The Higher Toll

All the converging crises of the world at large are together going to claim a very high number of victims. I do not refer here to death alone, but to abject impoverishment and other such ills. This number will be higher than it absolutely has to be. We could all band together to confront these crises, care for each other, and help in the long transition to a more sustainable society. Doing this would undoubtedly reduce the casualty list by a substantial amount, possibly even to the natural attrition rate. But we won’t. Not collectively, at any rate. There are any number of reasons for this and I see no reason to list them here, as I’m certain most people can come up with the list on their own. In many cases we will not even do this on a smaller scale, and that I think is the great tragedy –because it doesn’t need to be that way.

Many people speak of community and its importance in the coming era. Few people speak of what that really means or how to go about building one. Perhaps because we do not know how. It is this lack of community that will cause the higher toll as we move into this new paradigm. There are two specific aspects of this –barriers to building community, if you will –that I wish to discuss. In some ways they apply worldwide, but primarily to America. This is after all my homeland and the only culture I know deeply.

1.) Attitudes. Surprised to see this? We have a strange culture in this country, one that teaches us to look down on others who aren’t as favored as we are in some way, rather than seeing ourselves as lucky. Thus, as more and more people become squeezed and get knocked off a cliff the ones who are doing all right will, for the most part, look down their noses and complain about how the unfortunate one should have done this or that differently. Until it becomes their own turn to be tossed off the cliff.

This also applies to those who believe in being prepared for peak oil and so forth. I’ve noticed an attitude of “we’ve always been frugal so we’re okay” among many that also manages to imply a sense of superiority over those who haven’t been frugal. The same with the preparedness camps. All of this is well and good –until things get rocky. Say your roof starts leaking in a few years and you can no longer afford to have it fixed. That young man next door to you who hasn’t had a clue these past few years and loves McDonald’s might be a roofer. What if you get pregnant and can no longer afford the doctor? You haven’t prepared for that. But the hippy-dippy new age non-Christian woman who lives down the road from you and wears weird clothes may be a licensed midwife.
This is what I mean: these attitudes will help keep us apart from one another, help prevent us from banding together during the crises.

2.) The self-sufficiency up-by-your-bootstraps mythos. I bet that raised a lot of hackles. There’s nothing wrong with self-sufficiency –to a point. But, like anything else, it can go to far. We have been ingrained with a belief that everyone should be completely independent. Every person, every family for themselves. You either make it on your own or you fall on your own, and tough. This is barely possible in an expanding industrial society and only then if you have enough money to pay for everything you can’t do on your own. In any other society –including the transitional one we have now –attempting to do this is not only madness, it can actually be suicidal.

No one person or one family can do everything. Yet we have been taught that needing help is shameful and so many of us will not ask for it when we need it. Many others will look down on those who do ask. One person may be able to eke out a barely subsistence level existence –but a town can build a bridge. As we transition down the back side of Hubbert’s peak more and more people are going to be unable to make it. We all ready have the beginnings of this in the tent cities and slums of the world. It is spreading and will only get worse. Bands of people working together can help ease the transition and pull each other away from the cliff.

The problem will lie in how our cultural conditioning will attempt to keep us each thinking and trying to make it on our own. And this is what will make the toll far higher than it needs to be.

United we can make it. But divide us and we may all come down. It is time to retire phrases like “self-made man” and “up by your bootstraps” which were never very true anyway, and bring back older phrases, such as: one for all, and all for one.