Social Collapse Best Practices
I realize I'm reactivating an old thread, but this seems to be the best place for this.
For anyone else who is unimpressed by the current attempts at economic stimulus, the following talk was given by Dmitry Orlov on February 13, 2009, at Cowell Theatre in Fort Mason Center, San Francisco, to an audience of 550 people.
It may also link up with D Rusak's
Permaculture Thread (ways to save some money in a environmentally conscious manner).
This talk may contain some soon-to-be-useful information, considering that hyperinflation seems to be on the horizon due to the Fed's runaway money-printing press. At least the introductory portion is somewhat light (virtually humorus).
Social Collapse Best Practices
Audio of the talk is available here:
_http://fora.tv/media/rss/Long_Now_Podcasts/podcast-2009-02-13-orlov.mp3
Video of the talk is available here:
_http://fora.tv/2009/02/13/Dmitry_Orlov_Social_Collapse_Best_Practices
Transcript of the talk is available here:
_http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2009/02/social-collapse-best-practices.html
Here's a portion of the transcript:
[quote author=Dmitry Orlov]
Dmitry Orlov:
Social Collapse Best Practices
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for showing up. It's certainly nice to travel all the way across the North American continent and have a few people come to see you, even if the occasion isn't a happy one. You are here to listen to me talk about social collapse and the various ways we can avoid screwing that up along with everything else that's gone wrong.
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I am one of the very few people who several years ago unequivocally predicted the demise of the United States as a global superpower. The idea that the USA will go the way of the USSR seemed preposterous at the time. It doesn't seem so preposterous any more. I take it some of you are still hedging your bets. How is that hedge fund doing, by the way?
{...}
I learned that by observing what happened to the people who successfully predicted the collapse of the USSR. Do you know who Andrei Amalrik is? See, my point exactly. He successfully predicted the collapse of the USSR. He was off by just half a decade. That was another valuable lesson for me, which is why I will not give you an exact date when USA will turn into FUSA ("F" is for "Former"). But even if someone could choreograph the whole event, it still wouldn't make for much of a career, because once it all starts falling apart, people have far more important things to attend to than marveling at the wonderful predictive abilities of some Cassandra-like person.
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I would like my insights to be of help during these difficult and confusing times, for altruistic reasons, mostly, although not entirely. This is because when times get really bad, as they did when the Soviet Union collapsed, lots of people just completely lose it. Men, especially. Successful, middle-aged men, breadwinners, bastions of society, turn out to be especially vulnerable. And when they just completely lose it, they become very tedious company. My hope is that some amount of preparation, psychological and otherwise, can make them a lot less fragile, and a bit more useful, and generally less of a burden.
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So that's my little intervention.
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When the Soviet system went away, many people lost their jobs, everyone lost their savings, wages and pensions were held back for months, their value was wiped out by hyperinflation, there shortages of food, gasoline, medicine, consumer goods, there was a large increase in crime and violence, and yet Russian society did not collapse. Somehow, the Russians found ways to muddle through. How was that possible? It turns out that many aspects of the Soviet system were paradoxically resilient in the face of system-wide collapse, many institutions continued to function, and the living arrangement was such that people did not lose access to food, shelter or transportation, and could survive even without an income. The Soviet economic system failed to thrive, and the Communist experiment at constructing a worker's paradise on earth was, in the end, a failure. But as a side effect it inadvertently achieved a high level of collapse-preparedness.
In comparison, the American system could produce significantly better results, for time, but at the cost of creating and perpetuating a living arrangement that is very fragile, and not at all capable of holding together through the inevitable crash. Even after the Soviet economy evaporated and the government largely shut down, Russians still had plenty left for them to work with. And so there is a wealth of useful information and insight that we can extract from the Russian experience, which we can then turn around and put to good use in helping us improvise a new living arrangement here in the United States – one that is more likely to be survivable.
{...}
Food. Shelter. Transportation. Security. When it comes to supplying these survival necessities, the Soviet example offers many valuable lessons. As I already mentioned, in a collapse many economic negatives become positives, and vice versa. Let us consider each one of these in turn...
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