The Upside of Down
![gasbig2543863990_ec89460cd5[2].JPG](http://www.realitysandwich.com/sites/realitysandwich.civicactions.net/files/imagecache/large/gasbig2543863990_ec89460cd5[2].JPG "gasbig2543863990_ec89460cd5[2].JPG")
Dmitry Orlov -- author of the funny, sobering Reinventing Collapse and a Reality Sandwich contributor -- and I discussed the current state of disrepair on a recent C-Realm podcast. The mp-3s of the podcast are available below, or can be played through the C-Realm website, which features many interesting discussions.
In his book, Orlov proposes that the US is entering into a rapid decline similar to the one experienced by Russia after the breakup on the Soviet Union in 1989. He recommends stockpiling provisions and goods to sell on the black market, growing food, and connecting with your local community for security. He also proposes that we begin to imagine a life without money.
That this collapse already seems to be happening is confirmed by recent articles such as this one from The New York Times, on Elkhart, a once middle class town in Indiana, that is now destitute, and this one from Alternet, on "the new paupers". According to the NY Times, the city just passed a law limiting residents to one garage sale per month, since people were running them daily. From the article:
Elkhart, near the Michigan border in an area known as Michiana, is the white-hot center of the meltdown of the American economy. Its main industries, the manufacturing of recreational vehicles and motor homes, have fallen apart over the last year because of high gasoline prices. That has taken down ancillary businesses like R.V. parts suppliers and storage warehouses.
The jobless rate in Elkhart has increased more than in any metropolitan area in the country; it rose over 4.8 percentage points from August 2007 to August 2008. According to labor statistics released this summer, nearly 10,000 people were out of work, a rate of 9.3 percent.
“I’m just dwindling to the bottom,” Melinda Owens, 24, said as she emerged from the unemployment office.
City services are on the decline, and hold-ups are on the rise — there were nine armed robberies or attempted armed robberies on convenience stores in just the last two weeks. On Friday, the front-page news of the paper, The Elkhart Truth, was about a local plastic company that was actually not closing its plant.
One question is whether there is any resilience -- any fight -- left in the American character. At this point, it seems like the indoctrination mechanisms of the mainstream media have effectively deprived people of any capacity to shape their own destiny, to organize themselves, to create interdependent support networks. Unless this happens quickly, the collapse here may be far worse than that of the USSR, where housing was at least guaranteed, and people were not as cut off from basic survival skills as we have become.
The average bit of food travels around 2,000 miles to the plate in NYC (across the US the figure is probably similar). With fuel supplies becoming erratic and an inevitable decline of foreign imports as the economy plunges, producing food locally may become a survival issue for many people here. At the same time, the growth of the green economy may be threatened by economic pressures. It is most definitely going to require a mobilizing of the popular will and a rapid development of local communities to make the next few years into a positive transition to a different form of society, rather than a rapid degeneration into collective misery.
Listen to Dmitry Orlov, author of Reinventing Collapse, and me discuss the deteriorating state of things on a C-Realm podcast
Image by Napalm filled tires, courtesy of Crative Commons license.
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| OrlovPinchbeck1.mp3 | 8.79 MB |
| OrlovPinchbeck2.mp3 | 9.16 MB |
- 10-15-08
- Daniel Pinchbeck's blog
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I like that sharing part
What goes around comes around.
Lost my dog George in Chicago last weekend but someone found him and was walking around with him looking for me the owner.
I then sang to my dog not to do that again!
http://deanefamilyusa.proboards18.com/index.cgi?board=general&action=display&thread=3294
What a weekend.
I sing to my cats a lot...
Sexy
all the best folks seem to be on fire these days...
The HAT is nothing
yes
Economic Donkey-Show
Nice work Daniel. I'm looking foreword to hearing you speak in SF at the end of the month at the 'Shift by the Bay". I'm also seriously considering moving out of the city to somewhere that I can grow my own food. This donkey-show is already over as far as I'm concerned.
