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ОглавлениеRESILIENCE — WHY DOES IT MATTER?
As we look at the global predicaments laid out in Chapter 2—The Three Es—it’s natural to wonder: How did we get here?
The reasons are numerous—resource exploitation, population expansion, a profound societal disconnection from nature, short-term thinking, to name just a few—but the underlying cause is the same: our never-ending pursuit of growth.
A FAILED NARRATIVE
Research shows that it’s the stories we tell ourselves that guide and determine our destiny. And we, as a global society, have near-universally embraced a narrative that says “More is Better!” about practically every aspect of life.
Financially, we’re told that having more money is better than having less. At the national level, we’ve constructed an economy that must grow in order to function well—and so our politicians and captains of industry constantly agitate for more GDP and more job growth. To feed this growth, more and more debt is created each year. Energetically, this drives countries around the world in a race to extract more barrels of oil and other fossil fuels out of the ground. It’s the same with mineral ores, with bushels of food harvested, with fishery hauls, with new houses built, new cars manufactured, new smart phones sold, and on and on…
This narrative of “ever more” is coded deep within our ancestry. It served our hunter-gatherer ancestors well, as they lived under conditions of much greater resource scarcity than most humans today. Securing more calories, or more sexual mates, often determined the survival of both the person and their progeny. It continued to serve the human race well as we developed agriculture and began to industrialize. At least, for as long as civilizations had access to untapped resources.
But in today’s world where there are no more undiscovered continents and the concentration of remaining resources is becoming increasingly dilute, we are the first living generation to encounter limits to growth on a planetary scale. We no longer live in a world where our narrative of endless growth is possible, let alone desirable.
And as the global resources pie no longer expands as it once did, competition for the slices that remain intensifies—especially with overall world population still growing. If history is any guide (and we think it is), increased competition for resources will lead to friction between nations, social classes, and demographic groups alike—discord that is becoming ever more apparent, as those adhering to the old narrative find themselves increasingly unfulfilled and frustrated.
A good example of this is the wide-scale rejection of cultural norms the millennial generation is demonstrating (those born between the early 1980s and early 2000s). Facing a tough job market (the unemployment rate of millennials in the United States is double that of the overall population) that offers low wages and little employer loyalty, sky-high education costs resulting in record student debt balances, and over-inflated housing prices making first-time home buying unaffordable, many are simply “opting out.” They are—consciously or unconsciously—under-enthused to blindly follow the American Dream recipe of: go to school, get a job, get married, buy a house, and consume, consume, consume! Many rightly see this instead as a recipe for lifelong debt serfdom, especially when they’re also being asked to pay for the excessive debts and unfunded entitlements racked up by the generations that preceded them. Oh yes, and all while inheriting a national infrastructure that is quite literally falling apart.
Is it any mystery then why millennials are much less able, let alone interested and willing, to make major purchases (car, home, etc), get married, have children, or work a standard 9-to-5 corporate job as previous cohorts their same age?
We see similar pressure brewing between the haves and the have-nots. Across the world, the wealth gap between the rich and poor has rarely been as extreme as it is now. Remember that competition for pie slices? Well, as the pie itself stops getting bigger, those in power use their authority and influence to keep their share of the pie growing for as long as possible afterwards. This results in less and less for everyone else.
We can see direct evidence of this reality in the dramatic jump in wealth disparity that has happened since the 2008 financial crisis. For a few years, the credit pie stopped growing—and what happened? The response engineered by our governments directed trillions of new dollars into the asset classes owned by the already-rich, resulting in a robust boost to their portfolio values while the rest of the 99% has been left to simply watch and struggle onwards.
The outbreak of protest the world saw during the Occupy Wall Street movement of 2009-2011 was an immediate reaction to the unfairness of this class dichotomy. We are likely to see this pattern again, this time with more vitriol and violence, as the wealth gap grows further.
