How Everything Can Collapse By Brian Simpson
A number of writers at this site are collapsologists, seeing Western civilisation in deep trouble from numerous factors, such as centralisation of power, insane elites, ethno-racial replacement, you name it. The feeling is that all other civilisations in the past have collapsed so why should ours be any different?
Just in case this is thought by some to be an eccentric fringe view, collapsology is now a legitimate mainstream field, as detailed in this book by Pablo Servigne and Raphael Stevens, How Everything Can Collapse, (Polity Press, London, 2020). This is a mainstream book, which I do not have, but from what I read, deals with areas where we are in dispute, such as climate change. But this does show the larger issue that the issue of collapse is a live one, when both Left sand Right converge to the same point, although they come from very different perspectives, obviously enough.
“The belief that we are heading for some kind of all-consuming crisis is not exclusively French, of course. Serious scientists all over the world are discussing it. Wealthy Americans were buying spots in Armageddon-proof bunkers long before Covid-19, and militant environmental and social protest movements have been on the rise everywhere. Within Europe, however, a survey published last November by the left-leaning French think-tank the Jean Jaurès Foundation found that only Italy beat France for pessimism about the future. Seventy-one per cent of Italians and 65% of French people agreed with the statement that “civilisation as we know it will collapse in the years to come”; 56% of Brits shared that apocalyptic vision – slightly ahead of Americans, at 52% – while Germans came in last with a sanguine 39%.
In 2015, two Frenchmen, Pablo Servigne and Raphaël Stevens, who describe themselves as independent researchers, co-wrote an essay entitled How Everything Can Collapse, in which they introduced the term “collapsology”. In a long interview Servigne gave to Philosophie magazine this year, he explained that, at first, their neologism was tongue-in-cheek. The concept must have struck a chord, though, because within a couple of years he found himself at the head of a movement, and this summer the word collapsologie entered the popular French dictionary Le Petit Robert. “We created a monster,” Servigne told Philosophie.
For the authors of the Jean Jaurès study, the political scientist Jérôme Fourquet and the pollster Jean-Philippe Dubrulle, collapsology is driven at least in part by economic factors. The least apocalyptically minded country they polled, Germany, also has (or had, pre-Covid-19) the strongest economy, while the countries where the movement has the largest following – Italy and France – are those where economic performance has been poorest of late, and social and political tensions run high.
They deliberately left their statement vague as to the causes of the coming collapse, because people in different countries think differently about these. In Britain and Germany, the emphasis is on the climate crisis, as seen in the emergence of Extinction Rebellion in the UK. But in France, where they overlap to some extent with the gilets jaunes movement, collapsologists also consider society to be sick. The idea is that rampant consumerism, ever-accelerating technological advances and the dominance of neoliberalism are leading French people to perdition.
It is probably for this reason, say Fourquet and Dubrulle, that France stands apart from the other countries they surveyed in one important way: whereas in general the movement is strongest in the under-35 age group, “in our country, all generations, the 65-and-overs included, share the same sombre diagnosis”.
The movement also cuts across political boundaries, embracing everyone from the far right to the far left. One of the most outspoken collapsologists is Yves Cochet, a politician with Europe Ecology – France’s green party – and a former environment minister in Lionel Jospin’s left-wing government of the early 00s. He has retreated to a farmhouse in Britanny and reputedly has not seen the inside of a plane since 2009. But there are also French “survivalists” who – at least until about a decade ago – shared the drawbridge mentality of the Americans stocking up on peanut butter and ammo.
After the financial crisis of 2008, says Bertrand Vidal, a sociologist at the University of Montpellier who studies these groups, the predominantly right-wing, libertarian survivalists shifted closer to Servigne and Stevens’s softer, back-to-nature school of how-to-avert-the-worst, with its emphasis on sustainability. Differences between them remain, but one thing they share is a neo-Malthusian conviction that there are too many people on Earth. Even those who overtly criticise capitalism believe in a post-apocalyptic winnowing of the human species, in which nature will determine who lives and who dies. “They use the analogy of the grasshopper and the ant,” Vidal says, referring to the fable in which the ant survives the winter because it prepared for cold weather, while the improvident grasshopper expires.”
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2020-08-10/how-everything-can-collapse-excerpt/
“Despite the high quality of some of the philosophical reflections on this topic, the debate on collapse (or ‘the end of a world’) fails because of the absence of factual arguments. It is stuck in imaginary or philosophical speculation without any real factual grounding. The books dealing with collapse are usually too specialized, restricted by their point of view or discipline (archaeology, economics, ecology, etc.), while more systematic discussions are full of gaps. Jared Diamond’s bestseller Collapse, for example, sticks to the archaeology, ecology and biogeography of ancient civilizations and does not address some of the essential questions of the current situation. As for other popular books, they usually tackle the question by adopting a survivalist position (telling you how to make bows and arrows, or how to find drinking water in a world plagued by fire and the sword), giving the reader all the thrills of watching a zombie movie.
Not only do we lack any real inventory – or better, any systematic analysis – of the planet’s economic and biophysical situation, but above all we lack an overview of what a collapse might look like, how it might be triggered and what it would imply in psychological, sociological and political terms for the present generations. We lack any real applied, transdisciplinary science of collapse.
We here propose, by drawing on information from many scattered works published across the world, to create the basics of what, with a certain self-deprecating irony, we have called ‘collapsology’ (from the Latin collapsus, ‘a fallen mass’). The goal is not to indulge in the mere scientific pleasure of accumulating knowledge but rather to shed light on what is happening and might happen to us, in other words, to give meaning to events. It is also and above all a way of treating the subject as seriously as possible so that we can calmly discuss the policies that need to be implemented.
The issues that emerge whenever the word ‘collapse’ is so much as mentioned are many and varied. What do we know about the overall state of our Earth? Or the state of our civilization? Is a collapse in stock market prices comparable to a collapse in biodiversity? Can the conjunction and perpetuation of ‘crises’ actually drag our civilization into an inescapable whirlpool? How far can all this go? How long will it last? Will we manage to maintain our democratic reflexes? Can we live more or less peacefully through a ‘civilized’ collapse? Will the outcome inevitably be entirely negative?”
The issue of collapsology has been discussed by writers at this site for at least ten years, before most of the above writers, and it was always a concern of Eric Butler, who saw the forces of centralisation, what we call the nasty package of globalism today, as a force eroding the moral foundations of civilisation, as surely as white ants eat away the foundations of a wood framed house. And, now is the moment of truth, as we face it, with most people, even so-called thinkers, pretty much numb to the issues.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/everything-we-assume-permanent-actually-fragile
Comments