2R and the politics of collapse

General
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2R is focused on the need for a new ideological-epistemological paradigm for the West. It is defined in terms of cultural evolution. It is linked to collapse in the sense that it acknowledges the systemic nature of the problems that are leading to collapse (the “Metacrisis”). I think it is clear that collapse is going to come first, and that collapse-awareness is going to come first. 2R is the solution – it is the only solution that can work, since we obviously can’t build a new sort of civilisation based on old ideological-epistemological paradigm which led us towards collapse in the first place. But the point I am making is that not many people will come to 2R because they understand what modernism, postmodernism and metamodernism are. Instead they will put enough pieces of the puzzle together to reach the point where they realise that it is too late to prevent a significant degree of collapse. And in fact I think we’re very close to a breakthrough in the public understanding of this. I think there now must be large numbers of people who are realising that we have lost the battle to prevent catastrophic climate change. Not just losing, but lost: we’re going to keep burning fossil fuels until it becomes economically non-viable to do so.

Widespread collapse-awareness can only lead to a radical transformation of politics, both domestically and internationally. I’ve been posting on the UK’s peak oil forum (PowerSwitch - Index page) since 2008. The political discussions that take place there are almost about another world compared to anywhere even remotely mainstream. It is the politics of collapse rather than the pre-collapse politics that takes place almost everywhere else. We don’t have to continually discuss the fact that growth has to stop or pretend that we can stop climate change. Nobody gets accused of racism if they say that immigration has to stop. But there is no serious discussion of 2R issues – I’ve started relevant threads many times over the years, but people mostly either aren’t interested or don’t understand. Or at least they don’t have anything to say about it.

These two things need to be brought together, and this I think is likely to be the toughest challenge that 2R faces in holding itself together as a meta-movement. And the biggest single difficulty is going to be the issue of migration. Even now it is probably the most controversial issue in Western politics. I am no expert on US politics, but it I am guessing it is largely why Trump has happened. It is certainly why Brexit happened (had the UK been offered an opt-out of freedom of movement, Remain would have won easily), and it is the reason why “the populist right” is threatening to take power in many European countries.

The current migrant crisis is nothing compared to what is coming. Climate change alone is going to make large parts of the Earth’s surface uninhabitable for humans. How does this end? It seems to me that there is only one way that it can end, and that is with walls and fences going up all over the place. People will end up trapped trying to survive in places which are no longer survivable. They will end up in enormous camps which are completely dependent on the importing of large amounts of donated food and other essential supplies, and when the situation deteriorates in the rest of the world then eventually those supplies will stop coming and the migrant camps will become de-facto death camps. Not intentionally so, but because somebody has to die and those people will be bottom of the priority list.

There is no fair or just way to manage this process globally. There is no fair way to decide which 4 billion (or however many it is) die. What is going to happen is a desperate struggle to survive. This won’t be the sort of struggle that US-style preppers imagine it will be. Hiding in the hills with lots of canned food and ammunition won’t work for very long. The struggle to survive will be a collective effort – this is what Deep Adaption is all about. It will apply at every level of human organisation from individuals and families up to the sovereign state. Above that level I am expecting things to mostly fall apart. The best we can hope for is to avoid World War III. Global co-ordination is going to be impossible. The uselessness of the COP conferences and the UN show why. I think collapse needs to be defined in terms of this breakdown of the international order, and of the chaotic and unmanageable nature of that breakdown. It is a process rather than an event, and its defining features are chaos, unmanageability and unfairness. This is in contrast to “degrowth”, which is the attempt to manage the process of contraction, in order to minimise the chaos and eliminate the unfairness. This is simply not going to be possible – degrowth is utopian thinking applied to collapse.

The problem 2R has is that collapse politics is deeply in conflict with postmodern social leftist politics, and my limited experience of metamodern politics leads me to believe that this conflict is likely to be carried over into metamodernism. Is the politics of 2R going to be more like degrowth or more like collapse politics?