There’s a similar dynamic at the geopolitical level. A general East vs. West tension is brewing as developing nations increasingly look to wrest resources from the clutches of the OECD members, whom they understandably argue have consumed more than their fair share over the past several centuries.
The key conclusion to draw here is that, as the Club of Rome predicted in the 1970s, modern civilization is finally encountering the limits of a finite planet. If that’s indeed the case—which we hope The Crash Course and our related works empirically show it is—then our societal “growth = goodness” narrative is no longer enabling for us. In fact, it is now dangerous and destructive to our well-being, as its continued pursuit will only accelerate the drawdown of remaining resources and exacerbate the resulting conflicts.
Our warning is this: if we do not adopt a new narrative, the destructive status quo will continue…until the point it simply can’t. When that moment abruptly arrives, our entire system of living will break. At that point, we’ll be forced to make do with less—whether we like it or not—and our options for moving forward will be much more limited than they are now.
The first step towards achieving long-term sustainable prosperity is, of course, to adopt a better narrative. A narrative of living within our means, of resource stewardship, and of finding happiness in a life of purpose, not of possessions.
We don’t think it’s realistic to expect our leaders and social institutions to make this mindset shift on their own before calamity arrives. There are just too many people who are invested (emotionally, financially and otherwise) in continuing the status quo for as long as possible. As Upton Sinclair wrote “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it,” and all evidence since the last financial crisis shows that if the establishment can deny, ignore or delay dealing with problems, it will.
This is why we urge individuals like you to develop a mindset of resilience. You can make changes to your lifestyle now, before the next crisis, that will greatly reduce your vulnerability—while quite likely, boosting your quality of life at the same time. And when the whole house of cards comes tumbling down at some future point, you’ll be fine, as you’ve already acclimated to and learned to enjoy a low-input lifestyle. As our friend the archdruid John Michael Greer cheekily puts it: Collapse now and avoid the rush.
The rest of this book, and the workbook that accompanies it, will walk you through the details on how to prepare for tomorrow’s “de-growth” today.
WHEN? WHEN? DEAR GOD, WHEN???
When is this collapse going to happen? is a question we get asked all the time. If we only knew with certainty, we could make a mint. Sigh…
We don’t know. And neither does anyone else, by the way, which is why we deal in probabilities, not absolute forecasts.
The reality is that the collapse is happening right now, all around us. It is just happening at such a slow rate that people not consciously paying attention tend to miss it. You can see it in rising grocery prices, increasing political rhetoric between major powers, ice shelves calving at unprecedented rates, acidifying oceans, and depleting oil reserves.
As a scientist, Chris learned through years of study and observation that complex systems under stress tend to resist change until they reach a breaking point, and then they alter their state very quickly. The actual moment this trigger occurs is nearly impossible to predict, as physicist Per Bak demonstrated in the mid-1980s through his work involving the power-laws of self-organizing systems—most memorably by drizzling grains of sand onto a sand-pile. At some point, adding too much sand causes an avalanche that reverts the pile back to a lower-energy state. But as each individual grain is dropped onto the pile, current science has no way to predict its impact with mathematical certainty. Will it be the grain that triggers the avalanche? There’s just no way of knowing.
But, Bak’s work did prove that the odds of a major avalanche occurring increase with the number of grains added to the pile. More pointedly, as each sand grain was added, the pile would begin to accumulate larger areas of steepness, which he termed “fingers of instability.” The more of these fingers of instability, the greater the chance that the next grain would trigger a collapse, and the greater the chance the collapse would be a large one.
The complex economic and resource-based systems we rely on operate similarly. They will resist change until a final stress, a final grain of sand falls, and then they rather suddenly and dramatically will shift to a brand new state. The relationship Bak observed has been found to exist throughout nature: in the sun’s activity, in the movement of current through a resistor, and in the flow of rivers, to name just a few.