"The slow one now will later be fast" ~ Bob Dylan
Urban Homestead
Propaganda Anonymous
You might not have to move out of the city Naugahyde to grow your own food.
Urban Homesteading might be the better move than leaving the city in this day and age.
Check Homegrown Evolution's piece own Urban Homesteading
She and her partner also wrote a book
about how to get it going!
The best place to heal a wound is at its source.
PEACE
PRop!
I see an opportunity
Maybe I’m an idealist and will end up proved wrong if crazies come over my wall to raid the vegetable patch, but I think that cities actually have a future in all this.
I know it’s popular to advocate grabbing tracts of lands and going ‘off grid’ but many city dwellers simply do not have that option – especially on the little islands of the UK.
Elsewhere on RS Transition towns have been discussed and I think this is the best possible position we can take to mitigate the curtain coming down – plunging us all into a very intense dark.
Every single problem we have, absolutely without exception, can be solved with recourse to community. Our current problem is that we just don’t know enough about each other to have confidence in anything. I do not see a big conspiracy but it is easy to see how negative elements (certainly fuelled by the media grab) fill these gaps with dark tales of foreboding about dark skinned people, other cultures or foreigners. It’s always been the same; it’s part of an animalist distrust of the unknown. Our current system encourages exploitation of this facet for personal gain.
If we choose to reverse this through cooperation, shared production, renewed education and health (all universal and available to all), we can take our own lives back. For me the 2012 meme is only this: we finally realise that we actually already have everything we need and want and with the return of the community will determine our own course. This of course means brushing aside the limitations we’ve been programmed with about who we actually are – what it means to be human if in every sense.
Anyway I live in inner city London, and even I can see the land available for cultivation, the potential for community driven action, and a wonderful future if we stand up and choose to take it.
Of course we could (as is so prevalent on this site) decide to just shoot each other down with derisive statements every time somebody adopts a position; the stumbling block of the left for quite some time – the right are successful because they seem to have a handle on the bigger picture with an ability to subsume individual ego assertions.
To finish; face it we’re fucked right now. Both the US and the UK are renowned as violent and aggressive people across the world. The only chance to salvage anything is to work together with PLANS and recreate the amazing societies we were meant to be. Who has the humility to make it work?
I'm currently working on the initiation of a transition town in Wandsworth (London) and another strategy with freinds across the country. I'll let you know how we get on.
Blindness
"slactivist"
"Slactivisit" is quite funny.
"Will the transformation."-Rilke
how is daniel censoring you?
Take Back Technology!
Earth Intelligence/World Brain/World Game
Allow me to recommend the work of Robert David Steele and the Earth Intelligence Network.
Here's a good talk to sort of introduce the overall picture:
http://www.thelasthope.org/media/audio/64kbps/Earth_Intelligence_Network...
And the main website is at:
www.earth-intelligence.net
Black Light in the Attic Podcast w/Serpicody & Sancho
http://blacklightattic.podomatic.com
RE-Urban Homestead
Thanks Propaganda Anonymous for the links. Yes that is a major dilemma right now, where to go. Urban Homesteading sure makes sense especially when I see my father get a huge amount of veg. and fruit out of a tiny garden the size of a garage. When I lived in the UK I lived in a 'housing project' where some elderly people kept beautiful and highly productive gardens in between the apartment blocks. They were a legacy of WW2 and were called 'Victory Gardens'. It used to sadden me greatly to see them fall into disarray and disuse upon the death or illness of their carers and eventually to see them plowed up and seeded with grass to become just another part of the sterile landscape as they filled with litter and dog feces. Thanks again.
“Food is a weapon. It is one of the principal tools in our negotiating kit”
The American Secretary for Agriculture
Food Scarcity
Is one of those manufactured things that isn't nearly as real as it seems. I recommend Tom Brown, Jr.'s book Fieldguide to Wilderness Survival, for those interested. 99% of most front lawns are edible.
