Peak Civilization and the Winter of our Disconnect: Carolyn Baker

PEAK CIVILIZATION AND THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONNECT, By Carolyn Baker

Thursday, 24 April 2008

To be interested in the changing seasons is a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring. ~George Santayana~ The appearance of springtime in North America may be more welcome this year than at anytime in recent history. The winter has been long, cold, and dreary-particularly in the Rust Belt where the devastations of housing foreclosures, unemployment, and the resultant blight have left a trail of human misery and degradation not seen since the Great Depression. Ten percent of the population of Ohio now relies on food stamps while hordes of domestic animals abandoned in foreclosed homes endure long and grotesque deaths from starvation. For countless Americans across the nation, this winter has brought with it something far more distressing than brutal, bone-chilling temperatures-horrific, traumatic revelations that the American dream, neatly packaged and sold for decades, has become their worst possible nightmare. Should they happen to see on TV the guy from the Countrywide commercial greeting them with "Homeowners...", they are probably wondering why he hasn't been assassinated and at the very least wondering why Countrywide is still in business. Something is festering in the psyches of the formerly middle class of this nation-something far more ominous than burgeoning public assistance and food stamp applications or mushrooming meth labs. If the subprime mortgage massacre had occurred in a vacuum, the dirty little secret might have been kept a bit longer, but juxtaposing it with Peak Oil, skyrocketing food prices, wacky weather and debilitating droughts, not to mention proliferating pink slips, it daily becomes embarrassingly obvious that Jim Kunstler was spot-on when he uttered his infamous declaration in the documentary, "The End Of Suburbia" that "the entire suburban project is the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world." And yet during this "winter of disconnect" we have heard delusional economists and the President himself describe the current horrors in terms of "a soft patch" or the need to "ride this one out until things bounce back." And overall, the human race is virtually ignoring climate change and perseverating in the madness of the ethanol panacea. And speaking of insanity, Europe is rapidly returning to coal-fired power plants, while in China, coal "remains the major source of fuel for two billion people"-nightmare scenarios with respect to global warming and climate change. Meanwhile, Monsanto and other genocidal monsters of food and population control, tout ethanol as an energy panacea--the only tangible result of their hype being mass starvation and astronomical food prices. Or as a friend recently commented: Ethanol is a fabulous solution to our energy dilemma because it will provide more fuel for us to drive around and look for food. The Four Seasons Of Civilization Duane Elgin, author of numerous books including Voluntary Simplicity, postulated fifteen years ago that civilizations evolve through specific stages which ironically follow the shape of a bell curve, similar to the Peak Oil curve, in their development and to which Elgin refers as the "four seasons" of growth. This was long before the bell curve of Peak Oil was familiar to many other individuals besides M. King Hubbert, father of the Peak Oil theory, who died four years before Elgin's book was published. According to Elgin, Stage I of the development of a civilization, "Springtime" is characterized by high growth and an era of faith in future potential. During springtime, there is little bureaucratic complexity, and activities are largely self-regulating. Stage II or "Summer", is an era of reason where social consensus begins to weaken and bureaucratic complexity increases with less self-regulation and more external regulation. "Autumn" follows, ushering in an era of cynicism where consensus weakens considerably, special interest groups surpass the power of a shared social purpose, and bureaucratic complexity mounts faster than the ability to effectively regulate. An era of despair characterizes Stage IV, "Winter", and the collapse of consensus is supplanted by conflicting social purposes. Bureaucratic mechanisms and their complexity become overwhelming, and society begins to break down. Elgin believes that three possible outcomes are likely to emerge from the breakdown of the system. One outcome is collapse as the biosphere is pushed beyond its limits and can no longer support the burden of humanity. Stagnation is another option, in which members of the system expend energy on simply maintaining the status quo. Revitalization is the most desirable option which results from a "period of intense communication and reconciliation that builds a working consensus around a sustainable pathway into the