How to Prepare for Social Collapse (article)

note: the old ways are definitely collapsing, but I doubt it will unfold the same as in russia, the model cited below. And new technologies – notably the nano-wheel motor, will make dramatic changes, as like more doomdayers, his end is caused by lack of OIL. But still a useful exercise in releasing fear to imagine what he is saying happens. – Michael

————

SOCIAL COLLAPSE BEST PRACTICES
PoorBest
By Dmitry Orlov
Culture Change
February 14, 2009

http://culturechange.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=325&I
temid=1

The following talk was given on February 13, 2009, at Cowell Theatre in Fort
Mason Center, San Francisco, to an audience of 550 people. Audio and video
of the talk will be available on Long Now Foundation web site:

http://www.longnow.org/

…………….

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. I know
it’s a lot to ask of you, because why wouldn’t you instead want to go and
eat, drink, and be merry? Well, perhaps there will still be time left for
that after my talk.

I would like to thank the Long Now Foundation for inviting me, and I feel
very honored to appear in the same venue as many serious, professional
people, such as Michael Pollan, who will be here in May, or some of the
previous speakers, such as Nassim Taleb, or Brian Eno — some of my favorite
people, really. I am just a tourist. I flew over here to give this talk and
to take in the sights, and then I’ll fly back to Boston and go back to my
day job. Well, I am also a blogger. And I also wrote a book. But then
everyone has a book, or so it would seem.

You might ask yourself, then, Why on earth did he get invited to speak here
tonight? It seems that I am enjoying my moment in the limelight, because 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 think I prefer remaining just a tourist, because I have learned from
experience — luckily, from other people’s experience — that being a
superpower collapse predictor is not a good career choice. 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.

I hope that I have made it clear that I am not here in any sort of
professional capacity. I consider what I am doing a kind of community
service. So, if you don’t like my talk, don’t worry about me. There are
plenty of other things I can do. But 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.

Women seem much more able to cope. Perhaps it is because they have less of
their ego invested in the whole dubious enterprise, or perhaps their sense
of personal responsibility is tied to those around them and not some
nebulous grand enterprise. In any case, the women always seem far more able
to just put on their gardening gloves and go do something useful, while the
men tend to sit around groaning about the Empire, or the Republic, or
whatever it is that they lost. And when they do that, they become very
tedious company. And so, without a bit of mental preparation, the men are
all liable to end up very lonely and very drunk. So that’s my little
intervention.

If there is one thing that I would like to claim as my own, it is the
comparative theory of superpower collapse. For now, it remains just a
theory, although it is currently being quite thoroughly tested. The theory
states that the United States and the Soviet Union will have collapsed for
the same reasons, namely: a severe and chronic shortfall in the production
of crude oil (that magic addictive elixir of industrial economies), a severe
and worsening foreign trade deficit, a runaway military budget, and
ballooning foreign debt. I call this particular list of ingredients “The
Superpower Collapse Soup.” Other factors, such as the inability to provide
an acceptable quality of life for its citizens, or a systemically corrupt
political system incapable of reform, are certainly not helpful, but they do
not automatically lead to collapse, because they do not put the country on a
collision course with reality. Please don’t be too concerned, though,
because, as I mentioned, this is just a theory. My theory.

I’ve been working on this theory since about 1995, when it occurred to me
that the US is retracing the same trajectory as the USSR. As so often is the
case, having this realization was largely a matter of being in the right
place at the right time. The two most important methods of solving problems
are: 1. by knowing the solution ahead of time, and 2. by guessing it
correctly. I learned this in engineering school — from a certain professor.
I am not that good at guesswork, but I do sometimes know the answer ahead of
time.

I was very well positioned to have this realization because I grew up
straddling the two worlds — the USSR and the US. I grew up in Russia, and
moved to the US when I was twelve, and so I am fluent in Russian, and I
understand Russian history and Russian culture the way only a native Russian
can. But I went through high school and university in the US. I had careers
in several industries here, I traveled widely around the country, and so I
also have a very good understanding of the US with all of its quirks and
idiosyncrasies. I traveled back to Russia in 1989, when things there still
seemed more or less in line with the Soviet norm, and again in 1990, when
the economy was at a standstill, and big changes were clearly on the way. I
went back there 3 more times in the 1990s, and observed the various stages
of Soviet collapse first-hand.

By the mid-1990s I started to see Soviet/American Superpowerdom as a sort of
disease that strives for world dominance but in effect eviscerates its host
country, eventually leaving behind an empty shell: an impoverished
population, an economy in ruins, a legacy of social problems, and a
tremendous burden of debt. The symmetries between the two global superpowers
were then already too numerous to mention, and they have been growing more
obvious ever since.

The superpower symmetries may be of interest to policy wonks and history
buffs and various skeptics, but they tell us nothing that would be useful in
our daily lives. It is the asymmetries, the differences between the two
superpowers, that I believe to be most instructive. 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.

