New Scientist has a look at the propensity people have for apocalyptic predictions and some reasons why to be optimistic - Reasons to be optimistic for the future.

WE HUMANS have a natural tendency to believe that our own generation is living in extraordinary times. The past is littered with apocalyptic predictions, and within living memory dire warnings have been made about nuclear conflagration, communist takeover, a new ice age, global famine, a population crisis, deadly new airborne viruses, the millennium bug, the singularity... The list goes on.

As we approach the end of the first decade of the 21st century, apocalyptic thinking is thriving. There seems little doubt that we confront a host of unprecedented problems on an unprecedented scale, from economic meltdown to environmental degradation.

Are we just falling prey to our doomsaying disposition? No. The fact that so many earlier catastrophic predictions did not materialise does not mean that current anxieties are unfounded. The global reach of today's problems means we are truly living in extraordinary times.

That past predictions did not come true wasn't entirely down to dubious forecasting or good luck, however. Humans may tend to make mountains out of molehills, but when confronted by genuine existential threats - which appears to be most of the time - we have the ability to face them down. As a species, we are good at meeting the challenges before us.

When confronted by genuine existential threats, we have the ability to face them down
It is in this spirit that we launch a four-week campaign exploring ways to make the world a better place. It will come as no surprise that our starting point is the power of reason. From that springs an ironclad belief that the world can be made better through the application of science and rational thinking. ...

So talk of making the world a better place is not starry-eyed idealism. It is about survival - the long-term survival of the civilisation we have built and the lifestyles we have come to enjoy. On pages 30 to 39, we look at just a few of the radical changes we should be considering, from legalising drugs to taking Fridays off work, forever.

The Guardian has a debate between 2 factions of doomer thought - Goerge Monbiot arguing for a relatively optimistic radical transformation of the present against Paul Kingsnorth's darker vision - Is there any point in fighting to stave off industrial apocalypse?.

Dear George

On the desk in front of me is a set of graphs. The horizontal axis of each represents the years 1750 to 2000. The graphs show, variously, population levels, CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, exploitation of fisheries, destruction of tropical forests, paper consumption, number of motor vehicles, water use, the rate of species extinction and the totality of the human economy's gross domestic product.

What grips me about these graphs (and graphs don't usually grip me) is that though they all show very different things, they have an almost identical shape. A line begins on the left of the page, rising gradually as it moves to the right. Then, in the last inch or so – around 1950 – it veers steeply upwards, like a pilot banking after a cliff has suddenly appeared from what he thought was an empty bank of cloud.

The root cause of all these trends is the same: a rapacious human economy bringing the world swiftly to the brink of chaos. We know this; some of us even attempt to stop it happening. Yet all of these trends continue to get rapidly worse, and there is no sign of that changing soon. What these graphs make clear better than anything else is the cold reality: there is a serious crash on the way.

Yet very few of us are prepared to look honestly at the message this reality is screaming at us: that the civilisation we are a part of is hitting the buffers at full speed, and it is too late to stop it. Instead, most of us – and I include in this generalisation much of the mainstream environmental movement – are still wedded to a vision of the future as an upgraded version of the present. We still believe in "progress", as lazily defined by western liberalism. We still believe that we will be able to continue living more or less the same comfortable lives (albeit with more windfarms and better lightbulbs) if we can only embrace "sustainable development" rapidly enough; and that we can then extend it to the extra 3 billion people who will shortly join us on this already gasping planet. ...

Dear Paul

Like you I have become ever gloomier about our chances of avoiding the crash you predict. For the past few years I have been almost professionally optimistic, exhorting people to keep fighting, knowing that to say there is no hope is to make it so. I still have some faith in our ability to make rational decisions based on evidence. But it is waning.

If it has taken governments this long even to start discussing reform of the common fisheries policy – if they refuse even to make contingency plans for peak oil – what hope is there of working towards a steady-state economy, let alone the voluntary economic contraction ultimately required to avoid either the climate crash or the depletion of crucial resources?

The interesting question, and the one that probably divides us, is this: to what extent should we welcome the likely collapse of industrial civilisation? Or more precisely: to what extent do we believe that some good may come of it?

