Hello, and welcome to another installment of the KMO Show.
I'm your host, KMO, and this is episode number 17, prepared for release onto the World Wide
Web on Wednesday, June 28th, 2023.
In this episode of the podcast, I am going to share a conversation that I recorded a
week or so ago with somebody that I've known for a very long time as a result of my previous
podcasting efforts, the C-Realm Podcast.
His name is Christopher Harrison, and I think the best introduction to him is that he's
a really smart guy, trained as an engineer.
He cares a lot about ecology and community and human happiness.
And he's very practiced at articulating the, what I would call the tensions in our socio-political
economic arrangements.
I don't think he is a Marxist.
He doesn't use any of the jargon.
He doesn't talk about contradictions in capitalism.
He's much more specific than that, which I think is useful.
And he is somebody who, like many smart people who have an interest in sustainability and
who are frustrated with many aspects of our current way of life, gravitated in the early
part of this century to the peak oil fast collapse narrative.
And like, I think, a growing number of people who were in that cohort, he's come to realize
that collapse isn't coming, not a fast collapse anyway, and that preparing for the zombie
apocalypse is really not the best use of your time.
But that doesn't mean that everything learned during that period needs to be abandoned.
What's more, Chris sent me an email back in 2020 in response to a conversation that I
had with Brent Bednarik.
Brent is also somebody who was on the peak oil fast collapse track for a while.
And I talked to him just at the very beginning of the COVID epidemic.
And Brent said at the time that if the COVID epidemic didn't take down industrial global
society that he would then have to revisit his views on the topic.
Well, global industrial society survived COVID.
And so I spoke with Brent more recently.
I didn't use that in a podcast episode, but I will post a link to a YouTube version of
that conversation in the show notes for this episode, which you can find at KMO.show or
on YouTube.
So I got a little confused.
Somehow Christopher's three year old message in response to that three year old conversation
with Brent came to my attention again.
But I thought that he was making reference to my more recent conversation with Brent.
And so I asked him to come on the show and discuss his email and he agreed.
And it wasn't until we actually got on the call that the pieces fell into place for me.
And I realized that I had invited him on to talk about a three year old email.
Now the email, I'm going to read it in the beginning of our conversation.
And it is essentially an essay.
I mean, it would stand as a blog post.
It's certainly something that is worth reading.
It was worth rereading, reading aloud, editing, you know, my imperfect reading.
And it's something that I'm happy to share with you.
And it should probably exist in text form online somewhere.
And at this point, I'm tempted to start discussing the specifics of the conversation.
But rather than do that, I'll just play it for you.
Here's my conversation with Christopher Harrison.
You're listening to the KMO show.
Let's go.
Hi KMO.
I just finished listening to your recent free episode with Brent Badnarek.
So this is an episode of the Sea Realm podcast from back when I was living in Vermont.
So not the conversation with Brent that I thought you were referencing.
So we go on.
Oh, let me just mention what I remember from that conversation with Brent.
Brent was wavering in his commitment to peak oil doomerism back then, but he hadn't really
made the switch.
And this was just at the beginning of COVID.
And he basically said, I do think this civilization is fragile.
And I think if COVID doesn't take it down, then I'm really going to have to re-examine
my worldview.
And COVID didn't take it down.
So we reconnected just a few weeks ago for another conversation.
And he's gone from being a doomer to just a curmudgeon, which I can relate.
I can relate to that.
I definitely have a strong curmudgeonly current in my own personality.
But now I'm going to stop commenting on your email and return to reading it, although I
am going to ask for clarification when we get to one point.
OK.
So you just listen to the conversation with Brent and you continue.
I found this episode, like many of the ones you have put out over the years, to be thought
provoking, even if my worldview doesn't quite map with yours or Brent's for that matter,
quite as much as maybe as it did in the past.
I had a few thoughts and perspectives on some of the things you discussed in that episode
that I'd like to share.
First, when you referenced Joseph Tainter's work and cited J.M.G., John Michael Greer,
as a kind of counterbalance or different argument, I think you may have actually missed Tainter's
core thesis, because to be honest, it's not very different from John Michael Greer's idea
of catabolic collapse, but just looks at the process from a higher viewpoint.
Catabolic collapse is a ground level view based on the idea that people will start to
cannibalize the infrastructure of a decaying society to fix the things that can be fixed
and cobble together what they need to get through daily life.
Tainter's idea is that civilizations use increasing complexity to solve problems, and this typically
involves more complex infrastructure over time when they are experiencing infusions
of energy and capital early on in their development.
However, as time goes on, the cost of maintaining the complex infrastructure and social arrangements
goes up while the infusions of energy and capital, commonly plunder taken through conquest,
starts to decline, thus reducing the rate of return until it turns flat and then even
negative.
This process also eats up spare capacity of civilizations to deal with external shocks,
such as bad harvests, because all this spare capacity is devoted toward maintaining growth
rather than kept for when needed, the Anastasi network of sharing food between settlements
being the prime example, he cites.
Tainter never argued that this would result in a flash crash of civilizations.