The mid-1990s did not seem to me as the right time to voice such ideas. The
United States was celebrating its so-called Cold War victory, getting over
its Vietnam syndrome by bombing Iraq back to the Stone Age, and the foreign
policy wonks coined the term “hyperpower” and were jabbering on about
full-spectrum dominance. All sorts of silly things were happening. Professor
Fukuyama told us that history had ended, and so we were building a brave new
world where the Chinese made things out of plastic for us, the Indians
provided customer support when these Chinese-made things broke, and we paid
for it all just by flipping houses, pretending that they were worth a lot of
money whereas they are really just useless bits of ticky-tacky. Alan
Greenspan chided us about “irrational exuberance” while consistently
low-balling interest rates. It was the “Goldilocks economy” — not to hot,
not too cold. Remember that? And now it turns out that it was actually more
of a “Tinker-bell” economy, because the last five or so years of economic
growth was more or less a hallucination, based on various debt pyramids, the
“whole house of cards” as President Bush once referred to it during one of
his lucid moments. And now we can look back on all of that with a funny,
queasy feeling, or we can look forward and feel nothing but vertigo.

While all of these silly things were going on, I thought it best to keep my
comparative theory of superpower collapse to myself. During that time, I was
watching the action in the oil industry, because I understood that oil
imports are the Achilles’ heel of the US economy. In the mid-1990s the
all-time peak in global oil production was scheduled for the turn of the
century. But then a lot of things happened that delayed it by at least half
a decade. Perhaps you’ve noticed this too, there is a sort of refrain here:
people who try to predict big historical shifts always turn to be off by
about half a decade. Unsuccessful predictions, on the other hand are always
spot on as far as timing: the world as we know it failed to end precisely at
midnight on January 1, 2000. Perhaps there is a physical principal involved:
information spreads at the speed of light, while ignorance is instantaneous
at all points in the known universe. So please make a mental note: whenever
it seems to you that I am making a specific prediction as to when I think
something is likely to happen, just silently add “plus or minus half a
decade.”

In any case, about half a decade ago, I finally thought that the time was
ripe, and, as it has turned out, I wasn’t too far off. In June of 2005 I
published an article on the subject, titled “Post-Soviet Lessons for a
Post-American Century,” which was quite popular, even to the extent that I
got paid for it. It is available at various places on the Internet. A little
while later I formalized my thinking somewhat into the “Collapse Gap”
concept, which I presented at a conference in Manhattan in April of 2006.
The slide show from that presentation, titled “Closing the Collapse Gap,”
was posted on the Internet and has been downloaded a few million times since
then. Then, in January of 2008, when it became apparent to me that financial
collapse was well underway, and that other stages of collapse were to
follow, I published a short article titled “The Five Stages of Collapse,”
which I later expanded into a talk I gave at a conference in Michigan in
October of 2008. Finally, at the end of 2008, I announced on my blog that I
am getting out of the prognosticating business. I have made enough
predictions, they all seem very well on track (give or take half a decade,
please remember that), collapse is well underway, and now I am just an
observer.

But this talk is about something else, something other than making dire
predictions and then acting all smug when they come true. You see, there is
nothing more useless than predictions, once they have come true. It’s like
looking at last year’s amazingly successful stock picks: what are you going
to do about them this year? What we need are examples of things that have
been shown to work in the strange, unfamiliar, post-collapse environment
that we are all likely to have to confront. Stuart Brand proposed the title
for the talk — “Social Collapse Best Practices” — and I thought that it
was an excellent idea. Although the term “best practices” has been diluted
over time to sometimes mean little more than “good ideas,” initially it
stood for the process of abstracting useful techniques from examples of what
has worked in the past and applying them to new situations, in order to
control risk and to increase the chances of securing a positive outcome.
It’s a way of skipping a lot of trial and error and deliberation and
experimentation, and to just go with what works.

In organizations, especially large organizations, “best practices” also
offer a good way to avoid painful episodes of watching colleagues trying to
“think outside the box” whenever they are confronted with a new problem. If
your colleagues were any good at thinking outside the box, they probably
wouldn’t feel so compelled to spend their whole working lives sitting in a
box keeping an office chair warm. If they were any good at thinking outside
the box, they would have by now thought of a way to escape from that box. So
perhaps what would make them feel happy and productive again is if someone
came along and gave them a different box inside of which to think — a box
better suited to the post-collapse environment.

Here is the key insight: you might think that when collapse happens, nothing
works. That’s just not the case. The old ways of doing things don’t work any
more, the old assumptions are all invalidated, conventional goals and
measures of success become irrelevant. But a different set of goals,
techniques, and measures of success can be brought to bear immediately, and
the sooner the better. But enough generalities, let’s go through some
specifics. We’ll start with some generalities, and, as you will see, it will
all become very, very specific rather quickly.

Here is another key insight: there are very few things that are positives or
negatives per se. Just about everything is a matter of context. Now, it just
so happens that most things that are positives prior to collapse turn out to
be negatives once collapse occurs, and vice versa. For instance, prior to
collapse having high inventory in a business is bad, because the businesses
have to store it and finance it, so they try to have just-in-time inventory.
After collapse, high inventory turns out to be very useful, because they can
barter it for the things they need, and they can’t easily get more because
they don’t have any credit. Prior to collapse, it’s good for a business to
have the right level of staffing and an efficient organization. After
collapse, what you want is a gigantic, sluggish bureaucracy that can’t
unwind operations or lay people off fast enough through sheer bureaucratic
foot-dragging. Prior to collapse, what you want is an effective retail
segment and good customer service. After collapse, you regret not having an
unreliable retail segment, with shortages and long bread lines, because then
people would have been forced to learn to shift for themselves instead of
standing around waiting for somebody to come and feed them.

