The Global Polycrisis and Collapse

{This was originally written on November 14th, 2022, just before I left to spend a year at my own BOL.)

And So It Begins…

By this point, you should be able to see it all around you. Or perhaps you can just sense it. Something is wrong in the world. Every day, things become more chaotic, and there is an increasing series of negative events that seem to be happening much more often than they used to. Coming faster, impacting closer together, raging longer…

There is something of a storm rising. The world is changing in many unprecedented and often violent ways. Civilization itself is transforming. What we face is not just climate change, or the challenge of resource scarcity, or even the threat of global nuclear war. It is all of those things and many more. There are not really a bunch of different crises playing out independently, what we have are a series of connected and interdependent global crises, all working as force multipliers upon each other to create the beginnings of cascading failure across the entirety of human existence.

A global “polycrisis”

Climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic, the looming economic disaster, and rising wealth inequality, as well as military conflicts without end, political division and social unrest, food insecurity, energy resource scarcity, and unprecedented refugee flows. These are only a few of the many global stressors being placed upon both our planetary systems and our social ones. When it comes to the incredible array of consequences for human civilization… Well, let’s just call it “collapse.”

The reason to be more alarmed than usual is that these environmental, social, technological, and economic stressors are interacting with each other in ways not seen before and doing so with increasing velocity. “Faster Than Expected,” one could say. And it is not their individual effects we need to worry about, but their combined impact that will cause unpredictable future shocks of increasingly destructive force. Focusing on any one of them to the exclusion of the others is a grave mistake because there are simply too many. And even the solution to one may be the accelerator of another. You could “Just Stop Oil,” but then what? What happens to the global economy as a result? What about the industrial agriculture needed to feed a planet that just hit a new total of 8 billion hungry mouths? What sort of conflicts might this spawn between nations, especially those whose very survival depends solely on oil?

The answer is… that there is no answer. We are damned if we do and damned if we don’t. It is too far gone already, and by “it” I mean civilization. It cannot continue as it has been, “Business As Usual,” we already know this. And I don’t mean to shit in the soup of a great many hopefuls out there, but it cannot be changed either. It is like a terminal disease that has already started to progress, or a murder charge handed down for which you are clearly guilty. Yes, you can fight both of those, but the effort is a delaying tactic at best and utterly futile at worst. The clearest way to say it is that we have already fucked around, and we are getting ready to find out.

People don’t like that language, oh no. I can almost feel it through the internet right now. But hey, perhaps such vulgarity is needed every now and then, to shock people out of their denial and self-delusion. Maybe even make them a little mad. I’m certainly angry right now. Furious, actually. At the fact that we have allowed it to get to this point, but also because of the ridiculous ways we invent to try and avoid responsibility for the consequences of our actions. Denial being one of the biggest.

How much self-delusion is needed to deny the existence or cause of climate change? How much false hope must be mustered to pretend that we can fix it all? How much evidence must be actively ignored to inspire the belief that nuclear war is impossible and will never happen?

These are herculean efforts, in my opinion. Absolutely incredible acts of enforced ignorance that many are able to put themselves through. It is truly amazing, really.

But, let’s get back to the matter at hand, shall we? To the actual facts. This disruptive event we are at the start of now has been given many names. Some call it “the 6th mass extinction.” Others may refer to it as the “Anthropocene.” I’ve seen it called “the great unraveling,” “the great simplification,” and even TEOTWAWKI, or “the end of the world as we know it.” Recently I have read about it being termed the global polycrisis, and I am fond of the term. But it doesn’t matter too much what name we prefer to give it. What matters is that we recognize this event for what it is.

Total collapse of global civilization.

The media headlines and buzzwords for the global polycrisis change quite often. At this writing, catastrophic climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic, conflicts degenerating into nuclear war, and the impending global economic crash remain the principal headlines.

Unbearable heatwaves, melting arctic sea ice, frequent fierce storms, devastating floods, failing food crops, and raging wildfires all bear grim testament to the fact that the climate is deeply in crisis.

For the pandemic, it would seem that the economic needs outweigh the concerns of public health as much of the world has decided to live with COVID despite the immense human costs.

Surging refugees, starvation, unending war, disrupted economies, and the toxification of the entire planetary biome are all grim realities we see demonstrated around us daily. Climate, contagion, conflict, and complexity are truly the four apocalyptic horsemen driving much of global collapse, and each in its own right spawns many others in its wake.

The definition of “polycrisis” can be found in a recent report from the Cascade Institute, titled What Is a Global Polycrisis, by Michael Lawrence, Scott Janzwood, and Thomas Homer-Dixon:

“We define a global polycrisis as any combination of three or more interacting systemic risks with the potential to cause a cascading, runaway failure of Earth’s natural and social systems that irreversibly and catastrophically degrades humanity’s prospects. A systemic risk is a threat emerging within one natural, technological, or social system with impacts extending beyond that system to endanger the functionality of one or more other systems. A global polycrisis, should it occur, will inherit the four core properties of systemic risks—extreme complexity, high nonlinearity, transboundary causality, and deep uncertainty—while also exhibiting causal synchronization among risks.”

