In the parking lot of the guest house where I stay in Banga, Burundi,
105 people were killed in the civil war which ravaged the country from 1995 to
2005. It is a coincidence that I read Orlov’s book The Five
Stages of Collapse in Burundi.
This small, but densely populated country on the shores of Lake
Tanganyika, experienced a deadly kind of collapse in the shape of
a civil war. Over 200,000 people were killed in that war.
How does Burundi
fit into Orlov’s stages of collapse? Not so well, I am afraid.
Orlov does not spend a lot of time convincing people that collapse is
imminent. His readers would have already understood it. Orlov says he wrote the
book to help us deal with collapse; we can not avoid it, as it is unavoidable,
but survive it, and possibly find our way back to a nice society. His second cardinal
accomplishment is to provide us with “taxonomy of collapse.”
Stage 1: Financial collapse. Faith in “business as usual” is lost.
Stage 2: Commercial collapse. Faith that “the market shall provide” is
lost.
Stage 3: Political collapse. Faith that “the government will take care
of you” is lost.
Stage 4: Social collapse. Faith that “your people will take care of you”
is lost.
Stage 5: Cultural collapse. Faith in the goodness of humanity is lost.
The taxonomy is quite helpful. The presentation of collapses as stages
which occur in a certain logical order is more problematical. For instance,
while there are examples of financial collapse which trigger commercial
collapse which trigger political collapse, there are also examples of collapse
that are mainly driven by political issues, which in turn might influence
finances and markets. Burundi
is a case of a political collapse, and perhaps a social collapse, coming before
the commercial collapse. Some of Orlov’s own examples, such as the collapse of
the Soviet Union and the fate of the people Ik,
also contradict the idea that a collapse follows a certain order. To my
knowledge financial collapse did not trigger the fall of the Soviet Empire.
It may be a fair assumption that a collapse of the current
financial global market system - and thus of modern society - will start in financial markets (as has already
happened), and cascade further according to Orlov’s trajectory. Then again, how can we be sure about that?
Orlov’s perspective on the market economy is damning. He analyzes how
global competition drives all economic agents into economically efficient behavior,
simultaneously making them inefficient from other perspectives. The selling of
one’s labor is described as “desexualized prostitution.” Trade and market
relations have been allowed to take command of a too large part of our lives. We
care for family, friends and kin, and normally do not interact with them as a
market, and engage in monetary transactions. Money and market relationships should,
according to Orlov, be reserved for dealing with those you cannot trust, and,
largely, for non-essential goods. This, today, is turned on its head.
When Orlov says that a commercial collapse is not so bad, since we can
fall back on a gift economy for essentials and use the market only for
luxuries, he assumes that the essentials can be provided within the cozy circle
of kin and friends. This might be possible, but it also assumes that our
essentials do not include a large number of modern products and infrastructure.
Are cotton clothes essential? Are sugar, telephones, computers, bicycle chains,
etc., essential? None of them would easily materialize in a barter economy
limited to kin and friends.
Orlov’s views of how social collapse will unfold are not pleasant. He
does not claim to serve us only what is agreeable either. However, I find his
views a bit too negative. I also find them contradictory. He makes much of a
story of two communities living side by side: one, a typical middle class, well-educated,
well-behaved community with law-abiding citizens, and the other, a typical
criminal underworld community with its citizens engaged in drugs, black marketeering
and crime. He thinks it is apparent that the criminal sub-culture is superior
in hard times. To me that seems to contradict his praise for “mutual aid” as
promoted by Pyotr Kropotkin(a Russian anarchist), someone whom he attributes
many interesting pages to.
Orlov certainly has a point when he writes, “Under emergency conditions,
the previously enacted rules, laws and regulations will amount to an
essentially lethal set of inflated standards, unachievable mandates and
unreasonable restrictions, and attempting to comply with them or enforce them
is bound to lead to inaction at best and armed conflict at worst.” There are
probably few, if any, good ways to de-complexify complex societies. Perhaps, I just
have a higher faith in humanity to adjust, for better or for worse, to new
conditions. In discussing social collapse, Orlov puts his faith (!) in religion
being the institution that can take us over to another new social contract and
civilization. His argument is based on the premise that religions have been
able to survive many social collapses and to some extent have provided a refuge
for civilization.
The strategy to try to survive the collapse by being self-sufficient is not
a viable one. It may work for a few people but “for the rest, it might be better
to abandon the idea of finding a safe place to be, and to concentrate instead
on discovering a safe way to be—in company with others.” In other parts of the book, though, he takes
a much more individualistic perspective, and the reader is advised to hoard
items which might come in handy when financial and commercial systems have made
money meaningless. In line with this is also the analysis of who is best
adapted to survive a collapse: they should be indifferent to suffering; have
the will to survive; have the ability to persevere in spite of loneliness and
lack of support from anyone else, and, have “the sheer stubborn inability to
surrender in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds, opposing opinions from
one’s comrades or even force.”
Orlov sees human social bonds and actions as primitive, leading us to
act as a herd of sheep. We have to turn to the solitary geniuses for our
salvation. They are more highly evolved according to him, and it is thanks to “brilliant
loners and eccentrics” that progress is made. Later in the book, he emphasizes
family and similar bonds as being of utmost importance and central to humanity.
I wonder if I missed something, or, did he?
The contradictions might have been resolved with more critical editing.
Orlov also rants and goes off into side-discussions that are only vaguely
related to the main thread of the narrative. For example, he dismisses
charities and philanthropy as demeaning (they might be, but it is hardly a
central discussion for the stages of collapse); he has a distinctly gender-biased
discussion about how men and women react to the threat of collapse; and he
discusses the merits of various national languages in some detail, without
really making clear to us how Chomsky’s Universal Grammar has anything to do
with cultural collapse. They do not add much to the main discourse, though some
of them can be amusing and interesting.
Orlov should be credited for daring to challenge many established views
and promoting concepts that are not so often promoted, even within the
collapseological community. He has the guts to question the prevailing market
religion, not only because it is giving undesired results, which many agree
with, but more importantly, because it is built on the wrong foundation.
One can easily be provoked by Orlov, but, then again, this seems to be
his mission. After all he wants us to think for ourselves and not just accept
what he says. The prose is also full of memorable and entertaining statements
such as, “The intelligence of a hierarchically organized group of people is
inversely proportional to its size, and mighty military empires are so big, and
consequently so dumb, that they never, ever learn anything.” I encourage you to
take on Orlov’s challenge.
Start by reading the book.
Dmitry Orlov was born in Russia but moved to the US as a
teenager. For the past five years he has been experimenting with off-grid
living and renewable energy by giving up the house and the car. Instead, he has
been living on a sailboat, sailing it up and down the Eastern Seaboard, and
commuting by bicycle. He believes that, given appropriate technology, we can
greatly reduce personal resource consumption while remaining perfectly
civilized.
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