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?