Ah who's Jim? James Howard Kunstler that'd be - petrocollapse oracle and general doomster. I like to read his weekly rant on clusterfuck nation, published every Monday, where he sets his sights on the hallucinated wealth of Wall street and the impending oil crash and eventual return of our species to the stone age. I don't subscribe entirely to his views. His predictions come in 2 varieties - spectacularly wrong and spectacularly right. He hit the sub prime nail on the head long before the fact in his predictions for 2007, an article well worth the reading. His prediction for 2008 is even more doom laden and although Jim is a bit excitable and prone to prediciting things in terms of weeks and months instead of years a lot of the scenarios he lays out have come to pass with uncanny accuracy. So the fact that he reckons modern civilisation will come to an end sooner rather than later gives pause for thought - should I be stocking up on candles and freeze dried meals in preparation for post armageddon Ireland, assuming that I and the place I stash my candles survive that long? The idea is tempting - I can imagine only too clearly the lights going out round the neighbourhood, knackers burning sofas in the garden to stay warm and me kicking myself for not acting on something I thought was a reasonable possibility (although our life long conditioning would put armageddon and lack of electric out there with the flying pigs on a possibility spectrum). Its a big question - if I start hoarding non perishable food and medieval lighting materials would I not be our era's equivalent of the maniacs digging bomb shelters in back gardens during the 60's misslie crisis - come to think of it should I build a bomb shelter?? The embarrassment factor and big shed will almost certainly prevent me swinging the shovel in the back garden but it is conceivable that i may slowly accumulate a stash of post apocalypse goodies in a dark corner of the loft where my wife has never been. Candles, batteries, some sort of water filtration device, durable outdoor clothing in a variety of sizes to accomodate the various children, an angry dog to scare away the rapists and pillagers - I need a bigger loft. What surprises me these days is the complete lack of imagination of the average person. We live in a world full of conflict with supply lines that operate just in time and yet we have not an ounce of doubt that the status quo will roll on generation after generation ad infinitum. Its probably unfair to classify the entire population as zombies but the behaviour I see in my day to day life (including from myself) would merit such objective labelling. From my own perspective I feel I have free will and know there is the possibilty of behaving in some other way but the channels down which we are funnelled have become so deep and fast flowing that there is no practical way to step out from the hordes mindlessly consuming whatever is laid before them. I am the horde, my mind holds the channels, they are built on our deepest instincts, or were furrowed from them. Shelter, food, reproduction, all facilitated and all available down the path of least resistance - missing or difficult to acquire once you step out from under the umbrella of modern society. There is a part of me that longs for the collapse of the whole reeking edifice, like the bursting of a rotten abcess - I know that life in the aftermath will be brutal, unjust and probably short but to be able to deal with life and death face to face and to have the victories and painful defeat, to have grief and elation for even a short space of time is worth the living of a thousand lives of stagnation. I think its all my ego talking, shouting for a bit of recognition - I want to know what makes me different from the other 6 billiom people on the planet and i'm quite prepared for a lot of them to die in answer to the question. The fear is that i run my gerbil wheel for the flicker of eternity given me and never get off, never so much as a glimpse through the bars of my physical confines, no elevation or transcendence, no descent into instinct. Will it come in the end squeezed in a concentrated flash with my last breath, a realisation that it was there all the time under my nose or will I evaporate out of existence with a frustrated question mark? The dying part - only one way out they say, our attitude to death informs our behaviour in life. Fear of dying shows itself as a need for control and selfishness. Belief that death is a release and transcendence manifests as generosity and kindness of spirit. Uncertainty of what is after prompts a life of hesitation, repitition, waiting and restlessness. A person's view of death will necessarily change with circumstance, age and experience. What we believe now can change in ten years and what we have believed for a lifetime may prove an absurdity at the end - what is important is to believe something, to fill the spiritual void. I have the feeling that most people exist with a mixture of fear and uncertainty of the future, robbing them of the ability to make decisive decisions. I sense an air of apprehension and anticipation - the future is long past its predictable former self - the exponential complexity and explosion of possibility at a macro level has left us with an individual and collective inertia that is hard to overcome. We seem to be propelled through our lives in an irritated daze by forces beyond our understanding or influence. Waiting for the big show. Which should definitely be telivised. But the evolution will not be televized. If evolution it be we will have only a walk off part, subsumed beneath an explosion of vastly superior intelligence without the shackles of biological needs and moral imperatives. A new race more efficient in every way, born of our hubris and destined to file us next to Neanderthal in the annals of earth's inhabitants. It is surely hubris that encourages us to imagine we can create intelligence exponentially more efficient than ourselves with the sole purpose of serving us. We are instruments of evolution, no more - we are allowed the illusion of control and direction to further the natural cosmic inclination for faster and larger leaps in complexity, we are a stepping stone, a footnote and all the time unable to release the notion that we are somehow the intended end product of 5 billion years of the war against entropy. We even have a myriad of cultural myths and fairytales (religions) that encourage this view. The Creator is a man! The jaw dropping arrogance of it all! If not evolution then the fast crash back to pre-civilisation, a tragedy of Homeric proportions, our common inertia unleashed on ourselves for a brief and spectacular global pain fest. We might imagine huddling around short wave radios for news of the epic tragedies unfolding around the globe but the chances are we will be scrabbling around for food, fuel and bare necessities before rapidly resorting to stealing killing and reliving the glory of the dark ages. This is all very depressing but seems to me to reflect another common theme of our time, a complete inability to imagine a better future for ourselves and our progenitors. Subconciously we seem to be resigned to the fact that the game is up, we are being laden, collectively and individually with the guilt and responsibility for future chaos. Global warming, rain forest depletion, rapid species extinction, famine, resource depletion, genocide - we are not given much to be proud of these days and it weighs heavily upon us. We no longer possess the drive and enthusiastic forward looking spirit of the renaissance, we stare together at a species that has lost its way and fallen out of kilter with the natural balance of the earth. Our population has overshot spectacularly, bloated and swollen on a glut of nearly-free energy in the shape of fossil fuel. We talk about housing bubbles and dot com bubbles but the sheer number of humans on the earth is the largest bubble of all, primed to explode or deflate as soon as the miraculous free energy that maintains it is exhausted. The luminaries of our time see a future of limitless fusion energy, nano scale robots grafting together our basic needs from any flotsam and jetsam at hand, the harnessing of atomic computing powers, running godlike algorithms and exerting order and intelligence on the very matter of the universe. There is no place for us in this future, it is as fearful in its cold hard alien organisation as a hellish regression to chaos and brutality would be. The piper is coming and he needs paid - will we pass on the baton of evolution and slink quietly into the fossil record or will we die in a screaming mess gripping tightly with our last ounce of strength. I don't suppose it will be just as straight forward as that but the ingredients for both recipes are on the chopping board ready for the mixing. Mmmmhmmmmmm.
