Post Collapse Planning
Moving from Denying to Adapting
The Problem Matrix
Our planetary polycrisis is completely overwhelming. This creates a chaotic environment perfect for a common type of human mental illness to flourish and foster social destruction. We see this on a personal and social level with insecure and dependent individuals, as well as on a national level in states ruled by such people.
Nothing in our world is simple, and the complexity of historical forces driven by planetary climate disaster is entangled at the quantum-mechanical level. We live in an unkind age for those people who find rational analysis, data, and intense intellectual activity unacceptably difficult.
We are all struggling to understand what is happening and what consequences we face. The only thing that can be broadly stated is that this will not end well for our civilization, but there are elements of hope.
We need to take this a bit at a time, as the pieces cannot be dealt with individually in the nonlinear complexity of a hyperpolycrisis. Rather than take individual aspects of our disaster, I think it is better to deal with them at a broader level to keep the interrelationships in focus.
An important point is the quantum reality that we are not separate from any of this and that our observations affect the processes that we are observing. We cannot remove ourselves from the world we are working to understand.
A major difficulty for people is the polycrisis nature of this collapse. All aspects are interrelated in a recursive process that reinforces and realigns them. The single biggest failure is allowing discussion of one aspect without reference to the planetary climate disaster or to the planetary asset overshoot that is killing us. Conversely, failing to account for sociopolitical and economic factors in climate disasters and overshoot is equally disastrous.
Failing to consider our ten-year timeline to climate-driven collapse when looking at any individual process or potential solution is ridiculous. We are at 1.5 degrees C over our benchmark this year and will be over 2.0 degrees around 2035:[This timeline and consequences are based on AI projection and James Hansen’s current analysis.]
Right now, the political and social processes are centered on the disintegration of the dominant American Empire. There are other political and social processes in states of collapse, but the American one is the largest and most dangerous at this stage, as it encompasses much of the planet and is out of control.
We are closer than we have been in seventy years to a terminal world war. The nuclear standoff in the mid-20th century between the USSR and the USA was very dangerous, but the danger stemmed from potential technical mistakes or misunderstandings. The leadership of the lead nations was not insane.
The current American Empire positions are absurd, and the official media discussions of them are ridiculous. Donald Trump is functionally insane, irrational, and surrounded by stooges and incompetents.
The consequences of his irrational actions, whatever support he claims from equally irrational followers, will quickly accelerate the collapse of the American Empire and may trigger a short but brutal war with consequences beyond more chaos that are impossible to predict.
Current social insanity among members of the political and financial elite is symptomatic of a collapsing civilization. The irony is that with only approximately ten years before climate-driven cultural collapse, there is very little to be gained by manipulated regime changes or military conquests of planetary assets that are already being overexploited.
Of course, denial of reality solves all problems, but only for the deluded deniers.
Solution Elements
While many people have abandoned hope and are focused on finding maximum happiness in their daily lives, that only works if there is a reasonably long timeline to the direct consequences of future collapse. Our families are, after all, hostages to fate.
Cultural and even civilizational collapse is not new, and it is not likely to be existential. We are already facing population reduction among the dominant cultures in our world. This is resulting in national efforts to encourage reproduction, only a few years after national efforts to limit births were considered essential.
The critical change is a planetary mental transition from restoration to adaptation. The old world we live in is disappearing by the month and will be gone by 2035. That world is being torn apart by denial of reality and by versions of political authoritarianism dedicated to the impossible task of restoring a world that we have destroyed.
There are two categories of things that must change: those that will simply disappear, and those that will remain but cannot operate as they have up to now. The first category requires acceptance and social adaptation to a new reality. That reality will be a return to something like a late 19th-century European economy and technology.
The key understanding is that the energy-intensive cultures cannot be maintained. Attempting to maintain that will both hasten the climate disaster and the economic collapse. The projected timeline used as the basis for this article suggests that the critical failures will be disruption and social disintegration earlier than the economic collapse of fossil fuels.
Petroleum extraction will continue, but will be steadily more expensive. This is already the case, as the disastrous invasion of Venezuela by the Trump regime and the decline in fracking have illustrated. In a system based solely on capitalist profit, costs become unsustainable. The existing oligarchic, late-stage capitalist system will refuse to abandon energy-intensive, profit-based systems, as doing so would remove their hold on power, but reality will win.
Many surviving nation-states defined by American imperial capitalism struggle to the end to maintain their system. Transitioning to a sustainable economic system will not happen until the dream of restoration is laid to rest.
Obviously, the most difficult change will be re[laciing the oligarchs who have taken control of the American Empire based on late-stage capitalist and neocapitalist economic systems. This will probably fail repeatedly in the US as the American empire disintegrates. Late-stage capitalism is a rigid ideology that denies change.
The likely result, already becoming real, is the breakup of the old US nation-state into a number of independent nations, based on mergers of the old state structures. This will allow areas to retain something like an authoritarian capitalist nature until they collapse completely due to climate, food, and migration realities.
The spread of lawless, brutal warlord- or gang-controlled areas will lead to raids on any functioning nearby areas. These will also include climate disasters, growing starvation, and the loss of technology, specifically power infrastructure.
This disintegration cannot be prevented, as population losses from death and migration will cripple local governments in many areas. Failure to abandon the past to adapt to a better reality will be the dividing line between failed communities and new-model, successful ones.
We have a lot of history on social and political models despite the distortion of the late-stage American Empire’s failure. These alternatives are beginning to appear as conditions worsen.
The goal of all communities must be universal well-being and management of our planet as a commonwealth. This has only been abandoned in recent history, and only for the large modern empires. It will be recovered, or we will descend into a slave culture that is now being planned by the oligarchs primarily responsible for our civilizational collapse.
Many, if not most, of us will not survive the next fifteen years. The population reduction will be immense, but exactly how bad that will be depends on the speed and intensity of the adaptation discussed above.
We have triggered planetary climate change, which is unfavorable to our species, while vastly over-consuming resources that would allow us to judiciously limit its brutality. That is the essence of our disaster.
That disaster is inevitable, and we do not have the tools to reverse it except by massive population reduction and careful management of our new planetary environment. The longer we take to do that, the greater the increase in suffering and population loss to ourselves and our children.