In fact, all bladed grasses are edible -- leaves, roots, and seeds (although a very small percentage of grass seeds are poisonous until roasted, so always roast the seeds); dandelions -- root, flower, and leaf; field plantains (known as white man's foot to the Native Americans, as colonists brought it over for food); pine trees -- the nuts from the cones, the inner bark, and you can also make a tea from the needles that is higher in vitamin c than OJ; a handful of acorns has -- according to Mr. Brown, at least -- the equivalent nutrition of a pound of hamburger meat. You have to boil all but those from white oaks in a few changes of water to get rid of the tanic acid...but don't get rid of the water! It is a powerful antisceptic that you can use on bug bites, cuts, and even as a mouthwash.
These are just a few of the most prevalent (Tom Brown refers to pines, acorns, grass, and cattails as 'the big four'). There are hundreds of edible species of plant in North America that are ignored because we are indoctrinated (purposefully or not) to recognize certain things as food, an others not. This is among the most potent forms of control they have.
It doesn't help as much in a city, to be sure. But most cities have parks and front yards and whatnot. People are starving on the streets for even less reason than is normally understood.
Food is all around us. Nature is bountiful, and not as harsh a mistress as popular culture would make out.
"You must *be* the change you wish to see in the world." Mahatma Gandhi
Evolver__Now__Please!
"...deprived people of any capacity to shape their own destiny, to organize themselves, to create interdependent support networks. Unless this happens quickly, the collapse here may be far worse..."
Ahem, tongue marginally cheekward, but methinks y'all sittin' on a real good thing...lots of juice zinging around right now that could be synching into unique coherencies through new portals such as what's been tentatively announced here (and apparently all prepared for imminent release...)--just a nudge away? RS continues to define and generatively confabulate an idea/intention space concentric with the motive core in many of this time-spiralled era's crucial "cultural" creatives. The capacities and tendencies surely DO exist toward interdependent support networks of many forms and features, but the hyper-meta-pattern-nexus type of place bridging headcase and meatspace for allcomers to co-fabricate a red carpet to re-origin faster than it's yanked askance...seen no sign? Quit featherpetting footbottoms and BOOT UP!
~what i can do for my sandwich?
booting up
Hi solaureum,
We are getting ever-closer to launching the evolver network. The main technical difficulty we are experiencing is one of temporary cash flow. We have taken in some investment and are awaiting more to come. When we get over this hurdle, we expect to be weeks away from the launch. The process is requiring great patience, and is probably some kind of test in and of itself. I agree that the time is past-time to move from contemplating ideas of apocalypse to moving into active collaboration to forestall the worst consequences of what may soon come.
If you are truly interested in helping, please email me ( daniel@evolver.net ) and give me a sense of what types of skills and time commitments you might like to contribute, also let me know where you are located. We intend to help facilitate face-to-face gatherings around the US as soon as we can.
thanks for your interest!
yours,
dp
"Will the transformation."-Rilke
SAILING!
so you read Age of the spiritual Machine
The Collapse of America? or The Collapse of American Decadence?
Pack your gear and head up here!
Today's Quote
"When people are fearful, be greedy. When people are greedy, be fearful."
America is dying from the inside out. Capitalism has run it's course and the awkening is now more then knee deep. The bleeding of the innocent mind, heart, and spirit of innocent humanity has been seeping for a long time. And here we sit, some of us anyways, waiting for the endgame -- The total collapse, the total capitualtion, of all that doesn't matter in the long run.
Warren Buffett, master capitalist, tells us to be fearful and greedy to keep the wheels, of this unsacred way of life, this living in fear and greed, greesed and moving toward another unholy genocide in which many names have already been written.
The Empire of Greed and Fear and Manipulation has run it's unholy course in the Soul of Humanity. Today, I announce to the world...
