Symbollocks

The Fall (Part I: Origins)

So I suppose I should discuss exactly why and how I see our society coming apart around us in the near future. I guess I should note that I used to be a far more pessimistic doomer than I am now, but I’m still pretty worried about how this whole thing will unfold. I should also note that I believe that our society has already entered this period of decline, which brings me to a good jumping off point.

The beginnings of the current decline could be seen going back as far as the seventies when the production of oil in the United States peaked, meaning it went into decline and has trended downward ever since. Maybe you didn’t know this, so let’s look at a graph illustrating this point:

But why, you might ask, is a decline in oil production representative of a decline of our society? This question has been answered so many times I feel like it’s almost redundant of me to give yet another answer so I will first point you to a fairly standard explanation:

“Oil and gas are feedstocks for plastics, paints, pharmaceuticals, fertilizers, electronic components, tires and much more. Oil is so important that the peak will have vast implications across the realms of war and geopolitics, medicine, culture, transport and trade, economic stability and food production.” - Energy Bulletin

So the short answer is that we are dependent on oil to provide for our most basic needs. Do we need to be? No. But it will do us no good if we can’t admit that we are addicted to oil in the short term. Admitting as much will focus our search for solutions to the problems that Peak Oil presents us (more on this later).

When US oil production peaked in the early 70’s the economic response was to start importing oil from overseas to fulfill rising demand. This left the US open to foreign supply constraints. In 1973 OPEC started an embargo against the U.S., refusing to sell the country oil, in response to it’s support for the Israeli Army during the Yom Kippur war.

This embargo created a crisis within the U.S. sparking a stock market crash and a resulting recession. This event demonstrates that the health of the economies of industrialized nations depends (first and foremost) on steadily rising consumption of cheap oil. In the next installment we will visit several other examples of supply constraints leading to economic downturns.

Red Families v. Blue Families

I’ve just finished reading (well, partially skimming) the excellently researched Red Families v. Blue Familes. An excellent summary is provided here. The conclusions it comes to are these:

• The biggest factor dividing red and blue families is age at family formation.
• Red families form early.

Historically this was fine (and was true for most Americans), but the effects of economic globalization since it’s beginnings in the 70’s have destabilized key sectors of the economy that used to employ those without further education.

Economic instability translates into family instability. However, Red America doesn’t see it this way. Many don’t recognize the effect of economic instability has on families at all. Those who do blame this on the extremely mixed bag of government social programs, illegal immigration, jobs moving overseas, and vague notions of “big government”.

Others in Red America blame the effects of economic instability on the growth and formation of Blue America and it’s associated values. Those who do are most likely to emphasize specific values about sex that end up perpetuating instable families. E.g. emphasizing abstinence-only education, being anti-abortion, and being anti-contraception in general (you might even choose to include an anti-intellectual stance in this list because that’s often what keeps people from questioning said values).

• Blue families form later.

Blue families have adjusted to the global economy through education made possible by delaying family formation. This increases their chances of financial success by making them more mobile and more likely to get high-paying jobs.

Blue families are much less likely to discourage use of contraceptives in all forms. This allows them to reconcile sexual urges and exploration while also waiting to form families until later. Before the invention of many modern contraceptives sex and childbearing were intimately linked, but with birth control pills and condoms easiliy available this is no longer necessarily the case.

Forming families later also gives those involved a not so easily defined advantage in that they are more mature (having already been given plenty of time to “sow their wild oats”). All of which combined leads to much stabler families compared to Red America.

All that said, I have reservations about both philosophies. Let’s cover the contradictions present in both. With red families the contradiction is obvious: the values they wish to instill in children often result in the effects they are trying to avoid. Evangelical teens who embrace the idea of abstinence are statistically just as likely as all other youth to have sex before marriage.

With blue families the contradictions are harder to tease out and I must resort to using my personal worldview to deconstruct it. The unstated assumption on the parts of the authors of the book in question are that globalization, economic growth, and the resulting prosperity are here to stay. That paradigm’s ideal of success is reliant upon the fate of our industrialized, globalized society. I see this as failing in the long run (although that’s a topic for a post of it’s own). Which isn’t to say that the Red paradigm has nothing to lose with a societal collapse, but I think that the Blue paradigm has particularly far to fall.

If I find the time I’ll follow this up with why I think that is. I also want to do a bit of analysis about what each side has going for them in a future of societal decline and possible solutions to their potential problems. I’d also like to write about why I’m choosing to get married so young and also explain in better detail why I think our industrialized, globalized society won’t last past the end of the century.

