the last shreds of national government dissolved. Ordinary disasters such as hurricanes and massive floods will take on a new role as the resources to rebuild will be less and less available. The lessons of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 are likely to be repeated many times over in the years to come. These sudden events will punctuate the decline, not cause it, and attempts to respond to them without dealing with the broader issues will simply transfer stresses to other aspects of a society in decline.
Sooner or later in the process, weâll see the breakdown of existing social, political, and economic forms and the rise of transitional structures. At some point, continental governments such as the United States and Canada will come apart, in fact if not in name, to be replaced by regional and local governments cobbled together on an ad hoc basis; the global corporate economy will be replaced by jerry-built local exchange systems, and so on. The more sustainable, stable, and effective these transitional structures are, the more people, technology, knowledge, and culture will make it through the couple of centuries that this whole process will take.
That last is the detail that has to be remembered. Nobody now alive will see the end of the process thatâs now under way. The challenge we face in the short term is how to weather the next round of crises when it arrives. In the long term, the challenge is to get through the Long Descent with as much useful information and resources as possible, and to transmit them to the successor cultures that, to judge by past models, will begin coalescing sometime in the 23rd and 24th centuries. That means making sure that people right now have the information and connections they need to adapt constructively to the changes brought by the decline of our civilization, rather than backing themselves into one blind alley or another. It also means taking a hard look at some of the most fundamental ways people in todayâs industrial societies think about the world.
TWO
The Stories
We Tell
Ourselves
B y this point even those of my readers who havenât yet thrown this book at the nearest wall will likely be appalled by the image of the future presented in the last few pages. What I find most interesting about this very common reaction is that it can have its roots in two completely different, and in fact opposite, sets of assumptions and beliefs about the future. On the one hand, many people insist that no matter what problems crop up before us, modern science, technology, and raw human ingenuity will inevitably win out and make the world of the future better than the world of today. On the other hand, some people insist that no matter what we do, some overwhelming catastrophe will soon bring civilization suddenly crashing down into mass death and a Road Warrior future.
Discussions about peak oil and the predicament of industrial society constantly revolve around these two alternatives, as though they were the only possibilities. Many believers in either option donât seem to be able to wrap their minds around the possibility of a third alternative. Itâs a remarkable situation. If two meteorologists on a weather program were to get into a debate about the weather to be expected on a fall day, and one insisted the only possibility was clear skies and temperatures in the 90s, while the other claimed a sudden blizzard was about to happen, most viewers would probably suspect that something was out of kilter. Too many of todayâs discussions about the future of industrial society impose an equally strange distortion on the likely shape of the world our children and grandchildren will face.
Blind spots of this sort show the hidden presence of myth. Many people nowadays think only primitive people believe in myths, but myths dominate the thinking of every society, including our own. Myths are the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of our world. Human beings think with
Sooner or later in the process, weâll see the breakdown of existing social, political, and economic forms and the rise of transitional structures. At some point, continental governments such as the United States and Canada will come apart, in fact if not in name, to be replaced by regional and local governments cobbled together on an ad hoc basis; the global corporate economy will be replaced by jerry-built local exchange systems, and so on. The more sustainable, stable, and effective these transitional structures are, the more people, technology, knowledge, and culture will make it through the couple of centuries that this whole process will take.
That last is the detail that has to be remembered. Nobody now alive will see the end of the process thatâs now under way. The challenge we face in the short term is how to weather the next round of crises when it arrives. In the long term, the challenge is to get through the Long Descent with as much useful information and resources as possible, and to transmit them to the successor cultures that, to judge by past models, will begin coalescing sometime in the 23rd and 24th centuries. That means making sure that people right now have the information and connections they need to adapt constructively to the changes brought by the decline of our civilization, rather than backing themselves into one blind alley or another. It also means taking a hard look at some of the most fundamental ways people in todayâs industrial societies think about the world.
TWO
The Stories
We Tell
Ourselves
B y this point even those of my readers who havenât yet thrown this book at the nearest wall will likely be appalled by the image of the future presented in the last few pages. What I find most interesting about this very common reaction is that it can have its roots in two completely different, and in fact opposite, sets of assumptions and beliefs about the future. On the one hand, many people insist that no matter what problems crop up before us, modern science, technology, and raw human ingenuity will inevitably win out and make the world of the future better than the world of today. On the other hand, some people insist that no matter what we do, some overwhelming catastrophe will soon bring civilization suddenly crashing down into mass death and a Road Warrior future.
Discussions about peak oil and the predicament of industrial society constantly revolve around these two alternatives, as though they were the only possibilities. Many believers in either option donât seem to be able to wrap their minds around the possibility of a third alternative. Itâs a remarkable situation. If two meteorologists on a weather program were to get into a debate about the weather to be expected on a fall day, and one insisted the only possibility was clear skies and temperatures in the 90s, while the other claimed a sudden blizzard was about to happen, most viewers would probably suspect that something was out of kilter. Too many of todayâs discussions about the future of industrial society impose an equally strange distortion on the likely shape of the world our children and grandchildren will face.
Blind spots of this sort show the hidden presence of myth. Many people nowadays think only primitive people believe in myths, but myths dominate the thinking of every society, including our own. Myths are the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of our world. Human beings think with
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