future." The author notes that we get collapse by "perpetuating the status quo and running the biosphere into ruin. We get stagnation when citizens are passive and rely on remote bureaucracies and technological solutions to handle a deteriorating local-to-global situation. We get revitalization only when we directly engage our predicament as individuals, families, communities, and nations." Although Elgin has presented the three options in this particular order, it is clear to me that the current civilization has long since passed through stagnation and is rapidly collapsing. In my opinion, while revitalization may have been possible decades ago when society's elite first learned of Peak Oil, climate change, and numerous renewable energy options, it is now possible only as a consequence of collapse for the simple reason that the progression of collapse has rendered voluntary revitalization extraordinarily problematic, if not impossible. Richard Heinberg's Peak Everything reveals unequivocally that virtually every resource on earth has reached or passed its peak of availability to the human race. Elgin's 1993 theory, however, offers a larger picture in which the likelihood that civilization itself has peaked and is on the downward side of the bell curve is logically plausible. The immediate "winter of our disconnect" (and discontent), described above, has been characterized by an astonishingly rapid unraveling of civilization which appears to accelerate with every passing day. The larger winter is not about specific events such as foreclosures, bankruptcies, food rationing in America, or melting glaciers, but rather the final evolutionary stage of civilization and its eventualities in which we now find ourselves embroiled. In other words, particular occurrences of unraveling indicate irrefutably that we have entered Peak Civilization. It is crucial, in my opinion, to comprehend Peak Civilization so that just as we understand that all of earth's resources have peaked which would prevent us from embracing the chimera of a "return to normalcy", we more astutely grasp the progression of human evolution and its implications in the macrocosm. That is to say that a clear understanding of Peak Oil prevents any rational human being from assuming that a return to cheap and abundant energy is feasible in his/her lifetime. Likewise, recognizing that civilization is in an irreversible trajectory of descent may assist us in conserving our valuable mental, emotional, and spiritual energy so that we do not expend it on phantoms of long-term revitalization. Past-Peak Elections-You Have No Government At this point it becomes necessary to distinguish between long-term and short-term revitalization. From my perspective, as stated above, collapse must occur in order for long-term revitalization to become possible, so attempting to prevent collapse also prevents one from honoring the current stage of civilization now unfolding. One example of understanding civilization's "winter" is to grasp that the only thing more futile than addressing energy depletion with ethanol use is the delusion that legitimate presidential elections actually occur in America offering valid choices between two genuinely opposing candidates who represent two distinct political parties and who are beyond domination, contamination, or exploitation by the transnational corporations that in fact manage the United States. Furthermore, to fully understand Peak Civilization is to understand that the federal government per se does not exist, but rather an elite corporate cartel engaged in the management of citizens-citizens who are now completely on their own in terms of their survival as the pseudo-government continues to implode. Moreover, the cartel's direct intent is the cessation of nation states to be supplanted by corporations and their subsidiaries. Therefore, the task before us is not to perpetuate the status quo by participating in the ersatz federal election debacle, but to, in the words of John Michael Greer "transition to a Third World lifestyle." I believe that any politician who suggests that we can do otherwise and survive as individuals or as a nation, may be committing a crime against humanity. Politicians and centralized systems are incapable of effecting meaningful change. Or as Greer states, "...getting the Federal government to do something constructive about the situation, for instance - [is] a waste of time. That sort of change isn't going to happen. It's not simply a matter of who's currently in power, although admittedly that doesn't help. The core of the problem is that even proposing changes on a scale that would do any good would be political suicide." Although nothing could be more unpalatable for the American public, transitioning to a Third-World lifestyle is precisely what it is being forced to do. And as Greer comments: There's no way to sugar-coat that very unpalatable reality. Fossil fuels made it possible for most people in