There Is No Fixing What Is Wrong
Anyone with a plan or a set of policies that will "fix" things is lying to themselves and to you. It's not a matter of "if" things go sideways, it's more a question of "when" and "how bad will it be?"
We all live these days with a sense that things are not right. There is a weird disconnect at times between the seeming normalness of so much of life — buying and selling, marrying and giving in marriage, going on cruises, the lot of it — that it is at times hard to fathom that we are on a trajectory for a global collapse at some point in the future. It probably won’t be tomorrow. But it will come sooner than people think. Why is this? We could make a lot of arguments about energy and other non-renewable resources, and these are important, and they may be the catalysts for why things start breaking down rapidly once the tipping point is reached, but this is really not the main force of the argument I wish to make today. The problem is with the system and the nature of technology itself. Let us begin with a quick dive into the work of Joseph Tainter who wrote “The Collapse of Complex Societies.”
His work can be critiqued as too focused on the material conditions of collapse, igno…
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