The other half of my comment would have been how (mostly) competently Homo sovieticus did deal with societal catastrophe. Yes, post collapse Russia – and all the way through the early aughts – was a grim, violent place with a great deal of organized crime. Of course, organized crime almost always fills the void of collapsed states so that’s no surprise. I was there for some of it; i was also born in Detroit and attended university in downtown Detroit in the early/middle 90′s. Russia’s big cities weren’t any more frightening post collapse than Detroit with a roaring economy in the US.

The Russians did all right, and in many respects fulfilled Ian’s thoughts about catastrophe. They also came from a much different starting point which included most of them having zero faith in the system that collapsed and plenty of practice at getting around the dysfunction of the state to survive. (Other factors must be included, like how very few lost their homes or access to utilities because of political and economic catastrophe.)

We can say that they didn’t come out of it better than before, but that’s actually debatable and would require a multi-thousand word comment to fully discuss the economic policies pushed by other nations, the rise of Putin, etc. etc.

The title is a misnomer, it talks about social hierarchy and it’s predictable results…FYI, it not social dominance itself, but rather how well…or poorly it is done.

FDR/LBJ vs Bush2/Obama

Oh yeah…it’s got a catastrophe in it, so it should ring all the bells.

It is this mental state of self-preservation at all costs prior to real catastrophe that disturbs me. I do not think that Homo americanus is, on the whole, able to deal with catastrophe in a way that might be termed creative destruction.

You make a good, albeit disturbing, point. I have at least one friend who thinks that this “son-of-Unabomber” Dorner character “has a point” and is “cool” (whether or not he has a point is beside the point, and he certainly is not “cool.”) (This friend has also cleaved towards the the paranoid “don’t take my guns” crowd that has despicably closed ranks since the recent slaughter of children.) And, I hear on the Intertubes that some are calling this glorified disgruntled-employee-gone-postal “Dark Knight” (I could have had some sympathy for his grievance, but he has forfeited it with his greater evil.) I also received a thinly-veiled threat from another individual when I criticized his opinion that killing a man’s daughter was “acceptable” in a “war situation” (Dorner has apparently shot and killed a retired police captain’s daughter.)

There will always be people like this, but their lack of shame in articulating their disease indicates, to me, some disturbing cracks in the zeitgeist, no doubt abetted by ambient societal stress.

I hope that this is just a vocal and dismissible minority, that I’m just having a “bad day” brought on by the temporal proximity of events, because things are going to continue to get much worse – more stressful – before (if) they get better.

I’m not sure that there is a much better example of catastrophe than the Siege of Leningrad, with so much of the city’s civilian population trapped without food, medicine, water, electricity, heat, and 1941 was one of the harshest winters in a century. What the diaries say – both implicitly and explicitly – is that catastrophe brings out the true nature of people. Some are heroic, and in catastrophe, even simple acts can be heroic. On the other hand, there are plenty of people who loosed from the bounds of societal norms are terrible. There are also the people in between, many of whom simply cannot cope with catastrophe and lose their minds in some fashion or another. It is gut wrenching to read a diary entry describing the slowly starving family in the apartment next door, and the dull thump on the wall that signaled a mother killing her baby. I’ve known Siege survivors. The experience of catastrophe never left them and one needed to be careful to not unnecessarily trigger those memories.

On the diagnosis, i’m in complete agreement, Ian. It is this mental state of self-preservation at all costs prior to real catastrophe that disturbs me. I do not think that Homo americanus is, on the whole, able to deal with catastrophe in a way that might be termed creative destruction. I seriously fear rampant violence and fascism as that American reaction to catastrophe at the societal level. Or, a Randian utopia.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112257/california-balances-its-budget-how-progressives-balanced-books#

For the record, California’s economy is growing faster than any other state with a mixed economy.

Being fairly useless myself, I think I’ll learn to brew beer.

Bless you, @MontanaMaven – in spite of this contradictory sentence.

So we have to go against the flow instead of with the flow. John Michael Greer in his book “The Long Descent: The User’s Guide to the End of the Industrial Age” recommends living “as if” in your ideal world while acknowledging how screwed up the actual real world is. So don’t live in la la land. But live knowing we are probably on some sort of small plateau on our way down the long and bumpy road to the end of life as we know it. Don’t stick your fingers in your ears and don’t party hardy either. Figure out how to live better with your neighbors. Rediscover the old ways before cheap energy. Being fairly useless myself, I think I’ll learn to brew beer. Beer can be traded for other things. My husband is a rancher so he can fix things and birth things and grow things, so he’s very useful.

A book that Alcuin recommended, I just finished and another one I might have to reread. “The Pirate Organization” by Durand and Vergne. They seem to be pirates themselves as they teach at a business school but they don’t sound like Harvard MBAs (Masters of Bullcrap). They dare to discuss capitalism.

I have always been somewhat of a pirate in that I like to break the norms. Pirates are always looking to find that unclaimed territory or the unknown…the beyond on which to start something new. They have at times “taken a stance against the state to defend what we term ‘the public cause’. Pirates don’t necessarily want a safe or peaceful haven. The pirate organization “promises a utopia-free world, constantly changing, never isolated, never centric, forever contingent, confrontational, and temporary.”

So capitalism may not disappear because of crisis. It may just may shrivel up like the sovereign state does. Then some new organization will come to the fore. So we should be ready with alternatives.

The government, increasingly, is defining the economic system, and thereby becoming part of it.

So far as I can see, it is not designed to be fault-tolerant or fail-safe, in fact, it gives every signal of being exactly the opposite : many failure-prone very-important and un-replicated elements, too-strong links between elements, positive feedbacks between elements, especially in a negative direction, …

If I proposed a computer system with even one of these inherently failure-producing ‘features’, my boss would fire me.

When the economic failure happens, it will very strongly involve our government, and thereby increase the gain in our political polarization. Civilization will be under the same threat as the Great Depression produced, except this time we have all of the technology required for a very large-scale national surveillance state, Orwell come to life.

Good going guys. You Progressives have a lot to answer for, both the Left and the Right.