Dmitry Orlov emigrated from Russia with his parents when he was about 12. Traveling back and forth between the US and the USSR during the 1980s and 1990s, he observed the collapse of the Soviet government and economy. Deep into this decade of the Uh-Ohs, he began to see some of the symptoms of collapse in the US that he saw in the USSR. However, he believes that the US is suffering from a collapse gap, that the underlying system in the US is less resilient than that of the former USSR.
...I am suggesting that where Russia bounced back because it was not fully spent, the United States will be more fully spent and less capable of bouncing back.
The last act in the American consumerist tragedy will end with the now naked consumer standing on top of a giant mound of plastic trash. At the end of an economy where everything is disposable stands the disposable consumer. But once the consumer is disposed of, who will be left to take him out with the trash....
Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects by Dmitry Orlov
Gabriola Island, BC, Canada: New Society Publishers, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-86571-606-3
There is a lesson to be learned here: when faced with a collapsing economy, one should stop thinking of wealth in terms of money. Access to actual physical resources and assets, as well as intangibles such as connections and relationships, quickly becomes much more valuable than mere cash.
This, then, is the correct stance vis a vis the money economy: you should appear to have no money or significant possessions. But you should have access to resources, such as food, clothing, medicine, places to stay and work and even money. What you do with your money is up to you. For example, you can simply misplace it, the way squirrels do with nuts and acorns. Or you can convert it into communal property of one sort or another. You should avoid getting paid, but you should accept gifts and, of course, give gifts in return. You should never work for money, but always donate your time and effort charitably. You should have a minimum of personal possessions, but plenty to share with others. Developing such a stance is hard, but, once you do, life actually gets better. Moreover, by adopting such a stance, you become collapse-proof.
Camus also indicated a specific failure of both systems: their inability to provide creative, meaningful work. We see this failure in the very high rates of depression. We attempt to define depression as a psychological ailment, but it is a symptom of a cultural failure: the inability to make life meaningful or enjoyable.
This is something that Gandhi also knew and was the basis of his ideas on economics: full employment with meaningful work for everyone.
One of the things that weigh us in the US down is our military.
There is a little secret that everyone knows: the United States military does not know how to win. It just knows how to blow things up. Blowing things up may be fun, but it cannot be the only element in a winning strategy. The other key element is winning the peace once major combat operations are over, and here the mighty US military tends to fall squarely on its face and lay prone until political support for the war is withdrawn and the troops are brought back home.
... the US desperately needs an enemy to justify having a military that cannot win. This enemy must be safe to rail against, but obviously too powerful to attack directly, leaving a proud and purposeful paralysis as the only possible choice of action.
Unfortunately, in a collapsing world, war may become redundant.
Wars take resources; when resources are already scare, fighting wars over resources becomes a lethal exercise in futility. Those with more resources would be expected to win. I am not arguing that wars over resources will not occur. I am suggesting that they will be futile, and that victory in these conflicts will be barely distinguishable from defeat.
Orlov has a sardonic sense of humor and a unique take on the world:
Although people often bemoan political apathy as if it were a grave social ill, it seems to me that this is just as it should be. Why should essentially powerless people want to engage in a humiliating farce designed to demonstrate the legitimacy of those who wield the power? In Soviet-era Russian, intelligent people did their best to ignore the Communists: paying attention to them, whether through criticism or praise, would only serve to give them comfort and encouragement, making them feel as if they mattered. Why should Americans want to act any differently with regard to the Republicans and the Democrats? For love of donkeys and elephants?
Sometimes, he blows away the BS and cuts to the quick:
In the United States, medicine is for profit. People seem to think nothing of this fact. There are really very few fields of endeavor to which Americans would deny the profit motive. It could be said that making a profit off the suffering of sick people is simply unethical: it comes down to exploiting the helpless - a predatory practice that a civilized society cannot tolerate.
Marina Gorbis of the Institute for the Future, another Russian emigre, has also been writing around the edges of collapse as a guest blogger at boingboing.net:
http://www.boingboing.net/...
http://www.boingboing.net/...
Bruce Sterling, the Pope Emperor of the late Viridian Green Movement, has been giving collapse some thought too as he ricochets around the glove. The closing lecture at the recent Reboot conference is his latest missive:
http://video.reboot.dk/...
You can follow Orlov's further adventures at http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/
As for me, I go to my garden every day and read by a solar LED light. I collapsed a long time ago.