Collapse and Control
Learning to cope with fear of the future.
[Letter #015]
Good morning, son.
Your Grandmom’s visit was really nice. We went out to eat a couple of times. She delivered a rocking chair as well, which I presume will be something that you and I both enjoy in the near future. As I understand it, you’re supposed to be the size of a pound of ground beef or a papaya right now, or something to that effect. I’m not sure. All I know is that we’re only a bit over halfway, and your mother complains every day about how much harder it is to get around while lugging this some-sort-of-large-fruit-sized bulk. I just look forward to seeing you again on the sonogram, but that won’t be for another few weeks. Bummer.
Each time your Grandmom comes around, I am reminded of her worldview. I’m not about to talk bad about her, mind you, but she does certainly have a different perspective from people of other generations — and I mean both those who came before and those after. I’ll explain what I mean later in this letter.
Today, I have “control” on my mind. I think it’s something that a lot of people deal with and don’t really give much thought, but I think it’s the cause of some real difficulties in the world. My guess would be that it derives from fear. Well, at least that’s my take from “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” by Tears for Fears. See, it’s right there in the title and artist names. Papa Bear’s got jokes.
Actually, I don’t really know much about 80s pop music beyond humming the tunes. I could probably better make my point by explaining another silly thing. Your Papa Bear here really enjoys playing video games. I probably should be doing something far more useful with my time, but I’m going to just use the excuse that I’m enjoying this form of art while it’s still possible to do so. One day, there won’t be enough surplus electricity to justify something as trivial as a video game, and it’s not like avoiding them today will allow me to play them decades from now. So, smoke ’em if you got ’em, I suppose. (Please, don’t ever use nicotine, son. I made that mistake.)
These days, I have the itch to play a certain type of game that is loosely referred to as a “survival” game. I think there’s probably a lot that one could say about why these games have become so popular, but my very quick-and-dirty opinion is that it allows players to live the fantasy of being able to rise from essentially nothing- and nowhere-in-life to become powerful and often important.
Players in the real world today, when not actually engaging in the intoxication of fiction, often feel as though they are nonetheless in an early-game “survival” situation: they have nothing and they’re powerless. Inside a digital world, the early game has a player feel very vulnerable, and they’re not really capable of causing any sort of significant effect on the world around them, positively or negatively. The distressing difference is that advancing from nothing in a video game is usually obvious and fairly simple, and yet advancing from nothing in reality can be almost impossible.
As we’re all aging in a world that is built on exploiting us and preventing us from feeling any sense of progress or accomplishment, it’s incredibly cathartic to pretend to be part of a colorful, magical world where we can gather materials ourselves to build our own housing, hunt our own dinner and cook it over a fire and spit that we built ourselves, and eventually turn our labor into a real living. It’s the control of our own destiny that life is reluctant to offer.
These games remove the barriers that often stop such progress in the real world. They begin in an area that is full of easily-harvestable resources, and there’s no enforcer there to abuse you if you just harvest away. Usually, a simple tool, such as an axe, is constructed by locating a basic stick on the ground and a rock, and then smashing them together. Pop! There’s a tool. Gathering wood immediately becomes more efficient. Throw together more wood and rocks. Pop! Now you have a basic hammer for building.
You may not know how to actually construct a hut from branches and mud, but the character on the screen knows. You may have no idea how to start a fire without dry wood and matches or some other easy ignition source, but the character knows. While a wild animal might attack you, forcing you to defend yourself with your stone-based weaponry, a cop won’t come and rip your house down and arrest you for setting up camp on the government’s property or for indecent exposure simply because you haven’t collected enough plant fiber to sew pants together yet.
It’s all just play-pretending, and it’s so very satisfying. Why? Because it gives a sense of control when players feel like the real world is flying off the rails, sending us hurtling face-first toward the pavement below. If we are indeed flying through the air without any control over our lives, we can still play in a fantasy world wherein we are champions, pioneers, and, at the very least, able to consistently find food, clothing, water, and shelter by dint of our own efforts. Tasks in such a game sound like they shouldn’t be fun, since they’re essentially chores. Yet, they’re endlessly engaging. They fool the mind by simulating the satisfaction of a job well done, a dinner-time secured, or a creative feeling expressed. They provide the illusion of some type of control.