This is pretty much just a fancy way of saying that all those bad things you hear about in the news, like the economic crash, the climate emergency, escalating war, political turmoil and civil unrest, they are all a part of the same collective event. A singular event of global polycrisis, with the individual crises making up its form all reverberating back and forth inside it, amplifying the effects of all and eventually causing a total cascading system failure. I suggest giving that report a read.

This polycrisis is a perfect storm, and we cannot escape that storm. The only real question that needs to be addressed is whether or not we can ride it out. Can humanity at least survive? Can some few of us make it through to the other side and perhaps lay the foundation to build something better for the future? My best answer to that is…perhaps. But one thing is for sure, not all will make it. Indeed, if all were to try it would only seal the fate for the whole.

That is the mistake being made right now. World leaders are still trying to save their economies, still trying to find a solution that allows for growth to continue and for all 8 billion people to keep living and consuming as we always have been. They are trying to find ways to channel the polycrisis in better directions. Hoping for things like technological innovations and “soft landings” to be the answers that allow civilization to survive. The most important decisions ever made by our species, and they are being made based on logic backed only by irrational hope and calculations missing many of the facts.

It is comparable to a man living in a house on the beach, directly in the path of an oncoming and unavoidable category 5 hurricane. Everything about it should tell the man that his house is doomed, that it cannot possibly survive the storm. But still, he stays behind. He ignores the evacuation orders, and he expends great effort to shore up his home against wind and water. He cries out, “This is all I have, I refuse to give it up!” He pays no mind to his friends and family desperately pleading with him to get out, to save his life in the face of inevitability, but he just doesn’t listen. Whatever course the storm takes, he is determined to fight it. But the reality is that successfully fighting it requires understanding it. And if he really understood what he was facing, he would know it was impossible to defeat. And so he stays. And he faces the storm head on. And all his fury and desperation, his heroism and his hopes…are washed away with the house and his corpse.

That is where we are right now. Civilization is the house. It cannot be saved. The absolute best we can hope for is that some of us will be able to save our very lives and nothing more, and then only if we give it everything we have got. Every single effort must go to that. For each of us.

Soon the storm will be raging around us all. Many have already felt the first winds of it. In Pakistan, where entire cities were washed away in unprecedented floods. In Ukraine, where the bombs and missiles began falling on homes and schools and restaurants, killing children in the streets. In Sri Lanka and Lebanon, where the governments tore themselves apart and left the people to fend for themselves in a world gone mad. Across much of the African continent, where there are people who cannot even remember the feel of a full belly and a hunger satisfied. For many, the polycrisis has already arrived.

When it finally arrives to your front yard and mine, it will wash away all that hope and denial. It will show us what collapse really is, and in that moment of realization will come the knowledge that it is too late to survive. Right now, the only hope with any basis in fact would be the hope to stay alive through it all. Not employed, not housed, not healthy or happy, just alive. And that hope—however fragile it may appear—may be the only thing that helps push one into preparing for the end, and thus provide some chance for the hope to become reality.

It is indeed a truly fragile hope, but it is the only one worth holding.

And this is why I urge everyone I can to begin preparing for the eventual and inevitable collapse of civilization that is only just beginning right now. There certainly isn’t time left to save civilization, but there may be time for you to save yourself.

Which brings me to the point of this rather long (but hopefully informative) rant. Things across the world have progressed to the point now where I feel it is necessary to take action on the final stages of my own preparedness plans. Myself and my group of fellow preppers who have been on this journey with me for many years are getting ready to exit civilization and retreat fully to our own remote and self-sustaining location to conduct a real-world living test of its function and viability. I will not be returning to civilization for about a year, if I return at all. All of us recognize that continued participation in society is no longer worthy of being our sole focus in life. It is time to truly embrace the inevitability of collapse and get ready to ride out whatever comes. After that, perhaps we will return to watch from a front-row seat.

I have recently published my books about all of it, and some of you may have already read the first one, Wasteland By Wednesday, which detailed the reasons behind the coming collapse. The second book, Prepping For Collapse, available now, goes into what you can do to get yourself and your own people ready for such an end to civilization. That is what I am leaving behind, and truly, I thought I would have more time to work on other projects. Perhaps, once we finish up our proof-of-concept testing out at the compound, then I will probably return. Back to my task of helping others prepare for the inevitable. But for now, the general consensus here is that the time is close at hand… and so we are taking no chances. We all must be ready ourselves before we can help anyone else.

You should do the same. Start now. Prepare and get ready. Do not wait until it is too late.