If you notice, none of these things that I mentioned have any bearing on
what is commonly understood as “economic health.” Prior to collapse, the
overall macroeconomic positive is an expanding economy. After collapse,
economic contraction is a given, and the overall macroeconomic positive
becomes something of an imponderable, so we are forced to listen to a lot of
nonsense. The situation is either slightly better than expected or slightly
worse than expected. We are always either months or years away from economic
recovery. Business as usual will resume sooner or later, because some
television bobble-head said so.

But let’s take it apart. Starting from the very general, what are the
current macroeconomic objectives, if you listen to the hot air coming out of
Washington at the moment? First: growth, of course! Getting the economy
going. We learned nothing from the last huge spike in commodity prices, so
let’s just try it again. That calls for economic stimulus, a.k.a. printing
money. Let’s see how high the prices go up this time. Maybe this time around
we will achieve hyperinflation. Second: Stabilizing financial institutions:
getting banks lending — that’s important too. You see, we are just not in
enough debt yet, that’s our problem. We need more debt, and quickly! Third:
jobs! We need to create jobs. Low-wage jobs, of course, to replace all the
high-wage manufacturing jobs we’ve been shedding for decades now, and
replacing them with low-wage service sector jobs, mainly ones without any
job security or benefits. Right now, a lot of people could slow down the
rate at which they are sinking further into debt if they quit their jobs.
That is, their job is a net loss for them as individuals as well as for the
economy as a whole. But, of course, we need much more of that, and quickly!

So that’s what we have now. The ship is on the rocks, water is rising, and
the captain is shouting “Full steam ahead! We are sailing to Afghanistan!”
Do you listen to Ahab up on the bridge, or do you desert your post in the
engine room and go help deploy the lifeboats? If you thought that the
previous episode of uncontrolled debt expansion, globalized Ponzi schemes,
and economic hollowing-out was silly, then I predict that you will find this
next episode of feckless grasping at macroeconomic straws even sillier.
Except that it won’t be funny: what is crashing now is our life support
system: all the systems and institutions that are keeping us alive. And so I
don’t recommend passively standing around and watching the show — unless
you happen to have a death wish.

Right now the Washington economic stimulus team is putting on their Scuba
gear and diving down to the engine room to try to invent a way to get a
diesel engine to run on seawater. They spoke of change, but in reality they
are terrified of change and want to cling with all their might to the status
quo. But this game will soon be over, and they don’t have any idea what to
do next.

So, what is there for them to do? Forget “growth,” forget “jobs,” forget
“financial stability.” What should their realistic new objectives be? Well,
here they are: food, shelter, transportation, and security. Their task is to
find a way to provide all of these necessities on an emergency basis, in
absence of a functioning economy, with commerce at a standstill, with little
or no access to imports, and to make them available to a population that is
largely penniless. If successful, society will remain largely intact, and
will be able to begin a slow and painful process of cultural transition, and
eventually develop a new economy, a gradually de-industrializing economy, at
a much lower level of resource expenditure, characterized by a quite a lot
of austerity and even poverty, but in conditions that are safe, decent, and
dignified. If unsuccessful, society will be gradually destroyed in a series
of convulsions that will leave a defunct nation composed of many wretched
little fiefdoms. Given its largely depleted resource base, a dysfunctional,
collapsing infrastructure, and its history of unresolved social conflicts,
the territory of the Former United States will undergo a process of steady
degeneration punctuated by natural and man-made cataclysms.

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.

The Soviet agricultural sector was plagued by consistent underperformance.
In many ways, this was the legacy of the disastrous collectivization
experiment carried out in the 1930s, which destroyed many of the more
prosperous farming households and herded people into collective farms.
Collectivization undermined the ancient village-based agricultural
traditions that had made pre-revolutionary Russia a well-fed place that was
also the breadbasket of Western Europe. A great deal of further damage was
caused by the introduction of industrial agriculture. The heavy farm
machinery alternately compacted and tore up the topsoil while dosing it with
chemicals, depleting it and killing the biota. Eventually, the Soviet
government had to turn to importing grain from countries hostile to its
interests — United States and Canada — and eventually expanded this to
include other foodstuffs. The USSR experienced a permanent shortage of meat
and other high-protein foods, and much of the imported grain was used to
raise livestock to try to address this problem.

Although it was generally possible to survive on the foods available at the
government stores, the resulting diet would have been rather poor, and so
people tried to supplement it with food they gathered, raised, or caught, or
purchased at farmers’ markets. Kitchen gardens were always common, and, once
the economy collapsed, a lot of families took to growing food in earnest.
The kitchen gardens, by themselves, were never sufficient, but they made a
huge difference.

The year 1990 was particularly tough when it came to trying to score
something edible. I remember one particular joke from that period. Black
humor has always been one of Russia’s main psychological coping mechanisms.
A man walks into a food store, goes to the meat counter, and he sees that it
is completely empty. So he asks the butcher: “Don’t you have any fish?” And
the butcher answers: “No, here is where we don’t have any meat. Fish is what
they don’t have over at the seafood counter.”

Poor though it was, the Soviet food distribution system never collapsed
completely. In particular, the deliveries of bread continued even during the
worst of times, partly because has always been such an important part of the
Russian diet, and partly because access to bread symbolized the pact between
the people and the Communist government, enshrined in oft-repeated
revolutionary slogans. Also, it is important to remember that in Russia most
people have lived within walking distance of food shops, and used public
transportation to get out to their kitchen gardens, which were often located
in the countryside immediately surrounding the relatively dense, compact
cities. This combination of factors made for some lean times, but very
little malnutrition and no starvation.

