The End Of The World Is Just The Beginning

Peter Zeihan's book, now on the MUST READ list.

Having noticed the Zeihan on Geopolitics YouTube channel a couple months ago in the context of digging for more information on Panama and Venezuela, I first listened to what was immediately applicable. And then I started on the rest of his videos.

Part of why I went through his library was due to encountering Disconcerting Inauthenticity - there are a dozen scammers who take his audio, slap engaging but not really relevant photo/video montages over it, and they get a LOT of views. There are now half a dozen other articles here that involve his work, most recently Decivilization, which is a review of his latest book, The End of the World Is Just the Beginning.

Attention Conservation Notice:

This post reiterates the review in a less oblique fashion and places the book in context with some other futurism I’ve found useful over the years.

TEOTWIJTB:

Zeihan’s book offers seven chapters: The End of an Era, Transport, Finance, Energy, Industrial Materials, Manufacturing, and Agriculture. The primary driver behind his analysis is not agriculture, energy, or finance, all of which I’ve spent time on over the years. I was only vaguely aware of issues driven by demographics prior to reading this book, now I’m hunting for a book or online class that covers the topic in detail.

As a summary, we’ve had a golden century of industrialization that led to globalization, which is now inexorably drawing to a close due to the fact that industrialized societies fall below the 2.1 children per woman fertility rate needed to maintain such systems. Climate change is recognized for the disaster it is, but demographic reality was melting away our chances to manufacture solutions to climate problems well before we became collectively aware of Mother Nature’s response to our fossil fuel habit.

I place this book on the MUST READ list along with Barbara F. Walter’s How Civil Wars Start and David Ucko’s The Insurgent’s Dilemma, which could have been subtitled “How Civil Wars Progress”. But there are a collection of books about the future, both nonfiction and fiction, that I’ve found helpful over the years …

Dystopia Dead Ahead:

The first view of the future I read with an eye on peak oil, which was my concern circa 2007, was James Howard Kunstler’s The Long Emergency. The was followed relatively closely by Dmitry Orlov’s Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects, which does precisely what it says on the tin, and more recently his followup The Five Stages of Collapse. The five stages are not a fixed sequence; it’s possible for societies to self-arrest at various points during their tumble, and some are nicer than others.

The other books in a similar vein are on my cyberpunk shelf. I read Bruce Sterling’s Distraction not long after publication, and I now own my fourth paper copy of this classic. Every time I reread this post collapse political thriller I find more things I’ve personally experienced, and I’m very pointedly staying out of Louisiana because I don’t want to end up like the Anglo hacker in the book, shot by a gubernatorial candidate.

The other big influence are the Blue Ant trilogy from William Gibson. Years ago I signed an NDA for a television show in development that was right out of Pattern Recognition. The retired intelligence officer with a grudge in Spook Country is all too familiar. And there are aspects of my life that echo those of both Bobby Chombo and Milgrim in Zero History.

Conclusion:

The great big obvious in retrospect oh shit moment in Zeihan’s book?

Third, now that most of humanity has experienced things like electricity, it bears consideration that people will not consciously choose to go back to a preindustrial lifestyle, even if globalization collapses. Something the modern environmental movement often misses is that oil and natural gas are not only the world’s low-carbon fossil fuels, they are also the fuels that are internationally traded. In a post-globalized world, the primary fuel most countries can source locally is coal. And not just any coal, but low-caloric, low-temperature burning, high-contaminant soft or brown coal that generates far more carbon emissions than burning . . . almost anything else. We are completely capable as a species of devolving into a fractured, dark, poor, hungry world while still increasing greenhouse gas emissions.

I was on the right track when I took an interest in renewable ammonia back in 2007, but I suspect Roger Stone’s effort to steal the 2000 election was the inflection point, the make or break where the U.S. made the wrong choice.

Chemistry, geology, meteorology, and population dynamics all just do what they do, irregardless of the beliefs of humans observing them. We’ve got end of days nutters trying to hammer world events into their world model, which saves them. We’ve got Qanon, which is distressingly similar to ISIS in so many ways, churning out conspiracy theories that are swamping evangelical churches, and the outcome of those conspiracy theories save them. There’s a mildly less toxic Qanon branch that believes all debt will be erased, we’ll all live perfect lives to age 120 thanks to “medbeds”, and there are Nordic aliens involved in creating this new millennium. I’m not holding my breath for the advent of the Age of Aquarius.

Freeing myself of weird dogma and the weirdos pushing it was the primary motivation in my conversion to Buddhism twenty years ago. I find it comforting to have a belief system that doesn’t require me to believe nonsense, and which gives me some simple things to do throughout the day. The ending of Pax Americana and our golden century will be … unpleasant, at the very best. I can do things to reduce the suffering, and that gives me the openings to keep moving, even when things seem hopeless.