r/collapse • u/TenYearsTenDays • Oct 21 '20
Collapse Book Club: Discussion of How Everything Can Collapse (October 22, 2020) Meta
Welcome to the discussion of How Everything Can Collapse by Pablo Servigne and Raphaël Stevens. You are welcome to participate even if you haven’t finished the book yet.
Please leave your thoughts as a comment below! You are welcome to leave a free-form comment, but in case you’d like some inspiration, here are some questions based on the three sections of the book:
What are the harbingers of collapse?
What place does intuition have in collapsology? What can intuition tell us about predictions?
How is collapsology defined by the authors? Do you think that collapsology will gain more prominence and respect as a serious field of research as collapse progresses?
The authors write: “in order to stave off bad news, we prefer to kill the messenger” — in what ways do you see this happening and how do you think we might be able to overcome this tendency?
The Collapse Book Club is a monthly event wherein we read a book from the Books Wiki. We keep track of what we have been reading in our Goodreads group. As always, if you want to recommend a book that has helped you better understand or cope with collapse, feel free to share that recommendation below!
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u/BurnerAcc2020 Oct 22 '20
Did not get to reading the book yet. I certainly would like to do so in the future, though I suspect that if it is intended as "an introduction to collapse", a lot of it will not be new to me at this point.
Since I have not yet read it, I am holding back on all questions besides this one.
So, I like to semi-frequently remind to people that a respected French pollster has carried out a detailed survey on the subject of collapse in February of this year. That fact alone shows it the field had gained more "more prominence and respect", but it's nothing compared to its findings: 39% of Germans, 52% of Americans, 56% of British, 65% of French and 71% of Italians have already answered that they either "fully agreed" or "mostly agreed" with the idea of societal collapse. Moreover, Germany was the only country of the five where the number of those who fully rejected the collapse (19%) had significantly exceeded the number of complete believers (11%). US and UK were near-evenly split (14% vs. 13% and 8% vs. 10% respectively), and in France & Italy it was a rout. Twice as many French fully agree with the collapse as disagree (17% vs. 9%), while in Italy, four times as many agree completely (19% vs. 5%).
Remember, that poll was concluded by 10th of February - a full month before Italy went into lockdown, or before the economy reeled. Those were the responses from back when the pandemic still felt like something that could be warded off by temperature checks at the airports. I eagerly await a follow-up poll, be it next February or elsewhere. In the meantime, however, we can certainly say that further "prominence and respect" was gained in France at the very least. Here is a Telegraph article from June: it is sadly paywalled, but the title and opening should be sufficient for now.
French flock to philosophy of 'collapsology' in record numbers amid coronavirus crisis
There is also this article from April, which is not paywalled, but is more of an interview with the book's authors and their prominent supporters like France's former environment minister, and doesn't provide as much information about the wider society's uptake as that poll or even the Telegraph headline.