I think part of the reason my own perspective is somewhat different to the majority here is that I am looking for a new paradigm for the whole of collapse-aware society, including people who have never seriously thought about the relationship between science and mysticism. That is why I frame it in terms of ecocivilisation rather than 2R. This is because the concept of ecocivilisation can bring together everybody who is both collapse-aware and realistic enough to understand why humans aren’t going extinct any time soon. If you can accept that collapse is inevitable and also that we have no choice but to try to rebuild civilisation, and that rebuilding and survival amount to the same thing, then we have a beginning point for a meta-movement large enough to push a paradigm shift through. We have to convince people that 2R is an essential component of the solution – it is the ideological basis of the solution – where “problem” refers to the need to survive the collapse and construct an ecocivilisation. The collapse part of this process isn’t avoidable. People who are newly coming to terms with collapse are much more open to radical new thinking than people who are still addicted to hopium.

So I guess the question is how people here see the management of this problem with in 2R. How is 2R going to be kept together given how unpalatable collapse politics is likely to be to a large proportion of the people who are likely to be attracted it?

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That’s a lot … before saying anything about 2R and collapse, I’d like to take a giant step backward and propose a framework for collapse in general.

Imagine the world as a giant interlocking mesh of systems, each system giving input to and taking output from one another. Any system starved for input, or fed poisonous input, will collapse. Lately, multiple branches of the US government are being starved of inputs in an intentional effort to collapse them. Any such collapse will have ripple effects. Other systems will miss their inputs as well. Because of the complexity level of the global systemic mesh, the knock-on effects of such cascading collapse can be anticipated in at best a thematic, generalized way. Specific timing, sequencing, and magnitudes are subject to chaotic “butterfly effects”.

How might 2R optimize its impact in this global collapse scenario? I yield the floor.

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I am having trouble processing that question. What does “optimising its impact” mean? We are talking about 2R as a movement (or metamovement) rather than as a paradigm or a historical period or process. The only way I can see of holding such a movement together is to frame it in terms of collapse and ecocivilisation. Ecocivilisation provides a goal – an end point. Once you have a goal in mind then you can start asking questions about the options available for achieving that goal, and then you can start making value judgements about which of those options to choose. For me, the role of 2R in this is to enable the process I have just described. Without the concept of ecocivilisation as a great societal goal (first nationally, ultimately globally) then I don’t know how to hold the whole thing together, and I don’t know how to answer your question. That’s why I asked the question I did – for me, collapse politics became reality long before I understood anything about 2R so my own thinking about 2R has always taken place entirely within that context. So for me the key is to explain 2R (or my version of it, which I call the New Epistemic Deal) to people who are already aware of collapse, and help them to understand why it is critical to both survival and transformation. There is no point in trying to convince people who are still resisting accepting the inevitability of collapse, precisely because that just drags you back into the reality-free quagmire of pre-collapse politics.

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You’re overthinking, re-investing and compounding the bias, drift and model overfitting. Surely that’s not the way forward. Just imagine a better world, sell that idea to the people and work your way backwards. Nobody gets excited about doomsayers and their predictions (even when they turn out to be correct).

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One part of the narrative that was used to sway people was immigration - but even that problem was constructed. There is a much more holistic answer why Trump happened - it’s the intellectual bankruptcy of the liberal western democracies, the loss of idealism, the increasing systemic corruption and the auto immune disease. All that Trump (and the rest of the opportunists) needed to do is to cut the Gordian knot and show to the people that instead of everything being complicated and near impossible to achieve - everything is achievable with the right approach (albeit not a politically correct approach).

What we’re seeing now is turning the old normal into abnormal and the old abnormal into normal - isolationist policies, new alliances, new values!!!, etc…

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Those criticisms are very generalised and vague, and also unsubstantiated. You will need to expand on it or there is nothing for me to respond to. I don’t think it is possible to “overthink” the metacrisis.

OK. I think we need to explore this further. From my perspective, I am imagining a better world, and then I am asking about how we can realistically get from here to there. I am not trying to get people excited – I’m just trying to get them to face up to reality, and the reason I am doing that is precisely because I think that is the only way we can make the world better.

I genuinely believe that collapse is completely inevitable, and in fact has already started, and I also believe that it is a necessary precursor to the the transformation because we are not going to agree to that transformation voluntarily.

The mantra of the last 50 years has been “We must act now or it will be too late.” I think the mantra of the new movement needs to be “We must deal with reality or it will deal with us.”

To be honest, I am not entirely sure what you think 2R is. Why do you think it is necessary? What does it mean for you?