the industrial world to have a lifestyle that doesn't depend on hard physical labor, and to wallow in a flood of mostly unnecessary consumer goods and services. As fossil fuels deplete, all that will inevitably go away. How many people would be willing to listen to such a suggestion? More to the point, how many people would vote for a politician or a party who proposed to bring on these changes deliberately, now, in order to prevent total disaster later on? What Peak Civilization Really Looks Like Peak Civilization by definition means the disappearance of public education, healthcare, government-issued currency, commercial food production, public access to regional water supplies, interstate commerce, the North American energy grid, and the very infrastructure of the United States. Yet one need not succumb to fatalism. While long-term revitalization cannot be realized now, its seeds can be and are being planted by the proliferation of vibrant relocalization movements erupting and evolving around the world, many of which have been spotlighted at the Truth To Power website. As Duane Elgin emphasizes: "A revitalizing society is a decentralizing society, with grassroots organizations that are numerous enough, have arisen soon enough, and are effective enough to provide a genuine alternative to more centralized bureaucracies." The first headlines of food rationing in America are buzzing across the internet as I write this article. They underscore the unequivocal reality that collapse is going to compel us to feed ourselves or quite simply, we will perish. I believe that food security is the most urgent, the most immediate issue to which we must attend at this moment of Peak Civilization. For months, this website has been informing readers about food storage and preservation and other aspects of preparedness. It is now time, if you have not already done so, to organize groups of citizens in your neighborhood, schools, churches, and community centers to plant and maintain gardens. In addition, collapse is compelling us to rapidly mobilize our neighborhoods and communities to not only accumulate our own supply of stored water but to organize citizens to work with local public water utilities to ensure that they remain public and are not privatized. Health care professionals reading these words need to consider offering local workshops on a regular basis teaching citizens how to treat injuries and illnesses in the absence of a viable healthcare system. Doctors, nurses, dentists, and all manner of medical personnel are likely to be overwhelmed with patients during and after the full-scale breakdown of the system when hospitals and clinics have closed and almost no one can afford health insurance. A recent CBS News video link emailed to subscribers recently by Truth To Power confirms the imminent, total collapse of America's healthcare system and reveals the extent to which anyone with the slightest bit of training in the field is likely to find her/himself inundated with throngs of sick people desperately seeking care. Seeds Of Revitalization Greer emphatically stresses that "The key to making sense of constructive action in a situation of impending industrial collapse is to look at the community, rather than the individual or society as a whole, as the basic unit." Those familiar with Greer's article, "The Coming Deindustrial Society", recall his three requirements for community: A community must have some degree of local organization; it must have a core of people who know how to live without fossil fuels; and it must have food and a production and distribution system for it. In a future article, Truth To Power will add another requirement, namely, the ability to communicate clearly and compassionately with other community members. Our challenge at this moment in history is to recognize and intentionally connect with the evolutionary season of winter in which Peak Civilization finds itself because as Duane Elgin admonishes us: "It is time to begin the next stage of our human journey." As I witness most of humanity's current "solutions" to its climate-energy-food-water-population-economic dilemmas, I see only myopic, psychotic strategies, and I have to ask myself whether or not it will be necessary for us to annihilate ourselves and the planet in order to transition into a more advanced evolutionary paradigm that will not permit the human race to ever again engage in anything like the current madness. Tragically, I see almost nothing that suggests otherwise. It is crucial that we comprehend that not only have we entered winter, but that that particular season is going to last a long time. As we navigate that winter, we are allowed our discontent, but we dare not permit ourselves to disconnect from current reality. Simultaneously, it is imperative that we hold a vision of revitalization and plant its seeds everywhere at the same time that we honor more the changing of the seasons than our addiction to springtime.

