December 6. Just spent a week in Mexico. I've heard some buzz about Americans moving there to flee hard times, and I wonder if they know something I don't, or if I know something they don't: the Mexican nation-state is collapsing, and it seems likely to get awfully hot.
We were staying in La Paz, a city of 200,000 in southern Baja California. If you want to roll the dice on global cooling, you could hardly find a better combination of warm temperatures, empty beaches, low prices, and nice people. If you're looking for a smaller town, check out Todos Santos on the other side of the peninsula, and for something more cosmopolitan, I'm told that Guadalajara has a large and thriving gringo expatriate community.
While I was down there I read David Holmgren's book Future Scenarios, and he makes a good point about one advantage Mexicans have over Americans: they're a lot more mentally adaptable. His example is that hardly anyone who owns a house in Mexico has insurance, because they're not afraid to lose everything and start over. Of course, that resiliency is something we can all work on. Just in a week, I met four different American couples who had sold most of their stuff and gone permanently on the road, or the waves. Most impressive were two women from Oregon, both over 60, who are living on a 35 foot sailboat.
Also, the Baja California climate gave me a better appreciation of permaculture. On my own land, the difference between good and bad management is not that great. Even if I do everything wrong, bushes and trees will eventually grow. But down there, the difference is orders of magnitude. They have warmth and sunlight all year, but because of bad soil and long dry spells, the main plants are cacti, and big patches of ground are lifeless. Just building topsoil and keeping it moist would make any plot of land incredibly productive. And yet, the normal practice is to rake up piles of brush and burn them. If they just made one big pile and threw some water on it, it would turn into great topsoil, which they could then use to grow more biomass, and get a topsoil-building feedback loop.
December 8. Destroyed US town a model of eco-living as it rebuilds. Greensburg Kansas was 95% destroyed by a tornado, and is rebuilding with rainwater harvesting, LED streetlights, and wind and geothermal energy. I know this is still industrial-green, but it's a big step in the right direction. Maybe in 20 years, some destroyed town will rebuild with rocket heating stoves and food forests.
December 11. Two nice pieces by a long-time reader, about Unschooling, and Unworking. This bit is especially relevant right now:
Back when my husband had health insurance, we were appalled at how much we were spending on this "benefit." We could never afford to go to the doctor because we couldn't afford the deductible and co-payments. After keeping track of expenses, we realized we were spending thousands of dollars a year on insurance. We quickly canceled it and then were able to go to the doctor when we needed to see one.
December 14. Just over the last few weeks, it seems like America has turned a corner... a vertical corner. Our daily actions are the same, but on the level of mind, or spirit, we've dropped off a cliff. You can see it on the left, where the attitude toward Obama has flipped from excitement to disgust. You can see it on the right, where only a few elderly people still look like they're making arguments, and everyone else looks like they're having a seizure. And you can see it in the conspiracy crowd, who are telling increasingly ridiculous stories that this is all part of a plan, because the alternative is too troubling.
It is said that Obama is wearing a mask, being a deceiver, as if he carefully pretended to be a progressive activist for a quarter of a century because a time traveler from the future told him that would get him elected president in 2008 so he could pursue his secret right wing globalist agenda. "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss" -- but it's hard to imagine two presidents more different than Obama and Bush. The fact that the country is moving the same direction under each of them should tell us something else: the president is not the boss. Obama has never worn a mask -- Obama is the mask, and not a very good one. It has never been more obvious that America is an ossified dying empire with a suicidal inertia that no leader or movement can stop. If Sarah Palin, Dennis Kucinich, or Carrot Top were president, the system that the president pretends to run would still be bailing out banks and insurance companies, escalating wars, hiding atrocities, and generally chugging along to its ruin.
What would happen if you swapped out the bank executives, the generals, the billionaires? Nothing. It doesn't matter who you plug into the role of dog catcher -- the dog catcher still has to catch dogs, and every role in a domination system must channel domination. Ultimately there is no boss. At the top of the pyramid sits the logic of the pyramid itself. And that logic is basically a big fire that consumes everything and finally burns out.
It is said that the elite want a global government. They would also like to fart strawberries. If you think the elite get everything they want, stop pretending to oppose them and admit that you worship them as gods. Did the rulers of ancient Rome get a global government? The smart elites are already building their lifeboats, as you should be. Kunstler said it best: in a few years the government will be lucky if it can even answer the telephone.
It is said that climate change can enable a global government by uniting all of humanity against a common enemy. But climate change is not an enemy. If it were, right wingers would believe in it. An enemy is something that you get angry at and go violently destroy. Climate change calls for us to love strangers and animals and make sacrifices to help them. That's why our angry chimp tribe species cannot possibly stop it. Instead, we need to prepare to ride it out.