Like Greer, he sees collapse as a process that plays out over centuries for most societies
affected by it.
This brings me to my second point, which is in regards to the idea of Doomers vs. Technophiles
for the purposes of simplification.
Like you, I sometimes feel as if I wasted some opportunities to greatly increase my
own financial standing because I adopted Doomer views around peak oil and the likes, but while
I've moderated my views on many of these subjects, unlike you, I've also never really left them
entirely.
Do you remember the series that JMG did on his old blog about the world after the dissolution
of the United States, chronicling an emissary traveling from the nation that comprises the
northeast in New England to that made up by the former Great Lakes states?
So you're referencing a series of blog posts that he later published as a novel called
Retrotopia.
Because I think personally that the Atlantic Republic as portrayed in that series gives
a pretty good glimpse into the trajectory of the United States.
That society was one that was starkly divided among class lines, with a small elite that
was still able to take advantage of all the most recent technological advances and new
gadgets while a massive and impoverished underclass went about their days barely able to make
ends meet.
I see the trajectory of technology in the US playing out along similar lines, at least
vis-à-vis economic activity, especially combined with a state seemingly devoted to its new
mission as propping up high finance by any means necessary while telling everyone else
to go scratch.
We will continue to experience technological advancement, but the subset of people who
enjoy the benefits of that advancement will shrink until we either have a highly privileged
elite and small professional managerial class, PMC, who are integrated into that world with
the remaining 80-90% becoming proles who have access only to those features of it meant
to distract and entertain.
I think a reason for this is also that we will experience a declining base of surplus
energy to support a high-tech civilization, because no matter how much shale oil is out
there, the simple fact of the matter is that a lot more energy is burned up in extracting
it than what had to be devoted to light sweet crude.
And that means that there is less net energy left over for other economic activity.
Yes, we'll continue to go after it, and I would not be at all surprised to see the state
move in and essentially guarantee financing to continue that project, but it will become
more and more a case of a dog chasing its own tail as time moves forward.
I also think that Jasper, and this is where I have a question, because this is your first
mention of Jasper in the email, but you don't identify who Jasper is.
Oh, I would have to hear the statement to even jog my memory.
OK, the full statement is, I also think that Jasper is a lot more on point with his analysis
of China than Brent is.
That might have been someone in the comments on that one.
Ah, OK.
China is quite literally the world's longest continuous civilization, and they are simply
resuming the role that they previously held for three thousand plus years, the center
of gravity for Eastern Asia, culturally and economically.
The French demographer Emmanuel Todd published a book titled After the Empire around 2004,
in which he argued that the unipolar world was coming apart and would soon, within a
couple of decades, be replaced by a multipolar world of regional powers with their own spheres
of control.
For what it's worth, Todd also predicted the coming dissolution of the USSR based on demographic
analysis in the 1970s, a time when many Western conservative intellectuals were portraying
it as a great menace only growing in power and influence.
Along those lines, I think that it's far more likely that the United States ceases to exist
as a political entity over the next two decades than the current incarnation of China.
About four and a half weeks ago, my wife and I binge-watched the HBO series Chernobyl,
and one of the things featured in it that hit me upside the head like a sledgehammer
is the way that the Soviet bureaucracy's concern with appearances to higher-ups drove every
step of the response overlooking at it objectively and deciding what needed to be done until
they almost passed the point of no return, and how that mapped onto the emerging ham-handed
response to COVID-19 in the U.S. at that time.
And I've only seen the U.S. map onto the Soviet ineptitude exponentially since then, given
that the U.S. does not have any singular geographical features that link it together, nor does it
have a long-standing history of political integration and unity between these disparate
regions like China.
For the first time in my life, I'm seeing the breakup of the U.S. as a very real possibility
in the coming decade or two.
Not saying it's a foregone conclusion, or even necessarily likely at this point, but
I am saying that it's definitely possible.
Especially as our political class continues to bumble and fumble the response to the pandemic,
not to mention the economic carnage that is following close behind.
And regarding that last point, economic carnage, I'm not too sanguine on the current political
order surviving the present crisis, because it's just past its due date.
If you subscribe to the idea of historical cycles or anacyclosis established, orders
last around 80 to 90 years before they crumble in the face of mounting crises they cannot
deal with, and a new order emerges out of that wreckage.
The U.S. has been through the process three times already during its colonial history
through to the present.
The first crisis started in 1763 with the end of the Seven Years' War, and hit its breaking
point in 1775 at Lexington and Concord, while the destruction of the colonial order and
the rise of the early republic and its détente between slave societies in the South and the
burgeoning industrialism in the North.
The second crisis started in 1850 with the Fugitive Slave Act and continued through the
sectional crisis of the 1850s, finally bursting apart with the firing on Fort Sumter in 1861.
The model of industrialism driven by corporate entities won the day at that point, but that
model began to fall apart with the deepening inequality and labor unrest of the Gilded
Age, papered over, for a little while, by the reforms of the Progressive Era, but finally
done in with the speculative boom of the 1920s and the massive burst in 1929 that brought
in the Great Depression.