Last Updated ( Thursday, 24 April 2008 )

Today's Carolyn Baker - antiintellectualism

Welcome to Speaking Truth To Power—a website owned and managed by Carolyn Baker. Carolyn is an adjunct professor of history, a former psychotherapist, an author, and a student of mythology and ritual. This website offers up-to-the-moment alternative reporting of U.S. and international news, articles containing information and opinion, and a venue of support and connection for awake individuals who want not only to be informed, but to organize their lives and communities in ways that most effectively assist them in navigating what current events are manifesting.

Carolyn’s Mission: “The Chinese proverb and curse says, ‘May you live in interesting times’.” In the first decade of the twenty-first century, we live in profound uncertainty, faced with issues unprecedented in the history of the human race. Truth To Power seeks to provide readers with a ‘fixed point in a changing universe’ that both informs and supports humanity’s efforts to remake the world—both our personal worlds and our planet. My intention is to offer a beacon of light in the smothering darkness with which we seem to be engulfed, making available information and specific ideas and strategies which we all might utilize as we experience the life/death/rebirth process inherent in the inner and outer realms of our current reality.”

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DUMB AND DUMBER: ARE AMERICANS HOSTILE TO KNOWLEDGE?

Saturday, 16 February 2008

By Patricia Cohen ORIGINAL ARTICLE A popular video on YouTube shows Kellie Pickler, the adorable platinum blonde from “American Idol,” appearing on the Fox game show “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?” during celebrity week. Selected from a third-grade geography curriculum, the $25,000 question asked: “Budapest is the capital of what European country?” Ms. Pickler threw up both hands and looked at the large blackboard perplexed. “I thought Europe was a country,” she said. Playing it safe, she chose to copy the answer offered by one of the genuine fifth graders: Hungary. “Hungry?” she said, eyes widening in disbelief. “That’s a country? I’ve heard of Turkey. But Hungry? I’ve never heard of it.” Such, uh, lack of global awareness is the kind of thing that drives Susan Jacoby, author of “The Age of American Unreason,” up a wall. Ms. Jacoby is one of a number of writers with new books that bemoan the state of American culture. Joining the circle of curmudgeons this season is Eric G. Wilson, whose “Against Happiness” warns that the “American obsession with happiness” could “well lead to a sudden extinction of the creative impulse, that could result in an extermination as horrible as those foreshadowed by global warming and environmental crisis and nuclear proliferation.” Then there is Lee Siegel’s “Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob,” which inveighs against the Internet for encouraging solipsism, debased discourse and arrant commercialization. Mr. Siegel, one might remember, was suspended by The New Republic for using a fake online persona in order to trash critics of his blog (“you couldn’t tie Siegel’s shoelaces”) and to praise himself (“brave, brilliant”). Ms. Jacoby, whose book came out on Tuesday, doesn’t zero in on a particular technology or emotion, but rather on what she feels is a generalized hostility to knowledge. She is well aware that some may tag her a crank. “I expect to get bashed,” said Ms. Jacoby, 62, either as an older person who upbraids the young for plummeting standards and values, or as a secularist whose defense of scientific rationalism is a way to disparage religion. Ms. Jacoby, however, is quick to point out that her indictment is not limited by age or ideology. Yes, she knows that eggheads, nerds, bookworms, longhairs, pointy heads, highbrows and know-it-alls have been mocked and dismissed throughout American history. And liberal and conservative writers, from Richard Hofstadter to Allan Bloom, have regularly analyzed the phenomenon and offered advice. T. J. Jackson Lears, a cultural historian who edits the quarterly review Raritan, said, “The tendency to this sort of lamentation is perennial in American history,” adding that in periods “when political problems seem intractable or somehow frozen, there is a turn toward cultural issues.” But now, Ms. Jacoby said, something different is happening: anti-intellectualism (the attitude that “too much learning can be a dangerous thing”) and anti-rationalism (“the idea that there is no such things as evidence or fact, just opinion”) have fused in a particularly insidious way. Not only are citizens ignorant about essential scientific, civic and cultural knowledge, she said, but they also don’t think it matters. She pointed to a 2006 National Geographic poll that found nearly half of 18- to 24-year-olds don’t think it is necessary or important to know where countries in the news are located. So more than three years into the Iraq war, only 23 percent of those with some college could locate Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Israel on a map. Ms. Jacoby, dressed in a bright red turtleneck with lipstick to match, was sitting, appropriately, in that temple of knowledge, the New York Public Library’s majestic Beaux Arts building on Fifth Avenue. The author of seven other books, she was a fellow at the library when she first got the idea for this book back in 2001, on 9/11. Walking home to her Upper East Side apartment, she said, overwhelmed and confused, she stopped at a bar. As she sipped her bloody mary, she quietly listened to two men, neatly dressed in suits. For a second she thought they were going to compare that day’s horrifying attack to the Japanese bombing in 1941 that blew America into World War II: “This is just like Pearl Harbor,” one of the men said. The other asked, “What is Pearl Harbor?” “That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a harbor, and it started the Vietnam War,” the first man replied. At that moment, Ms. Jacoby said, “I decided to write this book.” Ms. Jacoby doesn’t expect to revolutionize the nation’s educational system or cause millions of Americans to switch off “American Idol” and pick up Schopenhauer. But she would like to start a conversation about why the United States seems particularly vulnerable to such a virulent strain of anti-intellectualism. After all, “the empire of infotainment doesn’t stop at the American border,” she said, yet students in many other countries consistently outperform American students in science, math and reading on comparative tests. In part, she lays the blame on a failing educational system. “Although people are going to school more and more years, there’s no evidence that they know more,” she said. Ms. Jacoby also blames religious fundamentalism’s antipathy toward science, as she grieves over surveys that show that nearly two-thirds of Americans want creationism to be taught along with evolution. Ms. Jacoby doesn’t leave liberals out of her analysis, mentioning the New Left’s attacks on universities in the 1960s, the decision to consign African-American and women’s studies to an “academic ghetto” instead of integrating them into the core curriculum, ponderous musings on rock music and pop culture courses on everything from sitcoms to fat that trivialize college-level learning. Avoiding the liberal or conservative label in this particular argument, she prefers to call herself a “cultural conservationist.” For all her scholarly interests, though, Ms. Jacoby said she recognized just how hard it is to tune out the 24/7 entertainment culture. A few years ago she participated in the annual campaign to turn off the television for a week. “I was stunned at how difficult it was for me,” she said. The surprise at her own dependency on electronic and visual media made her realize just how pervasive the culture of distraction is and how susceptible everyone is — even curmudgeons.

