Dire predictions made by
authoritative figures can provide the impetus to attempt great
things: establish community gardens and farmer's markets, lobby for
improved public transportation, bike lanes and sidewalks, promote
ride-sharing initiatives, weatherize existing homes and impose more
stringent construction standards for new ones, construct of windmill
farms and install solar panels on public buildings, promote the use
of composting toilets and high-efficiency lighting and so on. In the
midst of all this organizational activity neighbors get a chance to
meet, perhaps for the first time, and discover a commonality of
interests that leads them to form acquaintances and perhaps even
friendships. As neighbors get to know each other, they start looking
out for each other, improving safety and reducing crime. As the
community becomes more tight-knit, it changes in atmosphere and
appearance, becoming more fashionable and desirable, attracting
better-educated and more prosperous residents while pricing out the
undesirable element. News of these vast improvements spreads far and
wide, and the community becomes a tourist mecca, complete with food festivals, swank
boutiques and pricy bric-Ã -brac shops and restaurants.
The undesirable element
is forced to decamp to a less desirable neighborhood nearby. There,
it has no choice but to suffer with high levels of crime, but is
typically afraid to ask the police for help, having learned from
experience that the police are more likely to harass them then to
help them, to arrest them for minor offenses and to round them up and
deport them if they happen to be illegal immigrants. They also learn
to be careful around members of local gangs and drug dealers. Since
official jobs in the neighborhood are scarce, they seek informal,
cash-based employment, contributing to an underground economy.
Seeking safety in numbers, they self-organize along racial and ethnic
lines, and, to promote their common interests, form ethnic mafias
that strive to dominate one or more forms of illegal or semi-legal
activity. Growing up in a dangerous, violent environment, their
children become tough at a young age, and, those that survive,
develop excellent situational awareness that allows them to steer
clear of dangerous situations and to know when to resort to violence.
When the fossil
fuel-based national economy shuts down due to the increasingly well
understood local ramifications of the global phenomenon of Peak Oil,
both of these communities are harmed, but to different extents and
in different ways. Other countries may continue to function for
another decade or even longer: these are the countries that have
enough oil of their own, as well as those that were far-sighted
enough to enter into long-term barter agreements with the few
remaining oil producers that still have a surplus of oil for export.
But suppose that our two communities are in an English-speaking
country, which is likely to be afflicted with the irrational belief
that the free market can solve all problems on its own, even problems
with the availability of critical supplies such as oil. Just as one
would expect, the invisible hand of the market fails to make itself
visible, but it is plain to see that fuel is no longer delivered to
either of these communities, although in the second one some fuel is
likely to still be available on the black market, at prices that very
few people can afford. Sooner or later, due to lack of supplies and
maintenance at every level, electricity shuts off, water pumping
stations cease to function, sewage backs up making bathrooms
unusable, garbage trucks no longer collect the garbage, which piles
up, breading rats, flies and cockroaches. As sanitary conditions
deteriorate, diseases such as cholera, dysentery and typhoid reappear
and spread. The medical system requires fuel for the ambulances and
running water, electricity and oil-based pharmaceuticals and
disposable supplies for the hospitals and clinics to operate. When
these are no longer available, the surviving residents are left to
care for each other as best they can and, when they fail, to bury
their own dead. Along with the other municipal and government
services, police departments cease to function. Particularly
important installations are guarded by soldiers or by private
security, while the population is left to fend for itself.
The effect on the two
communities is markedly different. The first community is
superficially better prepared, being better equipped for emergencies
and perhaps even having laid in emergency supplies of food and water.
But being more prosperous at the outset makes a sudden transition to
squalor, destitution and chaos much more of a shock. It also makes it
a much more desirable target for looters. Used to living in safety
and enjoying the protection of a benign and cooperative police
department, the residents are not acculturated to the idea of
countering violence with violence. Their response is more likely to
take the form of a fruitless policy discussion rather than a
spontaneous decision to go out and prophylactically bash some heads,
causing the remaining heads to think twice. Unaccustomed to operating
outside the law and having few connections with the criminal
underworld, they are slow to penetrate the black market, which now
offers the only way to obtain many necessary items, such as food,
cooking fuel and medicines, including the items that had been
previously looted from their own stockpiles. Worse yet, they once
again become estranged from one another: their acquaintances and
friendships were formed within a peaceful, civilized, law-abiding
mode of social behavior. When they are forced to turn to scavenging,
outright theft and looting, prostitution, black market dealing and
consorting with criminals, they can no longer recognize in each other
the people they knew before, and the laboriously synthesized
community again dissolves into nuclear families. Where neighbors
continue to work together, their ties are likely to be weak, based on
altruistic conceptions of decency, mutual benefit and on personal
sympathies—a far cry from the clear do-or-die imperatives of blood
ties or clan or gang allegiance.
The second community is
already accustomed to hardship and, not having quite so far to fall,
can take the transition to mayhem, destitution and squalor in stride.