When I say that I should probably be doing something more useful with my time, what I mean is stuff that would help when things inevitably go sideways in the world. I mean, I have a kid on the way, after all. Shouldn’t I be, I don’t know, building a rocking horse in my woodshop right now? Or furniture for the baby’s new clothes? Or something more useful than just lighting up different arrangements of pixels within a make-believe world, producing nothing but ephemeral progress and artificial satisfaction?
I should be learning more about gardening right now, because food won’t always be plentiful. I should be trying to prepare the house better for the heatwaves that we expect in our infernal future. I should be finishing up some of these wood projects that I have in the basement or at least knock out some yard work. And yet, I would rather, by a longshot, just do those same kinds of things in a pretend world. A world that would cease to exist with a yank of a power cord. These video games instill, by design, the sensation of competence, of security. They instantly reward me for “doing work,” even if that only amounts to clicking things and making lights activate.
Hell, my life isn’t nearly as bad as, say, a person trying to survive on the federal minimum wage. I have it easy by comparison — I have time to write long letters! I could only imagine what those folks must be dealing with. Many of my fellow citizens are working multiple jobs and living with housemates of one form or another just to make it to the next month. What so many of them lack is security over their own lives and future, a sense of control. They surely can’t be feeling much in the way of accomplishment at work, since the system has endeavored to make people as expendable as possible, which incentivizes replacing employees with cheaper new people instead of promoting “loyal” workers.
This is where I find that funny observation about your Grandmom. She still believes that old canard called the “American Dream,” that anyone can make it in the US if they work hard enough. She doesn’t understand that the only reason that was ever possible, that people could rise well above the station they were born into, was that the US was participating in the largest economic growth in human history, and people were bound to get caught in the so-called “rising tide” that “lifts all boats.” You couldn’t throw a rock back then without someone offering you a job to throw rocks.
This economic expansion, it should be noted, was only possible because of the one-time consumption of the most energy-dense deposits of fuel that have existed on our planet in the last 100 million years. With almost every drop that we’ll ever be able to profitably extract already burned up, we’ve plowed through eons of concentrated sunlight within a couple hundred years just so that we could build our economy, especially from World War 2 to present. Everyone needed a new car, a new washing machine, a new lawnmower with a huge (and irrigated) grass lawn, a second new car, and a brand new garage to park these things. When you’re pumping that much energy into an economy in such a short time, it’s impossible not to grow huge, and the benefits will spread about to everyone involved, purely by association. Just sticking your toe into that economic system would earn you a lifetime pension, union benefits, 2.5 kids, a stay-at-home spouse, a dog, and a house that would appreciate in value for the rest of your life.
That sort of life is what really gave an entire generation, your Grandmom included, an ironclad sense of control over their world, even if it was built on artifice. What she never understood was that, if the economy she grew up in was itself a video game, it was stuck perpetually in the “Easy” difficulty setting. I have no doubt that she had some difficulty in life, as nothing in this world is “Big Rock Candy Mountain.” But, enduring the biblical tribulations of Job, she ain’t. She would often boldly proclaim how her family was poor, never having anything, and how they worked for every dime they ever had. I mean, her father owned a few hundred acres of land in Mississippi and a sawmill company, but he worked hard for that, dammit! Ok, she might have married a doctor, but he wasn’t a doctor when they first got together! He had to go to college first … in the 70s … when it was dirt cheap, nearly free, to go to college. But, he studied hard!
I’m joking, of course, and I would never actually insult your grandfather’s intelligence or competence. He was a really good man, very smart and certainly hardworking. My point is that despite “working hard for everything we had,” your Grandmom will probably never understand that her entire perspective of existence on our planet has been shaped by a miraculous economic boom, anomalous in all of human history, driven by the rapid squandering of the entire accumulation of the most powerful energy sources that we have ever harnessed. Such a process never happened before, and it will never happen again. It’s nowhere near “normal,” not by a country mile.
