Collapse

I’ve just finished reading Dmitry Orlov’s The Five Stages of Collapse.

Orlov’s blog is here.    It’s one of my favourite reads.

I’m not going to spend time waxing lyrical about this book, because I realise the imminent collapse of industrial civilisation is a taboo subject with most people, but I will say I found it unputdownable and the source of some stunning new insights into the human predicament.

Orlov’s five stages are: Financial, Commercial, Political, Social and Cultural. Although treated in the book in that order, there’s no guarantee they will occur in that order, or one after the other in an orderly slow succession. At the end of each chapter Orlov has added a case history to illustrate each of the stages: Iceland (financial); the Former Soviet Union (commercial); the Pashtuns (political); the Roma (social) and the Ik (cultural).

Orlov has posted some exerpts at his blog and I’ve pasted one of them here just to give you an idea of what to expect from his writing:

“Looking at the first three stages of collapse—financial, commercial, political—it is clear why financial collapse should, and to some extent already has, come first. Commercial collapse results from the disruption of the physical flows of products and services; political collapse occurs when governments are no longer able to fulfill their obligations to their citizens in the wake of commercial collapse; but all that is required for financial collapse is for certain assumptions about the future to be invalidated, for finance is not a physical system but a mental construct, one resembling a house of cards that, to stretch this metaphor just a little, can remain stable only while continuously adding more cards, in the sense of continuous credit expansion supported by economic growth. But we are entering a time when a wide variety of physical constraints are making themselves felt around the world, from the depletion of fossil fuel resources, metal ores, phosphate, fresh water and arable land, to massive disruptions because of droughts, floods and heat waves brought by accelerating climate change, to the political instability and upheaval which sweep the world in the wake of each food price spike. All of these elements combine to make a rosy projection for global economic growth untenable. In turn, an extended period of economic stagnation followed by a sustained, perhaps terminal contraction is fatal to a financial system that constantly requires more debt, and more growth.”

The remainder of the chapter goes on to describe ways of cashing out of the system before cash (along with all other financial contrivances) becomes worthless, how to trade in absence of banks or other financial institutions and what life without money tends to look like. All very fascinating stuff. Orlov’s book will be a permanent fixture on my bedside reading table.

If you’re interested in the subject of collapse (and you should be, for all past civilisations have collapsed and the present one will be no exception), and you want to do some thinking about how you might survive this one, then I can recommend this book.

If you need more background, then I’d also recommend the following:

Overshoot: the physiological basis of revolutionary change  (William Catton).

The Collapse of Complex Societies (Joseph Tainter).

Collapse (Jared Diamond).

If you’d rather watch than read, then the series of 20 short videos which make up Chris Martenson’s Crash Course, which deals with economics and finance is well worth it.