"When people are fearful, be strong in truth for them. When people are greedy, let them take it all, because all we are down to any longer is the shit, the piss, and dry bone of Warren Buffett's world."
The Great Beautiful Crash has finally arrived and the Spirit Wind moves and Horses Sigh and Squirrels Bark and the second from last rock breaks from the heat of the fire that the Spirits Walk Through. The truth is known and fear becomes a money monger, soul monger, head monger, and heart monger's only way as the a hand greedily grabs the last piece of soft shit standing as it mooches thru fingers, and we know him or her by the way he or she destroys all that was created for the beauty of being merely human in Spirit.
Arise, awaken, the waiting has ended. The Great Spirit returns and all will be made to pay in The Spirit's own way.
Today is the day.
Live it.
Market Manicheanism
"stockpiling provisions and goods to sell on the black market"
I get it. If you 'deal with' me, you're entering the shady "black market" world of dirty diabolical darkness.
All the good boys & girls always 'purchase their goods' straight from the clean, bright white shelves of Walmart, where you're always bathed in the pristine glow of God's glorious grace.
Walmart prudently 'manages
My Man J
Propaganda Anonymous
Good to see you stopping thru J. Looking forward to future roaming gnomic insights!
Amor Et Hilaritas!
PRop!
The Upside of Down
I listened to this podcast, and Dmitry Orlov is just repackaging ideas from the late 1970s. At that time there was an author who suggested, as Orlov has, that people should stockpile vodka, condoms, and razorblades for the coming financial panic. People did just that -- and went bankrupt buying vodka, condoms, and razorblades.
Also, barter is not going to work. In a barter exchange, one party always feels that the other party benefits more from the exchange. Money is supposed to be neutral. While people do need to be more self-reliant and self-sufficient (perhaps growing their own food in the suburbs or in urban communities), what we need to do in this country is print our own money. The money doesn't even have to be backed by gold or even silver if we would just take back the printing of our own money.
Currently, the Federal Reserve, which is no more federal than Federal Express, prints money which the U.S. Government then borrows and has to pay back the borrowed money with interest. At the current rate of borrowing, the U.S. Government owes more interest than can ever be paid back, and this is why our taxes are going up. The average worker in America is being asked to pay the interest on the loans that the U.S. Government has received from borrowing money printed by the Federal Reserve, which is a consortium of private bankers.
Even if people do "go back to land" or try to "reinvent community," if we do it with borrowed dollars and don't have control over our money supply, this too will be taken from us.
Central banks
I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.
Thomas Jefferson
"You must *be* the change you wish to see in the world." Mahatma Gandhi
Vision?
Daniel, I've noticed an urgent fear creeping into your posts lately. The vision of a new world where our spirit, soul, and mind are changed into something magnificent and strange and wonderful seem to have taken a backseat to the do-something-now-before-it's-too-late tone. I'm wondering if you agree with this and why it's happening inside of you.
Approaching 2012 and all the collapse around us with interest rather than urgency has been my best and most exciting approach. If our country falls into a sort of neo-primitivist daydream for awhile, we'll have to contend and take care of ourselves in new ways.
But with a spiritual vision intact - particularly one that acknowledges a vast spiritual world, the necessity and beauty of death, the inescapable gift of pain, and the mystical fact of reincarnation - we can recognize that urgency is an emotion we impose upon the events happening around us. It's a fear that is separate from the events unfolding.I love the information you're presenting, but I'm not sure why the tone I'm sensing has overtaken so much of it.What do you think?
Much love and respect,CH/AK
The spirit and we are
The spirit and we are inseperable. The urgency you sense (whether or not it actually exists), is the spirit itself manifesting through us. That is what all of this is. The divine is not seperate from us, or our world. It manifests and works through us, through the world.
We are the interplay of infinity with itself, throughout eternity.
