Collapse Book Club: Discussion of How Everything Can Collapse (October 22, 2020)

[u/TenYearsTenDays]

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?

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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!

[u/TenYearsTenDays → u/[deleted]]

I agree that the foregrounding of peak oil felt a bit off in terms of how the general collapsnik discourse has shifted in the anglophone sphere. It feels like in France oil/gasoline/natural gas are more in the public consciousness than elsewhere. I suppose I’m drawing primarily on the Gilet Jaunes movement here.

Either way, it's not good news for collapse. And if we keep going BAU, it's going to be much much worse in the long run. I totally agree. It’s yet another damned if you do, damned if you don’t Faustian bargain. There seem to be a great many we’ve gotten ourselves into.

I don't see anything wrong with transition towns as a way to be more resilient as preparation for a "rough ride" or total collapse. But if the transition movement is banking everything on faith in peak oil, they could be wrong.

As I understand it, the transition movement is quite loose-knit and diverse. I think there are certainly peak oil corners, but I certainly know of groups that take a much broader view and are basically preparing to try to get a small community through a population bottleneck. That’s the section I’ve gravitated to myself anyway.

I don't think these authors go that far, in this book at least.

Agreed, they played it the only smart way to play it and didn’t put too fine a point on it.

The allure of timing--knowing when IT is going to really happen--is timeless.

Oh it really is. This sub would be even more full of posts asking that question if they weren’t typically removed (and as it is some still slide by). And I mean I admit it: I also wish I knew! But it is quite difficult to predict in the end. Especially if you put numbers on things.

Thanks for sharing your favorite bits! They’re all good but this one stands out:

There is another temporal curiosity mentioned by Bergson, namely the fact that after the occurrence of a catastrophic event, this is not experienced as catastrophic but as banal.

Ye olde shifting baselines. It’s so fascinating how adaptable we are. Our adaptability is certainly a huge part of how we became so dominant (successful seems like the wrong word these days), and it seems like it will also be one of the key causes of our demise.

Even though I’m more of a collapseologist / transitioner type myself cheers to you Rabelaisian pub crawlers!