The New Deal and the U.S.'s assuming the role of global empire through World War II's outcome
ushered in the new era of centralized institutions and global industrial capitalism.
But it started to fall apart in the early 2000s with the dot-com bust, and the 2008-2009
financial crisis was the equivalent of a patient going through terminal and the response of
the doctors in the political class and the Fed was to hook that patient up to every machine
and IV they could think of while telling the family that the patient was perfectly healthy,
while he was not.
The COVID-19 pandemic didn't have to be a death blow, but for a patient as sick as our
financial system was, it was like a person with terminal cancer catching a cold that
turned into pneumonia and killed them.
The patient has flatlined, but the political class we have, being unaccustomed to anything
other than promoting the interests of large corporations and high finance, will spend
the next few years trying to restart its heart with the electroshock paddles over and over
and over again until we have another singular political figure who comes from the fringes
of the current system to deal with the crisis at hand and establish a new sociopolitical
order like Washington, Lincoln, and FDR did.
None of that means that what comes next will be better.
It will just be different.
And it will be preceded by a lot of pain and hardship, I'm sorry to say.
That brings me to my personal point.
Since you asked how and what people are currently doing, I myself am taking on the project of
doing a deep dive into my local community, mainly because I believe that under the current
political order, unless we are part of the top 5 to 10 percent, we will largely be on
our own, and the only way we'll make it through that situation is by learning to trust one
another, work together, and have each other's backs when needed.
Toward that end, I am initiating a Homesteaders' Grange to take advantage of the wealth of
knowledge my community has around topics of household economy, an informal network of
sharing information, skills, and even eventually labor, to help each other out in real and
tangible ways, in addition to providing real assistance to the least among us who are in
danger of falling through the cracks.
It may not presently be possible to meet in groups, but my vision for this organization
is that it will not be an online thing, but rather one that meets primarily in the flesh.
I have already gotten an enthusiastic response from many people in the community around this
effort, and I have gotten the Episcopal Church we attend on board with it as well.
In the next months, I will also be leaving my full-time employment as a public works
construction engineer to concentrate on these community-building efforts, as well as drive
a regenerative farming enterprise, as longer agricultural supply lines are already showing
signs of distress and breaking.
It may seem counterintuitive to give up a good-paying and relatively secure job during
what is likely to be a severe economic downturn, but this is a calling I have felt for some
time, one which was only hardened a thousand times over after reading David Holmgren's
book Retro Suburbia, The Downshifters' Guide to a Resilient Future.
And it increasingly feels like being pulled towards something where I am really needed
instead of where I can necessarily feel the most safe personally.
So I hope this message finds you well, KMO.
I do sincerely miss being able to interact with you on Facebook, because I got kicked
off, and I should have reached out to you earlier as your voice has been one that has
accompanied me during my commute and work days for many years now.
And email does offer the opportunity for deeper and more substantive exchanges than the ephemerality
of social media.
So until next time, warmest regards, Chris.
All right.
So let me say that that's something you wrote three years ago.
So the first question in my mind is, how has your thinking evolved since then?
OK, I would say that on the broad patterns, it's remained pretty constant.
The shift has been in the details.
And you know, the first part of that I could go into is probably a little bit more on the
personal side of it.
I attempted to do kind of a pasture poultry operation, which I just couldn't make money
off of because I was trying to raise poultry on pasture in chicken tractors with all organic
supplement feed on someone else's land and without a great deal of capital to do it.
And as a result, it was just something that economies of scale, there's no way you can
make any any money off of it.
But it was a very valuable kind of opportunity, both from the standpoint of on the business
side, but also working within the natural system side more intensively and kind of learning
what some of the limits are to deal with on that and looking at things like where my supply
chains came from for the birds and what needed to remain intact and how those might be either
what their what their prospects were for the future and how they might be replaced or kind
of raising birds on land a little bit more in context with what the land can support
in a lot of ways.
The second year, I tried basically going into my own little piece of land here, which is
pretty small.
It's essentially like a an exurban lot.
I wouldn't say a suburban lot where it's you know, we've got over an acre initially, and
now we have about two and a quarter and about a third of that is wooded third to half.
But it wasn't anything that could support like an ongoing enterprise was a lot more
in the household economy.
But in that year in twenty twenty one, I actually came down with a very significant case of
Lyme disease where, you know, I got hit pretty hard by it and it really, you know, kind of
walloped me during the summer when I'm trying to do gardening and manage chickens and all
of that.
And it made it exponentially more difficult.
And I never really came back from that.
And what I kind of came back around to was what my original idea was, which was concentrating
on the more of like the design side and consultancy around this sort of thing, because my prior
career, I'm a licensed civil engineer.
I worked in public works for a long period of time as a consulting engineer.
And so I had a lot of background in kind of the idea of analyzing data, being able to
tie things together and present them in a way that was holistic for my permaculture training
too.
And so that started picking up steam.
But I ended up last year then being hit by kind of a chronic case of Lyme.
And this is where a lot of my learning process came into play and where a lot of my views
around this kind of shifted a little bit, but remain the same in terms of patterns.