I detect in your writings, and in the conversations we have had, an attraction towards – almost a yearning for – this apocalypse, a sense that you see it as a cleansing fire that will rid the world of a diseased society. If this is your view, I do not share it. I'm sure we can agree that the immediate consequences of collapse would be hideous: the breakdown of the systems that keep most of us alive; mass starvation; war. These alone surely give us sufficient reason to fight on, however faint our chances appear. But even if we were somehow able to put this out of our minds, I believe that what is likely to come out on the other side will be worse than our current settlement.

Here are three observations: 1 Our species (unlike most of its members) is tough and resilient; 2 When civilisations collapse, psychopaths take over; 3 We seldom learn from others' mistakes. ...

John Michael Greer has some thoughts about the debate at Energy Bulletin, wryly noting Monbiot is a modern day Don Quixote "fighting for windmills rather than against them" - A Terrible Ambivalence (taken from The Archdruid report). By his standards I'm just a "technofantasist" but at least he's a well written collapse afficionado.

I’d meant to spend this week’s report talking about scarcity industrialism, the kind of economy that will be defined for us in the near future by the conjunction of resource scarcity with the immense mass of embodied energy we call an industrial civilization. There’s a great deal to be said about the forms such an economy will likely take, and the harsh challenges and unexpected opportunities that it will bring to a world still far too used to getting as much energy as it wants whenever it happens to want it.

Still, that necessary theme will have to wait a week or two. Last month the online edition of The Guardian, one of the leading (or at least surviving) British newspapers, featured a debate about the future of industrial society between journalist, poet and cofounder of The Dark Mountain Project Paul Kingsnorth, and the sturdy radical George Monbiot, who's most recently made a name for himself as a tireless advocate for drastic measures to counter global warming. It was refreshing to see the possibility of the collapse of our civilization debated on so public a forum, and of course it didn't hurt my feelings any to be cited as an authority of sorts by one of the participants. Still, the debate left me with a deep sense of disquiet, which has only become stronger. in the days that followed and finally made this point unavoidable.

At some risk of oversimplification, the argument between Monbiot and Kingsnorth may be summed up more or less as follows. Both agree that industrial civilization faces imminent collapse. Monbiot argues that collapse might still be prevented if we all pull together, that the only alternative is letting total collapse happen, and that this is unthinkable because billions of people will die horribly. He argues that the only alternative to preserving modern society in some improved form is a cataclysmic process of mass dieoff ending in a new dark age ruled by petty warlords, with some new earth-ravaging society likely to rise on the ruins of the old unless his preferred political solution gets put in place to control our species' ecocidal tendencies.

Kingsnorth rejects all this. He insists that collapse can't be prevented, and in any case should be allowed to happen, because industrial civilization is a "planetary weapon of mass destruction" and letting it collapse is less destructive than allowing it to continue. He cites my concept of the Long Descent to argue that the end of industrial civilization could be a lot less traumatic than Monbiot thinks it must be, insists that ecocide is inherent in our present society rather than in humanity as a whole, and suggests that whatever replaces our society is bound to be less dreadful than what we have now.

Anyone who has listened to debates about the future of industrial society at any point in the last fifty years or so will surely find both these arguments familiar. Since the limits to growth first became visible on the horizon of our civilization's future, the great majority of those who took the time to notice them either insisted that humanity can and must do something about them, and offered some plan for reaching a better future, or insisted that nothing at all could be done about them, and claimed that the arrival of those limits would bring a better future.

To be fair to Monbiot and Kingsnorth, their stances in the debate expressed moderate and nuanced versions of these common tropes. It wouldn't be hard at all to find examples much further out in either direction – out well past Monbiot, say, one of the current technofantasists or political zealots who believe that a world teetering on the edge of doom can be transformed into Utopia if only their pet project were to be adopted by all; out well past Kingsnorth, perhaps, one of the neoprimitivists who daydream about the carefree life in the bountiful lap of nature that would surely arrive if only six billion inconvenient people would hurry up and die.

The arguments in the Guardian debate are far less extreme, and far more reasonable, than these. So why do they leave me shaking my head, convinced that neither one has grasped what's most essential about the predicament before us?

