The Climate Change Solution that You Never Hear About
“Surviving the Future” by David Fleming is a roadmap for the future.
I will be writing several articles about the book “Surviving the Future: Culture, Carnival and Capital in the Aftermath of the Market Economy”.
This remarkable book takes a different turn than most climate change books. It is both a rude awakening (guess what: tech ain’t gonna save us), and an optimistic view of a very *human* future.
Our F’ing tech is not going to save us from the climacteric.
It assumes from the start that tech is not going to save us. A collapse of some sort, and the end of the market economy, what Fleming calls “the climacteric”, is inevitable.
“A climacteric is a stage in the life of a system in which it is especially exposed to a profound change in health or fortune.”
This book was written from Fleming’s huge tome 2006 “Lean Logic”, with this version edited and published in 2016. But it was already on point.
“Highly complex problems which cannot be solved in a straightforward way — and may not be soluble at all — are known as ‘wicked problems’. If we cannot see a solution, that does not necessarily mean that we have not understood the situation; it may mean that there isn’t one.”
Using 2020/2021 as a template, plans for electric cars, central control of everything just ain’t gonna work. We can’t even run the current grid with the decrease in coal and the fluctuating nature of solar and wind. We already have warnings of rolling blackouts coming in Winter 2021. (Funny how quickly this became the “New normal”) So how do we expect to add on electric cars?! The math breaks — it doesn’t add up.
Central control of consumption, travel (Covid lockdowns become Climate lockdowns), and even the gov’t and companies controlling your Stuff, even the temp on your thermostat, through Internet of Things.
Or “You will own nothing, rent everything, and you will be happy” — World Economic Forum. (This works better when read in Klaus Schwab’s megalomaniacal Nazi voice) — NOT a conspiracy theory. Schwab even has a best selling book about this on Amazon:
“Surviving the Future” predict this:
“As the industrial economy descends, unemployment will rise, and there will come a point when government revenues are so deeply reduced that funds are not there to support the unemployed or to pay for such fundamentals as education, health and law and order.
Households and communities will find it hard, bordering on impossible, to pay their way. Such necessities as food and even water supplies could be hard to get.
Communities will therefore have to provide these things for themselves, or do without. They will need to rediscover their locality and local skills, rebuild a culture, and apply the power of lean thinking; sharply focused, widely shared.”
It just won’t work. The market economy will collapse. It won’t be replaced by centralized socialist control. It needs to be replaced by EVERYTHING LOCAL. A Lean model, where the local folks know best how to fix their problems, and it gets done from the bottom up.
“Whaaaat?”, you are saying, thinking this is some Right Wing plot. No. (unless you term everything that does not embrace centralized gov’t control as domestic terrorism, like the Biden admin seems to).
Shaun Chamberlain, one of the editors of “Surviving the Future”, is one of the first people arrested in Extinction Rebellion protests in the UK. (Not a right wing guy).
The bottom line is that it is going to collapse.
The next step is what makes this book shine. It focuses on rebuilding communities through Carnival, a common shared celebration. Through religion (!), once again, a common shared set of values and culture. Maybe not the “religion” you are thinking of. Maybe developing a shared religion, focusing on the seasons, for example.
And it mentions multiple forms of capital — social, cultural, etc. to replace our primary monetary capital. You can already see this in intentional communities (like Dancing Rabbit) that have their own capital and currency, focused on time banks or other things, with reciprocity at the core.
More to come in future posts.
Are you building community? Real community that will stand the test?
What does community look like? Join me as we explore this through “Surviving the Future”.