Take our financial markets as another example. If stock prices have been growing much faster than earnings and the underlying economy (which has been the case since 2009), and if the market has not experienced a correction of 10% or more for an extended period of time (as of this writing, the U.S. stock market has not dropped more than 10% for nearly 1,000 consecutive trading days—the 3rd longest such stretch in its history), then we can express confidence that the next correction will arrive sooner, and be greater, than historically average.
And when you add in all of the other potential risk factors we look at (exponential resource depletion, exponential credit growth, exponential population growth, etc.), we are able to draw similar conclusions that large systemic shocks are highly likely to materialize within the next few decades. Quite possibly sooner.
Not that we predict that one night we’ll go to bed and wake up living in a Hunger Games-style dystopia. Rather, as is common with natural systems, we expect to see a series of smaller shocks and failures manifesting over time. In totality, the sum impact of these will be enormous. But the individual insults themselves likely won’t feel transformative as they occur, though we’re careful to add that local mileage may vary (meaning: different localities and populations will feel each impact with different intensities). We visualize this progression as akin to a bowling ball falling down a staircase. Each sudden jolt is then followed by a period of stability, albeit at a lower state. Things normalize, and then—Thunk! —the ball drops again.
James Howard Kunstler aptly named this drawn-out collapse as The Long Emergency. John Michael Greer refers to it as The Long Descent. Either moniker works for us; the point is that we should prepare for a series of variable changes, not just a single seismic one.
And after each change, we’ll have lost a little of what was possible before. Things will normalize around a new, simpler, baseline. We already have a number of examples of this. Take the nation of Greece, for instance. Before 2010, the people of Greece were able to do an awful lot more than they can do now. They built new infrastructure (construction for the 2004 Athens Olympics alone topped 8.5 billion Euros), had one of the most generous national pension programs, and had an unemployment rate in the single digits. Today in 2015, now that creditors have become fed-up with the staggering debt the country has amassed, the Greeks live under a fiscal austerity regime on par with the U.S. Great Depression of the 1930s.
The number of those living in poverty and homelessness has spiked, the unemployment rate has tripled to 25% (over 50% for workers under 25 years of age!), and business are shuttering at the rate of roughly 60 per day. To underscore our point: all this didn’t happen overnight, instead it steadily worsened over several years. But the end result is crystal clear: much of what was possible in Greece just a half-decade ago is but a distant memory today.
We see the same dynamic playing out in our oceans, with collapsing fishery stocks and the rise of acidification levels. Here’s a chart of the collapse of the Pacific sardine population, one of the base pillars of the food chain for the world’s largest ocean:
Just eight years ago, the sardine population was measured at a multi-decade high. But each subsequent year since, more fish were harvested than were replenished. Each individual year didn’t in itself look like a collapse; but now that we can view the past decade in its totality, the severity of the situation becomes immediately visible.
In this way, and in a multiplying number of others, we and our planet are experiencing a “death by a thousand cuts” as key supports for the economic, energy and environmental systems upon which we depend fail on our watch.
REALIZING IT’S ALL ABOUT POSITIVITY, NOT FEAR
Understandably, it’s hard for most people not to react to this information without anxiety.
After all, in many ways it’s a story of loss, which means it’s about being unable to continue practices we’ve been accustomed to for our entire lives. So, emotions of fear, worry and grieving are in many ways to be expected by those new to this material.
We too experienced these feelings, along with healthy doses of anger and depression, in our early days of coming to terms with the data. With the experience of our own journeys of processing through this material, as well as helping thousands of others (millions, if we include our website) with the same, we’ve come to realize that this emotional path follows a similar progression as Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’ Five Stages of Grief model. This makes perfect sense, as folks are essentially wrestling with the death of a dream, of a dearly-held belief of what the future was supposed to be.
But at the beginning, before they’ve successfully gone through these five stages, most folks find themselves living with a sense of existential dread. They describe themselves as feeling unfulfilled, unhappy, and powerless. This often creates a paralysis of despair which breeds inaction because, Hey, why bother? We’re all doomed anyways.
