We Knew it Was Coming

Some of us have been waiting most of our lives for a huge change to occur in our unsustainable civilization. We began to despair that it would never happen. We knew that the situation was unsustainable, but we still had to live our lives as though getting a good job in order to be able to afford products was the only option. Never mind pursuing our individual life's purpose. Sometimes we got sad, because the big shift never came and all that waiting time ended up being our life itself (to paraphrase John Lennon).

Well, now that I'm an official whacko with whacko fans and everything, I can admit that I personally believe that civilization is in the final stages of collapse. I can admit that I think that Carl Calleman and Ian Xel Lungold really are onto something and that we are on a sort of cosmic schedule toward an amazing, purposeful existence. Really soon.

Something is definitely up. I personally believe that within the next few months, global civilization will experience a "sudden" event that will finally shock Western civilization into reality... and I mean the reality that human beings at the bottom of the pyramid have been experiencing for two centuries. Something like having our access to the necessities of life cut off from us by empty grocery stores and regional blackouts, our sense of purpose and identity stripped as most jobs vanish, and the luxuries - such as affordable gasoline and choice of restaurant - becoming strange shapes from a half-remembered dream.

I expect to witness the paradox of young Canadian or Norwegian men making asses of themselves in small cities, looting and rioting and looking for an enemy to fight in helpless, dumbed-down, militia-style vision questing. I expect that most of us, if we haven't already in the last couple years, will experience serious personal changes.

For those who are awake, all this is ultimately for the good. Unfortunately, most people are not and do not want to be awake. This could very likely be instrumental in a measurable "population correction" (to quote a logical environmentalist I once knew).

Joseph Tainter (Collapse of Complex Societies) wrote an article a couple years ago in which he pointed out that when a complex system has passed the tipping point (as our wonderful Western civilization began to do in the 70's), the various ways that are used to try to fix all the problems (rationing, military intervention, new control systems, etc) each worsen the overall problem... until the point where the solutions are the problem. At that point there's no way out except a total clusterfuck-collapse-implosion-explosion of the current way of doing things.

That's what I expect it all to look like within a few months, if not weeks. I expect that by late June, the "new way" will be dominant in the world. There will be some sort of two-or-three week long incident of the same shock level as this current horror in Japan that will just be the straw that breaks the camel's back and makes most folks either decide to give up on the way they've been doing things most of their lives...or decide to go down with the ship. I intend to celebrate that event (she said too loudly).

What I mean by "new way" is a way of life based on the conscious decision that, "Wow, this situation is totally fucked, but I can have a good life anyway. I can make it the way I want it to be for myself."

Though that new way won't really be new at all. It will be tribal, which is what human beings evolved to be. Right now, most people believe in the One Right Way: that "we" should fix the situation because it's the "right" thing to do. The climate is changing and the economy is falling apart because "we" aren't recycling enough or being good citizens and buying green products and having nicey-nicey jobs implementing nicey-nicey Keynesian programs.

Within a few months, most of the people that are still alive will believe that they need to live their own personal lives with integrity to their own selves. Slaves throughout the world will be freed (though, sadly, many have no skills to live this way).

I speculate that this might be the trick to forming tribes that work: not coming at it with the top-down "we" mentality, but instead living from a self-confident and selfish place, hooking up with others only in a mutually-beneficial way.