If an increasing anxiety is being felt about the coming shift, perhaps that anxiety is itself a part of the change. This isn't going to just happen by itself. It will be brought into being by determined individuals coming together. And not just to hold hands and sing 'kumbaya'.
The millenarians of the previous millenial change suffered a delusion which caused them to fail. They failed to realize that their revolution was their own undertaking. They kept waiting for a sign from god to begin. And when no bolt of light lept from the sky -- with a thunderous voice giving exact instructions -- they just kind of disolved, and gave up.
We are the ones we have been waiting for. We must make it happen.
"You must *be* the change you wish to see in the world." Mahatma Gandhi
urgency not fear
hi conner,
i hope that i am conveying more urgency than fear. i am concerned that a huge number of people are going to die in the next few years, which is what the prophecies suggest as a possibility. If the more aware people were to figure out how to work together quickly and efficiently, we might prevent a lot of misery.
"Will the transformation."-Rilke
conner - its odd and kind of
conner - its odd and kind of repulsive to me - this position of disinterested 'interest'. its the opposite of the compassionate, 'urgent' engagement of a boddhisattva or a christ. i actually don't think its a spiritual position at all (its not my business to tell you how to be spiritual, though) - rather it seems to me like a hyper-mental kind of intellectual posturing, self-delusion, ego-tripping. we are not entering a 'neo-primitivist daydream'. this is reality. this is the only reality.
'beware & beware & beware. life is not a dream' - garcia lorca
Separation
Thanks for responding, Chibi and Devon.
I agree that anxiety is part of the shift. I think our feelings have a very real place in all the changes that are happening around us.
I also think that anxiety is the shadow side of excitement. Sometimes, I'm lucky enough to see that my anxiety is exitement bent into static by an unclear fequency. When I'm clear, a song comes through rather than agitation.
I wasn't advocating an intellectual coldness. I understand why you'd write that, Devon. I think that a lot of so-called spiritual people in the West, particularly those that follow an Eastern tradition, experience separation because of their beliefs. This is, in fact, the greatest danger of following an Eastern practice out of its cultural context. What's worse, many intellectuals use this separation to excuse inaction.
I don't advocate any of that. What I'm saying is that when I place the events unfolding around me in a larger spirtual context (to be more precise: in the context of spiritual worlds and beings - bearing in mind that the post was directed to Daniel, who I know believes in spirtual beings, I don't expect you to have the same beliefs), it dispells the anxiety and fear.
This doesn't lead to inaction. In fact when I remove "motivation" and "urgency", I find that I am living out the same actions - many of which are directed at helping myself and loved ones engage with the drastic changes occuring - but without having these actions be fear-based. For me, it's only when I view the world materialistically that I become anxious. My feeling is that this is stopping short of real understanding. It's like slamming the brakes while driving 70 miles per hour. I stop at the innaporpriate place, and everything shakes and shudders and all the contents in the vehicle are thrown around haphazardly.
My feeling was that some of the more recent posts by Daniel had been colored by urgency more than wonder, by anxiety more than excitement. I was interested in knowing if he had felt a shift in himself as per the spiritual context of his work.
Much love,
Conner
yeah, i see what you're
yeah, i see what you're saying. sorry if i came off harsh. i actually don't think we need to fear what's coming, as long as we are actively participating in creating an alternative destiny to total collapse and chaos. the anxiety comes then from a very real and true sense that we are not really doing that, not yet, and that one needs to agitate for change.
personally, climate change doesn't frighten me that much, nor really does peak oil. i think these issues are overblown by the corporatocracy, because it scares people, and fear is good business for fascists, and because it allows them to jack up the price of oil while building nuclear plants and subsidizing retarded energy 'alternatives' like ethanol. its the fascism that scares me more than anything (look what happened to poor garcia lorca, as cj pointed out).
