Awakening

Stages of Collapse

Stage 1: Financial collapse. Faith in "business as usual" is lost. The future is no longer assumed 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.

Stage 2: 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.

Stage 3: 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.

Stage 4: Social collapse. Faith that "your people will take care of you" is lost, as local 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.

Stage 5: Cultural collapse. Faith in the goodness of humanity is lost. People lose their capacity for "kindness, generosity, consideration, affection, honesty, hospitality, compassion, charity" (Turnbull, The Mountain People). Families disband and compete as individuals for scarce resources. The new motto becomes "May you die today so that I die tomorrow" (Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago). There may even be some cannibalism.

“I am quite certain that no amount of cultural transformation will help us save various key aspects of (American) culture: car society, suburban living, big box stores, corporate-run government, global empire, or runaway finance.... To make it intact through times of great need, the only reasonable approach...is to form communities that are strong and cohesive enough to provide for the wellbeing of all of their members, that are large enough to be resourceful, yet small enough so that people can relate to each other directly, and to take direct responsibility for each other's well-being.”

— Dmitry Orlov, The Five Stages of Collapse

The key in politics is not expression, nor expressing discontent or resistance, but actually transforming things. Collective action can change things, but still implies a separation between the “people” and “representative institutions.” It implies “we” are asking “them” to change their ways. So I think the real revolution of peer to peer technologies is that it allows people not just expression, but actually a redesign of social processes. For example, free software communities successfully embed their values in software, and so do the emerging open design communities that are now starting to tackle physical production itself. This is the next great frontier of peer production communities.
— Michel Bauwens, Founder, The Foundation for P2P Alternatives

The permanent revolution of the free market denies any authority to the past. It nullifies precedent, it snaps the threads of memory and scatters local knowledge. By privileging individual choice over any common good it tends to make relationships revocable and provisional. In a culture in which choice is the only undisputed value and wants are held to be insatiable, what is the difference between initiating a divorce and trading in a used car? The logic of the free market, which is that all relationships become consumer goods, is denied indignantly by its ideologues. However, it is all too clearly evident in the daily life of societies in which the free market is dominant.
— John Gray, False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism

More than just a mere liquidity or credit crisis, the current financial storm represents the death throes of the old global economic order, and perhaps the birth pains of a new one. The sun is setting on the borrow and spend culture that has defined us for a generation. Our long ride on the global gravy train is finally coming to an end, and once it does, nothing will be the same. The sooner we come to grips with this the better.
— Peter Schiff, The Party Is Over: The Crisis We Borrowed & Spent Our Way Into

As a long-time major market radio news director, I continue to be amazed at the genuine lack of media focus on what by the end of the year will be the biggest story of the decade and perhaps century. American business has incorrectly been mostly built on a continuous expansion model that requires growth--the Holy Grail--in order to just survive. Since you’ve got enough brain-cells yet uncooked by your cell phone/electronic doggie leash to have found your way back here, I’ll just assume you have already figured out that ‘TARP’ means taxpayers are really pissed. Come by next year when the squatter wars are going on, then you’ll know what ‘pissed’ is all about.
— George Ure, “The People’s Economist,” Global Financial Collapse - Day Two: Death of the Consumer Economy, Wednesday October 8, 2008, UrbanSurvival

Most of us planning for the next few months are building the economic equivalent of bomb shelters: 2009 will be treacherous... Companies and consumers will continue to tighten their belts. There will be a sharp rise in unemployment. Many businesses, especially big ones, will become unviable... Capitalism is changing in fundamental ways... Arguably the crisis will turn out to be more significant for us and other developed economies than the collapse of communism.
— Robert Peston, A crash as historic as the end of communism: The credit crunch has destroyed casino capitalism. From the rubble a new, less divisive, economic model will emerge.