- Orlov, Dmitry.
The Five Stages of Collapse.
Gabriola Island, BC, Canada: New Society Publishers, 2013.
ISBN 978-0-86571-736-7.
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The author was born in Leningrad and emigrated to the United
States with his family in the mid-1970s at the age of 12.
He experienced the collapse of the Soviet Union and the
subsequent events in Russia on a series of extended visits
between the late 1980s and mid 1990s. In his 2008 book
Reinventing Collapse (April 2009)
he described the Soviet collapse and assessed the probability
of a collapse of the United States, concluding such a collapse
was inevitable.
In the present book, he steps back from the specifics of the
collapse of overextended superpowers to examine the process
of collapse as it has played out in a multitude of human
societies since the beginning of civilisation. The author
argues that collapse occurs in five stages, with each stage
creating the preconditions for the next.
- Financial collapse. Faith in “business as usual”
is lost. The future is no longer assumed to resemble the
past in any way that allows risk to be assessed and
financial assets to be guaranteed. Financial institutions
become insolvent; savings are wiped out and access to
capital is lost.
- Commercial collapse. Faith that “the market shall
provide” is lost. Money is devalued and/or becomes
scarce, commodities are hoarded, import and retail chains break
down and widespread shortages of survival necessities become
the norm.
- Political collapse. Faith that “the government will take
care of you” is lost. As official attempts to
mitigate widespread loss of access to commercial sources of
survival necessities fail to make a difference, the political
establishment loses legitimacy and relevance.
- Social collapse. Faith that “your people will take
care of you” is lost, as social institutions, be they
charities or other groups that rush in to fill the power
vacuum, run out of resources or fail through internal
conflict.
- Cultural collapse. Faith in the goodness of humanity is lost.
People lose their capacity for “kindness, generosity,
consideration, affection, honesty, hospitality, compassion,
charity.” Families disband and compete as individuals
for scarce resources, The new motto becomes “May you
die today so that I can die tomorrow.”
Orlov argues that our current globalised society is the product of
innovations at variance with ancestral human society which are not
sustainable: in particular the exponentially growing consumption of
a finite source of energy from fossil fuels and an economy based upon
exponentially growing levels of debt: government, corporate, and
individual. Exponential growth with finite resources cannot go
on forever, and what cannot go on forever is certain to eventually
end. He argues that we are already seeing the first symptoms of
the end of the order which began with the industrial revolution.
While each stage of collapse sows the seeds of the next, the
progression is not inevitable. In post-Soviet Russia, for example,
the collapse progressed into stage 3 (political collapse), but was
then arrested by the re-assertion of government authority. While the
Putin regime may have many bad aspects, it may produce better outcomes
for the Russian people than progression into a stage 4 or 5 collapse.
In each stage of collapse, there are societies and cultures which
are resilient against the collapse around them and ride it out.
In some cases, it's because they have survived many collapses
before and have evolved not to buy into the fragile institutions
which are tumbling down and in others it's older human forms of
organisation re-asserting themselves as newfangled innovations
founder. The author cites these collapse survivors:
- Financial collapse: Iceland
- Commercial collapse: The Russian Mafia
- Political collapse: The Pashtun
- Social collapse: The Roma
- Cultural collapse: The Ik
This is a simultaneously enlightening and infuriating book. While the
author has deep insights into how fragile our societies are and
how older forms of society emerge after they collapse, I think he
may make the error of assuming that we are living at the end of
history and that regression to the mean is the only possible outcome.
People at every stage of the development of society which brought us
to the present point doubtless argued the same. “When we've
cut down all the forests for firewood, what shall we do?” they
said, before the discovery of coal. “When the coal seams
are mined out, what will happen?” they said, before petroleum
was discovered to be a resource, not a nuisance seeping from the ground.
I agree with Orlov that our civilisation has been founded on
abundant cheap energy and resources, but there are several orders
of magnitude more energy and resources available for our taking in
the solar system, and we already have the technology, if not the
imagination and will, to employ them to enrich all of the people
of Earth and beyond.
If collapse be our destiny, I believe our epitaph will read “Lack
of imagination and courage”. Sadly, this may be the way to bet.
Had we not turned inward in the 1970s and squandered our wealth on a
futile military competition and petroleum, Earth would now be
receiving most of its energy from solar power satellites and
futurists would be projecting the date at which the population
off-planet exceeded the mudboots deep down in the gravity well. Collapse
is an option—let's hope we do not choose it.
Here is a
talk by the author,
as rambling as this book, about the issues discussed therein.
December 2013 