In the United States, the agricultural system is heavily industrialized, and
relies on inputs such as diesel, chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and,
perhaps most importantly, financing. In the current financial climate, the
farmers’ access to financing is not at all assured. This agricultural system
is efficient, but only if you regard fossil fuel energy as free. In fact, it
is a way to transform fossil fuel energy into food with a bit of help from
sunlight, to the tune of 10 calories of fossil fuel energy being embodied in
each calorie that is consumed as food. The food distribution system makes
heavy use of refrigerated diesel trucks, transforming food over hundreds of
miles to resupply supermarkets. The food pipeline is long and thin, and it
takes only a couple of days of interruptions for supermarket shelves to be
stripped bare. Many people live in places that are not within walking
distance of stores, not served by public transportation, and will be cut off
from food sources once they are no longer able to drive.

Besides the supermarket chains, much of the nation’s nutrition needs are
being met by an assortment of fast food joints and convenience stores. In
fact, in many of the less fashionable parts of cities and towns, fast food
and convenience store food is all that is available. In the near future,
this trend is likely to extend to the more prosperous parts of town and the
suburbs.

Fast food outfits such as McDonalds have more ways to cut costs, and so may
prove a bit more resilient in the face of economic collapse than supermarket
chains, but they are no substitute for food security, because they too
depend industrial agribusiness. Their food inputs, such as high-fructose
corn syrup, genetically modified potatoes, various soy-based fillers,
factory-farmed beef, pork and chicken, and so forth, are derived from oil,
two-thirds of which is imported, as well as fertilizer made from natural
gas. They may be able to stay in business longer, supplying
food-that-isn’t-really-food, but eventually they will run out of inputs
along with the rest of the supply chain. Before they do, they may for a time
sell burgers that aren’t really burgers, like the bread that wasn’t really
bread that the Soviet government distributed in Leningrad during the Nazi
blockade. It was mostly sawdust, with a bit of rye flour added for flavor.

Can we think of any ways to avoid this dismal scenario? The Russian example
may give us a clue. Many Russian families could gauge how fast the economy
was crashing, and, based on that, decide how many rows of potatoes to plant.
Could we perhaps do something similar? There is already a healthy gardening
movement in the United States; can it be scaled up? The trick is to make
small patches of farmland available for non-mechanical cultivation by
individuals and families, in increments as small as 1000 square feet. The
ideal spots would be fertile bits of land with access to rivers and streams
for irrigation. Provisions would have to be made for campsites and for
transportation, allowing people to undertake seasonal migrations out to the
land to grow food during the growing season, and haul the produce back to
the population centers after taking in the harvest.

An even simpler approach has been successfully used in Cuba: converting
urban parking lots and other empty bits of land to raised-bed agriculture.
Instead of continually trucking in vegetables and other food, it is much
easier to truck in soil, compost, and mulch just once a season. Raised
highways can be closed to traffic (since there is unlikely to be much
traffic in any case) and used to catch rainwater for irrigation. Rooftops
and balconies can be used for hothouses, henhouses, and a variety of other
agricultural uses.

How difficult would this be to organize? Well, Cubans were actually helped
by their government, but the Russians managed to do it in more or less in
spite of the Soviet bureaucrats, and so we might be able to do it in spite
of the American ones. The government could theoretically head up such an
effort, purely hypothetically speaking, of course, because I see no evidence
that such an effort is being considered. For our fearless national leaders,
such initiatives are too low-level: if they stimulate the economy and get
the banks lending again, the potatoes will simply grow themselves. All they
need to do is print some more money, right?

Moving on to shelter. Again, let’s look at how the Russians managed to
muddle through. In the Soviet Union, people did not own their place of
residence. Everyone was assigned a place to live, which was recorded in a
person’s internal passport. People could not be dislodged from their place
of residence for as long as they drew oxygen. Since most people in Russia
live in cities, the place of residence was usually an apartment, or a room
in a communal apartment, with shared bathroom and kitchen. There was a
permanent housing shortage, and so people often doubled up, with three
generations living together. The apartments were often crowded, sometimes
bordering on squalid. If people wanted to move, they had to find somebody
else who wanted to move, who would want to exchange rooms or apartments with
them. There were always long waiting lists for apartments, and children
often grew up, got married, and had children before receiving a place of
their own.

These all seem like negatives, but consider the flip side of all this: the
high population density made this living arrangement quite affordable. With
several generations living together, families were on hand to help each
other. Grandparents provided day care, freeing up their children’s time to
do other things. The apartment buildings were always built near public
transportation, so they did not have to rely on private cars to get around.
Apartment buildings are relatively cheap to heat, and municipal services
easy to provide and maintain because of the short runs of pipe and cable.
Perhaps most importantly, after the economy collapsed, people lost their
savings, many people lost their jobs, even those that still had jobs often
did not get paid for months, and when they were the value of their wages was
destroyed by hyperinflation, but there were no foreclosures, no evictions,
municipal services such as heat, water, and sometimes even hot water
continued to be provided, and everyone had their families close by. Also,
because it was so difficult to relocate, people generally stayed in one
place for generations, and so they tended to know all the people around
them. After the economic collapse, there was a large spike in the crime
rate, which made it very helpful to be surrounded by people who weren’t
strangers, and who could keep an eye on things. Lastly, in an interesting
twist, the Soviet housing arrangement delivered an amazing final windfall:
in the 1990s all of these apartments were privatized, and the people who
lived in them suddenly became owners of some very valuable real estate, free
and clear.