Last Updated ( Saturday, 16 February 2008 )

Carolyn Baker reviews "The Final Empire" by Kotke

Carolyn Baker Reviews “The Final Empire” By William Kotke

Posted on February 1, 2008 by dandelionsalad

Dandelion Salad

by Carolyn Baker
Speaking Truth to Power
Friday, 01 February 2008

My intention in reviewing this stunning book is to share how it has illumined my understanding that collapse and vision are not separate, but that in fact, they travel together and need each other. That is to say that collapse makes vision possible, and vision makes collapse the most desirable option of all as we confront the earth community’s current dilemma.

Disaster is not approaching,

It has arrived.

It is happening now.

Blessings and Grace are not approaching

They have arrived.

They are here now

I say I believe in Grace

But I think, feel and move as though

Only Damnation is real.

Or if Grace does exist,

It is for someone else.

I close my heart to pain

But it doesn’t help,

I cannot circumvent disaster.

But in closing my heart to disaster

perhaps I can circumvent Grace.

Can I bear the burden

Of knowing disaster and Grace,

Each in its own awful fullness?

James Hillman says our problem

Comes down to a failure of imagination.

I need an image, a picture…

Who would I be

If I were willing to risk believing

That Grace is real?

~By Paul Tierney~

It has repeatedly been my experience that when a book is supposed to enter my life, it does. Often it falls off the shelf into my lap, and at other times a friend suggests it, or the author him/herself sends me a copy for review. William Kotke has written articles for this website, and his Final Empire has been reviewed elsewhere, most notably by Dan Armstrong. However, the timing of my requesting a review copy of the book from him could not have been more momentous. As a result, I am not only reviewing the book, but using the review as an opportunity for sharing a recent shift in my perspective that may make this the most important article I’ve ever written in my life. It is written in two parts: The first contains Kotke’s extraordinary analysis of why civilization is collapsing and must collapse, and the second offers his vision of what is possible when empire has been eliminated.

