{"id":545,"date":"2011-09-01T11:57:45","date_gmt":"2011-09-01T18:57:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/?p=545"},"modified":"2011-09-01T11:57:45","modified_gmt":"2011-09-01T18:57:45","slug":"collapse-scenarios","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/archives\/545","title":{"rendered":"Collapse Scenarios"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Photo by Marcia Sloane<\/p>\n

(This article appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser<\/em> August 2011)<\/p>\n

\u201cOur business gets better as the economy gets worse.\u201d<\/em> Kent Moyer, founder and CEO of World Protection Group Inc.<\/p>\n

<\/em><\/p>\n

The business referred to in the opening quote is officially known as Executive Protection, and Kent Moyer is the kingpin of a successful Executive Protection agency providing body guards and small armies and surveillance experts and surveillance equipment and defensive strategies to wealthy individuals and consortiums of wealthy people who are certain they need protection from kidnappers, assassins, disgruntled employees, mobs of poor people, psychotic fans, and the like. Having recently read The Three Musketeers<\/em>, it occurs to me that the musketeers were a seventeenth century equivalent of one of today\u2019s private armies dedicated to protecting a consortium of wealthy people. In the case of The Three Musketeers<\/em>, the wealthy people in question were the king of France and his sycophants.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt isn’t so much that hard times are coming; the change observed is mostly soft times going.\u201d Groucho Marx<\/em><\/p>\n

Today many thoughtful people are hard at work writing essays and books about the coming (ongoing) collapse of economic, social, and natural systems in North America and around the world. I applaud them for their efforts and salute them for their desire to awaken others to the dangers confronting us. I occasionally go on binges of reading (mostly skimming) these essays and I am variably filled with hope or despair depending on the prognosis presented by the prognosticator. Some of the most popular of these prognosticators are, to my wholly subjective way of thinking, charlatans, some are brilliant visionaries, some are down-to-earth folk with helpful information, and many could use good editors. Dave Smith, by the way, does a great job presenting a constant flow of these kinds of essays and other non-mainstream articles about important environmental, agricultural, and social issues on his admirable web site Ukiah Blog Live.<\/p>\n

I realize this is probably an unwise generalization (most generalizations are unwise), but most of these collapse scenario essayists strike me as impatient for their predictions to come true. That is, there is a tone in many of these essays of righteous indignation about all the horrible things humans have done to bring us to these points of collapse, and now they (we) will be sorry they (we) did those horrible things and it serves them (us) right for being so horrible and greedy and stupid, and tomorrow, or next week, or at the very latest next year, the various houses of cards will come tumbling down, roving gangs of starving killers will take over the world, internet service will become patchy and then disappear, only obscenely wealthy people will be able to afford gasoline for their armored vehicles driven by executive protection operatives, it will never stop raining in some places on earth, never rain again in other places, and no one with any sense would want to live within a thousand miles of a nuclear power plant because after the economic collapse such power plants will be too expensive to keep cool and they will all melt down and radiate the surrounding territories. Yikes!<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen did the future switch from being a promise to being a threat?\u201d Chuck Palahniuk<\/em><\/p>\n

I am not saying these collapse scenario essayist aren\u2019t right. Many of them are probably very right. Time is telling. What I\u2019m trying to say is that the gestalt, if you will, of the sum total of these collapse scenario essays is that we, you and I, are doomed to suffer horribly, and soon. Put another way, these presentations strike fear in the reader\u2019s heart, which I assume is the prognosticators\u2019 intention, to strike fear. And my problem with striking fear in people is that fear, in my opinion, is our single largest obstacle to making the myriad substantive changes we need to make in order to avoid or at least soften the impact of the coming collapses we are destined to experience.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhere is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?<\/em><\/p>\n

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?\u201d\u2028 T.S. Eliot<\/em><\/p>\n

