This installment features the conclusion of KMO’s conversation with Jason Horsley about the limits and pitfalls of entheogenic self-exploration and the utility of surrender. The second half of the program brings together clips from other podcasts and excerpts from Carolyn Baker’s book Sacred Demise: Walking the Spiritual Path of Industrial Civilization's Collapse to communicate the possibilities for transformation that collapse presents to each of us. At the end of your rope? Good on ya!
Music by Jesse Miller of the Mystic Mind Podcast
To learn more about the C-Realm/Cleaver Couch Surfing Tour or to lend a hand, please contact the following folks:
Los Angeles: Jesse Miller
San Francisco: Volunteer Needed
Portland: Doug Lain
Seattle: Volunteer Needed
Vancouver: Justin Ritchie
Lately, the much-repeated aphorism has circulated around the Web that civilizations build their most extreme monuments at the very moment of collapse. If this is true -- and it is hard to argue with the historical record -- then it's time to organize a new Third Party for the 2012 election with Jared Diamond and Cormac McCarthy heading the national ticket (and Roland Emmerich for EPA chief).
-James Howard Kunstler from his latest blog entry.
http://www.thegrowreport.com/Forums/sho
I read a short piece in Newsweek recently about how Apple's new tablet computer thingie will "reinvent computing" and how with it some indigo child of the post-iPod age "will be inventing a new language for telling stories."
http://www.newsweek.com/id/217683
And who knows? It may go that way. That would certainly be good news for me and my fellow "outside the mainstream mediocracy" podcasters, but I have lost my techno-Utopian religion.
Five years ago, I had DSL service in my home. Now, I use the wifi at the public library and I spend a LOT less time online than I did half a decade ago. I can imagine this being a temporary "setback," and I can also see it as an indicator of what's to come for a growing portion of "the Tribe" and as a decided improvement in the state of things.
John Horgan was telling me about a conversation that he had with an anti-terrorism think-tank wonk about how in five years the norm will be for everyone to be online all the time and that it will be extremely suspicious for anyone to be offline, just as now it is extremely suspicious for a person to leave their cell phone at home. The assumption of the authorities is that, since the GPS gear in your cell phone creates a continuous timeline of its (and presumably its owner's) movements, then the only reason to leave home without it is to avoid creating a record of your movements, and the only reason you would want to do that is because you are up to evil doings.
This is the panoptic dark side of the on-going collapse of the distinction between direct experience and electronically mediated experience. Things could go that way, but again, the faith of my younger years has wavered.
I think that in five years time most of us will still make use of the internet in some form. Some of us will continue sleep walking into the Panopticon and think that we're making "progress," and others will be spending more and more time "offline," and that doing so will both enrich our experience of life and make us personae non grata to those who occupy the top spots in the hierarchy.
I actually don't think that there is much danger of "the Internet" going away. "The Internet" (qua the global network of networks) existed for decades prior to the advent of MySpace, FaceBook, and free web-mail, and I suspect that some segment of the population will continue to make use of it come what may.
I can envision a time when the multi-media bells and whistles of the World Wide Web prove too expensive, impractical, and stunningly extravagant to maintain but in which Usenet, IRC, and similar text-based interfaces thrive and enable the functioning of far-flung "communities" that would otherwise not exist. It wouldn't pull the same audience as FaceBook and YouTube, but that might be for the best.
As I have slid increasingly into mnemonic and organizational impairment in recent years I have become ever more reliant on my Gmail inbox to serve as my prosthetic memory. As more people become reliant on the functions of "the Cloud," I can also imagine a time when the generous and civic-minded machines at Google might decide that if the service they provide to me is really "all that" then I shouldn't mind too terribly much if they asked me to fork over a few clams in exchange for searching the hundreds of thousands of messages in my inbox for all emails from Neal Kramer or that make mention of "the Singularity."
If that happens, a lot of people will add one more category of expenses to the list of things that they "have to" pay for each month... things that their parents and grandparents never imagined themselves using, much less "needing."
And some people will decide that they can do without the services of the Cloud. If the percentage of people who opt out is small enough, they will be ridiculed and considered kooks on the level of people who refuse certain types of medical care on religious grounds. If they are more numerous or if they opt out involuntarily due to deteriorating economic circumstances, then they may remain unacknowledged in the mainstream discourse, like the tens of millions of Americans who opt out of the annual income tax filing ritual. Whether they are ridiculed or not spoken of, they will be viewed with suspicion and antipathy by those who require a servile and predictable hoi polloi.