The places where Monbiot misses the turning, as I see it, stand out clearly, and longtime readers of this blog will likely have no difficulty at all anticipating my disagreements with his views. To begin with, his call to arms is an epic case of locking the barn door when the horse has not only left but mailed back a forwarding address from another state. The end of industrial civilization would almost certainly have been forestalled if sensible policies had been put in place in the 1950s; there was arguably still some hope of success if all-out efforts had been launched in the 1970s; at this point, with Hubbert's peak already past, CO2 piling up in the atmosphere and the world's human population approaching seven billion, the chances of preventing collapse compare unfavorably with those of a snowball in Beelzebub's back yard.

Now it could be argued that any possibility is worth pursuing if the alternative is dire enough, and this is basically the argument Monbiot makes. Unfortunately his plan of action is simply to dust off the same toolkit of protest methods that activists have been using with diminishing returns, and governments have been brushing aside with increasing success, since the dawn of the twentieth century. The handful of successes achieved by those methods many decades ago have imposed a bizarre astigmatism of the imagination on the left; the stereotyped methods of protest have become so sacrosanct, or so automatic, that the mere fact that they have failed consistently for years never quite seems to register.

All this invites comparison with Don Quixote, even if Monbiot is fighting for windmills rather than against them. Woeful countenances aside, though, insisting on the pursuit of an unreachable goal through ineffective methods is not normally a productive way to prepare for a difficult future. There's nothing in Monbiot's proposal that hasn't been tried repeatedly since the 1950s without having the least impact on the trajectory of industrial society, and as the saying has it, if you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always gotten.

All this may seem like support for Paul Kingsnorth's side of the argument, and of course it parallels a number of the points he makes in the debate and elsewhere in his writings. It seems fair to say that my views are much more in sympathy with his than with Monbiot's, and I suspect that Kingsnorth would agree with that assessment, as he's the one who cited me to support one of his arguments. Yet there's a sour note running through his contributions to the debate, and it comes out forcefully every time he finesses the human cost of the transformation ahead of us.

Monbiot, to give him his due, calls him on this repeatedly. A deindustrial world, as Monbiot correctly points out, will be able to support maybe two billion people at most – my working guess, for what it's worth, is that this is too optimistic by a factor of four – and this means that in any future that doesn't include the survival of the industrial system, a lot of people are going to die. Now of course he goes from there to imply, more or less, that yet another round of protest marches is the only way to keep five billion human corpses from hitting the ground in a single planetwide thud, and this doesn't exactly follow. Still, the basic point is valid, and Kingsnorth's efforts to evade it are troubling.

Yet that evasion is inseparable from a central theme of Kingsnorth's argument, which is that a better world can be expected to rise out of the wreckage of the present. That Monbiot's argument also hinges on his hopes for a bright new tomorrow adds a rich irony to the debate. Both men are proclaiming the gospel of a better future; their disagreements are simply about what form that future will take and how we will get there. Both assume that we can have, and ought to have, a future that's even shinier than the present. It's a very common assumption, so common that many of those who are reading these words may share it, but it's also the place where the worm gets in and rots the apple to the core. ...

Playboy has an article on the ongoing fascination apocaphiles have with global collapse / transformation in 2012 - APOCALYPSE 2012.

Displayed on Pace’s dining room table is a collection of weapons: an assault rifle, a shotgun, numerous handguns, hunting knives and enough ammo to start a small war. Alongside the arms are gas masks, antiradiation pills and about $10,000 worth of gold and silver. The gold and silver will come in handy when paper money becomes worthless, which it already has, according to Pace. It’s just that people don’t know it yet. Don’t call him a survivalist, though: “To me a survivalist is some white supremacist living up in the mountains somewhere. I’m not a survivalist. I’m a preparer.”

And there’s a lot to prepare for, according to Pace, who anticipates a world in the not too distant future where "you’ll need a wheelbarrow full of dollars to buy a loaf of bread, just like in Zimbabwe.” Catastrophic climate change will have swamped the coastal cities. (“You’ll want to be at least 300 feet above sea level.”) Law and order will have broken down. (“You’ll want to stay away from the population centers to avoid the mobs.”) And food will be scarce. (“If we have a major crop failure, millions of people will starve.”) But what Pace fears most is a terrorist nuke that could destroy America’s electrical grid: “If they really wanted to disrupt America, an airburst nuke would provide an electromagnetic pulse 300 miles wide that would probably cascade the rest of the system. Without electricity we’ve really got a problem.”