Tremendous fear, in my experience, may inspire short-term fight or flight, but fear per se tends to paralyze. Indeed, it seems clear that our current overlords employ fear-striking tactics, overt and subliminal, to keep the population acquiescent and afraid to act out against even the most horrific unfair amoral misuses of authority, such as our government handing over trillions of dollars to the very thieves who stole trillions of dollars from us and brought about the current economic collapse scenario we now inhabit. I\u2019m not advocating soft-pedaling the facts and figures underpinning various collapse scenarios; I\u2019m saying that I, selfishly, would appreciate it if collapse scenario essayists would make more of an effort to balance their terrifying scenarios with plausible scenarios of renaissance.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe.\u201d Goethe<\/em><\/p>\n

I realize that many collapse scenario essayists are making the point that there are<\/em> no plausible scenarios of renaissance. Our window of opportunity, they explicate, has closed. We\u2019re doomed. The end. Discussion over. Humans blew their chances. But how interesting is that, especially after the third or fourth or fiftieth proclamation of the irreversible nature of our catastrophic situation? Does it ever occur to these doomsters (I\u2019m sure it does to some of them) that our thoughts have an enormous impact on what manifests as reality?<\/p>\n

\u201cEverybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.\u201d\u00a0Gertrude Stein<\/em> <\/em><\/p>\n

Yesterday, as I was parking in front of the bulletin board fence on Ukiah Street in Mendocino, I counted seven people arrayed along the sidewalk, their backs to the bulletin board, gazing into flat little cell phones. These people were not engaged in phone conversations but were staring silently at their tiny screens. Something about the solemn eerie scene held me in my truck until one of the seven moved, and this movement did not occur for a short infinity. These seven were transfixed, each lost in a different scenario being presented to them on a tiny screen. When one of the seven finally lowered her phone, she did not put it away in her purse or pocket. She simply held onto the thing as if it were the hand of an invisible friend\u2014something to cling to on her walk through life. Then another of the seven lowered his phone and moved away, and he, too, did not put his phone away, but held onto it as one might clutch a gold coin too precious to entrust to a pocket.<\/p>\n

The other five remained unmoving, their eyes glued to their little screens; and so I got out of my truck as quietly as I could, not wishing to disturb the funereal atmosphere of the silent watchers in the fog of Mendocino. And for the rest of my round of errands in the village, I encountered more and more of these people who never put their phones away, but hold onto them constantly, as if fearing to separate for even a moment from the flow of information and the illusion of connection their little gizmos provide. I hasten to add that these were not exclusively young people, but people of all ages.<\/p>\n

Having completed my errands, the last of which was to fill my basket with tasty comestibles at Corners of the Mouth, I was hoisting said basket into the bed of my old pickup, when a young couple came by pushing their cherubic two-year-old in a state-of-the-art ergonomically-boffo royal purple baby buggy. The young mother paused in front of the former church that is Corners and asked her husband, \u201cWhat is this place?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThat,\u201d he said, gazing into the phone he carried in his hand, \u201cis a grocery store specializing in organic produce and run by hippies.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWant to go in?\u201d she asked, smiling hopefully.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think there\u2019s anything in there for us,\u201d he replied, continuing to stare at his tiny screen. \u201cWant to get some lunch?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat is there?\u201d she asked, gazing longingly at the little red church.<\/p>\n

And I was about to call out, \u201cLooking for a good place to eat?\u201d when the husband, reading from his tiny screen, said, \u201cWell there\u2019s nothing in the direction we\u2019re going, but back the way we came there is a three-and-a-half-star hamburger joint based on twenty-eight reviews, an almost-four-star caf\u00e9 based on seventy-eight reviews, somewhat pricey, and\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

So I did not call out to them. We did not converse. They did not get to meet me, nor I to meet them. The natural, fascinating, enriching, expansive proclivities of human beings were circumvented by the latest greatest tool of isolation and alienation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Photo by Marcia Sloane (This article appeared in the Anderson Valley Advertiser August 2011) \u201cOur business gets better as the economy gets worse.\u201d Kent Moyer, founder and CEO of World Protection Group Inc. The business referred to in the opening quote is officially known as Executive Protection, and Kent Moyer is the kingpin of a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1173,268,1162,47,1166,1165,42,244,1161,581,475,1167,1170,471,1164,1169,1172,1160,1168,1171,381,34,1163,701,1114,33],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/545"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=545"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/545\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":548,"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/545\/revisions\/548"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=545"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=545"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/underthetablebooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=545"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}