Voluntary Argument, Part 4: Smackdown

So like I said, Dimwit presents an opening that I just can't pass up. He starts out by posting a link to an AP article, and adding to it, as an intro:

How do others feel about these thoughts I offered?

One other thought: I think I'd rather die trying and failing to avert a catastrophic collapse than survive under the kinds of conditions you hope to survive. That kind of life might well not be worth living for me. Either way, I'm not most interested in my own survival.

How important is it to you to stay alive, even if the life you're left is one in which most of the people you love have died, maybe horrifically, when there has been a massive dieoff, that's still continuing, when you're struggling from day to day just to feed yourself and provide adequate shelter, to fend off those who are trying to take what you have built up? What kind of life is worth living for you?


The person who originally started the thread made some good points in her response:

I'm not exactly sure what you're asking. The life of the people who are the subject of this article doesn't seem bad to me, except in their isolation. I guess that the questions you've asked aren't the relevant ones to me. To me, the reason for surviving the crash is to protect the landbase, and hopefully leave a seed of a sustainable culture for my place. The quote from Derrick Jensen that I use in my signature embodies my view of a role for me in the collapse of civilization. ["What does it mean to dismantle civilization? What it means is: Depriving the rich of the ability to steal from the poor and to destroy the world. I can't give a better definition than that."--Derrick Jensen]

I responded only with a supporting comment that as more people adopt that kind of lifestyle, they'll be less isolated.

I have to say, though, that I think I have a broader view of "people I love" than you do. The list of people I love includes the fish people, the frog people, the tree people, and more, whom I love and depend on. Many of these people are unlikely to continue to survive much longer unless civilization is dismantled.

Getting back to the quote. I think it may offer some guidance. If dismantling civilization means, "Depriving the rich of the ability to steal from the poor and to destroy the world," then it implies an active role in guiding collapse. It means ensuring that the ones to survive are not the ones who are most capable of continuing the destruction.

Have you read The Road by Cormac McCarthy? I didn't find it particularly helpful to my understanding, but it seems to be more in tune with your thoughts on collapse.


Dimwit chimes in again, and finally states explicitly what his problem is. His entire response to her, with my responses to him interleaved:

No, I haven't read The Road. I have quite enough fears about how horrific the future may come to be without that vision in my head, though it's been highly praised. I watched Children of Men last night, and I think that's enough dystopian imagining for me for a while. I thought it was very well done but nothing I really needed to spend 2 hours of my short life on.

I believe this finally makes clear Dimwit's problem. He's still in denial, and can't handle the idea that things might (most likely will) get really bad. It threatens to push him over into the Depression stage. Meanwhile the rest of the world is still Bargaining, trying to hedge and find some way to make things not-quite-as-bad without fundamentally changing anything.


It wasn't the life that the people described in the article are living now that I was referring to, but the life that they imagine themselves to be preparing for. This also ties back into Stableboy's earlier message about making preparations and learning skills to go off into an isolated area and survive the crash. As I recall, he didn't necessarily mean "isolated" in the sense of geographic distance; could also be in the sense of a less-hospitable (for folks like us) ecosystem, such as the desert.

Granted, they "can imagine marauding hordes" of people who don't make such preparations, but they're not envisioning misery either. "Breault said she hopes to someday band together with her neighbors to form a self-sufficient community." What is so bad about that?


I love those other species in the community of life, too, but I doubt I'm abnormal in that I love the human beings in my life that I love--my friends and family--more than those other species, who are less like me and with whom I do not have close personal relationships. I think it's safe to say that Mother Bears love their cubs far more than other species, or other bear species, or even other bears of their own species. This is to be expected because it's what works in evolutionary terms.

That's fuzzy too. Most animals will run off (rarely kill, simply because it means they're likely to sustain some injury themselves) a member of their own species (that's not an immediate prospective mate) in order to protect their territory - which means their food supply. Therefore they put a higher priority on other species than on other members of their own species.

I don't think I'm being unreasonable, then, to say that I value the ecosystem in general and many non-human individuals in it over any given human that I don't know and care about personally.


I don't like that quote from Derrick, though this may be only because I'm seeing it from out of context. It seems to me to imply that "the rich" are the villains of the piece, when I think they have been acculturated to their role in the same way most other people have been acculturated to their role. As long as most people want to be among "the rich," it doesn't really matter who the individuals among "the rich" are.

Well, yeah, the rich are the villains. How they became the villains doesn't make any difference. The rich (and therefore powerful) have the power to take advantage of anyone who's not rich. As long as the system is the way it is, yeah, people are going to want to be rich, because then they'll be in power, and nobody else will be able to keep them down anymore. Which means that the system needs to be pulled apart before people will stop wanting to be "rich". Like I said before, those in power are not going to voluntarily relinquish that power.

And my response to his first question, the "What do you think about my thoughts?" question at the top of this post:

Honestly, those thoughts strike me as faux-noble cowardice. It sounds to me like you're saying, "I find what you describe so distasteful that I'd rather die than stoop to that level."

If you just wait for the civilization to end, then your quality of life is likely to be pretty low. However, if you build shelter, and plant fruit trees, and arrange for armament/defense, then your worries about those things later will be greatly reduced. Not that it'll be easy, but it won't be nearly as hard as you're making it out to be.

As for loved ones dying, I've lost loved ones in the past. I'll lose more in the future. Nothing anyone does will prevent that. Everyone dies. Get over it. But just because they're dead, or going to die at some unknown time in the future doesn't mean that I should roll over and die too. Absolutely not. In fact, I'm going to do what I can to make sure they survive as well. Which means assembling the necessary equipment, paraphernalia, and vegetation to allow for their survival.

He didn't like that. He didn't actually respond to any of the points I made there, he just asked about the alias comprising my e-mail address (and this is just too funny not to repost):

Wherever did you get the appellation "Ribbons the Friendly Viking"?

Could we hear from someone else now? Please?


The woman who started the thread wrote back to me, saying:

I think we have a slightly different perspective on survival, and part of it is probably based on age. At 59, I'm very much aware that I've lived more of my life than I have to come, no matter what happens. You (and my sons) potentially have more of your life yet to come. Mostly, I agree with you.

As for The Road, it's a post apocalyptic novel of a father and son roaming around, living off the remnants of civilization. The only non-human life to appear (well, maybe there were pets) were some morels. The central issue was whether the father would kill his son before he died so that the son wouldn't have to continue without him. For me, not a very useful story.


At this point the thread breaks off in a completely different direction. If it proves interesting/relevant, it'll end up here as well. But for now, this series of posts is done.