Whatever happens, Pace intends to be ready. “In my opinion 2012 is the year of collapse,” he says. “The perfect storm approaching is a conglomeration of crescendos. The financial collapse, political corruption, natural disaster, terrorism and resource scarcity will culminate in wars and revolution.”

Pace is not alone. In the past few years a growing number of citizens across the globe—survivalists, conspiracy theorists, alternative religion seekers, former military officers, UFO buffs, hard-core Bible-thumpers, ordinary housewives who,post-Katrina, don’t trust the government to save their loved ones if a disaster occurs—have become fixated on December 21, 2012 as EOTWAWKI (“end of the world as we know it”). The Mayan long-count calendar supposedly predicts 2012 as the year in which a 5,000-year cycle of civilization will come to an abrupt halt. The Mayan civilization, a sophisticated culture of temples and cities that flourished in what is now Mexico, mysteriously collapsed around the ninth century. The Mayans have been a source of fascination for spiritual Western tourists since the Beats, particularly William Burroughs, who peppered his novels with references to Mayan timekeeping. The idea that Mayans predicted the world would end in 2012 has been around since at least the 1980s, when writer and 2012 guru José Argüelles popularized the concept with his book The Mayan Factor.

For any number of reasons the 2012 meme has caught on. The media, in documentaries such as Disinfo.com’s 2012: Science or Superstition and books such as Daniel Pinchbeck’s 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, have endlessly chronicled the movement and what to expect. Pinchbeck perhaps more than anyone else has become the great—and most controversial—advocate for a transformational 2012. Apocalypse fever is set to hit multiplexes with the November release of Roland Emmerich’s big-budget Hollywood dystopian disaster movie 2012, starring John Cusack and Amanda Peet.

A cottage industry of small companies that supply products to 2012ers is now thriving, offering everything from bullets to backup generators to full-size bunkers (such as a $36,000 six-person bargain-basement underground bomb shelter, complete with a nuclear, biological and chemical filtering system, which a Virginia Beach company called Hardened Structures offers to deliver and install anywhere in the U.S.). In May the Associated Press reported that suppliers of survivalist gear and military surplus stores nationwide had seen as much as a 50 percent rise in business in recent months. One survivalist told the AP that the website of his consulting business—which teaches newcomers emergency preparedness—had seen a threefold increase in traffic in the past 14 months. ...

The 2012 movement would be easy to dismiss as pseudo-mystical mumbo jumbo if it weren’t for the disturbing real-world trends that inform the less fanciful predictions of bad times ahead: catastrophic climate change, terrorism, nuclear proliferation, financial collapse, swine flu, peak oil, peak food. This is the everyday fodder of CNN and Newsweek, not science fiction or religious fantasy. Home prices have declined almost 33 percent since their peak in 2006, and the unemployment rate in America is the worst it has been since 1983. When you add the specter of nuclear-armed religious fanatics, who wouldn’t be a bit anxious about what’s coming down the cosmic sewer pipe?

Toby Hemenway has an article on the genesis of peak oil doomerism, including a history of apocalyptic thinking through the ages- The Origins of Peak Oil Doomerism

People in the Peak Oil movement chafe at the label of doomer, but many of us do have an apocalyptic bent. Although plenty of Peak Oil commentary is sober analysis, a survey of the major websites and books quickly brings up apocalyptic titles like dieoff.org, oilcrash.com, The Death of the Oil Economy, The End of Suburbia, and The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight. Peak Oil writings are sprinkled with predictions that billions will die, civil order will collapse, and even that civilization will end. Scientists, too, aren’t immune. During geologist Ken Deffeyes’s Peak Oil presentations, he displays the words “war,” “famine,” “pestilence,” and “death”—the four horsemen of the apocalypse. The Right, the saying goes, has the Left Behind books, and the Left has Peak Oil. Both predict that the end is near.

After I published an article suggesting that Peak Oil may lead “merely” to widespread unemployment and hardship rather than collapse, hundreds wrote to tell me I was a naïve optimist and a cornucopian. A significant part of the Peak Oil community holds the rock-solid sentiment that the only future is one of chaos. While the end of the oil era possesses “death and taxes” certitude, plausible post-peak scenarios span a wide scope. So why is the most touted one the most extreme? Predictions of any stripe, a review will quickly show, are almost always wrong. The future rarely goes in the direction we expect. The certainty of coming doom held by so many made me wonder why we are drawn to societal collapse and our own extinction.