Switching back to the situation in the US: in recent months, many people
here have reconciled themselves to the idea that their house is not an ATM
machine, nor is it a nest egg. They already know that they will not be able
to comfortably retire by selling it, or get rich by fixing it up and
flipping it, and quite a few people have acquiesced to the fact that real
estate prices are going to continue heading lower. The question is, How much
lower? A lot of people still think that there must be a lower limit, a
“realistic” price. This thought is connected to the notion that housing is a
necessity. After all, everybody needs a place to live.

Well, it is certainly true that some sort of shelter is a necessity, be it
an apartment, or a dorm room, a bunk in a barrack, a boat, a camper, or a
tent, a teepee, a wigwam, a shipping container… The list is virtually
endless. But there is no reason at all to think that a suburban
single-family house is in any sense a requirement. It is little more than a
cultural preference, and a very shortsighted one at that. Most suburban
houses are expensive to heat and cool, inaccessible by public
transportation, expensive to hook up to public utilities because of the long
runs of pipe and cable, and require a great deal of additional public
expenditure on road, bridge and highway maintenance, school buses, traffic
enforcement, and other nonsense. They often take up what was once valuable
agricultural land. They promote a car-centric culture that is destructive of
urban environments, causing a proliferation of dead downtowns. Many families
that live in suburban houses can no longer afford to live in them, and
expect others to bail them out.

As this living arrangement becomes unaffordable for all concerned, it will
also become unlivable. Municipalities and public utilities will not have the
funds to lavish on sewer, water, electricity, road and bridge repair, and
police. Without cheap and plentiful gasoline, natural gas, and heating oil,
many suburban dwellings will become both inaccessible and unlivable. The
inevitable result will be a mass migration of suburban refugees toward the
more survivable, more densely settled towns and cities. The luckier ones
will find friends or family to stay with; for the rest, it would be very
helpful to improvise some solution.

One obvious answer is to repurpose the ever-plentiful vacant office
buildings for residential use. Converting offices to dormitories is quite
straightforward. Many of them already have kitchens and bathrooms, plenty of
partitions and other furniture, and all they are really missing is beds.
Putting in beds is just not that difficult. The new, subsistence economy is
unlikely to generate the large surpluses that are necessary for sustaining
the current large population of office plankton. The businesses that once
occupied these offices are not coming back, so we might as well find new and
better uses for them.

Another category of real estate that is likely to go unused and that can be
repurposed for new communities is college campuses. The American 4-year
college is an institution of dubious merit. It exists because American
public schools fail to teach in 12 years what Russian public schools manage
to teach in 8. As fewer and fewer people become able to afford college,
which is likely to happen, because meager career prospects after graduation
will make them bad risks for student loans, perhaps this will provide the
impetus to do something about the public education system. One idea would be
to scrap it, then start small, but eventually build something a bit more on
par with world standards.

College campuses make perfect community centers: there are dormitories for
newcomers, fraternities and sororities for the more settled residents, and
plenty of grand public buildings that can be put to a variety of uses. A
college campus normally contains the usual wasteland of mowed turf that can
be repurposed to grow food, or, at the very least, hay, and to graze cattle.
Perhaps some enlightened administrators, trustees and faculty members will
fall upon this idea once they see admissions flat-lining and endowments
dropping to zero, without any need for government involvement. So here we
have a ray of hope, don’t we.

Moving on to transportation. Here, we need to make sure that people don’t
get stranded in places that are not survivable. Then we have to provide for
seasonal migrations to places where people can grow, catch, or gather their
own food, and then back to places where they can survive the winter without
freezing to death or going stir-crazy from cabin fever. Lastly, some amount
of freight will have to be moved, to transport food to population centers,
as well as enough coal and firewood to keep the pipes from freezing in the
remaining habitable dwellings.

All of this is going to be a bit of a challenge, because it all hinges on
the availability of transportation fuels, and it seems very probable that
transportation fuels will be both too expensive and in short supply before
too long. From about 2005 and until the middle of 2008 the global oil has
been holding steady, unable to grow materially beyond a level that has been
characterized as a “bumpy plateau.” An all-time record was set in 2005, and
then, after a period of record-high oil prices, again only in 2008. Then, as
the financial collapse gathered speed, oil and other commodity prices
crashed, along with oil production. More recently, the oil markets have come
to rest on an altogether different “bumpy plateau”: the oil prices are
bumping along at around $40 a barrel and can’t seem to go any lower. It
would appear that oil production costs have risen to a point where it does
not make economic sense to sell oil at below this price.

Now, $40 a barrel is a good price for US consumers at the moment, but there
is hyperinflation on the horizon, thanks to the money-printing extravaganza
currently underway in Washington, and $40 could easily become $400 and then
$4000 a barrel, swiftly pricing US consumers out of the international oil
market. On top of that, exporting countries would balk at the idea of
trading their oil for an increasingly worthless currency, and would start
insisting on payment in kind — in some sort of tangible export commodity,
which the US, in its current economic state, would be hard-pressed to
provide in any great quantity. Domestic oil production is in permanent
decline, and can provide only about a third of current needs. This is still
quite a lot of oil, but it will be very difficult to avoid the knock-on
effects of widespread oil shortages. There will be widespread hoarding,
quite a lot of gasoline will simply evaporate into the atmosphere, vented
from various jerricans and improvised storage containers, the rest will
disappear into the black market, and much fuel will be wasted driving around
looking for someone willing to part with a bit of gas that’s needed for some
small but critical mission.