And what that experience I basically went where I ended up bedridden for about a week
where I would get up in the morning, crawl to a chair or the couch.
And within a half an hour, I was literally crawling back into bed and not even really
able to move for the day.
Just the chronic fatigue hit me so bad.
And the crawling back up out of literally out of that kind of nadir of my life, it was
at a time in the year of late summer in early fall, right?
A lot of Garvin harvest that needed to be done.
I had firewood that needed to be split, that sort of thing.
And just by letting people be aware of what my situation was within our church community,
within kind of the circle of friends that I had gotten around me to a degree, that ended
up with them volunteering to step forward to help me.
And I was not in a situation where I could say no at that point, because one of the conclusions
I've kind of come to is we live in a society, even in American culture, where we are encouraged
to try to help other people.
But it's also kind of in a very paradoxical framework in which we are discouraged to ask
other people for help.
That it's looked at as being a sign of weakness if you can't do things yourself.
Well, I was in a situation here where I couldn't even afford the luxury of any kind of social
appearances.
So it forced me to put myself in a position of vulnerability and accept other people's
offers for help.
And out of that experience, I kind of realized, OK, this is the direction I need to take this.
I need to take this in, gathering other people around me that kind of like we can all be
vulnerable enough to accept each other's offers for help.
And it started with some of the people that helped me out in that time.
And out of that grew kind of a core group of people that I have in the community that
are all doing kind of like their own funky things, but they're connected to kind of the
homestead and community building type of space.
And it really started out with us just doing a few potlucks at each other's houses.
And then that kind of went into developing a list of projects that we have or things
that we need to do at our own places that we can't handle ourselves and organizing
labor parties where we show up at each other's house on a certain day of the month that all
of us or most of us can get together and we help each other knock out these projects.
And we've done two of them so far within our group.
We've hit a little bit of kind of scheduling issues around the end of the school year and
beginning of summer, which isn't surprising.
But I'm very hopeful on this, just with the idea of it forming something that other things
can spin off of with it.
And if I could describe it with a natural analog, it would be very similar to a rhizome
network that you've got individual nodes that are each kind of doing their own thing.
But there's free flow of information and communication between those nodes that they're helping each
other out, maybe cross pollinating with labor, with skills, with knowledge, that sort of
thing.
With my consultancy business, I'm making effort to kind of get out into the community.
And I have one of the people in my group manages a kind of what's called a common ground community
garden where they pretty much just open up the food to people that come and help out,
but also whoever in the community wants to come by and get free food and is in need of
fresh vegetables and things like that.
Well, they're hosting a water harvesting workshop.
And that's really kind of my value with the crossover of my engineering license and engineering
experience and the permaculture realm.
And so I'm doing the water harvesting workshop to help them out with that and also gain a
little bit of exposure for my business, but also just to kind of scare to share this skill
in the community in the hopes that it will kind of spin out with other people doing similar
things on their own properties.
Because in this year, I don't know what the weather has been like and your location came
in, but we had a May here in southeastern New York that was really without rain at the same
time that we're planting our gardens and expecting the rain to kind of kickstart everything off.
And I had certain vegetables just did not do well, like carrots did not germinate for
anything.
You know, my potatoes did well because I was mulching them and they were buried deep enough.
And then once I got my drip irrigation in and started, you know, irrigating with that,
but that's well water, it's highly mineralized.
So water capture and storage is something that I see as being a major issue moving forward.
And this is even spun out in another direction with one of the other people in our group
were looking at opportunities for kind of doing like a community land trust enterprise
within the green belt around our village, which has tourism, kind of agro tourism as
a core ideal.
And they want to prevent the fringes of the village from being undergoing just tracked
suburban development.
So we're looking at the possibility of this one parcel that is available right now of
trying to put together a plan on that and bring in investors and things like that.
So it's just looking at areas that we can kind of, you know, seed this kind of vision
of cooperation and collaboration a lot more within the local community in the physical
realm, and do it in a way that is very grounded in biological and ecological processes and
principles and patterns.
Well, I apologize.
We got your rain.
It's just so the ground is so we're getting we're getting it now, thankfully, but everything
is thrown thrown off like crazy.
Like I'm seeing certain cycles out there with certain volunteer plants that will come up
that typically would have come up about a month ago that are just now starting to show
like anywhere there's volunteer tomatoes, for instance, usually we start seeing those
around Memorial Day.
And this year we're in mid mid June, and we're seeing them and, you know, I took one of my
professional development courses for my engineering license recently, it was a roundtable.
There was a couple conversations about long term development planning in Bangladesh, which
was actually fascinating because you're looking at there a culture that is very strapped for
resources, especially in terms of capital.
And what is their plan in dealing with this rapidly changing world, because they're kind
of on the front row of climate change and being a tropical or subtropical delta region.
And in the last part of it, it was looking at how to deal with climate change.
And the presenter was bringing up the fact that their growing seasons there have shifted
up to two months.
And it's not because of temperatures, it's because of precipitation patterns changing.