The point of this article is not to argue for or against a Peak Oil collapse—a futile debate that won’t end until we enter that future—or to discuss whether our civilization deserves to continue. Rather, it’s an exploration into why, given an impending crisis or major challenge, many people in our culture spiral so quickly and automatically toward an “end of the world” vision rather than imagining any of the countless other options.

My earliest hypothesis was that a person’s chosen energy future was based more on personality than on data: Given the same information, people I knew to be optimists generally envisioned a positive future, while pessimists descended into doomerism. But in this simplistic reasoning, I was leaving out a growing mass of critiques of civilization itself by authors such as Joseph Tainter, Derrick Jensen, and Daniel Quinn, and others esteemed by many Peak Oil adherents. While these writers argue that civilization is evil, unsustainable, and must collapse, they also posit that human beings deserve something better that can only arise after this culture dies. This death-and-rebirth thinking didn’t fit my “optimist versus pessimist” hypothesis. And seeing how vehemently and urgently people argue for doom-and-gloom—I’ve literally had my lapels grabbed—made me suspect that neither individual psyche nor the cold logic of pure reason was at work here.

I now believe that Peak Oil catastrophism is largely a manifestation of our primary cultural myth: that all things end with suffering, death, and then resurrection. Belief in apocalypse is programmed into western civilization. Given our heritage, “the end is nigh” is the nearly unavoidable personal and collective response to times of uncertainty and rapid change.

Apocalypticism is at the core of the Judeo-Christian social mythology, and it influences our beliefs far more deeply than we are conscious of. I can hear the objections: “I’m not religious—I’ve never even been to church.” But that’s like saying, “I never studied Greece, so ancient Greek culture hasn’t influenced me in any way.” Cultural beliefs are in the air we breathe. We are programmed by our knowledge of mortality and of the natural world, as well as by millennia of myth-telling, to believe that all things, from organisms to businesses to civilizations, progress from birth to a shuddering death and, often, a renewal in new form. As much as the Religious Right’s boast that America is a Christian nation makes liberals uncomfortable, there is some truth to it. From the Declaration of Independence’s “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights” and the dollar’s “In God We Trust,” to once-pagan, Christian co-opted Easter egg hunts, Judeo-Christian beliefs saturate our culture. And the idea of apocalypse, that some time soon the End Times will be upon us and all will be transformed, is one of the most fundamental tenets of that system. A look at the history and particulars of apocalypticism will show the truth of that statement, and reveals that Peak Oil catastrophism conforms to our apocalyptic myth in such detail that it is difficult to deny its role.

The archetypal apocalypse story in the West is, of course, that of Jesus of Nazareth. Both his life’s story and his messianic prophecies of Judgment Day reflect oppression, death, and transformation, following the common arc of the apocalypse myth. This trajectory is echoed in the Peak Oil projection of increasing global despoliation and chaos, collapse, and the belief that “after Peak Oil, everything will change.” But this myth has also emerged hundreds of other times in our history. Jesus would have remained one of thousands of minor apocalyptic prophets, all predicting a similar end, if not for the brilliant public relations of Saul of Tarsus and other early Christians. And one of their tactics was to piggy-back onto already existing apocalypse stories.

Apocalypse myths predate Jesus by centuries. Ancient Greece, Persia, and Egypt are their primary birthplaces for the West. In Greek mythology, Zeus destroyed the world several times via flood, fire, and war. In one typical example, Zeus, seeing that humanity had become corrupt, ended the world by flood, sparing only two people to found a new race. And there it is: the basic pattern of apocalypse that’s been followed ever since. Humanity becomes wicked and is destroyed except for an elect, who go on to birth a new world.

Always a Social Context

Most people think of apocalyptic groups as religious sects. Religion and apocalypse are still tightly wedded, especially in the US, where a Gallup Poll reports 75% of the people believe in life after death. But as religion has been replaced with other organizing principles such as science and economics, so too have the reasons for apocalypse. Religious people express their doomsday belief through acts of their deities, but the common feature of apocalyptic belief is not religion. It is a social background of upheaval and anxiety. When times get uncertain, people in Judeo-Christian culture gravitate to the idea that there will be an end to the wickedness and misery through disaster and collapse.