I am quite familiar with this scenario, because I happened to be in Russia
during a time of gasoline shortages. On one occasion, I found out by word of
mouth that a certain gas station was open and distributing 10 liters apiece.
I brought along my uncle’s wife, who at the time was 8 months pregnant, and
we tried use her huge belly to convince the gas station attendant to give us
an extra 10 liters with which to drive her to the hospital when the time
came. No dice. The pat answer was: “Everybody is 8 months pregnant!” How can
you argue with that logic? So 10 liters was it for us too, belly or no
belly.

So, what can we do to get our little critical missions accomplished in spite
of chronic fuel shortages? The most obvious idea, of course, is to not use
any fuel. Bicycles, and cargo bikes in particular, are an excellent
adaptation. Sailboats are a good idea too: not only do they hold large
amounts of cargo, but they can cover huge distances, all without the use of
fossil fuels. Of course, they are restricted to the coastlines and the
navigable waterways. They will be hampered by the lack of dredging due to
the inevitable budget shortfalls, and by bridges that refuse to open, again,
due to lack of maintenance funds, but here ancient maritime techniques and
improvisations can be brought to bear to solve such problems, all very
low-tech and reasonably priced.

Of course, cars and trucks will not disappear entirely. Here, again, some
reasonable adaptations can be brought to bear. In my book, I advocated
banning the sale of new cars, as was done in the US during World War II. The
benefits are numerous. First, older cars are overall more energy-efficient
than new cars, because the massive amount of energy that went into
manufacturing them is more highly amortized. Second, large energy savings
accrue from the shutdown of an entire industry devoted to designing,
building, marketing, and financing new cars. Third, older cars require more
maintenance, reinvigorating the local economy at the expense of mainly
foreign car manufacturers, and helping reduce the trade deficit. Fourth,
this will create a shortage of cars, translating automatically into fewer,
shorter car trips, higher passenger occupancy per trip, and more bicycling
and use of public transportation, saving even more energy. Lastly, this
would allow the car to be made obsolete on the about the same time scale as
the oil industry that made it possible. We will run out of cars just as we
run out of gas.

Here we are, only a year or so later, and I am most heartened to see that
the US auto industry has taken my advice and is in the process of shutting
down. On the other hand, the government’s actions continue to disappoint.
Instead of trying to solve problems, they would rather continue to create
boondoggles. The latest one is the idea of subsidizing the sales of new
cars. The idea of making cars more efficient by making more efficient cars
is sheer folly. I can take any pick-up truck and increase its fuel
efficiency one or two thousand percent just by breaking a few laws. First,
you pack about a dozen people into the bed, standing shoulder to shoulder
like sardines. Second, you drive about 25 mph, down the highway, because
going any faster would waste fuel and wouldn’t be safe with so many people
in the back. And there you are, per passenger fuel efficiency increased by a
factor of 20 or so. I believe the Mexicans have done extensive research in
this area, with excellent results.

Another excellent idea pioneered in Cuba is making it illegal not to pick up
hitchhikers. Cars with vacant seats are flagged down and matched up with
people who need a lift. Yet another idea: since passenger rail service is in
such a sad shape, and since it is unlikely that funds will be found to
improve it, why not bring back the venerable institution of riding the rails
by requiring rail freight companies to provide a few empty box cars for the
hobos. The energy cost of the additional weight is negligible, the hobos
don’t require stops because they can jump on and off, and only a couple of
cars per train would ever be needed, because hobos are almost infinitely
compressible, and can even ride on the roof if needed. One final
transportation idea: start breeding donkeys. Horses are finicky and
expensive, but donkeys can be very cost-effective and make good pack
animals. My grandfather had a donkey while he was living in Tashkent in
Central Asia during World War II. There was nothing much for the donkey to
eat, but, as a member of the Communist Party, my grandfather had a
subscription to Pravda, the Communist Party newspaper, and so that’s what
the donkey ate. Apparently, donkeys can digest any kind of cellulose, even
when it’s loaded with communist propaganda. If I had a donkey, I would feed
it the Wall Street Journal.

And so we come to the subject of security. Post-collapse Russia suffered
from a serious crime wave. Ethnic mafias ran rampant, veterans who served in
Afghanistan went into business for themselves, there were numerous contract
killings, muggings, murders went unsolved left and right, and, in general,
the place just wasn’t safe. Russians living in the US would hear that I am
heading back there for a visit, and would give me a wide-eyed stare: how
could I think of doing such a thing. I came through unscathed, somehow. I
made a lot of interesting observations along the way.

One interesting observation is that once collapse occurs it becomes possible
to rent a policeman, either for a special occasion, or generally just to
follow someone around. It is even possible to hire a soldier or two, armed
with AK-47s, to help you run various errands. Not only is it possible to do
such things, it’s often a very good idea, especially if you happen to have
something valuable that you don’t want to part with. If you can’t afford
their services, then you should try to be friends with them, and to be
helpful to them in various ways. Although their demands might seem
exorbitant at times, it is still a good idea to do all you can to keep them
on your side. For instance, they might at some point insist that you and
your family move out to the garage so that they can live in your house. This
may be upsetting at first, but then is it really such a good idea for you to
live in a big house all by yourselves, with so many armed men running
around. It may make sense to station some of them right in your house, so
that they have a base of operations from which to maintain a watch and
patrol the neighborhood.