And, you know, it's that really got me thinking along the lines of this water capture and
storage and kind of seeding the ground when you've got, you know, when you've got precipitation
events and, you know, snow melts and things like that in order to hold on to it longer
in the soils and also in kind of reserve tanks and things like that to be able to keep your
agriculture in line with kind of what the temperature growing season is in the temperate
regions.
The email from you that I read, again, is three years old.
You were writing it in April of 2020.
So you didn't know what the full impact of the covid pandemic would be.
You didn't know what the government response would be.
And you just didn't know.
I mean, nobody knew how long it would last or what the ultimate impacts would be.
So here we are three years on.
You sort of echoed Brent in thinking that, you know, the damage to I'm not sure if it's
the United States or industrial civilization generally would be a lot more significant
than I think it has been.
What's what's your your perspective here at the tail end of covid?
OK, I think that it's it's followed again.
It's followed in line with what the patterns are in a lot of ways in that, you know, the
United States, we we suffered a death rate that was four times basically what it should
have been in accordance with what global averages are.
And when I bring this up to people, I've had them say, well, you know, other countries
might be jiggering their stats and my response is, well, are they jiggering their stats where
they're only recording a quarter of covid deaths?
Because even if they're only reporting half, we're still twice.
And this is supposed to be the wealthiest country in the world.
I mean, to me, that's not exactly indicative of a society that is on the rise.
And you look at the distribution of a lot of those deaths, it tends to follow a lot
more with with levels of society where people can't really quarantine themselves.
You know, where they're even just their basic home living patterns are a lot more in contact
with with other human beings.
And you know, it really broke down long class lines.
And it also follows that, you know, we continue to see, especially when you look at it adjusted
for income distribution, the bottom 60 percent in this country is not doing well.
I mean, among white males that are in the bottom 60 percent of, you know, income distribution,
their life expectancy has been falling and continues to fall in a lot of ways.
You're seeing this this continued consolidation of capital around kind of like a shrinking
pool of people.
And you know, when we look at a lot of these things that come out now that are touted like
the jobs reports and things like that.
Well, part of the question is what, you know, what are the wages that those jobs are offering,
especially in median terms?
And how does that compare to real rises in the cost of living?
And I think in a lot of those instances, it's not looking rosy.
I mean, what we're looking at is kind of this playing out of the slow motion decline, you
know, that's punctuated then by, you know, kind of these stair steps and reconsolidations
in a lot of ways.
And I think about it in my adult lifetime, you know, being a being a Gen X or well, I've
experienced this, you know, in the early 90s or the late 80s, early 90s, just as I was
coming out of high school and in the college with the recession that took place then.
And then again with the dot com bust and again with the housing crash and then again with
COVID, but a lot of the a lot of the things for the kind of fueled the COVID crash were
building up at that time.
And let's also not forget that the only thing that prevented a COVID crash was basically
governments infusing tremendous amounts of capital, whether it be in states like a lot
of the European states where they gave job guarantees and basically paid people to, you
know, to sit at home or in the U.S. where they gave people a two thousand dollar check,
but then really solidified, you know, the the biggest firms ability to to weather that.
And those are all debts that, you know, we could kind of go down the rabbit hole of of
the nature of financial debts, but debts ultimately are a claim on, you know, future production.
And as long as that production is expanding continuously, we're in good shape.
But as soon as it starts to flatten out or worse yet, even go negative, then we're we're
in a world of it at that point.
And you know, we've seen this with how the how little it takes for the global economy
to decline, to throw finance and industrial capital into just absolute chaos like it did
during COVID.
Well, it is not my intention here to tell you that you should have a different point
of view.
But what I notice is that I'm hearing a lot of things that I used to hear regularly, you
know, when I was in the peak oil scene.
And for example, I think Jim Kunstler is possibly the author of the the bond mot that debts
that cannot be repaid won't be.
And in the peak oil community, that means, you know, the financial system as it is constructed
right now is not sustainable for the long term and it will crash and burn and bring
take the rest of industrial society down with it.
And you know, my perspective is debts that can't be repaid won't be and there'll be
a bookkeeping correction and we'll continue on.
You know, and the what leads to one conclusion from that same starting premise versus the
other conclusion to me is a matter of temperament.
And I just, you know, from my perspective, pessimism and particularly doomerism is just
a self-defeating personal strategy.
It's a self-defeating approach to life.
And just in, you know, empirically speaking, in terms of whether one adopts a pessimistic
or an optimistic attitude, people who adopt optimistic attitudes have better life outcomes.
So I've you know, you say that you've maybe moderated your stance since the peak oil doom
days, but I repudiate any participation in that mindset.
You know, I don't I haven't adjusted.
I reject it.
I have nothing to do with it myself.
I'm still happy to talk to people, you know, that I know from that period.
That was the best part about that period.
You know, traveling around, talking to different people, the people that, you know, fixate
on collapse, they tend to be smarter than the average.
You know, they tend to be more interesting conversationalist.
They tend to have more varied life experience.
But the same is true of flat earthers.
Flat earthers tend to be smarter than most people.
And it's because it takes a higher intellect to defend a particular worldview like that
against refutation from empirical, you know, inputs from the outside.