An example is one of the first Western apocalypse stories with a known historical setting, Daniel’s prophetic dream of the world’s end in the biblical Book of Daniel. Here, political and social strife paints the background. This story was written about 165 BCE, during the height of a Jewish revolt. Jews had enjoyed several centuries of peaceful rule under first the Persians and then Ptolemy, but Palestine then fell under a Syrian-Greek tyrant. He trampled on civil and spiritual liberties, and forbade Jewish religious ceremony. The result was the Jewish Maccabean uprising. During this, Daniel dreamed of four beasts, each representing a successive ruler of Palestine, in which the final beast would “devour the earth . . . and break it in pieces.” This rapacious empire would then be overthrown, and only Israel would be saved. Nearly every subsequent example of apocalyptic belief occurs in a similar social context of upheaval, oppression, and alienation.

The hallucinatory Book of Revelation is the best-known apocalyptic text, but early Christians and Jews had many other books for solace in difficult times. The first-century books of Ezra and Baruch, excluded from the Bible, tell of a time of terrible hardship and injustice, symbolized by the wrath of a devouring eagle. The eagle was the well-known emblem of the Roman Empire, which held Christians and many Jews under brutal repression at the time these books were written. This empire, it was prophesied, would soon be destroyed by a mighty warrior, and all those who collaborated in the empire’s rule would die.

A later set of end-times texts, known as the Sibylline books, first appeared in the fourth century after the death of Emperor Constantine, when rule of the failing Roman Empire was contested by his two surviving sons, Constans and Constantius II. Constans, who favored the Nicene version of Christianity that is common today, was murdered by his brother. The Sibylline books mirror the fearful response of Catholics to this killing and reversal for their beliefs, and tell of a time of tyrants who oppress the poor and enrich the guilty. The books say a new leader will appear and destroy the heathens and their temples. A similar set of Sibylline books appeared when Syrian Christians suffered under Moslem rule in the seventh century. In all these cases, people hoped for the end of social disorder through catastrophe.

Countless other apocalyptic movements arose in similar contexts of confusion and oppression. In 13th century Germany, Frederick II was enmeshed in bitter conflict with the Pope, claiming that the Church was irredeemably corrupt. During this clash, Joachin of Fiore arose as a prophet to preach of approaching last days when the Church would be destroyed, choosing 1260 as the date of its collapse. Later, in the reign of the singularly ineffective Frederick III, when the gap between rich and poor grew enormous, and lawless nobles extorted the populace, the Bohemian Wirsburg brothers attracted thousands who believed the final days would come in 1467. Apocalyptic cults arise, it seems, in a context of oppression, uncertainly, and corruption. And in most cases, the subsequent destruction of the wicked was to be followed by floods, storms, and plagues that would decimate mankind, reminiscent of claims that global warming and ecosystem collapse will come on the heels of Peak Oil, as if one calamity isn’t enough. ...

On the subject of apocaphilia and reversalism, Tom Whipple's latest "peak oil crisis" column in the FCNP is heavy on doom - The Peak Oil Crisis: Civil Unrest. No mention of green new deals or rapid shifts to clean energy sources and transport systems to be found unfortunately - just talk about "involuntary changes" that people will need to make to their lifestyles that seems rather totalitarian to me (did all that time in the CIA make Tom start to think like the Soviets ?). Why not go for persuading people to make the necessary adaptive changes voluntarily ? We'll all end up with a better world in the end (rather than the locked down world of rationing and limited transport that some seem to think inevitable).

Before grappling with 2009, it might be useful to remind ourselves that there is a dark side to what lies ahead.

There was a little flurry in the news last week when it was discovered that the Army War College had released a report talking about preparing for civil unrest in the U.S. When you read the report, it turns out to be yet another warning about generals preparing for the last war. It devotes only three pages to the idea that the Army might soon find itself so embroiled in helping local authorities cope with civil unrest that international commitments, such as the war on terrorism, could become secondary concerns.

Since the close of the Civil War, America has enjoyed nearly 150 years of domestic tranquility. There were, of course the Indian wars, some labor disputes and a handful of urban riots in recent decades, but these were isolated and did not last for long. Even during the great depression of the 1930's America's social fabric stayed largely intact. Signs that these idyllic decades may be coming to close are starting to arise. In the last few weeks the deteriorating economic situation has seen serious disturbances in Greece and Thailand. We are beginning to read of disturbances in Russia and China. ...