Comment on Metafilter, December 9:

For those of us who want to work as little as possible, office work works.

Well, to an extent I agree. But something I’ve come to realize is that stuff (“watch YouTube, share music, play Flash games, and kill time”) is ultimately not really fulfilling (and although I only speak for myself, I know it’s true of many other people I know… /anecdote).

For a while it was fulfilling (I had not had very much exposure to broadband connections). When I started working I used to spend all my down time at work on metafilter, watching TED videos, etc. etc. Then I got bored because I actually wanted to do a lot of the things I read about online (example), things I don’t necessarily have the time or energy to invest in when I’m off work and I’m tending to my relationships, going through all the mundane parts of independent living, and just relaxing.

So I started spending my down time figuring out how best to get out of this… trap? And then I came up with a plan. So now I spend my free time at work brushing up on my math skills, exploring technical manuals and getting ready to become an apprentice electrician. I really want to get a good background on all of the jobs that society could not function without, especially the trades (electrical systems, metal machining, welding, plastics, masonry, carpentry, plumbing/water/sewage systems, etc.) and agriculture which seem the most foundational. Unfortunately there is no university program anywhere that offers anything like a tour of these fields, so I’ll just have to do it myself.

You say it’s easier to smash the system from within, and although i take it that you’re joking I personally find the society (“the system”) we live in to be quite horrific on a number of levels, especially when it comes to how much we work, what kind of work we’re doing, and how that work affects the broader world. Office work is a good start in working as little as possible (in that access to the internet gives you the opportunity to get an education on how the world works and how it could be better) but the only way to REALLY work less is to create a better world in which we don’t have to work as much, and the only way to do that is to get out there and make it. Which is a lot more interesting than anything made possible by working less (hard) anyhow.

I’m wondering if peak oil will ever be recognized as the root of our economic problems. To most people, it’s always something else. We’ll continue to hear about how bankers, political turmoil, global warming legislation, or other small speed bumps are preventing oil production from carrying on at an ever increasing rate. People in 50 years will all still be clinging to their various personal scapegoats. It’s really sad because no one benefits from disinformation spread about peak oil. Not the elites, not any particular political party, not anybody.

Until now I hadn’t realized how hard it really is for people to admit that they were tricked into building the houses of their lives on shifting sands. This situation echoes that of the retired auto workers whose pensions were pulled out from under them. They had no reason (except a good feeling) to believe that the auto companies they worked for could sustain such enormous profit margins for so long. There was no proof. There was no accountability. You might hear these people (rightfully) badmouthing their former employers for breaking those empty promises (although most don’t complain, as even they know it won’t solve a thing), but you will never hear them admit to their own bad decision to rely on those promises in the first place. It’s extremely embarrassing. But people need to talk about it. Take your pick of these recent examples where examining the nature of trust might have prevented people from becoming victims: Bernie Madoff’s investors, the whole mortgage crisis (and every financial bubble in history), victims of “development” scams in third world countries, victims of the “post-industrial” economy in first world countries, etc. etc.

A reasonable painting of the future from Sorry Comics by John Kinhart.

“Consider, for example, the process of running a small, informal brew pub or restaurant out of your home, under a genuine free market regime. Buying a brewing vat and a few small fermenters for your basement, using a few tables in a remodeled spare room as a public restaurant area, etc., would require a small bank loan for at most a few thousand dollars. And with that capital outlay, you could probably make payments on the debt with the margin from one customer a day. A few customers evenings and weekends, probably found mainly among your existing circle of acquaintances, would enable you to initially shift some of your working hours from wage labor to work in the restaurant, with the possibility of gradually phasing out wage labor altogether or scaling back to part time, as you built up a customer base. In this and many other lines of business (for example a part-time gypsy cab service using a car and cell phone you own anyway), the minimal entry costs and capital outlay mean that the minimum turnover required to pay the overhead and stay in business would be quite modest. In that case, a lot more people would be able to start small businesses for supplementary income and gradually shift some of their wage work to self employment, with minimal risk or sunk costs.”