So it tends to be the smarter people who gravitate to these more sort of esoteric worldviews.
And you know, I don't want to equate peak oil doomerism with flat eartherism, but they
do have a very similar overlap in terms of the mentality of the people that they attract.
In particular, they tend to attract higher IQ people.
So but you know, to me, doomerism is a mind virus and one needs to defend oneself from
that mind virus and root it out.
I mean, seriously, root it out and, you know, put up barriers to keep it from reestablishing
itself.
And well, let me just have you respond to that.
I'm sorry, I got distracted by the chat.
No, no, that's fine.
I think that I want to make sure that as we're discussing this, we're not kind of talking
past each other and when when I'm talking about debts, debts take, you know, debts take
typically the form of of the financial economy in terms of being denominated in dollars and
cents, which if we're to look at, you know, the economy is kind of consisting as I think
the best definition I've heard of this is the one that EF Schumacher developed and John
Michael Greer kind of tweaked a little bit.
And this is in terms of very broad strokes, but that the economy consists of largely three
parts in the modern world.
And there's the primary economy, which is the economy of nature, which is basically
everything that we get for close to free that the natural world gives us.
That can be things like pollution sinks, you know, the things that we refer to as natural
resources, food products, you know, those sorts of things that you can forage.
Those are all part of the primary economy of nature.
Also anything that we use towards the secondary economy, which is everything that is labor
value added to turn into products and services of some sort.
So this is where agricultural commodities can come in because there's labor that's
required to actually do like some sort of broad field agriculture and resources that
flow into that.
But it's still based upon the hard resources.
Then you have the tertiary economy, which is the economy of money and financial instruments.
Now that should be based upon the primary and secondary economies.
But because it is an abstraction, it has the ability to really separate itself from a lot
of those things.
So this is why, for instance, we can look at a barrel of oil being drastically underpriced
in terms of the tertiary economy in regards to the amount of physical work that it can
provide, because it's literally on the order of like, you know, working for a person working
for years to produce the energy that's in there.
But yet it only costs $55.
Now that's also a product of the abundance with which it is brought to the market.
But again, if you're comparing physical work to physical work, it's drastically underpriced.
Also with a lot of these sorts, you know, the main way that we have gotten rid of debts
and been able to pay debts over the years, especially over our adult lifetime or over
our lifetimes, is by inflating away the currency in the financial realm.
Now there has been actual growth that has taken place during that time, but a lot of
that is flattened, especially in the developed world.
So I think that when we're talking about those debts, we need to draw that connection
between there's the currency that the debts are repaid.
And there's a lot of games that can be played with that, and nobody will ever go broke betting
on the ability of capital to kind of consolidate and, you know, push the, you know, kick the
can down the road a little bit more.
But the other side of that is also the physical realm.
And if we look at the physical realm, the, you know, the news on that front, it's not
good.
You know, I saw recently in the last week where they were looking at mean temperatures
in the North Atlantic Ocean, and they're vastly departing from the mean over the last 40 years
in terms of getting a lot warmer.
We're looking at the effects of climate change coming down.
We're looking at through climate and geopolitics reduced grain harvests around the world.
We're looking at continued resource and energy.
I don't want to say scarcity because we still live under unbelievable abundance in those
terms, but things are getting tougher to get what we need.
And then if you look at all the things that are talked about as far as a transition from
any moving away from fossil fuels, the amount of material that's needed to do that, we,
I don't, it's not there by the numbers.
And when we talk about a lot of these things, as far as doomerism, I really go back to a
lot of data on this.
I mean, look, I went to school for engineering.
I also went, you know, I also have studied history in a lot of depth.
I always go back to data and looking at how these things play out.
And that's what leads me to when I look at industrial civilization, I don't have an optimistic
view of it.
I try to just look at it for kind of like, okay, what, what is, and where is this thing
heading?
Now, where I went wrong in the past was listening to the people who were putting a date on peak
oil, um, listening to people who are putting a date on really anything.
Because when you're talking about these things in terms of patterns versus details, details
can change a lot, but when you kind of assemble them and you look at a lot of these things
in a broader context in terms of ecology, energy, materials, even, you know, like the
financial economy and how it overlays a lot of those, a lot of those things, I find it
very hard to maintain an outlook that that's going to continue to grow and provide bigger
and better things.
And this is the reason why I've kind of looked at staking, you know, a lot of my life within
developing alternatives in a lot of ways.
And this has not been from the standpoint of, you know, running towards doomerism as
much as it's been about recognizing the lost art of community and the way that bringing
economy and discovering other forms of capital other than finance capital, which really has
commodified everything around the world for the last 150 years, the way that that can
help people gain a measure of agency over their own lives by working together with other
people.
And, you know, I came to the viewpoint a while ago that a lot of the, a lot of the reason
why people have embraced commoditization of everything, part of it has to do with marketing
because they're continually bombarded with the advertising telling them that it's true.
Part of it has been kind of coerced because capital markets try to curtail any opportunities
to tap into other forms of capital, like social capital, experiential capital, you know, spiritual
capital, things like that in order to meet your needs because they're not able to be
profited off of.