Of all the world's nations, America is probably the worst prepared to deal with deep, prolonged economic hardships, for more of us have disconnected from 19th century, rural, somewhat self-sufficient, lifestyles than in most other countries. In the 1930's many found that they could still return to the family farm, where food, shelter, and meaningful work was available. In 2010 that option exists for very few; we have become dependent on a complex infrastructure fueled by oil for our food, water, clothing and warmth. Start reducing the flow of oil and increasing numbers of us are going to become increasingly desperate.

There are too many turns in the twisting paths that the current economic and oil depletion crises could take to speculate on the details of what is likely to happen. However, there are many potential "failed states" around that we are likely to have concrete examples, shortly, of what happens in the 21st century when civil order breaks down.

It is clear that we are already seeing the opening ripples of what might turn out to be the major social problem of the century - caring for large numbers of destitute people. Most of the social nets in America such as unemployment insurance, charities or shelters have strict time or limited resources. Already charity and religious contributions are starting to drop.

As the situation worsens, it is going to be much cheaper for governments at all levels to provide essential food, shelter and other services, rather than wait for desperate people to start stealing and become ensnared in the criminal justice system. One of the key benchmarks of the next few years is how quickly governments will redeploy resources away from 20th Century priorities such as space travel, expensive weapons systems, and highways towards simply getting people through the decades of transition from current lifestyles. The change will not be an easy one.

Before we get to mobs in the streets, we are likely to go through a time of increasing petty crime and the ensuing pressures on the criminal justice system. Somebody is going to have to think through the appropriate response to major increases in shoplifting and burglaries by people who are trying to feed children after having exhausted all other avenues of assistance.

It is likely that who is kept in prison and for what is going to have to be rethought. State and local revenues are already dropping rapidly and the day is not far away when choices between funding school systems and maintaining vast prison systems will need to be addressed. Alternative forms of deterring criminal behavior and forms of punishment will need to be devised. Indeed the economic situation could deteriorate so rapidly that some of these changes may need to be made in months rather than years.

It is likely that part of the of the solution to getting hundreds of millions through decades of shortages will involve increasing infringement on what many now consider their civil liberties. Better forms of personal identification will be necessary. It is likely that rationing of many things we take for granted such as fuel, food, medical services and travel and even places of residence may become necessary. Other societies have found such measures necessary in times of crisis.

America has not faced a serious domestic crisis for 150 years. We have never faced a situation where 300 million of us bound up in a complex and interdependent society has had to make major involuntary changes in our lifestyles.

Jamais at Open The Future has a post on the problem of reversalism (or "reactionary futurism" as he puts it) as a lens for viewing the future, particularly when it involves unlikely predictions of apocalypse and a desire to see what you want to see - Aspirational Futurism.

One of the secondary effects of the latest set of crises to grip the world is the rise of essays and articles from various insightful folks, laying out scenarios of what the future will look like in an era of limited resources, energy, money, and so forth. Most of these follow a similar pattern: a list of reasonable depictions of a more limited future, and at least one item that seems completely out of the blue.

The best example has to come from James Kunstler's description of the world to come in his "non-fiction" The Long Emergency and his explicitly fictional World Made By Hand. Along with his schadenfreude-soaked claims about the end of suburbia, automobiles, and all things superficial, he comes in with stark assertions that we'll all be making our own music and acting on stage for each other, instead of listening to that damnable recorded "rock-roll" music and the disco and suchlike.

Yeah, I'm no big fan of JHK's reactionary futurism, but this points to a bigger trend, one that I'm seeing across a variety of political spectra: the vision of an apocalyptic near-future as a catalyst for making the kinds of social/economic/political/technological/religious/etc. changes that the ignorant or deceived masses wouldn't have otherwise made.

This isn't just Rapturism, where a glorious transformation happens, which may or may not have nasty results for some; in that kind of scenario, an apocalypse isn't a trigger so much as a possible side-effect. In this kind of scenario -- "aspirational apocaphilia" -- the global disaster is a requisite enabler.

It's a notable trend in that it's something that those of us who consider ourselves ethical futurists need to pay close attention to in our own work. I'd love to see the current crises result in a variety of more sustainable social patterns -- but I have to be careful not to mistake my desire with what would be a useful forecast.