Trump, Permaculture and seizing the day

Permaculture must bring a new social order from the chaos

Historians and archaeologists have identified a bunch of things that developed before the collapse of ancient civilisations. They talk about things like climatic change, environmental destruction, and external shocks (invasion, volcanism, earthquakes, and suchlike). It is obvious that we have lined all these things up, and the stability of the systems on which we depend has been substantially damaged or even destroyed. We are looking at a range of external shocks, sea-level rise, global climatic instability, pollution, and more. Most people know about these, what the true consequences will be we cannot say, most projections are however a bit grim.

Social precursors to collapse.

Turchin and others point out what they call ‘elite over-population’. Members of the elite reproduce, and eventually, there aren’t enough roles with sufficiently high social status and power for everyone. Someone from the elite will provoke or profit from social instability to break up the existing elite social status quo to replace it with another one. This has happened in the USA, the moribund, top-heavy staus quo has been shattered by a new leader and his lick-spittle cronies. Like vultures to a cadaver, other people have quickly seen the opportunity to combine their obscene wealth with political power. They have rushed to squeeze into the new developing elite status quo and to pay homage to the King.

A separation between the leader and the ‘people’ develops as cronies ensure that the leader only gets the information that suits them. This is another precursor to social collapse, one which has repeated itself throughout history. Cronies are selected for their capacity to bend their knee before the leader, not for their competence or appropriate experience. They then select advisors who fit well with their points of view, again not for their competence. We end up with a layered structure that acts like an echo chamber. The information that flows through the structure is deleted, censored, or blocked to ensure that the messengers keep their new social status. We don’t tend to kill messengers anymore, but they do get fired for saying what the elite considers inappropriate.

The idea that all politicians are liars is one that has continued over the ages. They give it large about all the good things they are going to do to make life better and then, when elected, make life worse. Except, of course, for their loyal supporters who get a share of the power cake. As the political class bloats, the lies, mis-truths, and distortions increase. The idea that ‘the people don’t need to know’ becomes the new normal. Inside the swamp, cronyism and corruption develop exponentially, especially around election time. Power is addictive, and people will go to any lengths to maintain their grip on it. The leaders of nation-states have always fiddled around to try and manipulate the political affairs of other nations. Today, with our wonderful internet, this has gone ballistic. The manipulation, to this end, of the new social media now goes hand-in-hand with the older methods developed over centuries past. Democracy and democratic elections can only be fair and free when people can access truthful and valid information. This is something that has been lacking for a long time now. Once upon a time, the political winners were the ones who could shout the loudest. Then, it became those who owned newspapers or were supported by those who did. Now, it’s both of those plus the ability to use social media.

The historians also talk about collapse precursors that are internal social effects like increasing complicatedness. The historians mean that bureaucracy becomes increasingly onerous, and a state develops a huge bureaucratic class that becomes difficult to access. Day-to-day life for citizens turns into a battle to fill in forms, comply with rules, reply to demands, and so on. The political and bureaucratic elites continually tighten their grip on their power-over. The population as a whole feels increasingly outcast and burdened. The response to protests against these elites becomes increasingly difficult as the latter use the law and the agents of the law to smother dissent.

This has happened around the world, and the bureaucratic and political classes have led us into crisis after crisis. They have conducted vast experiments on their citizens, adopting one economic and social strategy and then jumping to another. These functionaries were never particularly fit for the job, and this has only gotten worse as they have made the world more and more complicated. Now they are jumping around like overexcited fleas as their Big Brother USA has suddenly veered away from supporting them. They are seeing how dependent they have become on having a friendly shoulder to lean on, they are reeling from the shock of the new, predictable, yet unpredictable behavior of the USA government. Said shock means a knee-jerk reaction and a standing jump back to the old and comfy concentration on defense, weapons and war. The jump takes them away from the increasingly uncomfortable focus on climate change and environmental protection. Uncomfortable because the measures have become increasingly unpopular with some key voting blocks. The scrabble to bring the focus back onto defense means that those political parties threatened by the flight of voters to more extreme parties can show themselves as being strong and up to the job.