And then what? This will not be the final empire, because three of the things that empires feed on -- topsoil, forests, and human foolishness -- all regenerate, one of them very quickly. It is said that we are "evolving", and it's true that we have gained blue eyes and the ability to digest cow milk. But if we're evolving resistance to large repressive systems, not on the level of culture that blows away with the wind, but on a deeper level, then we're doing it so slowly that it's going to take us thousands of years to get anywhere.
A thousand years is not such a long time. Here's something to cheer you up, written about 2300 years ago in Ecclesiastes chapter 9:
7 Go thy way, eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine with a merry heart; for God now accepteth thy works.
8 Let thy garments be always white; and let thy head lack no ointment.
9 Live joyfully with the wife whom thou lovest all the days of the life of thy vanity, which he hath given thee under the sun, all the days of thy vanity: for that is thy portion in this life, and in thy labor which thou takest under the sun.
10 Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.
11 I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.
12 For man also knoweth not his time: as the fishes that are taken in an evil net, and as the birds that are caught in the snare; so are the sons of men snared in an evil time, when it falleth suddenly upon them.
December 18. The other day I posted a link about white skin being an adaptation to vitamin D deficiency in high-latitude grain eaters. Then Emily suggested something similar and mind-blowing: suppose malnutrition causes greed. It makes sense that malnutrition would make us greedy about food, and that greedy feeling could carry over to other things. I'm sure we can find exceptions, but there could still be a strong correlation, and as far as I know it's never been investigated. Also it's important to remember that neither wealth nor obesity necessarily means a person is getting the right nutrients. In a culture where unhealthful food is fashionable, rich people will be malnourished, and if the government subsidizes food with high calories and low nutrients, poor people will be both fat and malnourished.
December 20. Again with politics. The reason health care reform is impossible goes deeper than corporate control of the government, and deeper than capitalism. The underlying problem is that civilization has not learned how to shrink. It can get larger in a smooth steady motion, but it can only get smaller in ugly collapses. I don't know why. I like to think we will someday learn how to build large complex systems where all the numbers move gently up and down like waves -- although we might decide it's more fun to just keepy cycling through growth and collapse until we go extinct. (Or we could evolve out of our big brains that drive us to large complex systems, which is basically the same as extinction.)
Since American oil peaked in the early 1970's, continued real economic growth has been impossible, so we've been having fictional economic growth by increasing the amount of money flying around without increasing useful activity. Among the pillars of the fictional economy are the medical industry and the insurance industry. Collectively we can no longer afford to pay for them, but we also can't shrink them without economic collapse. You've probably seen this chart of worldwide life expectancy vs health care spending. The problem is, all that wasted money is holding up the economy. It's being paid to people whose jobs are parasitic, who could serve society just as well (or better) by sitting home and doing nothing. But we have no mechanism to pay them for sitting home and doing nothing! And if we pay them less than they're now getting, they'll have less to spend, and more unnecessary jobs will be lost, and so on.
I can imagine simple ways to fix this if I were the Magical Utopian Dictator, but that's now how it works. The Archdruid covered the same basic idea in his latest post, Weishaupt's Fallacy. Adam Weishaupt was the leader of the original Illuminati, who were basically a bunch of nice people who thought they could convert the existing power structure over to doing good. Of course the existing power structure crushed them, and they've been villified ever since. Greer thinks this was because they understimated the strength and intelligence of the ruling system, but I think it's because they failed to grasp its very nature.
Lefties do not understand that central control is fundamentally evil, and an evil system wants to do evil things: bomb foreign cities, build torture prisons, spy on citizens, and generally channel money/power from those who don't have it to those who do. Nature abhors a benevolent dictator. Right wingers do understand this, which is why they're always trying to undermine the government when they're not in power, and use it to do evil when they are in power -- and more important, it's why they always succeed.
Now, I think European socialism is the best large-scale centrally controlled system in history -- but it can't last. Inevitably it will become more and more repressive and unstable. As a long-term solution, the only way to build a good society is to start from the ground up, making every relationship one of equals, and every action completely voluntary. As I've said before, I think this is going to take us thousands of years, and it will require us to become aware of many kinds of domination more subtle and powerful than government.
December 21. New post from Anne, Rick Santorum, Sarah Palin and the End of Modernist Epistemology. Basically, thanks to the internet, authority has been eliminated as a basis for belief, and not just opinion beliefs but fact beliefs. Now you can go online and find an authority supporting any fact you want. The result is that our mental models are now determined by only two things: what we want to believe, and direct personal experience. Where I see this going is that global consciousness will continue to fragment into what Anne calls information tribes, and these tribes will go through a kind of natural selection: the ones that are the best at seeking out relevant personal experience and adapting to it, will thrive, and the ones that are the best at blocking personal experience that contradicts their beliefs, will suffer.