Most people reading this will be familiar with the life and work of Edward Bernays and his successors and with their decades-long project of blurring the distinction between wants and needs. Only in the scenarios that most resemble the fantasies of the techno-Utopians will this program continue its relentless conquest of the space of human concerns. In most of the futures I see as likely, the continuation of this program will fall into the category of endeavors that Jim Kunstler derides as "efforts to sustain the unsustainable."
In the coming years, I see more and more people regaining a working distinction between the conditions they need in order to live and enjoy a good quality of life and the objects and "services" which they have been duped into regarding as essential for the maintenance of a desired self-image and social status.
Whether by Flicker, or sneakernet, or semaphore flags, the people who opt out will find ways to communicate with each other and share the techniques they have learned for getting by without some of the so-called "essentials."
Much of what we fear will never come to pass, and much of what we fear will come to pass, and we'll discover ways to cope with it, learn from it, and live better because of it, in no small part because circumstances will force us to work with and depend upon the people close to us rather than paying anonymous and distant strangers for the things we genuinely need in order to survive.
Ever wonder what would happen if you popped into the Quickie Mart for a quart of juice and some batteries and found the shelves were empty...permanently? I do. An essay I wrote on this issue, which I've thought about for several years and which partly explains the Digital Age Carbon-Neutral Life I'm attempting here on the Funky Butte Ranch, runs in the Washington Post's Outlook section Sunday. Which means, of course, that it went up online today (Thursday) -- newspapers even scoop themselves online these days, which doesn't really seem like a winning business model to me, but I'm glad it's available early. So even if you don't live on the Beltway (or in the White House, though hard copy readers get photos), you can read it at:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/05/AR2009080504266.h tml?hpid=opinionsbox1
And so we confront our prospects for Keeping the Googling Good Life Going in a Post-Box Store era.
Not that I'm rooting for a collapse. Comfort is good. But it seems mainstream to at least wonder about it, given the goings-on of the last two thousand years. Or the last two.
Hope everyone's having a lovely summer. I'm waiting on a recalcitrant monsoon season here in the desert -- all thunder, not much moisture every afternoon. Having a lot of fun waiting, though: writing, hiking, and stuffing myself with goat ice cream. In other news, "Funky Butte Goat Squad" organic t-shirts will soon be available at my live events and on the "Dispatches from the Funky Butte Ranch" blog of Carbon-Neutral Misadventures at www.dougfine.com. And even more important than swag, I've started work on my next book.
Sustainabilty or bust, everyone. Meaning, cross your fingers that building a Green economy is going to launch us back into a worldwide leadership role this Millennium.
And the Post story is at:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/05/AR2009080504266.h tml?hpid=opinionsbox1
First-time visitors might or might not have to do a free registration. Another stupendous business model.
Oh, well, I can't worry about the old media's problems. As long as the check doesn't bounce. I'm off to refill the hummingbird feeders for the second time today -- the manic little miracles are swarming, darting in a deafening frenzy of orange and olive green wings outside my window (above a parade of week-old ducklings). I hope all the bird activity is a monsoon harbinger.
Best,
Doug
KMO ventures into the Kunstler Kave with two C-Realm listeners to engage James Howard Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century and Scooter the cat in a conversation on the topic of conspiracy, paranoid thinking, and the undeniable fact that humans at all levels of society do, in fact, collude with one another to advance their own interests and agendas. Other topics include the Obama administration's response to the ongoing financial meltdown, the impossibility of continuing to live on debt, and the maladaptive American penchant for grandiosity that distorts workable responses to challenging times into quixotic fantasies doomed to failure.
Music by East Forrest
AyasminA returns to the C-Realm to help KMO plumb the darkness for landmarks along KMO's invisible path. In response to an email from the world's only credentialed "creative urbanist," KMO quotes from Kevin Kelly's blog entry about the fatal flaw in the anti-civilizationists' agenda. At the end of the program KMO enlists the words of Charles Eisenstein to anchor the over-arching theme of the episode.
Music: Reggae Drift by Adam of the Psychonautilus.
Thanks to a robot, i am not for prompting me to get around to reading something by Charles Eisenstein. Here's the very end of a recent Reality Sandwich piece:
The ideology of perpetual gain has brought us to a state of poverty so destitute that we are gasping for air. That ideology, and the civilization built upon it, is what is collapsing today.
Individually and collectively, anything we do to resist or postpone the collapse will only make it worse. So stop resisting the revolution in human beingness. If you want to survive the multiple crises unfolding today, do not seek to survive them. That is the mindset of separation; that is resistance, a clinging to a dying past. Instead, allow your perspective to shift toward reunion, and think in terms of what you can give. What can you contribute to a more beautiful world? That is your only responsibility and your only security. The gifts you need to survive and enjoy will come to you easily, because what you do to the world, you do to yourself.
There's more. Much more.