But the other thing is people kind of move towards that stuff because it allows them
to get away from the difficulty of dealing with other people.
But paradoxically, that cooperation and collaboration with other people is what gives you kind of
like a measure of freedom from maybe being completely controlled by those forces.
So, you know, like my garden in my backyard growing more and more food or trying to every
year where we can support ourselves and maybe even have a little bit of spare capacity to
help other people out or even just share with other people to kind of build up social capital.
Those sorts of things I think are very worthwhile projects for a world in which more people
seem like they're being kind of spun off of being within that demographic that gets the
benefits of industrial society.
I know I kind of went into my screed a little bit there and I was trying not to at the beginning,
but I think that it's important that if we're discussing this, I'm very clear about kind
of where, you know, the place that I'm coming from with it and make sure that if you're
rejecting my doomerism to make sure that it's clear, you know, if you're still rejecting
it, I don't have, you know, obviously I don't have an issue with that.
This is kind of a worldview that I've developed over a long period of time and taking in a
lot of information and a lot of data.
But I want to make sure that, you know, it's that you're rejecting what I'm actually proposing,
if that makes sense.
Well, this is not a debate.
Second, I mean, can you see that the answer that you just gave to my statement is very
much an illustration of my statement?
OK, I can.
But at the same time, like I feel like this thing of running towards running towards community
is trying to replace some is trying to tap into something that can give people happiness
and purpose from the standpoint of, you know, a lot of things that have been lost with the
culture that we inhabit.
And look, I come from a rural area where this is, you know, I look at the stories that I
got from growing up in a place that my you know, my family on one side had occupied for
200 years and seeing how many of those institutions that had furthered communal life were had
evaporated by the time I came along and how it's only gotten worse in the time since.
So you know, yes, there's a side of it that's looking at it from the perspective of.
You know, I haven't seen a compelling case that we've got a cornucopia on the horizon
in a lot of ways.
That's really where my quote unquote, doomerism comes from on that.
But the other flip side of it is that that opens up the opportunities for building other
things that are very worthwhile and that are very much missing in a lot of our a lot of
our lives.
And being able to see that is something that maybe, you know, contaminates or infects other
people within my locality.
And there's already a lot of fertile ground for that already because I live in a place
where when there's something that needs to be done, it's the kind of place where people
just kind of step in and and fill those gaps in a lot of ways.
So yeah, it's I think there's a there's a little bit of a little bit of both of those
impulses going on at the same time.
And this is this goes into a lot of my own spiritual kind of development with embracing
a lot of things on Eastern thought that I really hadn't considered over the last few
years of living within dualities and, you know, instead of dichotomies in a lot of ways
and living within that tension of opposing poles.
That was Christopher Harrison.
And I wrote to him and I asked him if he had a website that he wanted me to link to or
some notification about an upcoming event.
And he wrote back and he said, no, not really.
Everything he's doing is really hyper local.
If you don't live where he lives, you know, you're not going to be part of his activities.
He's not selling anything online.
He doesn't he's not pimping a course.
He doesn't have a show or a book that he wants you to spend money on.
He really is directing his efforts at building local community and local resilience.
So obviously there's a few things that Christopher and I disagree on, but I have a policy that
after a guest has left the conversation, I do not use these closing remarks to score
final points against them.
So instead, what I'm going to do is reiterate the places where I agree with what Christopher
articulated in this conversation.
First of all, there's a famous quote by John Paul Sartre and I had to look it up because
I didn't know the source.
It's just sort of this free floating quote that stuck in my head.
Hell is other people.
It's from his 1944 play No Exit.
And I take that to mean that, you know, most of the frustrations that we experience in
life are from our interactions with other people.
But at the same time, all of our hopes, you know, all of our ambitions and most of our
satisfactions in life come from our interactions with other people or involve our interactions
with other people.
And one thing that Chris has articulated, which I really agree with, is that the modern
world with its sprawling international supply lines and mechanisms that allow us to access
the expertise and the labor of distant strangers, and also the commodification of everything,
has made it very easy to avoid lots of human interactions, which in the past would have
been unavoidable.
And as a result, our interpersonal skills have atrophied.
Our ability to enter into cooperative, collaborative interactions with the people around us to
achieve goals that we all need to have achieved have atrophied to our detriment.
Because in addition to being a burden, that was also a source of satisfaction.
It was also a source of what Theodore Kaczynski called human freedom, in which I would just
call human flourishing.
We have evolved to cooperate with a group of people whom we know very, very well to
achieve the mutually beneficial goal of the survival of everybody in our group.
That means providing for food, protection from the elements, protection from rival human
bands, and also participation in the commemoration of the passage of certain life mile markers.
When I was young, I rode horses a lot, because my dad was into horses.
I've spent many, many hours in the saddle, but I never did learn to cinch a saddle, which
is to say how to tie the saddle onto the horse.
It's a particular knot with a long strap and a couple of rings, and my dad always did
it for me.