My intention in reviewing this stunning book is to share how it has illumined my understanding that collapse and vision are not separate, but that in fact, they travel together and need each other. That is to say that collapse makes vision possible, and vision makes collapse the most desirable option of all as we confront the earth community’s current dilemma.

For at least the past two years I have been writing and speaking about the collapse of empire/ civilization, along with a chorus of other voices such as Matt Savinar, Mike Ruppert, Dmitry Orlov, Catherine Austin Fitts, Richard Heinberg, James Howard Kunstler, and Tim Bennett and Sally Erickson. I name only a few of us, mindful that ours are not the only voices speaking from the depths of exhaustive research and personal experience. And now in the first month of 2008, the world is beginning to witness a dramatic unraveling of civilization. The spectacle has begun with the convergence of what I have been naming for years as the “Terminal Triangle”: Peak Oil, climate change, and global economic meltdown. A number of related issues such as population overshoot, species extinction, and global pandemics, abide in the mix, but the “Big Three” are now juxtaposed in what appears to be the beginning of the end of life as we have known it on planet earth.

William Kotke has brilliantly articulated what I would not only describe as an “encyclopedia of collapse” but has skillfully depicted a vision of possibility imbedded within the core of apocalypse. The introduction and first chapter of this masterpiece can be read online, but they do not include what I believe are the book’s fundamental underpinnings consisting of Chapter 9, “The Cultural Dynamics Of Empire” and Chapter 10, “The Psychology Of Empire”, nor do they contain Kotke’s elaboration of the exquisite vision he holds for the earth community.

The author painstakingly describes the history of the disintegration and the collapse of the ecosystems in such a manner that the reader cannot escape the reality that all of this is inherent in the very nature of civilization itself. In fact, he thoroughly convinces us that no project in the history of the human race has been so unequivocally doomed from its inception as civilization, its ultimate destiny being its demise and the obliteration of everyone and everything in its wake. Had I had the slightest doubt that civilization must and will collapse in order to spare what it has not yet annihilated on this planet, my uncertainty would have been expunged by Kotke long before arriving at Chapters 9 and 10.

The Cultural Dynamics of Empire

Kotke takes on the linear concept of cultural evolution which assumes that natural cultures of ancient times were "in much worse condition than we are today" and that "we are at the forefront of social evolution." Contained within this notion is the delusion that humans invented agriculture as an escape from unsatisfactory conditions. (197) This myth presumes that "there has been a qualitative advancement with the change from forager/hunter culture to civilization." On the contrary, Kotke notes, compared with natural culture, civilization has brought forth a lowering of living standards and a world in which starvation is increasing--where "progress" is defined primarily by the technological objects that we have invented.

But the fundamental question that must be asked is: "What is it about the culture of empire that has produced the prospect of planetary suicide for the earth community?" Most of us know the standard answers to this question: Human culture changed from cooperation to competition; from social equality to hierarchy; from matrilocal consciousness to patriarchy and an emphasis on the warrior. (199)

Yet even more specifically, natural culture understood that each living thing is a spiritually conscious entity as well as understanding that "everything in material reality was spiritually vivified." The hallmark of that culture was a "continuing and direct spiritual contact with the cosmos" and one in which decisions were made with their repercussions on subsequent generations in mind. (200-201)

The culture of empire is characterized by a rejection of adaptation and insistence on control. It may be argued that as a result of natural culture's intimacy with the cosmos, its most remarkable asset was a willingness to adapt; whereas a culture immersed in materialism can only manage, manipulate, and dominate. Natural culture is one informed and guided by something greater than itself, but the culture of empire is a culture where the ego reigns supreme. Civilization inculcates the belief that bigger is better in every realm, and especially with respect to population. Increase in numbers of citizens offers the hope of physical safety, and economic growth delivers the false promise of immunity to scarcity. In summary, "a profound change takes place in the psyche of the culture when this change from forager/hunter to civilized, imperial energy systems occurs." (203)