i can take or leave your abstract 'spiritual beings and spiritual worlds'... i happen to think that i am a spiritual being and that i live in a spiritual world. the big mind-fuck is the idea that matter - the material world - is somehow un-spiritual... that's exactly the kind of thinking that got us into this mess. the more advanced forms of eastern thought (as far as i understand them, which is not that much) recognize the non-duality of matter and spirit. 'there is nothing which is not shiva'... etc... of course, that kind of thinking can and does lead to sentiments like 'well its all just shiva dancing' in reference to wars famines fascist takeovers etc... when the response should be, holy shit, i am literally god and i can change the world, through action... and that it is really action which is holy, not meditation or prayer... those things are there to make you realize what you really are, so you can act from that knowledge.
the anxiety i feel is the result of having these very real ideas of what must be done and feeling powerless to do them. the same, i think, is true for a lot of us compulsively writing on this site (its weird, two months ago i had never written a word on an internet message board - now i am addicted to the discourse. why? because people don't talk much about this shit, and its aggravating, because something really needs to get done - besides voting for the ludicrous 'hope' that a neo-liberal imperialist who just signed over a trillion dollars of free money to corporate capitalism is going to magically get us all free healthcare and end the war). the reason is that action needs to be collective, and it is very hard to drum up collective will. of course, obama shows that its not impossible (it helps if you can rustle up a few millions from goldman sachs & jp morgan). if we could come up with a real, compelling, comprehensive, revolutionary platform for change and then get sheperd fairey to print up a few posters, maybe then we'd be cooking...
freakin exactly
chibi.cory@gmail.com
I have no car, and am poor as dirt. But I am willing if anyone wants to get something started in the Athens, GA area.
^_^
"You must *be* the change you wish to see in the world." Mahatma Gandhi
stfrequency is planning something here in Atlanta...
It is possible
Where can I find out more information?
"You must *be* the change you wish to see in the world." Mahatma Gandhi
An' don't get it twisted, it is Fascism
Fascism is exactly what is being instituted, even though the media continues to mis-label it socialism.
From Economic Fascism by Thomas DiLorenzo:
"Despite the fascist rhetoric about "national collaboration" and working for the national, rather than private, interests, the truth is that mercantilist and protectionist practices riddled the system. Italian social critic Gaetano Salvemini wrote in 1936 that under corporatism, "it is the state, i.e., the taxpayer, who has become responsible to private enterprise. In Fascist Italy the state pays for the blunders of private enterprise." As long as business was good, Salvemini wrote, "profit remained to private initiative." But when the depression came, "the government added the loss to the taxpayer's burden. Profit is private and individual. Loss is public and social." The Italian corporative state, The Economist editorialized on July 27, 1935, "only amounts to the establishment of a new and costly bureaucracy from which those industrialists who can spend the necessary amount, can obtain almost anything they want, and put into practice the worst kind of monopolistic practices at the expense of the little fellow who is squeezed out in the process." Corporatism, in other words, was a massive system of corporate welfare. "Three-quarters of the Italian economic system," Mussolini boasted in 1934, "had been subsidized by government.""
Combine this with the increasing influence on corporations on our lawmakers, as well as the increase in power granted to -- and excercised by -- the executive branch (in fact, the neocon's have a whole theory of 'the unitary executive'), and you have a fairly classic example of fascism, if in an early form.
"When fascism comes to America; it will come wrapped in the flag, and bearing the cross."
Sinclair Lewis
NeoCons/NeoLiberals As the late, great George Carlin pointed out, "Germany lost the second World War Fascism won it."
You must *be* the change you wish to see in the world." Mahatma Gandhi
knock,knock!
Q:how many Dadaists does it take to change a lightbulb?
A:doorknob
Emigration and migration...
Thomas Homer-Dixon
Given the title of the post, I think I should mention Thomas Homer-Dixon's excellent book The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization. I spoke to him in episode 36 of the C-Realm Podcast.
C stands for "Consciousness."
http://www.c-realm.com
http://c-realmpodcast.podomatic.com