child seeing castles in clouds, and the good doctor would note the patterns of your fantasies and make educated inferences about your deeper nature. Today it seems quaint.
And today we have the Decline and Fall as the canvas for our daydreams, the screen upon which we project all including our deepest desires.
--- Reflections in the digital mirrors ---
If the lights go out...
If the economy breaks...
If the raging mobs are rioting...
When we move to the farm or forest...
When we rebuild the cities (or raze them)...
How to build, how to trade, how to fight, how to govern...
And most pointedly, how to treat others.
Listen closely when people talk about what they *would* do under this or that scenario. It may have much to say about what they wish, more than anything, they could do right now.