Just Because You're Paranoid

[degringolade]

 

Impressionism / Willard Metcalf/ Flying Shadows

Been pondering fate of late.  Right now I am at the intersection of pattern recognition and risk management, and it appears that I am on the wrong side of town.

OK...straight up front, it really does look to me that the current situation on the planet I inhabit is getting a mite unstable.  Maybe I am over-reacting.  That has been known to happen.  Truth be told,I am just happy that it has taken this long to get to this liminal state. Quite happy indeed.  

But after a couple of gummies a couple of times, and now sagging down the last of my “Lot 7” porter (BTW, not my best at all) I am sitting on the front porch and trying to come ups with a guess regarding the approximate possibility of a major systems failure in the next twelve years (I really don’t see any use of planning past 80.  That shit just ain’t gonna happen).

So.  Gotta figure out where the origin is.

Here is where I go out on a limb.  I am now creating a unit of measure called a Systems Failure Estimate (SFE).  This is in now way an accurate measure.  It is just the “gut feel” that I have when I have finished digesting as much information about the world as I can from as widely variate sources as I can possibly jam into the inadequate perception of the world around us as provided here in the source of our woes called the Internet.

Now, I am sending you over to re-read Dmitry’s “Five Stages of Collapse”.  Now, don’t think that I am asking you to agree with his conclusions, but the way that he frames the ideas seems to me to be fairly useful.  

So, per per Dmitry, I propose to use these definitions. I am using them as pretty damn good description.  I have liked the models that he has presented here since I first read them over at Mike Ruppert’s place in the long ago:

1. Stage 1: Financial collapse. Faith in “business as usual” is lost. The future is no longer assumed to resemble the past in any way that allows risk to be assessed and financial assets to be guaranteed. Financial institutions become insolvent; savings are wiped out, and access to capital is lost.

2. Stage 2: Commercial collapse. Faith that “the market shall provide” is lost. Money is devalued and/or becomes scarce, commodities are hoarded, import and retail chains break down, and widespread shortages of survival necessities become the norm.

3. Stage 3: Political collapse. Faith that “the government will take care of you” is lost. As official attempts to mitigate widespread loss of access to commercial sources of survival necessities fail to make a difference, the political establishment loses legitimacy and relevance.

4. Stage 4: Social collapse. Faith that “your people will take care of you” is lost. As local social institutions, be they charities, community leaders, or other groups that rush in to fill the power vacuum, run out of resources or fail through internal conflict.

5. Stage 5: Cultural collapse. Faith in the goodness of humanity is lost. People lose their capacity for “kindness, generosity, consideration, affection, honesty, hospitality, compassion, charity” (Turnbull, The Mountain People). Families disband and compete as individuals for scarce resources. The new motto becomes “May you die today so that I die tomorrow” (Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago). There may even be some cannibalism.

Now, where I think that the model kind of breaks down in that it presents the five stages of collapse as sequential.  Now, there is nothing wrong with this, his guess is as good as mine (hell, it might well be better, we are grasping at smoke here.)  I take a differing view of looking at it, I kinda think that you can assign a single probability of the stages landing in the neat sequential order are pretty slim.  As WIlliam Gibson says, the future is here, it just isn’t evenly distributed.  

So what I propose is kind of a big ball with five sections.  Immediately below is an example of the ball with a value of 31 (out of a possible 500 as I am assigning each stage of collapse with a 0-100 value.  The values are 0=”peaches and cream” and 100=”we are so completely fucked”

Now, the number 31 is kinda arbitrary in this example.  A quick look at the values assigned will reveal to the numerate the source of the values assigned.

But the trouble with this kind of graphing is that scale matters too.  Here is a chart of SME with 10x values

 

But the 10x values don’t reflect the scale.  Here are approximate sizes for comparison.

OK Done for today.  I’ll keep working on this.