131: Rocky Top
M. King Hubbert's peak is a perfect mathematical abstraction, and gliding over the top at speed might leave one with a giddy feeling of momentary weightlessness, but according to Albert K. Bates, the reality described by the mathematical object is more of a rocky mountaintop than a glassy smooth parabola, and moving over it's jagged topology won't (doesn't) feel much like gliding.
Read Albert's thoughts on bio-char or learn more about the upcoming permaculture design course in Belize.
The musical interlude in this episode features a track from Tibet2Timbuk2.
You can find the Michael Pollan for Agriculture Secretary petition here:
http://www.petitiononline.com/MPoll
Thank you.
http://c-realm.blogspot.com/
HI KMO,
I read this article in full:
http://www.newscientist.com/channel/being-human/mg19826501.500-why-the-demise-o f-civilisation-may-be-inevitable.html
The article is dated april 5th of this year in the magazine and 2nd of april online.
Refers firstly to an old book (pub. 1988) "The Collapse of Complex Societies" by Joseph Tainter of University of Utah, Salt Lake City.
He holds that all civilisations develop more layers of complexity until they are crushed under their own weight. Ours has only grown so big because of the free ride that oil has given us.If crops fail, and rain is patchy, build irrigation canals. When they silt up, organise dredging crews. When the bigger crop yeilds lead to a bigger population, build more canals. When there are too many for ad-hoc repairs, install a management bureaucracy, and tax people to pay for it. When they complain, invent tax inspectors and a system to record the sums paid.
laterThere is, however, a price to be paid. Every extra layer of organisation imposes a cost in terms of energy, the common currency of all huiman efforts.
The article later talks about how societies can move from hierarchies to networks but that the evidence suggests that this can make things worse. Your friend, Thomas Homer-Dixon is also quoted in this article.
Can you find NewScientist in your local library?
Cheers,
D
Thank you, D. I think it would be pretty presumptuous of me to claim Thomas Homer-Dixon as a friend. I've read and found great value in his book, The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization, and I've had one conversation with him, which you can hear in episode 36 of the C-Realm Podcast, but we've never met face to face, nor have we carried on any sort of on-going correspondence.
Multiple C-Realm guests have made mention of Joseph Tainter's book. I list it in the C-Realm Amazon Store under "Guest and Listener Recommendations" with Dmitry Orlov as the person who recommended it. That was in the context of our discussion in episode 96: Kollapsnik & the Ripping Yarn. If you haven't heard that episode or don't remember it, you might want to give it a listen or go and read Dmitry's essay The Five Stages of Collapse. It has a renewed relevance given the on-going catastrophe in the financial markets and the reportedly urgent need to pass unread legislation that will throw seven hundred billion dollars at the goal of preventing total collapse of the money-for-nothing economy.
I have not yet read the article to which you linked, but when I do, I may come back and expand upon this entry.
I don't own a gun. I was never any good at shooting a gun. I was educated by Quakers and avoid violence every chance I get. Still, I was delighted by the Supreme Court's Second Amendment ruling. Not simply because it upheld the Constitution, but because, in a land whose leaders are increasingly contemptuous of democracy and its people and where the specter of dictatorship has loomed as never before, an armed citizenry is one of the last defenses - both symbolic and practical - left to us.link: http://prorev.com/2008/06/swampoodle-re
(...)
It turned out that there was another advantage for a peace loving progressive to oppose taking away other people's guns. Once some of these folks found I wasn't after their guns, they were more willing to listen to my ideas on other subjects. It was something many liberals have never learned: don't mess around too much with the other person's culture. Stick to the big things that can bring us together.
I found the above through a hyper-link in a post to a site called Electric Politics. The author of that post argued, "If we should suffer a catastrophic collapse of society then those with guns will be a heck of a lot better off than those without." To which someone responded:
Really? Maybe if you find yourself in a Hollywood movie and have only to survive to the 90-minute mark. But in a situation lasting more than a few days, I'm not sure how much having guns would help you. I lived in Russia in the 1990's, when society did collapse in a lot of ways, and I think you're much better off having some good friends and well placed acquaintances than a bunch of guns.
Put yourself in a "you vs. everybody else" situation (I think having guns encourages this mentality), and I can tell you who will win.
While I absolutely agree with the closing paragraph, I don't see how "having some good friends and well placed acquaintances" and owning firearms are at all mutually exclusive. Unfortunately, I am geographically distant from my good friends, and I don't own any guns. I've set myself and my family up for the worst of both worlds. That was not my intention, but here I am.
This is only tangentially related to the stuff above about guns, and it could probably stand alone as a separate post, but it comes up a lot in this context. Urban(e) Blue Staters like to throw the word "redneck" around to express their contempt for the attitudes, tastes, and lack of sophistication of people who live in the red states.