- The Homebrew Industrial Revolution (pdf), by Kevin Carson

The metaphor of alcoholism to our society’s addiction to oil is unbelievably rich, as apparently withdrawal from alcohol can kill you (Alcohol Withdrawal Syndrome):

“Some organs are rapidly swelling while others do just the opposite, restricting blood flow in both directions. At the same time, body cavities are filling with fluids- a normal, 175-180 pound man can swell to 250, 275, even 300 pounds before a vital organ finally, and mercifully, simply gives up. It is a painful, “ugly” death made even less appealing by the complete evacuation of fluids and solids at the time of death. While the body begins it’s organ shut-down schedule (which can last hours or even days), the mind somehow knows what lies ahead, and opts for an early check-out.”

Our society really truly needs cheap energy to continue functioning. Just like with any addiction we’ve gotten used to consuming more and more of our substance of choice. It has done things to us, irreversible things. At this stage in our addiction it is as if we no longer have any money to buy more, and we’ve even stolen to get it. But now we are now left with a dwindling supply, a supply which cannot last much longer at our current rate of consumption. Even if we could continue using at this rate we would eventually die from the very effects of using the substance (aka global warming).

But can’t we wean ourselves off our dependence? This is where it gets really, really sad: We don’t even have enough left to do that. Our problems are too intractible, our population too large, our dependence too complete. All we can do is prepare for the moment that “vital organ finally, and mercifully, simply gives up”.

Fuck.

Impromptu Curry (Aloo Mattar)

Ingredients:

5-7 Red Potatoes (less if using brown regular potatoes)
1-2 Onions
1 15oz Can Peas
1 15oz Can Cut Green Beans
1 15oz Can Diced Tomatoes
1 15oz Can Sliced Carrots

1-2 Tbsp Butter
1-2 Tbsp Oil
Some Water

1 Tbsp Curry Powder
1-2 Tsp Garam Masala
1-2 Tsp Ground Coriander
1-2 Tsp Cumin
.5 - 1 Tsp Chili Powder
.5 - 1 Tsp Turmeric
Salt to taste (I prefer 1-2 tsp)
Pepper to taste (I prefer .5 - 1 tsp)

Instructions:

Everything is optional, except that to preserve the taste you won’t want to do without the curry powder, coriander, and cumin. I would probably also keep in the potatoes and onions, as they are the “backbone” of the recipe.

Saute the onions in a large pot with the butter and oil. While they’re sizzling away (you’ll want to check on them every once and a while), scrub and chop up the potatoes. Chop them into small chunks not much bigger than an inch cube. I usually just chop them up into eighths.

When the onions are starting to brown, put in all the spices except for the garam masala. Then dump in the potatoes in and let them cook for a minute or two. Stir around the mixture making sure the spices are well distributed. Then pour a cup of hot water into the pot with the potatoes, onions and spices. Keep adding water until the potatoes are mostly covered. When you’ve added enough to boil the potatoes in, turn up the heat and put the lid on the pot. Let the mixture boil away for 15 minutes or more, enough so that the potatoes are soft. Add more water depending on how soupy you want the dish to be.

While the mixture is boiling, get the canned vegetables ready. Open all the cans and drain the liquid from the peas, green beans, and carrots. Pour everything in when the potatoes are about done. Add the garam masala at the same time and cook for a few more minutes. Voilà!

Best served with some kind of rice, naan, or flatbread.

I modified this recipe.

Brandon Darby is an FBI informant.

Brandon Darby was a victim of the same game he played with the activists he turned in. The activists he was spying on didn’t have the guts to carry through with their plans, but he himself was too cowardly to simply let it go, to not follow through on the awful obligations he had made to the FBI to catch some crazy kids. Now he is $12,000 richer and the two activists he turned in are going to lose several years of their lives to prison sentences.

He was the one who put them in the position to make the illegal weaponry that ended up getting them in trouble (molotov cocktails) by purposefully having the FBI confiscate the equipment they had originally brought with them (home made riot shields). He took advantage of their idiocy or perhaps he was an idiot himself. He incited their rage. He stoked the fire. And when even that failed to bring many criminal acts to fruition he tried to recoup his losses by ratting on their possession of unregistered firearms out of a subordinate relationship with a deceptive power structure… one of the power structures he once sought to destroy. What a sad sad tale.

What conclusions should we draw from this whole situation? Greater awareness of security culture protocol? Or perhaps a different approach.

From a post on the Ran Prieur forums:

Can we have a quick-check on “corporate farming”? Its a rarity. Seriously. Corporations do not want to own farms because farms fail too often. There’s a complicated sequence of operations in which corporations effectively own and control farms, but the big players are more than happy to let the guy-with-the-land-mortgage suck up the losses.

