Saturday, May 3, 2014

Consuming our Problems

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I've written before that our current civilization has the familiar reek of a speculative bubble whose days are numbered.  Whenever any of our leaders talk about our future, the combination of bad math, delusional happy talk, and faith that this time it's different just confirms the conclusion.

As far as John Michael Greer is concerned, the decline of cheap energy, combined with our unwillingness to change course until it is far too late, have doomed our civilization to join the many, many others that have fallen hard and left their people to find a way through the hard times and dark ages that can follow.  The destruction of a civilization can take centuries, but in fact it is already under way and has been for decades - a lived experience that more people are starting to intuit.

I have tremendous faith in humans' ability to muddle through, (which is why I gravitate toward Greer rather than many other doomsayers who envision a universally sudden, catastrophic and even extinctive collapse).  But there are reasons to think that our current crop of Americans are exquisitely ill-prepared to deal with the twin calamities of an end of the American Empire and the decline of Industrial Civilization.

I think there are numerous reasons for our terrifying inability to grapple with our upcoming problems.  One ingredient of our current recipe for incompetence is what (in our research work) we call the consumer stance.  The consumer stance stands as an antithesis to the engaged citizen or practical problem-solver and shows up regularly as a obstacle for advocates who are engaged with various public issues.  The consumer creates nothing - neither the end product nor the underlying conditions, but instead chooses among options that are presented to them.  However, in an ironic twist, consumer choice is mythologized as the proper expression of power and individuality.  Wherever you may be in the hierarchies of life, when you are the customer you are the one who holds the cards and the one who has to be catered to.  This delusion of power (trumpeted in each of the thousands of advertisements we face every day) can hide people's actual powerlessness.

In fact, most people don't get much practice anymore in creating their own things and social spaces.  Our tastes, our hobbies, our ways of defining ourselves may seem like they come from a kind of infinite buffet, but they are increasingly commodified and pre-packaged for us in ways we don't even perceive.  From the playground, to the workplace, to leisure, to the community organizations that used to be so central to daily life, most people have been maneuvered into being passive recipients rather than active producers and organizers.  

When it comes to politics, we don't get much practice in being producers of power, compromise, and collective problem-solving.  The problem of the consumer stance has been at the forefront of my mind in recent weeks, as I was researching in California, interviewing chance-met people about their thoughts on government.

There are all sorts of themes that come up, which I won't go into here, but one of the most unsurprising findings is that people do not participate in a democracy as creative, constructive citizens.  Instead they are classic consumers, forever electing between Brand X and Brand Y, and if one brand is mostly useless and the other poison, they don't see what they can do about that.  Vote against the poison or protest their lousy options by not voting at all.  Rather than considering their potential to meet challenges collectively through public, collective institutions, the average American is a dissatisfied customer increasingly giving up on democracy and its unreliable barkers.

In another project we research into how to communicate to farmers and their allies about sustainability.  Normally farmers are an unreceptive audience when it comes to progressive policies, since they skew heavily conservative and tend to regard government with scorn.  But interestingly, when it comes to sustainability they are much more "progressive" than regular people.  

Farmers have been producers and they are much more clued into how and whether systems can be sustained over a year, a lifetime, or through the generations.  They have some inkling about what is involved in protecting or maintaining the generative foundations that we all rely on.  Although they are trapped in an increasingly unsustainable food system and being sidelined themselves, unlike regular people they understand enough to be seeking for a way to keep things going over the long haul.

When I look around at the so-called solutions to climate change, fossil fuel depletion, unsustainability, and economic contraction, I see marketers hawking various bottles of snake oil (e.g. fracking our way to energy independence, SUVs driving on windmill electricity, productivity apps for our phones), but only in those cases where someone sees a way to turn a profit on us consumers.  Otherwise there is a deafening silence, and a population that doesn't fully grasp how and why it isn't being served.

A common thread among the problems we aren't solving - is that we need to consume less and do more for ourselves. We need to use less energy, consume fewer goods, participate in democracy and community (rather than delegating it to others).  We need to wind down the consumer-capitalist juggernaut that is quickly destroying its own foundations.  As long as Americans remain habituated to their consumer stance, and fail to become active agents, we're doomed to the sad spectacle of our current lemming-march toward multiple fiascos.
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11 comments:

  1. Good points, AB.

    On the plus side, there *are* many 'maker spaces' popping up in the country and the world, where people are a) learning to get along with each other and b) learning to make stuff with their own hands, and c) sharing tools and resources (http://makerspace.com/makerspace-directory).