The prevalence of illegal activity prior to collapse smooths the
transition to a black market economy. Already resistant to the idea
of relying on police protection, the residents are relieved when the
police disappear from the streets, and a great deal of unofficial and
illegal activity that previously had to be conducted in secret bursts
out into the open. With the police no longer stirring the pot with
their invasive arrests and confiscations, local criminal gangs now
find themselves operating in a more stable environment and are able
to carve up the neighborhood into universally recognized zones of
influence, avoiding unnecessary bloodshed. The children, who are
already in the habit of roaming the streets in gangs and harassing
and mugging strangers, now come to serve as the community's early
warning system in case of an organized incursion. (Not that too many
people would want to venture into this area in any case, given its
fearsome reputation.) Lastly, the prevalence of illegal drug dealing
means that it already has a trained cadre of black market dealers
who, now that official commerce has collapsed, can diversify away
from drugs and branch out into every other kind of commerce. Their
connections with the international narcomafia, whose representatives
tend to be well organized and heavily armed, may turn out to provide
certain benefits, such as an enhanced ability to move people and
contraband through the now highly porous national borders. If the
narcomafia ties are sufficiently strong, a narcobaron may take the
community under his cartel's explicit protection, founding a new
aristocracy to replace the now disgraced and powerless former ruling
class.
Community organizing is
quite wonderful, and can provide some of us with a perfectly pleasant
way to while away our remaining happy days. As a useful side effect,
it can provide individuals with valuable training, but it does next
to nothing to prepare the community for collapse. A safe and
congenial environment for you and your children is obviously very
nice, much better than trying to survive among social predators. But
humanity is not immune to the laws of nature, and in nature one can
usually observe that the fewer are the wolves, the lamer, fatter and
more numerous are the sheep. The central problem with community
organizing is that the sort of community that stands a chance
post-collapse is simply unacceptable pre-collapse: it is illegal, it
is uncomfortable, and it is unsafe. No reasonable person would want
any part of it. Perhaps the best one can do is to gather all the
unreasonable people together: the outcasts, misfits, eccentrics and
sketchy characters with checkered pasts and nothing better to do.
Give them the resources to provide for their own welfare and keep
them entertained. Keep the operation low-key and under the radar, and
put up some plausible and benign public façade, or your nascent
community will be discovered, shut down and dispersed by the
pre-collapse officialdom. And if through some indescribable process
all of these undesirable, unreasonable people manage to amalgamate
and self-organize into some sort of improvised community, then you
win. Or maybe they win and you lose. Either way, you would deserve
credit for attempting to do something unusual: something that might
have actually worked.
There may be a few people
who would be willing to tackle such an assignment. If they are
serious about it, they will stay well hidden, and we will never know
how many of them have succeeded, because we will only learn of their
existence when they fail. As for the rest of us, who are itching to
do something useful within the confines of existing legal framework
and economic reality, there is just one path: the path of emergency
preparation, with the added twist that the emergency in question has
to be accepted as permanent. Community emergency preparation is about
the only type of officially sanctioned activity that may allow us to
prepare for collapse.
The first and obvious
part of preparing for the permanent emergency is to construct systems
that will allow some, ideally most, of the population to survive in
the long run without access to transportation fuels, or to any of the
technology that comes to a standstill when starved of transportation
fuels. The second, equally important part involves laying in
sufficient emergency supplies of food, medicine, cooking fuel,
temporary shelter for displaced persons, and so on, to allow some,
ideally most, of the population to survive in the short run, while
the transition to non-fossil-fuel-based existence is taking place. Yet
another task is to organize streamlined, military-style control
structures that can step in to maintain order and to provide
security.
But the most important
element of preparing for the permanent emergency is to devise a plan
to force through a swift and thorough change of the rules by which
society operates. Under emergency conditions, the current rules, laws
and regulations will amount to an essentially lethal set of
unachievable mandates and unreasonable restrictions, and attempting
to comply with them or to enforce them is bound to lead to an
appalling spike in mortality. The current way of changing the rules
involves lobbying, deliberation, legislation and
litigation—time-consuming, expensive activities for which there
will be neither the time nor the resources. There are no
non-destructive ways to decomplexify complex systems, and while
systems that have physical parts fall apart by themselves, the legal
framework is a system that, even in an undead state, can perpetuate
itself by enslaving minds with false expectations and hopes. By
default, the procedure for those who wish to survive will be to
universally ignore the old rules, but this is bound to cause mayhem
and much loss of life. The best case scenario is that the old rules
are consigned to oblivion quickly and decisively. The public at large
will not be the major impediment to making the necessary changes.
Rather, it will be the vested interests at every level—the
political class, the financial elite, professional associations,
property and business owners and, last but not least, the lawyers—who
will try to block them at every turn. They will not release their
grip on society voluntarily. There is just one institution with
enough power to oppose them, and that is the US military. It would be
most helpful if enough high-caliber military types with lots of stars
on their epaulets could step up and lay down the new law: henceforth
anyone who wants to litigate their orders will do so before a
military tribunal. It is heartening to see that many of the world's
militaries, the Pentagon included, have recently woken up to the
reality of Peak Oil, and are taking steps to prepare for it, while
our craven and feckless politicians and businessmen continue to
wallow in denial. Clearly, many Americans would rather not live under
military rule, but then beggars can't be choosers, and, in any case,
the alternative is bound to be even worse. The United States has not
been invaded since 1812, but in its short history it has managed to
invade other countries over 30 times. It should not come as a
surprise, then, if the United States wraps up its existence by
invading itself.
When taking part in
community organizing activities, if your envisioned community is to
survive the transition to a non-fossil-fuel-based existence, it is
important to keep in mind a vital distinction: is this community
going to operate under the old rules or under the new rules. The old
rules will not work, but the new ones might, depending on what they
are. You might want to give the new rules some thought ahead of time,
perhaps even test them out, as part of your community's permanent
emergency preparation program.
