Ending and Beginning

One hundred years ago, progress was always good. It meant more leisure, less pain, less work, longer lives, and more ease and comfort.

But sometime in the last century, many of us began to realize that progress was not what it used to be. We began to see that progress was a double-edged sword. We began to understand that progress for some meant more hardship for other people, or harm to the planet, or even detriment to the individual who is supposedly the beneficiary of the progress; in other words, we began to realize that the American version of progress is never wholly good. And so the idea of progress today is much more complicated than it was in 1909.

In 2009, progress might mean giving up some of our trinkets and baubles and comforts and food in order to lead a more rigorous, austere, but meaningful life.

Change is always happening; all that changes is the rate of change. We live in a world today that is different from the world of a decade or year or month ago.

So when we talk about the TEOTWAWKI, we’re talking about dramatic changes to the world that make us realize change has occurred, that things are not the way they used to be. For most of us over 50, comparing our lives and the world today to our lives and the world of our childhood, it’s already the end of the world as we knew it. If we could somehow compare those two editions of the world side by side, the changes would be dramatic.

But for most of us, TEOTWAWKI means dramatic changes in a short period of time — the changes of the last 40 or 50 years, for example, compressed into 5 or fewer years. And I don’t know if that will ever happen. It may be that the truly dramatic changes most of us expect in the near future will never reach the critical level to shock people into calling the end of the world as we know it.

I think for most of us, the end result of most of the changes happening in the world today will be a return to ordinary human poverty. There will probably not be any cataclysmic world-wide events that will release the zombies, it will be more like a gradual, uneven slide down into the poverty that has characterized most of human existence. And if it’s gradual enough, we may not even recognize what’s happening. The wealth of the late 20th and early 21st centuries will be nothing more than a distant memory — for most, a myth.

Yes, I want it. I want TEOTWAWKI.

Why am I so crazy as to believe I want that? And how many other doomers believe in impending doom more because they want it than because they actually believe, based on an honest appraisal of the world’s situation, that it’s really going to happen in their lifetime?

I can see it: I convince myself and my family that the End is Near, and we move to a farm where a sustainable, self-sufficient life is possible. And so that life, and the unrelenting labor and privation that goes along with it, begins.

But I’m still not happy.

We live out in the country. The roads around here often follow the borders of a section (one square mile), but in our case the roads trace out a rectangle to the North that is 1 1/4 x 1 mile. Close to the opposite corner of the rectangle from where we live, about 1 1/2 miles away, there’s a motorsports family. There are two young motocross-riding men in that family, and they have a little dirt track on their property. They’re pretty good, and they race, they’ve even gained some local fame for their abilities on the motocross track. I can hear them, off in the distance, practicing, riding around and around their loop. It’s not really annoying since it’s so far away; it’s just one of the background sounds in my little corner of the world (although I pity their next-door neighbors — living next to that would drive me insane — seriously).

But still, when I’m working out in my yard, and I hear them, I wish that gasoline cost ten or twenty dollars a gallon and that such a foolish waste of it was not just unwise and immoral (which it already is), but also impractical to the point of idiocy and perhaps illegal. I want something or someone to take those people and force some sense into their heads.

I could go on and on here about how those people are living in a fool’s paradise of cheap gas and past glory, but my intention here is not to analyze them. I’m trying to get at the root of what makes me want those people to stop.

I get the same feeling when I read or think about the Wall Street investment bankers making millions in bonuses every year. I want them to be forced to stop what they’re doing and to be forced to return to the reality most of us not on Wall Street inhabit.

Why?

Because riding motocross and being an investments banker are such peripheral things, that’s why. They are extra, unnecessary things, and they distract from an understanding of the meaning of life. I want everyone to be doing those things that are intimately associated with getting food and water and shelter for themselves and their families, and only those things. And I don’t mean making tons of money to pay for what it takes to keep your family alive, I mean making or doing it with your own hands.

There’s a part of me that wants to cut life to the bone, to remove everything that isn’t essential. I believe that’s how I should live my life. It’s part of wanting to experience and understand what is truly life without all the frills that make it so hard to see what’s at the core. I believe that is the path of wisdom. I believe that is the path of wisdom for myself…and for everyone (who doesn’t believe, in their heart, that if only people were more like them the world would be a better place?). And I believe that a sure route to that simplicity is to raise the price of gasoline to five or ten times its current level, and let that force people to live locally, to become personally involved in the production of food and provision of shelter, to get rid of that which is unnecessary and distracting. In other words, TEOTWAWKI.