Imperial culture, Kotke emphasizes, in contrast to natural culture, is shortsighted and accumulative. No longer is value found in preserving soil, water, forests, or other resources. Thus he argues that:

No one in the empire advocates long-term gain in soil fertility when the short-term gain of profit margins or production quotas are the whole point of the effort. This is the reason that nothing real will be done to avoid the final collapse of civilization. The structure of empire is to enrich the emperor/elite at the expense of the earth and society, not to manage affairs for the benefit of the whole life of the earth. (205)

Therefore, the culture of empire is one in which the earth is a "resource" to be used for the benefit and gratification of empire. Another word for this is quite simply, fascism.

Kotke's brilliant analysis of the cultural dynamics of empire confirms nothing if not the desirability, indeed the absolute necessity, of the collapse of civilization.

In "The Psychology of Empire" we are offered an intimate exploration of empire's impact on our hearts, souls, and bodies with a daring statement by Kotke that "We live in a culture that conditions us toward psychological disintegration" and the admonition that "the examination of these disintegrative factors will aid us in creating a new culture that is pointed toward healing and wholeness." (216) He then presents the analogy of malignancy, stating that "empire feeds on the earth like a tumor" because humans do not depend on the life of the earth for their sustenance but on what human society produces by way of using and exploiting the earth.

When one considers the cancer epidemic of recent decades in the light of the above assertion, one can only wonder to what extent our collective "feeding on the earth like a tumor" is influencing the incidence of this fatal disease. Kotke quotes cell biologist, L. L. Larison Cudmore, who states that "Cancer cells do not respect the territorial rights of other cells and refuse to obey the two rules obeyed by all other cells: they neither stop growing nor stop moving when they encounter another cell, and they do not stick to their own kind. Quite simply, they are cells that have decided on autonomy and independent growth, rather than cooperation....Cancer will not stop its hideous course of uncontrolled growth and invasion until it or its victim is dead." (218)

In other words, the cancer dynamic is without limits, inherently colonizing, omnipotent, and anti-dependent. Can we find a more apt description of empire consciousness?

Enculturation to empire begins in the birthing process itself which is not given the proper reverence it deserves, often complicated by or intruded upon by medication, technology, or both. Equally sacred is the bonding process, so frequently minimized, thwarted, or non-existent in the culture of empire. Yet another characteristic of civilization is its stilted relationship with erotic pleasure and the "anguish, shame, guilt, and automatic negative response to sexual love." (237) Thus the "civilized" child frequently enters adulthood carrying massive anxiety and little sense of connectedness with other humans or the earth. One of the most common outcomes is addiction, which empire feeds and perpetuates endlessly with a plethora of substances, things, activities, and people. Unlike growing up in natural culture, the child of empire "Not knowing the security of life and the earth and not knowing the security of a natural clan providing the learning of human sociability, the industrial human becomes a victim of all the forces of society that tend to make the person powerless and dependent, the perfect subject of addictive dependencies." (248)

Therefore, Kotke wisely concludes: "The logical extrapolation of civilization is the mental institution." (249) Neurosis, schizophrenia, and catatonic states, politically defined as insanity, are simply "logical extensions of the already existing social isolation of the individual in the culture of empire. It is also the logical end of the culture itself in the cosmos, lost in space and surrounded by life but talking only to itself." (250)

By the end of "The Psychology of Empire" it is difficult to even consider arguing for "reform" or the prevention of collapse. In fact, Kotke boldly and blatantly argues for collapse!:

We are not fighting to reform a maladaptive and dying social body. There is no conflict with civilization, it is passing away. There is no battle for civilization's power, the power to kill. There is only the open, positive and sharing sustenance of the new life. (252)

That is to say: Stop trying to fix a dying system. Rather, in Kotke's words, "As with a physical wound, the imperial tissue that has lost integration with the body, lost coherence with the complex flows of energy, falls away. One allows the diseased and injured portions to fall away, while resisting injury to that which is still healthy. One focuses on the new growth, the area of healing....In the case of civilization, it is now poised, tipping and beginning the slide into complete disintegration."