People who lived before the 20th century never really had much of a prayer of moving on beyond the conditions they were born into. Born to a dirt farmer? You’re probably destined to be a dirt farmer. Born rich? God must favor your family, and you’ll die rich, unless you screw things up royally. Why do you suppose “rags to riches” stories are as old as time? Because they’re fantasy, naturally. It never happens in the real world, and if it did, it would be worthy of an epic tale. Of course, you can just invent epic tales from whole-cloth as well.
As we begin to see the end of the energy bonanza, it seems to me that we’ve been moving back into that sort of old arrangement again. The wealthy in the US have calcified themselves as the new aristocracy, the so-called middle class of the mid-20th century is basically gone, and everyone else is just doing their best to make it. There’s no such thing as “putting in the work” and then “moving up the ladder” anymore. Now, the expectation is that you just put in the work, or else you lose your job and end up on the street. You’ll only get paid just enough to make sure that you can come back again next time to do it all over again.
The capitalist expansion and economic boom time made possibly only by fossils is coming to an end, and it isn’t ever coming back. That’s why we feel the loss of control. That’s the source of the low-level, constant anxiety. The fear of losing the things that we’ve been accustomed to getting, or at least the things that we were promised growing up — the only things we were ever prepared for. This is all that your Grandmom’s generation ever knew: the economy will always recover, so you just have to get out there and put in the work in order to win.
Thing is, them saying that also makes the reverse true. If you don’t succeed, that’s your fault for not working hard enough. They just can’t seem to understand that the world is changing, and this ain’t the economy they grew up in. A world on fossil fuels, to them, is like a fish in water. It’s just how life is. Those of us who came along after her generation started seeing the changes. If it only happens that a few people lose out despite working hard, then that’s just chalked up to bad luck. When most of society is busting ass, and yet we’re all sliding backward into peasantry, then faith in the system dies.
To put it bluntly, that faith should die, because the system itself is crumbling. People alive now, and those being born in the near future (hey, that’s you!), don’t really know how to survive in a world “after oil.” For those of us willing to look into that future, it’s terrifying. Any sense of control over our wellbeing, our livelihood, has been stripped away. There’s a growing sense that the only way we know how to live is going to become impossible. I’m sure that a lot of us would like to pretend that we could handle ourselves should civilization come to a screeching halt, but pretending is probably the best many of us can do.
Whether our world goes out with a bang or a whimper, I think that those of us who simply enjoy the satisfaction of watching our little electronic villages growing in our fantasy worlds are harmless enough. Sure, we probably should, and I definitely should, be learning more about how to take care of ourselves in a collapsing world. Or, you know, maybe just working out a little more. Overall, I think we’re just seeking that catharsis of providing for ourselves by our own means, and games reduce or remove the barriers to accomplishing that, at least in the simulation. By no means would I ever suggest that these games actually teach anyone how to really fend for themselves in a “survival” situation, but I guess they do get us to begin thinking about first securing the necessities if things go bad: food, water, shelter, and security.
The problem that I’m starting to really see here in the US is, well, not everyone is a gamer. That is to say that there are a great many people in our country who aren’t interested in something as harmless as a video game, and yet they are also feeling the desperate loss of control in their lives. This happened before, about a hundred years ago, during another crisis of capitalism. I’m not going to go into the reason now, but what you end up with when capitalism fails is authoritarianism. Last time around, fascism was a popular flavor. That might happen again, but we’re definitely seeing a lot more dictatorial tendencies among the elite.
It’s dead simple to see why elites would favor authoritarianism. It increases their already considerable power to the level of absolutism. If you have what amounts to a “master/slave” relationship, then you can dispense with all of the pretense and charade of “democracy” and “representation.” That was always nonsense anyway, but authoritarianism just gets the extra fluff out of the way and calls it what it is. A king on his throne and peasants in the field, all is right in the world, they’ll think.
