So what lies ahead for us?
I think Collapse and Descent.
What do I mean by these terms?
Many parts of the world will surely Collapse into Chaos. The New never appears all at once and all over.
The old always fights back. Some never can change.
The New always starts in a type of place where the hold of the Old is less. The New, as per the rules of Chaos, has to start on the edge. A cultural edge. England and then America were on such a cultural edge. They were separated by geography and by culture from the old.
The new always follows the rules of adoption. It starts small, weak and insignificant when compared to the old. It has to find the best way to "Cross the Chasm" None of the Big Men Hunters would have thought that the women would become the main providers of food. The shift to horticulture and then to agriculture must have been very hard.
The Eden Myth in the Bible tells us of the struggle. Who would give up Eden for a life of Toil and subordination easily?
There has to be a natural advantage. England and America had coal and oil. Agriculture did not start all over the world but in the Middle East where the plants and animals most easily domesticated lived.
Lastly, someone has to find an entirely new model.
Collapse and Descent I think will imply two features of the challenge of the New Model.
Part of the model is acceleration. Each Paradigm lasts much less than the one before. The reason is connection and communication. It took over 1,000 years for the chariot to reach England from the Middle East. Now we are down to minutes. We live in a hyper connected world now. There will be no time for most to adjust. Also there will be no places that will escape for Agribusiness now dominates every part of the planet. Never has the food system of the world been so brittle. So out of the control of the many.
When it breaks, it will happen as the financial collapse happened. It will be overnight and it will be everywhere.
With no oil, this model the traditional idea of dominating nature will be all that most can comprehend. Such a model will have to default to subsistence and its design will take us back to a medieval system that struggled to feed less than 1 billion!
Mindset is the only chance. Will there be enough people with enough of the new in their minds and enough of the new in their practice to use an entirely new system?
A tiny number of people have been thinking or living a heretical alternative.
They are our only hope for Descent. This is the entirely new model that synthesizes Hunting and Gathering with Farming. It will be a way of "Working with Nature" to produce a lot of food.
We can predict what such a society and food system will be like.
To mimic nature demands the opposite of what we have today. It demands a highly decentralized society with immense diversity.
What is the essence of this system?
It is to work with Nature. To work with a force that we can now use science to help us understand. The bet is that by working with Nature, we can remove most of the effort that we had to use when we worked against her. In this model, Nature does most of the work.
This model violates all of Nature. Only vast effort can keep her at bay.
This is what it looks like to work with Nature. A quick anecdote. What if you have too many slugs? Answer, you don't have enough ducks. See what I mean. This is an approach that integrates. Such a system can produce as much food per acre as the traditional field but with almost no inputs and very little effort.
But it does demand that that a human being tend it. It demands that it be small in scale. To produce a lot of food, a lot of small places have to be connected in a network. So it demands that lots of people are involved. There is a lot of work here for a lot of people.
With oil being scarce and expensive, distance becomes an issue. Most of the food will have to be produced where the people live. Much of the work we do, will revert to getting food.
Being made up of a system of lots of small nodes, it also pulls community back together. As more work with nature and with each other. As more open their eyes again to the detail of how nature works, the more we wake from our dream and find ourselves back as part of nature again.
Our new information revolution, the web, is of course a mirror of all of this. It offers us the model for organization, nodes and links. It brings back two way conversation.
We will have returned but in a bigger way to using a much larger source of energy than the capital of the sun. We will be using its income.
How we design where we live will change. Today we ignore the climate and build boxes that fight off the climate by using oil. We have stopped seeing how we can build and live with nature so as again to let Nature do most of the work in supplying key services such as heat, cooling, water, waste etc. By observant design, Nature can do all of this.
The need for lots of capital for food and housing diminish just as they do in our web world today.
This system demands very little money or credit. The financial system will weaken as it becomes less central to how we live. But it does demand a Healthy Social Capital. It also reinforces and strengthens it.
With High Levels of social capital, health and behaviour improve. We need less health care and we will have a very different educations system. Pensions? Called the family. Daycare? Called the family. Work life? Done in the same place at the same time. Busy? Likely back to Hunter Gatherer norms of about 20 - 30% of the time. The rest leisure.
Community will replace bureaucratic institutions. Reputation will replace credential. Men and women will return to true parity.
Of course there will be an economy and there will be transactions. But they will not be the centre of society.
Sounds Shangrilaesque?
Yes but..
Collapse is certain. We will not have access to cheap oil. We are financially and socially weakened. Nature will pay us back. A weather event? A pandemic? A conflict?
Any society that holds onto the old way will not have any chance of feeding its people. Any society too rooted in the old will not be able to react in time. As it is so clear, the principles of the new violate the beliefs and identity of the existing power elites. As we are seeing with Newspapers, they will prefer to die that give in. As we saw in the Reformation, sides will be taken and much blood will be spilled. The Old Testament is also the story of the herders taking on the Horticulturists. It is a story of Genocide.
There will be nothing gentle about this transition. Unless a critical mass of us can go there deliberately. Like the pilgrims who went to America or the Huguenots who went to England.
How could we do that? Who are the new pilgrims and how to we get to the Promised Land? My hope is that enough of us will be ready that we can choose Descent and pull it off.
In the next post in this series I will do my best to see what the Fractals say about what might be the work of the winners.
I will say more also about where we may learn about how this new system works in practice. For it exists of course.
The New Exists in its proto and weak form. It exists in a despised edge society that has no power and that is hated by the current power holders. It does not even know that it is the new because we cannot see ourselves.
It exists in two "places". One is an Island off the coast of the pinnacle power state. The other is a cultural Sate that exists hidden within the the culture of the old.
The place is Cuba. Their special circumstances were being cut off in 1989 from oil. Their achievement? To create a new system, based on Permaculture, that uses next to no oil or chemicals that feeds Cuba better than before and that has increased the nation's social capital so that with no money, they have some of the best health and education outcome of any nation.
The hidden is to be found in the "Permaculture" and the "Locavore" movements in the Anglo Saxon states. This is where the ideas of working with nature and how best to do that have originated. This is where they are being applied locally, under the radar in the heart of the old. They are though in a way located in a New Country. They are the Protestants in Europe in the early years. They are located in the New New World. This New World is not a place but a new Global Culture. It transcends nations and national cultures. It is a child of the web born in the 1960's with the first bloom of the rejection of the current "religion" consumerism. No one takes them seriously.