If this sounds in any way like you, take heart. There is a good reason you’re feeling this way (and, no, it’s not because things are hopeless). What you’re reacting to, possibly on an unconscious level, is the realization that the system itself is unsustainable and, as such, is destroying itself—for all of the reasons itemized in Chapter 2 and in The Crash Course, or perhaps additional ones you’ve observed in your own surroundings. Simply put: it doesn’t feel good to participate in such a system.
Our observation of thousands of people like you have convinced us that when your actions are out of alignment with what you know to be true, we can predict two things.
The first is that fear takes residence in that gap between the actions you’re taking and the actions you know you should be taking. Deep down, you know that denying reality only delays its arrival and magnifies its impact. That gnawing in your gut when you’re charging more expenses to a credit card you know you should be paying off instead? That’s the kind of angst we’re talking about. But worse. For many, putting on a suit each day, fighting traffic on the commute to and from work, and living a frenetic consume-and-spend lifestyle feels increasingly like a sacrilege they’ll be punished for as the post-peak-resources era arrives in force.
The other important development is that your integrity becomes compromised, and that feels awful. The simple morality all children are born with rebels within us when we engage in behavior we know to be wrong, triggering self-rebuking feelings of guilt, cognitive dissonance, and regret. If you truly believe that the system in which you live is destructive to both yourself and everybody else, then continuing to live and operate within the rules of that same system is self-harming. The mind rebels, and often forces itself to dissociate from this contradiction. As a result, since your consciousness is ignoring the issue, it manifests elsewhere as stress, depression, health issues, etc.
This duality of fear and compromised integrity is toxic to our health and happiness. Yet we see it all around us. In the 80% of Californians living in homes not inspected or retrofitted for earthquake resistance. In the millions of Texans and Pennsylvanians permitting natural gas fracking in their counties, despite the resulting contamination of their groundwater. In the millions of American workers annually at risk of losing their jobs due to automation and off-shoring, who are not taking steps now to re-train for a more secure role. Clearly, there’s a widely shared human trait of ignoring an existential risk above a certain magnitude. Yet the long-term cost of such behavior may prove to be as high as the feared injury.
But it doesn’t have to be this way! And here is where we get to the heart of this chapter: Why resilience is so important. In the natural world, it is the resilient systems and organisms that are best able to survive existential threats. During times of evolutionary transition, omnivores fare better than animals with specialized diets. Those who produce frequent and large litters outcompete those with fewer young and longer gestation periods. Those with adaptive traits like warm-bloodedness or parthenogenesis are much more likely to persevere through periods of environmental hardship.
The same is true for humans. We are one of the most adaptive species nature has ever created. And we are capable of greatness. We can be builders or destroyers. Stewards or spoilers. On the same acreage, we can choose to erect a strip mall or an organic farm. It all comes down to choice. We’ve been pursuing a course of de-generation. But it’s just as much in our power to embrace re-generation instead.
The Kübler-Ross model mentioned earlier dials through Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression—finally ending at Acceptance. And we find that once people make their way to this stage, a whole new set of possibilities starts to open up. At this point, emotions swing away from fear and back to hope as realization sets in that we have an over-abundance of opportunity to do things differently, more intelligently, and more sustainably. We have the chance to look at everything afresh, challenge old assumptions, and make new choices—many of which, while potentially quite different from the ones we’ve made in the past, nurture us in ways we didn’t realize we needed.
And so we return to the importance of narrative, and of the need for a new one that better serves us.
Two quotes from the great civil rights leader Mahatma Gandhi underscore the wisdom of cultivating useful narratives, whether at the individual or societal level. The first explains how our beliefs, which are shaped by the stories we tell ourselves, have a cascading impact on the reality we experience:
“Your beliefs become your thoughts,
Your thoughts become your words,
Your words become your actions,
Your actions become your habits,
Your habits become your values,
Your values become your destiny.”
