ORLOV'S STAGES OF COLLAPSE

[Joanne98]

And so it is with a great many things. We can wait until the lifestyle that is killing the planet and is making us crazy and sick is no longer physically possible, or we can opt out of it ahead of time. And what we replace it with can be difficult at first, but quite a lot better for us in the end.

1.Hello, everyone! The talk you are about to hear is the result of a lengthy process on my part. My specialty is in thinking about and, unfortunately, predicting collapse. My method is based on comparison: I watched the Soviet Union collapse, and, since I am also familiar with the details of the situation in the United States, I can make comparisons between these two failed superpowers.

I was born and grew up in Russia, and I traveled back to Russia repeatedly between the late 80s and mid-90s. This allowed me to gain a solid understanding of the dynamics of the collapse process as it unfolded there. By the mid-90s it was quite clear to me that the US was headed in the same general direction. But I couldn't yet tell how long the process would take, so I sat back and watched.

I am an engineer, and so I naturally tended to look for physical explanations for this process, as opposed to economic, political, or cultural ones. It turns out that one could come up with a very good explanation for the Soviet collapse by following energy flows. What happened in the late 80s is that Russian oil production hit an all-time peak. This coincided with new oil provinces coming on stream in the West - the North Sea in the UK and Norway, and Prudhoe Bay in Alaska - and this suddenly made oil very cheap on the world markets. Soviet revenues plummeted, but their appetite for imported goods remained unchanged, and so they sank deeper and deeper into debt. What doomed them in the end was not even so much the level of debt, but their inability to take on further debt even faster. Once international lenders balked at making further loans, it was game over.

What is happening to the United States now is broadly similar, with certain polarities reversed. The US is an oil importer, burning up 25% of the world's production, and importing over two-thirds of that. Back in mid-90s, when I first started trying to guess the timing of the US collapse, the arrival of the global peak in oil production was scheduled for around the turn of the century. It turned out that the estimate was off by almost a decade, but that is actually fairly accurate as far as such big predictions go. So here it is the high price of oil that is putting the brakes on further debt expansion. As higher oil prices trigger a recession, the economy starts shrinking, and a shrinking economy cannot sustain an ever-expanding level of debt. At some point the ability to finance oil imports will be lost, and that will be the tipping point, after which nothing will ever be the same.

This is not to say that I am a believer in some sort of energy determinism. If the US were to cut its energy consumption by an order of magnitude, it would still be consuming a staggeringly huge amount, but an energy crisis would be averted. But then this country, as we are used to thinking of it, would no longer exist. Oil is what powers this economy. In turn, it is this oil-based economy that makes it possible to maintain and expand an extravagant level of debt. So, a drastic cut in oil consumption would cause a financial collapse (as opposed to the other way around). A few more stages of collapse would follow, which we will discuss next. So, you could see this outlandish appetite for imported oil as a cultural failing, but it is not one that can be undone without causing a great deal of damage. If you like, you can call it "ontological determinism": it has to be what it is, until it is no more.

I don't mean to imply that every part of the country will suddenly undergo a spontaneous existence failure, reverting to an uninhabited wilderness. I agree with John-Michael Greer that the myth of the Apocalypse is not the least bit helpful in coming to terms with the situation. The Soviet experience is very helpful here, because it shows us not only that life goes on, but exactly how it goes on. But I am quite certain that no amount of cultural transformation will help us save various key aspects of this culture: car society, suburban living, big box stores, corporate-run government, global empire, or runaway finance.

On the other hand, I am quite convinced that nothing short of a profound cultural transformation will allow any significant number of us to keep roofs over our heads, and food on our tables. I also believe that the sooner we start letting go of our maladaptive cultural baggage, the more of a chance we will stand. A few years ago, my attitude was to just keep watching events unfold, and keep this collapse thing as some sort of macabre hobby. But the course of events is certainly speeding up, and now my feeling is that the worst we can do is pretend that everything will be fine and simply run out the clock on our current living arrangement, with nothing to replace it once it all starts shutting down.

Now, getting back to my own personal progress in working through these questions, in 2005 I wrote an article called "Post-Soviet Lessons for a Post-American Century". Initially, I wanted to publish it on a web site run by Dale Alan Pfeiffer, but, to my surprise, it ended up on From The Wilderness, a much more popular site run by Michael Ruppert, and, to my further astonishment, Mike even paid me for it.

And ever since then, I've been asked the same question, repeatedly: "When? When is the collapse going to occur?" Being a little bit clever, I always decline to give a specific answer, because, you see, as soon as you get one specific prediction wrong, there goes your entire reputation. One reasonable way of thinking about the timing is to say that collapse can occur at different times for different people. You may never quite know that collapse has happened, but you will know that it has happened to you personally, or to your family, or to your town. The big picture may not come together until much later, thanks to the efforts of historians. Individually, we may never know what hit us, and, as a group, we may never agree on any one answer. Look at the collapse of the USSR: some people are still arguing over why exactly it happened.

