Down from the peak
It’s too much and things will start to go in the other direction.
Look around and behold: This is the peak . . .
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1713209.Peak_Everything
An example is how millennials are less inclined to buy houses than were prior generations. The houses, full of “features,” crammed with so many appliances and gadgets, so much stuff, have become expensive and hard to maintain.
A disconcerting public secret is the falseness of the narrative about “labor-saving technology.” As mentioned before, it’s a case where looking at a machine or device in isolation can focus on some greater degree of efficiency, ease, or comfort, but taking account of the development of the Technosphere as a whole reveals the tendency to keep adding tasks and obligations. Technology is, like, a thousand times more efficient and productive than it was a hundred years ago, yet the number of labor-hours contributed to the economy per household has not declined. And our domestic labors have increased.
If we’re drowning, suffocating, hemmed in, and burdened . . . how about . . . collapse as liberation . . .
Joseph Tainter sees collapse as a way for a society to provide some semblance of continuity, if at a lower level: a kind of “Chapter 11” bankruptcy proceeding. A civilization is compelled to cut its losses and scale down. “Societies collapse when stress requires some organizational change.” In a situation of declining marginal returns, in which the payoff for increased outputs would be too low, “collapse is an economical alternative . . . [and] may be the most appropriate response.” Even if global industrialism has not yet reached the point of diminishing returns, “that point will inevitably arrive . . . However much we like to think of ourselves as something special in world history, in fact industrial societies are subject to the same principles that caused earlier societies to collapse.”
Something is becoming clear: A world made fit for life once more can never come from the failed mystique of more growth and further modernization. Ivan Illich wrote that breakdown will be “the result of synergy in the failure of the multiple systems that fed its expansion.” He argued that such a moment should be “welcomed as a crisis of potential liberation because our present institutions abridge basic human freedom for the sake of providing people with more institutional outputs” (Tools for Conviviality, 1973).
In spite of the dangers, such a devolution may be our only hope of breaking free of the megamachine complex. By shrugging off the onerous burden of treadmill culture, we may consciously choose the “appropriate response” of collapse, and find ways to let it be a disaster for the System but an adventure for ourselves. This means, without exception and without any hesitation on our part, the abolition of all empires, of a world of sacrifice zones, drudgery, penury, and the toxic cornucopia of commodity society. It means the renewal of subsistence cultures, which still hang on in villages, among tribal peoples struggling to survive, and even among people finding practical responses in the fissures and cracks of civilization. It means making a life that is slower, quieter, and more contemplative. It means revivifying an aesthetic not of the assembly line but of the forest, and restoring a life that can hear what the natural world is telling us, what we once knew long ago and have forgotten as the urban labyrinth grew up around us and enclosed us.
The System may, of course, find a way to entirely suffocate what is humane in us before it reaches its inevitable limits and implodes under its own inertia. So far, though, creativity persists. People are becoming aware that life’s adventure cannot be found at control panels or in cubicles, or in digging the foundations for the work pyramid, or building higher stories in its edifice. Nor is it to be found consuming the laboratory chow of McDonaldization at the petrochemical banquet table, or running on its treadmill to nowhere. It is with the fabric of the living world, the universe itself. We are living an aberration, a nightmarish turn from our true journey. Let the megamachine crumble. It is time we rejoined the dance.
[adapted from Fifth Estate, Fall 1992]