Where does the term "redneck" come from? Think about that.
A person whose neck is red probably works out in the sun.* At the time the word was coined that person probably worked in agriculture, so to deride someone as a redneck is to denigrate people who work the land and grow food.
Food producer = semi-literate doofus.
Guess what folks, if you don't know how to grow food but you intend to keep eating it even in the event of a collapse of industrial civilization, you might want to consider how your skill set matches up with that of your archetypal redneck and figure out what it is you have to offer in that situation. What do you have that someone who knows how to hunt, fish, garden and SHOOT might want?
If the only thing you can come up with is your ass, then you might want to get back into that pilates class because the supply of helpless/useless city slicker ass will greatly exceed the demand in the event that the power grid goes down and all those ones and zeros in your bank account amount to less than a can of beans.
*According to Wikipedia, this is probably not the original meaning of the term "redneck." The word has a fascinating history:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redneck_(s
So we now head into the general election. One thing the pundits of the mainstream media seem to miss is how much more room for economic carnage there is in the months remaining. They seem to be laying their current odds on the idea that McCain and Obama are starting on a "level playing field." In fact, McCain is already up to his hips in trouble from his sheer association with the Republican establishment, which will be so badly discredited by the shattered economy that it may actually go the same route as the 19th century whig party and dissolve in a putrid vapor of fecklessness. By November, the Republicans will be viewed as the party that wrecked the nation, and McCain will be in a hole so deep (still on the 20-yard-line by the way) that nobody will be able to see his lips move.
I post this because it made me laugh. If you know me at all, you probably realize that I have no interest in engaging in a Democrats vs. Republicans flame fest (or even a reasoned discussion on that topic). Post your partisan rants if it helps you exorcise your demons. It won't bother or offend me.
Episode 98: Beyond Civilized & Primitive
First, Dmitry Orlov, author of Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects, details the Collapse Party Platform: a list of initiatives that acknowledge the danger of collapse and, if implemented, would make near-future America a more livable place than the destination that political business-as-usual will produce. After that, Ran Prieur shines a harsh but instructive light of reality on a few cherished neo-primitivist fantasies.
Ran makes multiple references to 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann and describes it as a major influence on the ideas that he articulated in his essay, "Beyond Civilized and Primitive."
Higher States of Collapse
KMO responds to a query concerning the best place in the US to ride out the Malthusian Correction and later enlists the aid of former guests of the program to answer a listener's question about whether entheogens really do produce spiritual experiences or "higher" states of consciousness.
Folks who knowingly contributed to this episode:
Dennis McKenna
Matt Pallamary
Neil Kramer
Lorenzo
Unwitting contributors:
Dmitry Orlov - The Five Stages of Collapse
Stanley Krippner - The Future of Religion
Ben Goertzel - Unification of Science and Spirit: Chapter 8 The Psychedelic Experience
Musical links to come.
Episode 79: The Red Queen
First up Dmitry Orlov and Albert K. Bates explore visions of a
post-collapse America, and later KMO talks food, consciousness, and
the forces of darkness with Neil Kramer of the Cleaver.
Dmitry Orlov is the author of Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects, and Albert K. Bates is the author of The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook: Recipes for Changing Times. In the podcast, Dmitry makes mention of Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology by Eric Brende
You can find my appearance on the Chronicles of the Psychonautilus here:
http://the-psychonautilus.podomatic.c
I recently spoke with Matt Pallamary in a recent episode of the C-Realm Podcast about the same topics I discussed with Adam on the Chronicles of the Psychonautilus. In fact, both conversations took place on the same day.
And you can find Martin Ball's Entheogenic Evolution podcast here:
http://entheogenic.podomatic.com/
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cadmusSource: Navigating the Collapse of Civilization: a Spiritual Map by Carolyn Baker, Ph.D
Link: http://www.karavans.com/a_spiritcollaps
Excerpt:
So what might be some of the gifts of collapse?
First, collapse strips us of who we think we are so that who we really are may be revealed. Civilization's toxicity has fostered the illusion that one is, for example, a professional person with money in the bank, a secure mortgage, a good credit rating, a healthy body and mind, raising healthy children who will grow up to become successful like oneself, and that when one retires, one will be well-taken-care of. If that has become your identity, and if you don't look deeper, you won't discover who you really are; and when collapse happens, you will be shattered because you have failed to notice the strengths, resources, and gifts that abide in your essence which transcend and supersede your ego-identity. In a post-collapse world, academic degrees and stock portfolios matter little. The real question, as Richard Heinberg so succinctly puts it is: Do you know how to make shoes?
- Location:The Shiraz House