The clear logic of this progression provides a compelling reason for hope. If the path of our destiny is set in motion by the narrative we hold, then if we change the narrative, we can change our destiny.
Let’s look at some of the main narratives our society holds right now:
• 3%+ GDP growth will rescue our economy. All efforts to make that happen are necessary, even if they punish the prudent.
• American energy independence is just around the corner.
• Our banks are too-big-to-fail (or jail) and therefore need to be supported at taxpayer cost.
• Enhancing national security requires sacrificing more of our civil liberties.
• Gold is not money.
• We’re all better off if the stock market is higher.
• Most of our social problems (schools, jobs, global competitiveness, etc.) will be solved with more taxes and more regulation.
• Housing and education loans are “good debt.”
• We live in a completely free and fair society.
• The Fed knows what it is doing.
Nearly all of these is either arbitrary, favoring of certain groups over others, self-destructive, or straight-up delusional.
What if we replaced them with the following ones instead?
• To leave a sustainable future for our progeny, nations must learn to live within their economic, energetic and ecological budgets.
• Humans can be incredible forces of regeneration, creating abundance wherever and whenever they wish.
• No one is above the rule of law. All laws should be applied equally regardless of class, race or any other demographic categorization.
• We are stewards, not exploiters, of the planet and its finite resources. Conservation trumps consumption, whenever possible.
• A nation’s currency should be a means of exchange and a store of value—period. It’s not to be manipulated for political reasons.
• Those entrusted with the most power are required to demonstrate the most proof behind the decisions they make.
Were we to embrace new stories like the above, how different would our priorities and actions be today? Vastly different, in our estimation. We would be investing orders of magnitude more into renewable energy sources and electrifying the transportation grid, and orders of magnitude less on fracked wells and SUV manufacturing. We would be treating our top-soils and fisheries as natural treasures, not as ATMs. Those caught trying to influence market prices would be in prison, not in the boardroom.
The point is: once the narrative changes, a whole new set of outcomes becomes possible.
The same is true at the individual level. Changing your personal narrative to align better with the future you wish to see frees you up from many of the ropes bound to you by your current one. It gives you permission to focus on developing the 8 Forms of Capital—to deepen other aspects of your life that society may even, in some cases, discourage you from attending to.
And most importantly, this world of alignment and opportunity gives you a positive view of the future to step into. No longer are you operating out of fear or doubt. The pit in your stomach warning you: I really shouldn’t to be living like this is gone. Instead, hope, purpose and optimism bloom. Self-esteem returns. Regardless of what the future brings, you’re now truly living.
In our work at Peak Prosperity, we see an abundance of inspirational examples of such progress demonstrated by many of the resiliency pioneers we talk with, as well as many of our readers who have undergone transformation in their lives.
We’ve personally seen the benefits a shift in personal narrative can bring. Both of us experienced sizable life changes when we left our corporate executive roles to pursue our mission, a big one being a dramatic drop in income. But we had worked in advance on re-defining what ‘wealth’ meant to us. True, money still plays a material role in our calculation of wealth, but we decided that there are many other components with an equal footing (purpose, health, self-sufficiency, strong relationships, time in nature, community involvement, etc.). We believed we could cut our standard of living in half, yet double our quality of life.
That was a foundational narrative for us. And it helped us weather the ‘tight times’ that ensued as we worked to get PeakProsperity.com off the ground. Holding that aspiration, along with a practical plan (with specific goals and milestones), really did take a lot of the worry and stress away during a time when, without it, we easily could have become consumed by the shock of the lost income and the uncertainty of our venture.
These are just a few examples of how embracing a narrative focused on resilience leads to empowering results. The better destiny it offers is there for the taking. But you’ve got to grasp it yourself.
Returning back to Gandhi in closing: another of his maxims is often paraphrased as “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” A wise sentiment from a wise man.
Such change only comes from within.
And starts with getting our stories straight.