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I was referring to your cinematic vision - the imagery of “walls and fences” and the rise of “camps” as survival mechanisms fit within the catastrophe, apocalypse or dystopian film genres.

Let me respond to your other question tomorrow :slight_smile:

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From a Cynefin standpoint, it’s important to distinguish between the complex and complicated. The complicated is tractable to long chains of cause and effect reasoning. The complex, by contrast, is more elusive and requires a looser sort of modelling. I’d suggest the metacrisis is fundamentally complex.

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Maybe they do. But they also fit with reality. I believe that what is coming fully deserves the name “eco-apocalypse”.

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I see it rather differently. If we’re talking about Brexit, it wasn’t that this narrative was used to sway people. That is an attempt to rewrite history. The referendum only happened because of 20 years of growing political pressure, and that pressure was coming from the people themselves. Saying “they were swayed by politicians” is demeaning – you are implying that those people were too stupid to have a valid opinion of their own, and they were manipulated by self-serving politicians. This attitude among remainers is part of the reason why leave won. People were sick and tired of not being listened to. The truth is that the UK is seriously overpopulated and this is almost entirely down to mass immigration – the “native” population isn’t even reproducing at replacement rate.

And the point that really matters is that all of these overshoot-related problems are going to get much worse. Telling people they have been brainwashed into thinking migration has anything to do with it will have the end result of the far right taking power.

And what is “the right approach”?

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Good framing. That will be the eventual end of post-truth politics.

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I’d like to use this as a case study for the “cascading systems” model proposed up higher in the thread. First, in general, I think its fair to say numerous system either fully or partially failed to allow Trump’s election. More than one root cause in all likelihood. Migration issues certainly loomed large.

First all, the US asylum system was bent out of shape beyond all reasonable bounds. The idea of “asylum” was intended to accommodate relative handfuls of escapees from political persecution. It was never meant to sort low income migrants in the millions. The US legal system is extremely procedural, and the courts cannot remotely keep up with the number of cases. How about revising the law? That would be a good idea, except Congress has been deadlocked on this matter for over a generation. Both sides see the current situation as politically favoring them. Democrats miscalculated this, I believe. What the Democrats failed to recon with is that low income minority voters don’t like the competition for food, housing, jobs, and benefits from recent arrivals. The Democrats counted on race to earn votes. It turns out class matters also. Of course, behind the migrant push are all sorts of systemic collapses all over the world, exacerbated in turn by numerous imbalances in the global economic system.

I’d love to propose some holistic solution that would just “fix” all this in short order, but nothing occurs. Different actors are likely to address specific symptoms and problem areas, with the global result being an unpredictable amalgam of all those. The general notion of “walls and fences” is not just cinematic hyperbole. As a practical matter, it’s been rather normal in the US for quite awhile. It was often done through property values, zoning laws, gated communities, private clubs, and the like. It’s hard not to imagine more of that sort of thing - with more hardened barriers - in future cycles. Even when bike riding in rural areas, I’ve noticed that fencing and “no trespassing” signs are very much the norm. Quite a few of those properties advertise dog and guns in case anyone wants to put the matter to the test.

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I stole it. It was the motto of an early 2000’s website called Life After The Oil Crash (LATOC) run by Matt Savinar. He was an oil finance expert from California. After the 2008 crash he became an astrologer and LATOC was no more.

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The same problem exists in Europe. It is why there is so much debate about leaving the EHCR. The European Convention on Human Rights: leave or stay? You decide | Institute for Government

This is where pre-collapse politics meets reality. This treaty was negotiated with a very different world in mind, and yet anybody who says we should leave it is accused of being a right wing extremist. At least that is what they say in public.

There isn’t one. Once you accept the realities of collapse then it stops even being a live issue – or rather the question becomes “when” rather than “if”.

To what extent this is possible within nation states is likely to depend on the details. It does exist in Europe, but it is increasingly clear that European and US politics are diverging. This is another huge question we need to address. This thread focuses on international migrants and international borders, and so it is about inequality between countries. I don’t see any way that is going to change, because doing so would required unprecedented levels of co-operation at a time when things are heading in this opposite direction. But within sovereign states, especially in Europe, it is less clear that these levels of inequality can be politically sustained without something resembling a revolution.