But sometimes the picture is clearer than we would like. In January of 2008, I published an article on "The Five Stages of Collapse," in which I defined the five stages, and then bravely stated that we are in the midst of a financial collapse. And ten months later it doesn't seem that I went too far out on a limb this time. If the US government has to lend banks over 200 billion dollars a day just to keep the whole system from imploding, then the term "crisis" probably doesn't do justice to the situation. To keep this game going, the US government has to be able to sell the debt it is taking on, and what do you think the chances are that the world at large will be snapping up trillions of dollars of new debt, knowing that it is being used to prop up a shrinking economy? And if the debt can't be sold, then it has to be monetized, by printing money. And that will trigger hyperinflation. So, let's not quibble, and let us call what's happening what it looks like: "financial collapse".

Continued>>>
http://carolynbaker.net/site/content/view/845/1/

[Bigmack]

1. Reinventing Collapse

Thanks for posting this - a few months ago I read Orlov's book - Reinventing Collapse, and I thought at the time that it was going to prove a VERY prescient book. Alas, it has. I recommend his writing VERY highly - Ms Bigmack

[Joanne98]

2. You're very welcome Ms Bigmack

I haven't read it. I wonder if my library would have it.

[my2sense]

3. k & r

[IrateCitizen]

4. Orlov -- the consummate "black humorist" of the PO crowd!!!

I've been reading Orlov's online stuff for a while now -- although I still haven't read his book.

I find his comparison between Russia and the United States to be very engaging. Especially his portrayal of the Russian people as being used to hardship and the American people being used to entitlement. Additionally, I am always reminded of John Kenneth Galbraith's analysis of "private wealth vs. public squalor" when Orlov describes how Russians were able to still have access to previously state-owned housing and transportation networks, and how that access mitigated some of the worst aspects of PO collapse.

Here in America, we are stuck with public squalor due to our over-emphasis on private wealth. This will make transitions much more difficult, IMHO.

[Morpheal]

5. MILITARY DICTATORSHIP AS AMERICA'S REAL FUTURE ?

It is my own political theory, somewhat consistent with other theories of socio-economic collapse, that as the costs of improving and maintaining an increasingly complex and costly war machine continue to grow the costs eventually exceed what a democratic, capitalist, and particularly free market system are capable of truly bearing. Deficit spending to maintain that war machine and its infrastructure eventually exceeds fiscal capacity of the
system to bear, and the resulting deficit is indicative of that failure.

Unfortunately in a world where more than half of it is radically and completely hostile to many of your own beliefs, your religion included in that, some of your fundamental values, and inclusive of your own economic system and your own faith in that system as being what is "right", you have no choice but to maintain that war machine. As your competition grows by leaps and bounds, aligning itself increasingly against you and your beliefs, you end up with increased pressure to strengthen that defence, and an increasing pressure to improve military intelligence, which is as expensive as is the actual defence mechanism that intelligence puts into motion. The spiral of costs comes necessarily in response to the growing external systemic, political, economic and ultimately military competition. If you are in the lead, in some ways, you tend to have more others trying to push you off the hill. It's not unlike kick the can games played in childhood. They want their flags on that hill, and your's off of it. Diplomacy notwithstanding because in our essentially Machiavellian world diplomacy is a striving for advantage as to position and time, and not really a way out of the conflict. Not unless you are willing to give up some ground and see the world differently than your own beliefs tend to constrain you to. Right or wrong, its the reality. It's all about power.

So what happens when the costs, deficit spending, to maintain that war machine reach a critical level ?

My theory is military dictatorship.

The free market system and much of capitalist values collapse, and are replaced with a system where the military itself controls the means
of production and profit is no longer the obstacle to continued improvement and maintenance of a growing military capability.

No, the option of knowing the military down in size does not exist.
Then the enemy wins, whomever that enemy is, and the military is likely to be a very sore loser, willing to do anything to avoid that unacceptable scenario, inclusive of taking over control of a government.

I think we have seen the pattern in history in various situations, but as times change and levels of technical sophistication change, along with many other factors, today is not the same as yesterday and "history repeats" is not a very good argument for predicting the future. Nevertheless, unless
something is done to alleviate the "free market" problem, and to alleviate the problems capitalism is bringing into the issue of defence, as well as
to all other areas of human endeavour and interest, in terms of real needs and reasonable wants, we can be assured of system meltdown eventually leading to the demise of democracy, and to the assertion of a military dictatorship aimed at self preservation and the preservation of the core
of a system excessively under increasing siege. Terrorism is only one form attack. We are seeing new variants, inclusive of economic terrorism directed at undermining exactly those institutions and processes that I am specifically talking about.

Ultimately look at it as saying that survival comes first before freedom, and before democracy.
Even in America.
The core tends to choose survival even if some principles considered near to "sacred" are discarded in the process of surviving.

Robert Morpheal

[tama]

6. Rather the real present

Number 1 politickal taboo in US "democracy": don't fuck with the military industrial complex and the Pentagon etc. military billions from taxpayer toil (about half of Federal budget...).

And Obama fucks not but promises more and more billions for the bottomless pit.

>>>Ultimately look at it as saying that survival comes first before freedom, and before democracy.<<<

Nope, it's much worse. Ultimately look at it as Power comes first before survival.