    My view on fast collapse/slow collapse is still unclear. There's a hell of a lot of interconnectedness, more so than has ever been, in any other civilization that has collapsed. Stairstep collapse sounds like the way things might happen, but I'm wondering if at one point along the stairs downward we get one step that breaks, so we fall through to the next floor. A fast-slow combo, that, when you pull back, looks like a fractal. A quick search on fast-slow collapse turns up oodles of discussion. It does seem that things will be uneven, for sure. Too many variables influence things, in my opinion.

    Look forward to more commentary in the JMG vein!

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    1. I think the Maker movement is great. Probably the best way to shore up our numbers of much-needed tinkerers! As for the speed of collapse, my guess is that it won't be evenly distributed. There's a case to be made that places like Syria have already tumbled down a couple of steps (since demographics, climate change, water shortages and so on may prevent it from ever getting back to where it was). Egypt has pulled itself together, but is it recovering ground it lost?

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  2. Great topic. We were having a discussion on the GW forum about when things are in season recently. I'm so used to having fresh lettuce available 365 days a year for a salad that I don't even know when vegetables are naturally in season anymore.

    I'm trying onions this year in the garden, which can be staggered. The garden guru at the nursery where I buy compost (can't compost on my own since I rent) introduced me to "onion sets" and suggested planting them as two rows. You harvest the first when they are young and sweet then the second set later when they are mature. We came up with a follow on of scattering seeds on top so that a third planting will come up later as well. I understand onions can be dried and stored well too.

    BTW Anubis, this would make a good guest blog post for the Green wizards website if you'd like me to cross post this there. Even better it would get you three chances to win one of the free JMG books we are giving away in our June promotion. Info is HERE. Pop me an email at ran domsurfer 200 at yahoo dot com, if that interests you.

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  3. Very interesting post. I'm particularly interested in hearing your thoughts about alternatives to the consumer stance in the political process. Speaking personally, i do feel like an alienated, dissatisfied consumer in elections, but short of running for office myself I'm not sure what to do. Well - today I'm marching for immigration reform, but even as I make my cardboard sign, it feels like an exercize in futility.

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    1. That's a really good question, Aimee. And one that probably deserves a full post. Maybe you've given me the topic for my next essay. But marching for the changes you want isn't futile, even if it may not be enough.

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  4. Hmm, between the nation-changing population growth (5 million to 300 million over two centuries, or two orders of magnitude of change, plus some territory gain) and the outsized influence of money in American politics, compared to, say:

    "The most famous example of electoral expense is perhaps that of Yorkshire, where William Wilberforce’s two opponents in the bitterly contested election of 1807 each reputedly spent £ 100,000, or more than £6 million today; Wilberforce topped the poll, but out of a total of nearly 24,000 votes only 850 finally separated the three candidates. By comparison, the average election budget allowed by law for a parliamentary candidate in the final month of the 2010 general election, including all staff, office and equipment costs, campaign literature, merchandise and advertising, was approximately £12,000 – less than the cost of a single TV advertisement in a U.S. congressional election." — Norman, Jesse (2013-05-21). Edmund Burke: The First Conservative (p. 75). Basic Books. Kindle Edition.

    it may be no surprise that the American political process might be down on the ropes. (Parallels to the democracy-at-home-but-Imperial-tributes-from-abroad Athens look interesting; I really must get through Thucydides one of these days.) Is democracy something that can scale out to multiple millions, or are different structures required with that many humans about?

    However! There will need to be consumption, only of different quality: glass containers and clay pots for food preservation, local food and not greens flown from Chile. Alas, enthused patrons in a local bar spoke of their new TV, and a snorkling trip to Alaska—doubtless things more fun than pondering the mysteries of Sauerkraut.

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    1. The one thing that everyone agrees on up and down the political spectrum is that politicians have been corrupted. They just think the other guy's candidate is even worse than theirs.

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  5. But that old paradigm of "growth is good" persists, to our collective peril.

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    1. Aye, the blinding desire for infinite growth on a finite planet is the defining madness of the age.

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  6. @ thrig - on a trip to Scandanavia a few years ago, our guide - a Norwegian who lived in Denmark but gad also lived and studied in the US - explained that in general citizens in the Scandanavian countries trusted their governments because they believed they (the citizens) could change the government if they didn't agree with what it was doing. He also patiently explained that this attitude was possible because of the small and relatively homogenous population (I say patient, because some people in the group took every description of a local system as a criticism of the US). Unfortunately, given the tribal nature of human beings, I think democracy does not work well in a country as large and diverse as the US.

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  7. Very good post. The idea that the "consumer stance" applies to much more than just buying stuff is so accurate, but something I had never thought about. Thank you.

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