Soft-Pedaling Systemic Collapse
By Peter Goodchild
17 February, 2012
Countercurrents.org
When popular guests on the TV talk-shows want to soft-pedal systemic collapse by failing to mention the imminence of unprecedented levels of war, famine, plague, and death (the Four Horsemen), I am reminded of a Christmas party I once attended for a writers' group I belonged to. We got into a discussion of vegetarianism, and how to avoid offending people who don't eat meat. My host said, "I always explain that they don't actually kill the chickens to get the wings. They just pull the wings off, and they grow back again."
The number of famine deaths during China’s Great Leap Forward (1958-1961) was perhaps 30 million, but we'll never get a very accurate count. The rest of the world didn't even know the event had occurred until long afterward. Even nowadays it's strange how the news media in general operate with something like a thermostat: any event below a certain level of comfort is wiped out by artificial warmth. If the rest of the world knew what goes on in half of Africa right now, they'd be dumping their TV sets at the end of the drive for the garbage collectors to pick up. Even spending the evenings alone without Facebook and Twitter wouldn't induce them to head to the garbage dump and try retrieving those TVs.
So even if the arithmetic is fairly simple, and we can see that annual oil production will drop to half of its peak level by 2030, and if we can easily calculate that the drop will be accompanied by a roughly equal decline in most other non-renewable resources, we can tell ourselves that pulling off a few wings is no problem. They can just grow back again. China's Great Leap Forward will be nothing like the Great Lurch Downward, but if we see people lying by the side of the road, we can tell ourselves that they're just resting their eyes. In any case, there are plenty of respected academics who will tell you that cannibalism is just a myth.
Peter Goodchild is the author of Survival Skills of the North American Indians, published by Chicago Review Press. His email address is prjgoodchild[at]gmail.com
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