The yellow brick road of the last few decades, globalisation, took a major hit with Covid, then with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Now, someone else has come along and has started digging more potholes on the yellow brick road than you find on British roads. Something that one would have thought impossible given the state of UK roads. Citizens have been living in fear for too long, fear of inflation, job loss, conflicts, and all the other symptoms of defunct socio-economic systems. Protest marches and movements are time-consuming, take a lot of energy, and have become increasingly dangerous. In France, people being injured or killed by crowd control weapons is now the new normal. These projectile and chemical weapons were once called non-lethal, but this had to be changed to less-lethal. Today, in the UK, more and more people are thrown into the courts and prison for minor infractions or non-violent protests.

Frustration breeds discontent, and the latter opens the path for more extreme polemics, and this goes the usual way. Identify a group of people, turn them into scapegoats, blame them for all that’s going wrong, and then encourage people to turn against them. The more liberal media may scream and rage about it, but certain soils grow certain types of plants; our socio-economic soil grows the dark flowers of discontent, frustration, anger.

We know what’s happening

Thanks to historians and archaeologists, we are aware of what is happening today; we can see it. This means that we should be able to act in a more enlightened way, and instead of heading full-speed towards social collapse, we should be able to guide the system to another stable state. Ideally, one in which we move away from the seemingly eternal process of revolt followed by the rise of a new elite, followed by the growth of a bloated bureaucracy.

Thanks to the researchers who study the hunter-gatherer societies of times past, we know that they used several strategies to avoid the development of elites and power structures. Over past centuries, political theorists have come up with an unending stream of ideas about how to make this sort of thing work in sedentary, agricultural societies. The separation of the State and the Judiciary, a written constitution, a Congress and a Senate, universal suffrage elections, and the rest. None have stopped the inevitable rise of bloated bureaucratic and political classes. None have stopped increasing inequality and the growth of wealthy people who can influence the governments. The USA now has an unelected, multi-billionaire, cost-cutter. The EU has an unelected (by universal suffrage) President who is trying to move the Bloc towards greater economic growth by watering down environmental legislation.

A few decades ago, a film star became the President of the USA; he and his BFF Thatcher turned 19th-century ideas about free-market capitalism into neo-liberalism. In so doing, they helped pave the way towards the polycrises we are now facing. Now the USA has a ‘media-celebrity’ President intent on taking a wrecking ball to the eggshell fragile status quo, history shows us that this was inevitable and built into the system. Round and around we go.

Seize the day

For too long people in general and politicians in particular have been caught in a trap of binary thinking, it’s this or the other. Today it’s defense or the environment and defense is winning. Researchers have studied whether or not one should put the milk in before the tea or vice versa. Binary, they didn’t study putting both in at the same time. Permaculture designers around the world should take this opportunity to present a third way, this may well mean getting out of the comfort zone and into the fight. This is what Permaculture was created for and now is the time to get going and rebuild or agricultural, social and economic systems.

The tragic reality is that very few sustainable systems are designed or applied by those who hold power, and the reason for this is obvious and simple: to let people arrange their own food, energy and shelter is to lose economic and political control over them. We should cease to look to power structures, hierarchical systems, or governments to help us, and devise ways to help ourselves.

Bill Mollison

It’s difficult to see how the above message could be made more clear, Bill and many others believe that it’s up to us to get on with the job DIY style. This has always been my opinion and that of my close Permaculture colleagues, it’s how I have designed projects and it’s what I teach on courses. We live in a world faced with a long list of crises, these crises have solutions, these solutions aren’t complicated.

Johann Fichte came up with the thesis, antithesis, synthesis triad, the synthesis part, in today’s world is Permaculture.

Chaos theory produced the bifurcation interpretation of system collapse. A dynamically stable system is stressed and starts to break down, it bifurcates from the original solution and eventually if the stressors continue it will collapse into chaos. From chaos comes a new form of order and a new dynamically stable state. This shines a light on what is happening today, the old social order is breaking down under the impact of a few wrecking balls around the world. Other current leaders are trying to ensure that the fall-out will be in their interests. As Permaculture designers we must get going to ensure that from the chaos grows a new world, one that is ethical, just. One which cares for the Earth and for people.