All of which adds up to the possibility of ever greater political divergence between the US and Europe. I can see the US descending into neo-feudalism at the same time as Europe sees the rise of a new sort of eco-revolutionary politics. And not a purely leftist revolution either – it would need to be the majority of society, including elements currently classed as right wing. Collapse politics forces a complete recalibration of what left and right mean.

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OK, so now I’d like to look at “collapse” in mid-range structural terms. Less than everything falling apart all at once (it won’t) but more thematic than just incident-based (Trump, Brexit, etc.)

First of all the arena for agent-arena analysis is the globe. The world may be a chaotic political-economic mess, but it’s pretty clear, like it or not, we have global entanglement. On generational scales, the arena may come to include moon, Mars, asteroids, etc., but for now near-Earth orbit is the effective limit. Earth-bound resources and systems frame the effective limits to growth.

Climate change is unlikely to directly threaten anything as major as sudden human extinction. There will be some mass-casualty events (flood, fire, storm, heat wave, freezing), but the main first-order effect of climate and resource depletion will be in economic systems. In a battle between nature and economic theory, nature wins.

When the economy contracts, political systems go down next. However, new political systems also emerge, more focused on getting whatever is left of the global economic base. This is quite literally the Trump administration program. The likely result of all this is something like Turchin’s “musical chairs” model, except with nation-state actors seeking elite status, rather than groups or persons within particular nation-states (although that will keep happening too). What simply can’t be predicted is how “hot” the wars are likely to be, or how destructive, or when, or how soon. This is the sort of question in which smallish matters (like Archdukes taking a wrong turn in Sarajevo) can have an outsized impact on the details of how history plays out.

Meanwhile, the most forward looking people (often artists, intellectuals, the spiritually attuned) sense all this coming and cultural systems start to churn in advance of events, like animals reacting to a storm or an earthquake before most humans feel it. The future sends shock waves, as it were, before it fully manifests. 2R strikes me as the sort of place people who are above-average sensitive to the shock waves of what’s coming like to gather to sort through options. As for the options … well, this is long enough as is.

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Yes, I agree with all that. But I think it still leaves the question I asked in the opening post unanswered. It feels like your replies are so far just extending the justification for asking it, and expanding the scope of what needs to be considered.

Pre-collapse politics is the politics of privilege – it is a politics that can only exist if the majority are not concerned about their own survival prospects or that of the whole society in which they live. For me, that is why it is important recognise that the process of collapse has already begun, and why it can’t just be turned around. Minds need to be focused.

Are you familiar with Alf Hornborg?

Hornborg | How to turn an ocean liner: a proposal for voluntary degrowth by redesigning money for sustainability, justice, and resilience | Journal of Political Ecology

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Yes, it’s a complex system and it’s difficult to predict the outcomes - especially because of the time factor. With weather, as an example of a complex system, you can make reasonably good predictions based on a short timespan. You look through the window and the weather is very likely to remain similar for the next 15 minutes, let’s say.

What we can do is follow trends - that’s what’s making us nervous and uncomfortable. The trends are heading towards trouble, but we don’t know how sub-systems behave at the limits, etc… So when I say “overthinking” - I’m alluding to you filling the gaps with imagination - and in your case it’s biased to fit your theory of inevitable collapse (whatever the collapse in this case actually means).

I actually don’t mind exaggeration - if that’s a message you want to send to the world in order to make it more aware of the problem. But that extreme doomsday scenario is not the only outcome and, without doing any fancy stats or probability evaluation, not a likely one - purely because you’re imaging it quite precisely.

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I understand that is how it looks to you. However, I believe the truth is that I have a significantly better grasp of the reality than you do. I came the conclusion collapse was inevitable 35 years ago, and everybody told me I was wrong. They locked me up in a psychiatric hospital and told me I was psychotic – detached from reality. They told me what you just told me – that my imagination was running out of control. Since then, everything that has happened has confirmed to me that my analysis was basically correct. I have lived my whole adult life based upon this understanding, and it has served me well.

So I am sure you can imagine what your comment looks like to me. I have spent the last 35 years watching Western society catch up with me. I started on my own on the outside looking in. Now there’s a subreddit called Collapse of Civilization, with 527,000 members. Why should I take any notice of people telling me my imagination is out of control now, when I had the courage to stand alone like that in 1989, and history has already proved me right?

(whatever the collapse in this case actually means).

