I had already had my world rocked by the implications of the
PowerPoint that Dmitry Orlov first created on the topic of collapse
here in the US, so was excited to learn that he had expanded his
insights to book length in Reinventing Collapse.
While you can get the gist of his message from the PowerPoint [Closing
the 'Collapse Gap'], the book fills in details that bring the full
implications of his points into broader focus while offering
fascinating insights into the cultural underpinnings of both the US
and the SU (Soviet Union) as they danced the superpower tango.
This all makes sweet reading for me as a foreigner, living in the US,
having long been subjected to the self-important stories fellow
citizens have told themselves to keep this whole mirage of greatness
afloat, be it the one about intellectual freedom and self-governing
democracy (while carefully self censoring themselves), or less often
in my circle, cultural superiority and the rightness of world
domination. All the while ignoring the major flaws of an overblown
infrastructure that would ultimately be the country's undoing.
In comparing the two superpowers as two ideologically different sides
of the same flawed empire coin, Orlov confirms the premise that
empires fall and the US would fall particularly hard and perhaps quite
soon. He takes on the task of breaking it to American readers that the
very successes that made them so rich (a few anyway) and so great,
will help not at all, and this is where his best jokes are embedded-
allowing me to laugh wryly out loud throughout his short book.
Along the way, he reveals pithy insights to explain how the American
system works in contrast with the Russian one. For instance the story
of the classless society is exemplified by the concept of a middle
class =97 something Americans have proudly espoused =97 which he points
out is held together by the common denominator of everyone owning a
car. That's right, not education, not equal opportunity, or equal
rights but the one-ton behemoth that we must have to get around the
wasteful geography created by suburbia.
We know about this waste from the film The End of Suburbia and James
Kunstler's Geography of Nowhere and all the other peak oil fellows,
but Orlov points out that because we are so identified with owning a
car as part of this American middle class identity we will be hard put
to let it go. And when we are forced to (due to diminishing and
increasingly expensive gasoline supplies) so will go the myth of the
middle class. In turn he explains how the Russians lost faith in the
classless worker's paradise because they could clearly see that there
was an elite strutting around in cool Armani threads. Meanwhile the
lack of consumer goods and trendy fashions meant that a good life for
all never became a reality.
And because our ideologically indoctrinated minds are so closed to
such deep seated change and so invested in our "can do" innovation, we
will, like Napoleon, be unable to retreat from the overextended, oil
fueled, debt based economy which is poised to come crashing down,
financed as it is by foreign investment that will eventually decide
that we are not a good credit risk.
And there was the revealing insight about each country's self-image
regarding defense. That the Russians were all about being undefeated
while the Americans were all about victory, leading both to overextend
themselves in the weapons department. Both can say they won, because
the SU did indeed remain undefeated by the US and the US gets to cry
"victory" every time it bombs somebody back into the stone age.
While these cultural details make the book a fascinating read just for
his pragmatic sociopolitical perspective, Orlov's main goal is to get
Americans to understand what it will mean to live without an economy,
when cash is virtually useless and most people won't be getting any
income anyway because they'll be out of a job. Peak oil gurus already
talk about how economic growth will be curtailed by decreasing
supplies of energy, but Orlov takes it one step further by adding
currency collapse and the collapse of the known economic system into
an unknown bartering system. The reader cannot escape his picture of
inevitable collapse as he takes pains to explain that the usual
channels of activism, politics and private enterprise, if we use them
to attempt to mitigate the collapse, will only make things worse
because these systems are ideologically driven and incapable of
putting into practice what is needed to happen to ensure survival.
Since his book will likely be read chiefly by those already inclined
to accept that collapse is inevitable, I don't think we need worry
about attempts to mitigate collapse. Indeed the public is only just
beginning to be able to hear the news that peak oil is a phenomenon
that must be managed. The end result of the collapse of the Soviet
Union was to pronounce that it was no longer a country, no longer a
controlled political entity under the superpower operating system. So
game over.
What I imagine we will get is a whole lot of denial about how collapse
won't happen here. Joseph Tainter, in his 1988 classic, The Collapse
of Complex Societies, after first describing how collapse is
inevitable (because of diminishing returns on investment of energy and
labor), goes on to give three reasons why collapse is not likely in
modern times. 1) Absorption by a larger state or neighbor. 2) Economic
support by a dominant power or by an international financing agency.
3) Payment by the support population of overhead costs to keep the
society going. He added a telling little aside. Complex societies, he
claimed are excellent at solving complex problems and if they fail to,
then it is not because they are incapable of it, but because of some
psychological underpinning in the society itself. He did not delve
further into these underpinnings. The mirror that Orlov holds up shows
us that this very psychosis is built into the society that attempts to
play the game of empire. Why else would a people believe such
delusions about themselves? P.S. Nobody bothered to save Russia,
preferring, instead, to loot it.
After offering this futile outlook, he does give some practical tips
on what individuals can do to prepare. In this he shows a kindness and
compassion for his American reader, much as he did for his Russian
countrymen when he returned to visit after the collapse of the Soviet
Union. As a non-superpower foreigner reading this, it is tempting to
use his book as a launching pad to spew forth a backlog of pent up
sentiments held back (mainly for lack of scholarly ammunition) after
the ideological righteousness became even more unbearable once it was
declared that free market capitalism had beat out socialism (thus
justifying all that anti-communist sentiment that had driven foreign
military intervention all over the world and into my backyard in South
East Asia). And held back again (just barely), out of compassion,
after 9/11, when the tales used to justify a war against terrorism
became even more transparent, given that the US was the only remaining
superpower left.
In the face of a people whose very earnestness would have one
convinced that a single person/small group of passionate individuals
can bring about social change, it is not up to me to take away this
last vestige of self determination as those vaguely aware of what the
future holds strive to achieve yet another false ideology of high-tech
"sustainability".
Some of the consequences of not having an economy, as Orlov describes
it from the Russian experience, sound really grim - especially given
the uncertainty of how Americans will respond. It makes me want to
always have a viable first class plane ticket out of here. Orlov does
mention that most immigrants (the ones doing all the skilled and
unskilled work around here) are going to go home. At the same time he
describes a lot of skills and psychological resiliency that I already
possess, making it possible to think of staying (as opposed to the
psychologically daunting task of persuading my American partner that
we must sell the house, spend all our savings on durable, useful goods
and move to a completely foreign land that will, incidentally also
suffer in the backwash of American collapse in the urban parts where
it has bought into the American lifestyle). At least I will have a
model, from my formerly considered backwards, peasant country, of how
one can live a viable low tech sustainable existence that has already
proven to be collapse proof following the economic collapse of the
Asian Tigers. In fact not having America's consumer glory around as an
example to strive for will help a lot both for the self-esteem of
these peasants and the well-being of the planet.
In the end the picture that emerges is that of a simplified America
based on complex interrelationships between people one can trust, hand
skills to make things work, an ability to relate up and down the
social classes and left and right to different social groups, being
able to grow food, being able to downgrade living standards
dramatically and manage expectations, being self-sufficient, flexible
and adaptable sounds like a big improvement to the hollow, consumer
driven, meaningless, success culture we do live in.
In his conclusion, Orlov neither tries to sell cheerful optimism, Al
Gore style, or grind you to a pulp Kunstler, Long Emergency style. For
that I am grateful, as well as for the experience of having my mind
opened to the view while drifting silently to earth wondering what
crocodiles will be lurking in the swamps of post-collapse America.
Book Review of Dmitry Orlov's "Reinventing Collapse"
by Amanda Kovattana
http://www.energybulletin.net/42910.html
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