What’s more difficult to imagine is why poor people would go along with this plan. I mean, they’re absolutely going to remain on the bottom of the dogpile. Can’t they see that? The masters will remain the masters, and they will continue to be nothing more than bootlickers, right? Well, maybe not. At least, that’s not the promises they’re hearing these days. They’re being offered some return of control. Not much, mind you, but a little, and that’s enough.
As an example, reproductive rights are big right now. Women in the US, ever since Roe v Wade, have been able to secure a safe abortion if that’s what they decided to do. After decades of assaulting it, the conservatives managed to get it repealed. Now, they’re stepping farther and farther into the realm of controlling women. For the wealthy, this just helps to ensure there are more peasants to work the field. For the poor, this gives control back to the men.
Creating a hierarchy, such as men over women or whites over blacks, is how the elites divide and conquer. Had people simply always worked together, there would never have been elites because no one would allow the bastards to rule over them. Many of the indigenous tribes I’ve read about have been described as “fiercely egalitarian.” These are folks who weren’t divided against each other. There are countless tales from all cultures about the dangers of being divided against other people, and yet that’s exactly how elites “manage” populations today.
They’re exploiting our anxiety about the future and our lack of control over our own lives. Of course, it was the greed and power-lust of elites in the first place, the forces of imperial domination on the planet, that created the systems that are currently crashing and stripping away our collective sense of control. But, that’s surely not relevant to this, right? I mean, “We’ve got to get ‘those people’ back in line and behaving properly if we’re going to save our nation/planet/civilization!” It’s the same song and dance.
Inevitably, “those people” will always be the ones with the least power to defend themselves and the least capacity to actually change anything on their own. They’ll just be used to control everyone else until they’re used up, and then the target people will shift to a different demographic. Divide et impera.
I don’t believe, not for a moment, that the way humans are acting and will act in the near-term future is somehow indicative of “human nature” in general. It is, however, a straight-forward task to predict how “civilized” people will respond to the crumbling of civilization. These people rely on the infrastructure of modern society in order to survive. They rely on the systems of economics, authority, and technology. As these systems fall away, and the infrastructure falls into ruin, many among these folks are going to lash out and take hold of any measure of control they can find.
I suppose my conclusion is, once again, that we simply need more acceptance. That is, the final step in the stages of grief. The longer we remain within our grief, the longer we live with anxiety and fear. Our sense of the loss of control over our future makes us vulnerable to manipulation. For some of us, that seems to be expressed in fairly harmless games, which only really amount to unproductively spent time. For others, well — wars have been fought and genocide committed by the exploitation of such vulnerabilities. It’s happened before, and the warning signs have been lighting up again for years now.
The world that we’ve always known is certainly ending. The planet will eventually be fine again. Whether the future planet will include the reformed descendants of us fire apes is still yet to be seen, but I feel optimistic about it. I think that the first step toward that possibility is to accept that the current way, the old way, of doing things is ending. We need to find a new way, or else we will die with the old way. Either choice is scary, but we have to accept that a choice is necessary. Trying to return to the “good old days” isn’t going to work. The glory days are behind us, and we have to consider what new glory days will look like ahead.
Son, I want you to know that I write these letters just as much for myself as I do for you. I definitely want to have something available for you to read one day, and maybe you’ll even learn a thing or two from your old man. But right now, I’m also writing these so that I can force myself to get my thoughts straight and clear on some of these subjects. I don’t know that I’m always successful, but I think it’s helping a lot. So, thank you for listening to this confused forest critter trying to think things through.
Most of all, however, I want you to know that I love you very much. Your mother and I are very excited to meet you and give you your name. I can’t wait to have you become my little buddy, and you will forever know the love of a big bear hug. I hope you’re doing well when you read this as well. Be safe.
Your father,
Papa Bear
[Author’s note: This is a series of letters that I intend to print to paper and deliver to my son, probably around the year 2040. You are more than welcome to read along. The links in the article are only for you, the reader, and will include citations, jokes, asides, and links to books or other items. If you happen to purchase anything through such a link, I’ll get a small commission. Every little bit helps, right?]