A couple of years ago I half-jokingly proposed a political solution to
collapse mitigation, and formulated a platform for the so-called Collapse
Party. I published it with the caveat that I didn’t think there was much of
a chance of my proposals becoming part of the national agenda. Much to my
surprise, I turned out to be wrong. For instance, I proposed that we stop
making new cars, and, lo and behold, the auto industry shuts down. I also
proposed that we start granting amnesties to prisoners, because the US has
the world’s largest prison population, and will not be able to afford to
keep so many people locked up. It is better to release prisoners gradually,
over time, rather than in a single large general amnesty, the way Saddam
Hussein did it right before the US invaded. And, lo and behold, many states
are starting to implement my proposal. It looks like California in
particular will be forced to release some 60 thousand of the 170 thousand
people it keeps locked up. That is a good start. I also proposed that we
dismantle all overseas military bases (there are over a thousand of them)
and repatriate all the troops. And it looks like that is starting to happen
as well, except for the currently planned little side-trip to Afghanistan. I
also proposed a Biblical jubilee — forgiveness of all debts, public and
private. Let’s give that one… half a decade?

But if we look just at the changes that are already occurring, just the
simple, predictable lack of funds, as the federal government and the state
governments all go broke, will transform American society in rather
predictable ways. As municipalities run out of money, police protection will
evaporate. But the police still have to eat, and will find ways to use their
skills to good use on a freelance basis. Similarly, as military bases around
the world are shut down, soldiers will return to a country that will be
unable to reintegrate them into civilian life. Paroled prisoners will find
themselves in much the same predicament.

And so we will have former soldiers, former police, and former prisoners: a
big happy family, with a few bad apples and some violent tendencies. The end
result will be a country awash with various categories of armed men, most of
them unemployed, and many of them borderline psychotic. The police in the
United States are a troubled group. Many of them lose all touch with people
who are not “on the force” and most of them develop an us-versus-them
mentality. The soldiers returning from a tour of duty often suffer from
post-traumatic stress disorder. The paroled prisoners suffer from a variety
of psychological ailments as well. All of them will sooner or later realize
that their problems are not medical but rather political. This will make it
impossible for society to continue to exercise control over them. All of
them will be making good use of their weapons training and other
professional skills to acquire whatever they need to survive. And the really
important point to remember is that they will do these things whether or not
anyone thinks it legal for them to do be doing them.

I said it before and I will say it again: very few things are good or bad
per se; everything has to be considered within a context. And, in a
post-collapse context, not having to worry whether or not something is legal
may be a very good thing. In the midst of a collapse, we will not have time
to deliberate, legislate, interpret, set precedents and so on. Having to
worry about pleasing a complex and expensive legal system is the last thing
we should have to worry about.

Some legal impediments are really small and trivial, but they can be quite
annoying nevertheless. A homeowners’ association might, say, want give you a
ticket or seek a court order against you for not mowing your lawn, or for
keeping livestock in your garage, or for that nice windmill you erected on a
hill that you don’t own, without first getting a building permit, or some
municipal busy-body might try to get you arrested for demolishing a certain
derelict bridge because it was interfering with boat traffic — you know,
little things like that. Well, if the association is aware that you have a
large number of well armed, mentally unstable friends, some of whom still
wear military and police uniforms, for old time’s sake, then they probably
won’t give you that ticket or seek that court order.

Or suppose you have a great new invention that you want to make and
distribute, a new agricultural implement. It’s a sort of flail studded with
sharp blades. It has a hundred and one uses and is highly cost-effective,
and reasonably safe provided you don’t lose your head while using it,
although people have taken to calling the “flying guillotine.” You think
that this is an acceptable risk, but you are concerned about the issues of
consumer safety and liability insurance and possibly even criminal
liability. Once again, it is very helpful to have a large number of
influential, physically impressive, mildly psychotic friends who, whenever
some legal matter comes up, can just can go and see the lawyers, have a
friendly chat, demonstrate the proper use of the flying guillotine, and
generally do whatever they have to do to settle the matter amicably, without
any money changing hands, and without signing any legal documents.

Or, say, the government starts being difficult about moving things and
people in and out of the country, or it wants to take too much of a cut from
commercial transactions. Or perhaps your state or your town decides to
conduct its own foreign policy, and the federal government sees it fit to
interfere. Then it may turn out to be a good thing if someone else has the
firepower to bring the government, or what remains of it, to its senses, and
convince it to be reasonable and to play nice.

Or perhaps you want to start a community health clinic, so that you can
provide some relief to people who wouldn’t otherwise have any health care.
You don’t dare call yourself a doctor, because these people are suspicious
of doctors, because doctors were always trying to rob them of their life’s
savings. But suppose you have some medical training that you got in, say,
Cuba, and you are quite able to handle a Caesarean or an appendectomy, to
suture wounds, to treat infections, to set bones and so on. You also want to
be able to distribute opiates that your friends in Afghanistan periodically
send you, to ease the pain of hard post-collapse life. Well, going through
the various licensing boards and getting the certifications and the permits
and the malpractice insurance is all completely unnecessary, provided you
can surround yourself with a lot of well-armed, well-trained, mentally
unstable friends.