We must realize, says Kotke, that "the dear thing cannot be saved, even with major surgery."

The Ramifications Of Surrender

Some may object to the use of the word "surrender", with its spiritual undertones. However, I was greatly inspired last year by Sally Erickson's blog piece "Catastrophe As Spiritual Practice" in which she shared how surrender to collapse can be a powerful component of our personal, as well as planetary, evolution. These past two years have been for me a cellular-level experience of comprehending more deeply than ever what that actually means. The spiritual dimension for me is non-religious and non-theistic, yet informed by something greater than myself.

From the beginning of this millennium until I encountered the topic of collapse, I had been a prisoner of ego, intent on doing battle with the darkness of empire, hopeful that enough grassroots momentum could be marshaled to affect change and return the United States to the principles of a democratic republic verbalized in the Constitution, albeit not always practiced, through political and community action. What I have learned from my willingness to descend into the abyss of collapse is that there is no return to the "Common Sense" of Thomas Paine, nor is the prevention of collapse even desirable. On the contrary, the collapse of civilization is the only "hope" humanity has of restoring sanity to its own species.

Unfortunately, as I have written profusely about the desirability of collapse, some readers have argued that embracing collapse is synonymous with "giving up." For this reason, the second part of this review of Kotke's Final Empire will be devoted to exploring the other half of the book, "The Seed Of The Future," in which I will demonstrate that surrendering to collapse is anything but giving up.

What natural cultures understand that empire culture does not and cannot, is that before we can take action that makes a significant difference, we must surrender to the worst case scenario; that is, we must be willing to abandon, reject, and resist "hope" and open to abject despair. In other words, as Paul Tierney's poem reminds us, when we circumvent pain, we also circumvent grace.

Hope Vs. Vision/Mindset

As Truth To Power readers know, I have a strong reaction to the word "hope", and I take great pains to distinguish it from vision or mindset. For those who don't know, I want to explain why-again. My 2007 "The End Of The World As We Know It: Hope Vs. Mindset" addressed the issue by illuminating the word "hope" as an unfortunate casualty of the language of empire. Although not quite as cynical about it as James Howard Kunstler, I agree with him when he argues that any hope we have must come from within ourselves. Empire has inculcated in us the belief that our hope lies in something external-politicians, policies, programs, or other people, and as a result, the tendency is to embrace those as our "hope" rather than journeying into the recesses of our own psyches in order to create a vision that we can manifest in relationship with our fellow humans and the entire earth community. More often than not, our "hope" is a defense against feeling despair, but until we have visited the abyss, we are ill-equipped to affect meaningful change and are more likely to engage in activities that appear to be innovative but actually perpetuate denial-our own and that of our allies.

When I abandon the ego-driven project of preventing collapse, when I surrender to utter hopelessness, a fertile space is created in my psyche and my life for giving birth to and nurturing my vision. No longer is my vision jaded by fantasy or a compulsion to circumvent upheaval. I can stand in the tracks of the non-humans struggling to avoid extinction engendered by "superior" humans and open to the possibility of sacrificing myself and my own species so that they may live. My surrender allows me to find my proper place and purpose in the earth community-one species among countless others, willing to allow those others the last word because, of course, they will have it anyway.

Part II of this review will explore "The Seed Of The Future", creating and tending one's vision.

Wm. H. Kötke is widely traveled and published. His most recent book, prior to Planet Garden, was the underground classic, The Final Empire: The Collapse of Civilization and the Seed of the Future. He has been a journalist, a radio script writer, a pamphleteer, a novelist, an essayist, and has had many articles published in periodicals. He lives in Geyserville, California and may be contacted at wmkotke@earthlink.net This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it .

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The Plan By William Kotke (Survival; resources)

THE HERO’S JOURNEY By William Kotke