I have said what I mean – catastrophic ecological and climate collapse, and the involuntary and chaotic breakup of the existing global order, with all that that entails. Robert has put some flesh on those bones.

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This really requires a nuanced analysis, but I can’t cover it here… There are many underlying problems and those are not specific to the UK, but are present in the decline of the Western democracies. I really don’t want to go political here - I’m just an observer and try not to take sides.

There are liberal values that Western democracies have been priding themselves on and using them to highlight a qualitative difference compared to competing political systems. Some of those values are Freedom of Speech, Political Pluralism, Human Rights, Rule of Law, Equal Rights…

All of those have been seen as progressive and positive values to aspire to and have been used for decades to illustrate how our society, despite being focused on wealth creation and meritocracy, also cares more about the people than the Socialist East, the Undeveloped South, the Autocratic and Dictatorial Middle East …

In 1951 we became the signatories of the Refugee Convention, and later the Protocol, but continued to actively destabilise foreign countries under the pretext of “bringing freedom”. It worked fine, we found a good way to continue exploiting countries and it didn’t look like the old style imperialism/colonialism.

By the early 2000s - we’ve started experiencing serious issues with migration from the Middle East, Africa, South Asia, Balkans … due to wars, environmental reasons and simply because the logistics of illegal immigration scaled up and became more efficient and cheaper.

Instead of addressing the new challenges - we continued explicitly subscribing to the values of Western democracies, but implicitly we’ve seen a huge inflation of those in all areas. Politicians saw it easier to proceed with the stealth erosion of domestic rights and values then to find new ways to competitively (or synergetically) engage with the post cold-war world.

Our society became so much “on the edge” and politicians couldn’t find a way to fix it without a fundamental re-organisation. They had no courage to do so and the tensions grew.

The accompanying cracks, anomalies, contradictions and paradoxes were easy to spot and that’s what Brexit and Trump and the rise of the Far Right is all about. The system become internally so incoherent and ripe for taking apart and putting back together - it presented a clear opportunity.

As to “people” (whoever they are) - they have completely outsourced their sense-making. All there is to their behaviour is repeating and re-enforcing what they can all refer to. Just like the “small-talk” can only be about what everyone knows and can comment on (the lowest common denominator) - the political discourse is the same.

Migration can be seen as a problem, just like the decline of the NHS can be conveniently blamed on the EU contributions (as evidenced by Boris Johnson’s bus banners). There is an infinite number of problems that we suffer from and they can all be weaponised. Migration is just one of them… The main meta problem is the lack of ideas, solutions, direction - stopping migration won’t solve anything in isolation.

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Love to take credit, but at best I curate a collection high-quality theoretical perspectives. The best point of entry lately seems the one below. Pogany worked with the ecological impact on the economy for quite a long time - generally being a voice crying the wilderness. Toward the end of his life, he connected this work to the mystical insights of Jean Gebser on mutations of structures of consciousness. To get to the next world system (Pogany GS3) requires Gebser’s aperpectival integral consciousness. Part of the integral is “time freedom”. Linear time dissolves into something much more fluid. The past in some sense includes the present and the future.

My own adventures with dissolution of self and massive intuitions never got much farther than anti-depressants, light duty therapy, and counter-culture infused spiritual experimentation. Never had a problem holding down a “day job”, thankfully. So the collapse story has been creeping up on me in the course of other sorts of twistings and turnings. In any case, it’s not a new story. Apocalyptic literature is thousands of years old in multiple civilizations.

So the idea of a vision in 1989 blowing clean through a previous ego structure and being misdiagnosed by conventional psychiatric medicine is more or less how I expect the world to work. Look at it this way - you could have been Nietzsche. Or pick any other misunderstood visionary. It must have been painful many steps along the way. But really, you have way more company than you may have imagined, but maybe not in the sort of places you might have imagined.

The challenge problem of the moment seems to involve letting intuition and insight come roaring in with all their thunder, and then presenting resulting insights in a prosaic way for the consumption of wider audiences. That’s why I latch on to theorists like Turchin and Pogany - they show how day-to-day normal processes we are all familiar with can build up imperceptible pressures leading to periodic large fractures. Being ready for the large fractures is not crazy - it’s just prudent. But anyone who explains these matters too much or too often to people who are not seeing it will unfortunately be relegated to the fringes of society.

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