Food. Shelter. Transportation. Security. Security is very important.
Maintaining order and public safety requires discipline, and maintaining
discipline, for a lot of people, requires the threat of force. This means
that people must be ready to come to each other’s defense, take
responsibility for each other, and do what’s right. Right now, security is
provided by a number of bloated, bureaucratic, ineffectual institutions,
which inspire more anger and despondency than discipline, and dispense not
so much violence as ill treatment. That is why we have the world’s highest
prison population. They are supposedly there to protect people from each
other, but in reality their mission is not even to provide security; it is
to safeguard property, and those who own it. Once these institutions run out
of resources, there will be a period of upheaval, but in the end people will
be forced to learn to deal with each other face to face, and Justice will
once again become a personal virtue rather than a federal department.

I’ve covered what I think are basics, based on what I saw work and what I
think might work reasonably well here. I assume that a lot of you are
thinking that this is all quite far into the future, if in fact it ever gets
that bad. You should certainly feel free to think that way. The danger there
is that you will miss the opportunity to adapt to the new reality ahead of
time, and then you will get trapped. As I see it, there is a choice to be
made: you can accept the failure of the system now and change your course
accordingly, or you can decide that you must try to stay the course, and
then you will probably have to accept your own individual failure later.

So how do you prepare? Lately, I’ve been hearing from a lot of high-powered,
successful people about their various high-powered, successful associates.
Usually, the story goes something like this: “My a. financial advisor, b.
investment banker, or c. commanding officer has recently a. put all his
money in gold, b. bought a log cabin up in the mountains, or c. built a
bunker under his house stocked with six months of food and water. Is this
normal?” And I tell them, yes, of course, that’s perfectly harmless. He’s
just having a mid-collapse crisis. But that’s not really preparation. That’s
just someone being colorful in an offbeat, countercultural sort of way.

So, how do you prepare, really? Let’s go through a list of questions that
people typically ask me, and I will try to briefly respond to each of them.

OK, first question: How about all these financial boondoggles? What on earth
is going on? People are losing their jobs left and right, and if we
calculate unemployment the same way it was done during the Great Depression,
instead of looking at the cooked numbers the government is trying to feed us
now, then we are heading toward 20% unemployment. And is there any reason to
think it’ll stop there? Do you happen to believe that prosperity is around
the corner? Not only jobs and housing equity, but retirement savings are
also evaporating. The federal government is broke, state governments are
broke, some more than others, and the best they can do is print money, which
will quickly lose value. So, how can we get the basics if we don’t have any
money? How is that done? Good question.

As I briefly mentioned, the basics are food, shelter, transportation, and
security. Shelter poses a particularly interesting problem at the moment. It
is still very much overpriced, with many people paying mortgages and rents
that they can no longer afford while numerous properties stand vacant. The
solution, of course, is to cut your losses and stop paying. But then you
might soon have to relocate. That is OK, because, as I mentioned, there is
no shortage of vacant properties around. Finding a good place to live will
become less and less of a problem as people stop paying their rents and
mortgages and get foreclosed or evicted, because the number of vacant
properties will only increase. The best course of action is to become a
property caretaker, legitimately occupying a vacant property rent-free, and
keeping an eye on things for the owner. What if you can’t find a position as
a property caretaker? Well, then you might have to become a squatter,
maintain a list of other vacant properties that you can go to next, and keep
your camping gear handy just in case. If you do get tossed out, chances are,
the people who tossed you out will then think about hiring a property
caretaker, to keep the squatters out. And what do you do if you become
property caretaker? Well, you take care of the property, but you also look
out for all the squatters, because they are the reason you have a legitimate
place to live. A squatter in hand is worth three absentee landlords in the
bush. The absentee landlord might eventually cut his losses and go away, but
your squatter friends will remain as your neighbors. Having some neighbors
is so much better than living in a ghost town.

What if you still have a job? How do you prepare then? The obvious answer
is, be prepared to quit or to be laid off or fired at any moment. It really
doesn’t matter which one of these it turns out to be; the point is to
sustain zero psychological damage in the process. Get your burn rate to as
close to zero as you can, by spending as little money as possible, so than
when the job goes away, not much has to change. While at work, do as little
as possible, because all this economic activity is just a terrible burden on
the environment. Just gently ride it down to a stop and jump off.

If you still have a job, or if you still have some savings, what do you do
with all the money? The obvious answer is, build up inventory. The money
will be worthless, but a box of bronze nails will still be a box of bronze
nails. Buy and stockpile useful stuff, especially stuff that can be used to
create various kinds of alternative systems for growing food, providing
shelter, and providing transportation. If you don’t own a patch of dirt free
and clear where you can stockpile stuff, then you can rent a storage
container, pay it a few years forward, and just sit on it until reality
kicks in again and there is something useful for you to do with it. Some of
you may be frightened by the future I just described, and rightly so. There
is nothing any of us can do to change the path we are on: it is a huge
system with tremendous inertia, and trying to change its path is like trying
to change the path of a hurricane. What we can do is prepare ourselves, and
each other, mostly by changing our expectations, our preferences, and
scaling down our needs. It may mean that you will miss out on some last,
uncertain bit of enjoyment. On the other hand, by refashioning yourself into
someone who might stand a better chance of adapting to the new
circumstances, you will be able to give to yourself, and to others, a great
deal of hope that would otherwise not exist.

………….

Dmitry Orlov is author of Reinventing Collapse, New Society Publishers
(2007). His website is cluborlov.blogspot.com, where the above article is
also featured. His articles on Culture Change include The New Age of Sail,
The Despotism of the Image, and That Bastion of American Socialism.

————

__,_._,___