to get lost. A well-deserved revenge!
Our second fable is that of the Three Little Pigs. All three are preparing for the arrival of the Big Bad Wolf with more or less seriousness, and with a different vision of the threat he will pose. When the wolf destroys the two weaker houses, the first two pigs (or grasshoppers) run to their super-survivalist brother … who opens the door for them. Of course, he may well say, ‘I told you so!’, but this does not prevent them from subsequently sharing a brotherly meal together. The difference between the two fables is that in the second case there was a sense of brotherhood before the disaster.
A last story will give some extra colour to our picture. It is told by our friend Kim Pasche, who has been organizing wild nature immersion courses for many years. Despite his remarkable skills, he refuses to be called a ‘survivalist’, and mischievously says: ‘If you put ten survivalists in a forest for a few months, they will kill each other and destroy the forest. If you put ten Native Americans in the same forest, not only will the forest be more beautiful and productive, but they will have formed a tribe, a true community of humans in connection with other living beings.’14
We take it for granted that physiological and safety needs are important. Anyone who has not thought of preparation of this kind is only half awake. Yet survival is a precarious, transient state. It is ‘a list of facts without a vision’.15 We can survive for a few days, for a few weeks, but after that? Worse, if we find ourselves in a really bad disaster with this materialist attitude, with the objective of surviving a few weeks at the expense of our neighbours, it’s a safe bet that we will all be dead after a year.
These four stories highlight the reasons for writing this book. These are the desire to get ready for living through the consequences of disasters that are happening and will happen in the future, above all by looking for connections between human beings, connections with non-human life, and a meaning for what is happening. For people who cannot imagine continuing to live without a feeling of achievement, of other people’s esteem, trust and love, without reasons to share, Maslow’s pyramid is apparently turned upside down. Perhaps it would be better to speak of ‘Maslow’s table’,16 of which each leg is essential for the overall balance of the person …
Cultivating edible plants in one’s garden, learning to do without fossil fuels and preparing one’s family for emergencies are certainly necessary, but they are not enough to ‘make a society’, that is to say to make us into human beings. As the American psychologist Carolyn Baker puts it: ‘In fact, could not a budding society of emotionally myopic survivalists produce a culture as terrifying and devoid of humanity as Huxley’s Brave New World?’17
We have no desire to see the continued existence of a violent society that selects for the most aggressive individuals. Wanting to live beyond the shocks, and not just survive them, is already to start our preparation with a different attitude, one that looks towards joy, sharing and fraternity.
A branch of collapsology directed towards inner experience
After we put together the facts about a possible collapse in a first book (How Everything Can Collapse: A Manual for Our Times),18 we can see several directions that are open for ‘collapsologists’ who want to move onwards. The most important, it seems to us (though not the most urgent one), is that of collective action, in other words of developing realistic, bold and courageous political proposals. However, before we act, and even before we propose courses of action, there are still things we need to understand and an inner journey we need to make. That journey involves coming to terms with the psychological aspects of climate change or other global disasters.19
Here we face a huge challenge. Even to be interested in these subjects in their scientific or sociological forms brings with it some risk for our mental health. As for people who take this question head-on and make it the central direction of their lives, they are confronted (and will be for a long time) with very strong demands, both psychological and in their relations with others, as well as in their social and political commitments.
Those who have thought about how bad the situation might get ‘will not have an easy time coping with it, but they are not as apt to be overwhelmed by it as those who refuse to contemplate it’. 20 Between the person who is ready for action and the one who remains in denial, there is a whole range of people with various problems: those who just live through catastrophic events at a physical level, those who feel that something is wrong but cannot find the words for it (weak cognitive dissonance), those who know but cannot act in the way that they would wish (acute cognitive dissonance), and those who know and act but are exhausted or discouraged.
During these years of discussions with the public, we arrived at the same conclusion as that described by Carolyn Baker, who has accompanied many people struggling with the prospect of collapse: once the penny drops, most people don’t want to see more and more evidence (even if it was important to begin with); they want above all to learn how to live with the collapse. They become ‘collapsonauts’.
So, preparing oneself for this future does not just involve material and political aspects. It also has psychological, spiritual, metaphysical and artistic dimensions. The questions which the disasters pose for us are difficult to come to terms with. If we want to continue thinking about the collapse, if we seek to act, to make sense of our lives, or just to get up in the morning, it is important not to go crazy. Crazy with isolation, crazy with sadness, crazy with rage, crazy from thinking too much about it, or crazy from continuing one’s little routines while pretending not to see.
Some people think of this psychological dimension as a matter for women, or as a luxury reserved for fragile city dwellers who have known nothing but comfort. It’s not like this at all. The psychological challenge is a primordial one, and it affects all social classes, all peoples, all cultures. What do we say to the Sudanese refugee who suffers from anxiety or post-traumatic stress in a camp in Libya or in Calais? That his suffering is negligible? What do we say to the family of a young hyper-sensitive Belgian student who commits suicide because he has seen too much? How do we help the engineer in charge of oil-well drilling, who is reluctant to return to work every morning after kissing his children? How can you keep your spirits up as an activist trying to block a development project, when you create new ways of living in the territory you are defending, and you get bulldozers and grenades in reply?
The purpose of collapsology is not to state certainties that will crush any possible future, nor to make precise predictions, nor to find ‘solutions’ that can ‘avoid a problem’, but to learn to live with the bad news and with the changes that they foretell, sudden or gradual, so that we can find the strength and the courage to do something that will transform us, or, as Edgar Morin would say, will bring about our metamorphosis.
Expanding out to ‘collapsosophy’
The Canadian Paul Chefurka is one of the community of ‘collapseniks’ (popular bloggers who are trying to make sense of the coming collapse).21 He has a striking talent for explaining complex subjects, and has given us a very simple but illuminating scale for describing the growth of awareness.22 ‘When it comes to our understanding of the current global crisis,’ he says, ‘each of us seems to fit somewhere in a continuum of awareness that can be roughly divided into five stages.’23
At Stage 1, people do not seem to see any fundamental problem. If there is a problem, it is that there is not enough of what we have already: growth, jobs, wages, development, etc.
At Stage 2, people become aware of one or another fundamental problem (with a choice between themes such as climate, overpopulation, peak oil, pollution, biodiversity, capitalism, nuclear power, inequalities, geopolitics, migrations, etc.). This ‘problem’ grabs all of their attention, and they sincerely believe that if it can be ‘solved’,