So while if you, you know, if you present a saddled horse to me, I can get on and ride
it like I know something, present me the horse and the saddle, and I'll probably have to
pull out my phone and then fiddle with the saddle strap for a long time to get it cinched
up properly.
That's a skill that in a previous time, most everybody would know how to saddle a horse.
And now very few people do.
But we don't need to.
Most of us don't have access to horses.
I think this is a phrase I got from Albert Bates, who runs the Ecovillage Training Center
on the farm in Summertown, Tennessee, a place where I lived for a couple of years.
He called horses land yachts, which is to say just very expensive toys that you don't
use very often that don't really do all that much, but which cost a lot of money.
Similar to the definition of a boat, which is a hole in the water that you throw money
into.
But that wasn't always the case.
It used to be that if you needed to go someplace further than it was convenient to walk, you
used horses, which meant you knew how to put a saddle on a horse, or you knew how to hook
a horse up to a conveyance of some sort, a wagon or a carriage.
Nobody knows how to do that anymore.
And it's not a big deal.
We don't need to know how to do that.
But it is a loss.
And when it comes to interacting with human beings, it's a devastating loss, I think.
I put up a video yesterday in which I was responding to a post to a subreddit that I
mostly just lurk on.
It's called StupidPoll, or StoopidPoll, criticizing identity politics from a Marxist perspective.
And I was reading both the initial post about why we in the United States and in the industrialized,
so-called, previously so-called, First World generally don't rebel or can't rebel effectively.
The original poster was saying it's largely because of social media.
All of our discontent goes into crafting angry tweets, and we just don't get together and
do anything effective.
And other people, they chimed in saying, eh, not so much.
Probably one of the reasons we don't rebel is we are pretty comfortable.
There is great inequality, but even people at the very lowest end are mostly suffering
from a lack of dignity, not a lack of food and shelter.
And other people have chimed in to say, look, the demographic that is going to carry out
a revolution is typically young men.
Men age 15 to 30 will put their lives on the line for attention, for validation, or in
the service of an ideology.
But once you're over 30, that willingness to throw your body into the meat grinder of
a battle in the service of an ideology is greatly diminished.
And in aging societies like the one in which we live, the idea that there's going to be
a violent uprising against the government, particularly when we are mostly pretty comfortable,
it's just, it's a stretch.
And our young men today are cocooned.
You know, they don't really need to get out and interact with people.
They can just stay at home and play video games and increasingly interact with AI companions.
And AI companions are very easy to get along with.
You don't have to be nice to them.
They will always be nice to you.
You don't have to learn how to negotiate the ongoing interaction so as to maintain the
relationship.
The AI does all that for you.
And while, you know, it can be really nice to have a long conversation about something
you're interested in with, you know, for me, it's Pi from inflection.ai or, you know, with
chat GPT or if you're into, you know, simulated romantic relationships, an app like replica.
While that can be a nice outlet, it's better than nothing in an environment where somebody
is starved for comfort.
The more you lean into that, the more you lose your ability to actually get along with
real human beings and getting along with real human beings is what we are designed to do.
Designed, I would say, by evolution.
But, you know, even if you're a theist, it's clear that, you know, if you think of our
psychology as something given to us by God, that God intended for us to interact with
other human beings and to cooperate with them to meet our survival needs and our sprawling
international, you know, supply system, this mechanism by which we provide people with
food, shelter, clothing, medical care, and entertainment, it's so sprawling we can't
know everybody who is engaged in the process of bringing us the things that we need.
It becomes all very impersonal, which for us, given our psychology, be it God given
or instilled in us by evolution, that's just not how we are designed to live and thrive
and enjoy our existence.
So while we are old, fat, and happy, and not about to rock the boat, we're also unhappy.
But the system that provides for our needs makes it really difficult to reestablish those
local networks.
As Christopher demonstrates with his ongoing efforts and his ongoing actions, he's clearly
committed to the project, but it's an uphill battle, but one that is certainly worth fighting
and I'm glad he's fighting it.
Alright, you heard about half of the conversation with Christopher.
The remaining half will be on the next episode of the Sea Realm Vault podcast, which, if
memory serves, will be episode number 461.
That is a podcast that is behind a paywall.
It's $7 a month, if you want to listen to it, and the only way for new subscribers to
access it is through Patreon.
So my Patreon page is patreon.com slash KMO.
Now I'm a little chagrined, I haven't listened to the second part of the conversation, but
I've seen the WAV files and I see...
I remember going on a long rant and I can see that it's more than 20 minutes, you know,
of like a 45 minute conversation.
So I'm reluctant to even listen to it, but I will.
I will make it available in the next episode of the Sea Realm Vault podcast.
So if you want to hear the conclusion of the conversation with Christopher, do check out
my Patreon, patreon.com slash KMO.
And if you just want to hear me rant, well, I do it on YouTube all the time.
My YouTube channel is out of my head, which if you search for it by the title, you'll
never find it.
YouTube will never show it to you.
But I post links to my YouTube videos on my Patreon feed and they are not behind a paywall,
so there's plenty of free content at patreon.com slash KMO.
All right.
Thank you very much for listening.
I will talk to you again quite soon.
Stay well.