Okay, here’s the brief form. You can’t make money selling large amounts of ag product on the open market. There are reasons for this, mostly related to market development- farmers just can’t find anyone who will pay to drive out and pick up their quinoa or broccoli. Outside of a few valleys, in South Texas and California, there isn’t much of a vegetable packing, storage, and distribution infrastructure capable of handling more than a single truckload or two to the local farmstand or specialty restaurant. Specialty grains and pulses are even harder to unload, because the packing and redistribution points are few and far between.

The upshot is, farmers have to grow what the local elevator will take, and for virtually the entire continental US, that means the Archer-Daniels-Midland elevator, and it means corn, soybeans, rice, wheat, cotton or tobacco (which technically goes in a barn, not an elevator.) So Joe Farmer, who inherited three hundred twenty acres and some equipment, has to either go to business school and start his very own quinoa packing, warehousing, distribution, marketing and sales empire, or he has to sell a commodity product to an ADM elevator.

Now, commodity prices are artificially deflated in this country. That’s why we don’t spend much money on food, and why corn syrup is so cheap they put it in canned tomatoes. The difference is made up for with government subsidies, which are on a per-acre (rather than a per-bushel) basis. There are a zillion different subsidies covering everything from water conservation to feed corn, and farmers put more time into understanding how to fit the subsidy rules than they spend driving tractors. The catch is, to qualify for subsidies, you need crop insurance, and to qualify for crop insurance, you need a crop plan.

Now, what’s a crop plan? A crop plan involves telling the insurance agent what you plan to grow, where, when you will plant, what equipment you will till, disc, and seed with, what herbicides you’ll lay down, what fertilizers you’ll amend with, what seed you’ll plant, when you’ll spray and how and with what, and when the harvest is. The insurers look at your crop plan, say either “this makes sense, looks reliable, and we expect you to succeed, here’s a cheap rate” or else “this looks risky and weird, you might get eaten by armyworms, we’ll charge you more to cover the increased risk” and there you have it- something to collect on if your crops fail. You take that insurance to the feds, they cut you a check, you pay off the land mortgage, and you’re in business for another year.

Oh wait, did that sound rational? I forgot to mention that the company that insures your crops also sells herbicides, pesticides, fertilizers, seeds, land mortgages, and financing on those chisel plows and seed drills. Think they’re going to accept your crop plan if it doesn’t use their products, in copious and expensive quantities? Fuggedaboutit.

So who needs insurance, though? Why not just save seed, plant a crop, sell it and take your chances with floods and blights? Nobody is stopping you- but you won’t qualify for subsidies, so you’ll have to sell at commodity prices which are, did I mention, deflated below the cost of production. And when you go back to renew your mortgage, because you won’t have earned enough to make payments, well, do you think the guys you snubbed on insurance, not to mention chemicals and seeds, are going to lend you any money?

So fuck the commodity crops. Why not grow lettuce- its worth a fortune on a small plot, no? Yes, but assuming you don’t also own a fleet of trucks, a refrigerated warehouse, and a team of marketing agents, what will you do with the other three hundred and fifteen acres? Land taxes cost money, y’know.

What about growing commodities, but growing them better? Sweeter sweet corn, tastier edamame-quality soybeans? Heirloom wheat? Could you charge more? No, you couldn’t- you couldn’t even sell them to the local elevator, because guess who owns that too? Making stuff come out of the ground is easy- making it go away on a truck, and have money come back later in the mail, that’s the hard part of farming.

So after fighting that for years, and watching the GMO crops come up the year after you tried to rotate them out because of the armyworms, or watching the price on glyphosate go up and up and up (seriously- ask your local farmer what he’s paying for roundup this year) , or watching the margins on an acre of potatoes (or peanuts, or whatever your local commodity specialty might be) get narrower and narrower, then some guy comes to the front door of your house- or trailer- in a suit and offers you eight million to build a subdivision on your land. And you think, holy shit, I could get out of this company-store racket for good, maybe take my family someplace with a decent school system and less meth, and you walk downtown to sign the papers. And what greets you? A bunch of college kids damning you to hell for selling out the independent spirit of the American yeoman, for giving up the sacred stewardship of The Land (and you can hear the capitals when they say it) and they call you a corporate overlord bastard and tell you your crops ain’t fit to eat and we’re a nation of slaves.

And you hate them. They’re right.

That’s a “corporate” farm.