The View from my Bicycle [COLUMN]

What is ‘The Long Emergency’?

[all are marching and singing in cadence. One sings a sentence, the others repeat it]
Piggy, Ralph, Steve, Tony, Peter, Jack Merridew, Simon, Sam, Twin #1, Eric, Twin #2, Roger: Mama, mama can't you see? / What the Army's done to me? / They put me in a barber's chair. / Spun me 'round, I had no hair./ I used to drive a Cadillac. / Now I'm marching in a pack. / I used to drive a Chevrolet. / Now I'm marching for my pay.

Can you feel the stress levels rising? When the movie The Dark Knight opens, the music is a cicada-like buzz saw. The noise of stress, or growing disorder.
The disorder and trouble that has long been brewing, is starting to bubble over. The collapse of $639 billion Lehman brothers is the biggest bankruptcy ever. Wall Street hasn’t seen this much blood since the Great Depression. And here’s a heads-up: gas stations in Tennessee are running dry, US oil inventories are at record lows despite imports probing record highs. And I don’t know about you, but the price of ‘stuffs’ – food and fuel is gnawing at my personal stress levels. I notice the same with colleagues, who are taking more sick leave, and appear more withered by work and home demands than ever.

Personally, my stress levels have caused me to have two nasty bouts of illness. I've put on a lot of weight during this 'down and out' period - maxing out at 88kg. You can see the blank columns above are two weeks of no training. This week has been better, and hopefully next I will get to solid levels again (over 8 hours). I for one am having to work a lot harder and smarter to remain financially sound. What is happening on a collective scale is that populations are taking strain. Individuals are having to face the loss of cars, homes and as a result families break down through cycles of bickering culminating in divorce.

Piggy: We might have to live here for a long time! Maybe the rest of our lives! If we *are* stuck here until we get old, then we can't go on acting like kids! We've got to be sensible and make things work!
Ralph: [looking up] No!
[a rock is pushed off the cliff above, killing Piggy]
Ralph: You're not gonna get away with this.
Jack Merridew: Yeah? Well, what are you going to do, huh?

William Golding’s the Lord of the Flies is an allegory that becomes frighteningly appropriate with each passing day. Flies is the story about a group of young boys – from a military academy - who are stranded on a island. They try to govern themselves but fail with both disastrous and macabre results. Flies probes the manner in which human nature and individual welfare become antagonistic towards the common good. We know that today people are hyper individualistic. Part of this has been induced by the consumer mindset, where an individual purchases every indulgence to satisfy every ego want and customise every need. The motto of the consumer is ‘I deserve to have this simply because I want it, and because I can have it’. There is no consideration towards the environmental or social cost of a particular consumption choice multiplied thousands, or millions of times. An example is a person buying a hamburger at MacDonald’s. The singular purchase of ‘loving it’ may not spark the realisation that on a global scale, MacDonald's is responsible for a large portion of Amazon forest deforestation, as the insatiable carnivorous human demand for beef (hamburger patties) becomes manifest in the farmer’s of third world countries attempt to profit out of meeting these rapacious demands.

Even in our consumption of media, we listen to what we want and ignore or tune off what doesn’t suit us. This has made us opinionated and arrogant purveyors of not a collective truth, but cults of individual truth. Blogs represent one version of the many individuals strong desire to broadcast a unique message of judgements and opinions. How many blogs attempt to really engage with the world? How many attempt to dictate or profit from it? How many give in to simple self-interested ranting? Our consumption has explicitly begun to erode the common good – via pollution, environmental degradation, and ultimately, the collapse of sustainable resources.

It may sound like a euphemism – ‘the collapse of sustainable resources’ – but in reality it is nothing less than setting fire to the tropical island you live on to snuff out a single criminal, or a single pig for food. Man’s greed for stuff, our addictions (on an individual basis) for energy are nothing less than a massive furnace over all our other resources. Oil is the basis – we know – for pesticides, medicines, fertilizers etc. We combust – burn – this irreplaceable resource when we drive to the mall, or take a trip to the seaside. When all that remains of the island is ash, there is no food left and a handful of survivors (assuming they have not killed each other). That is a desperate situation to be in, and the only salvation from that scenario is a rescue.

[last lines]
[Ralph and the boys hunting him come out of the burning jungle where they encounter a Marine officer and several marine soldiers on the beach]
Marine Officer: What are you guys doing?

And that is a question we need to be asking ourselves. As stress levels rise, it becomes harder to hold back the tide of collapse. Under stress, whole groups of people will give themselves over more and more easily to basic human nature – violence, self-interest, anarchy.







If you watch the videos above you begin to see the dilemma in which we are in. All of these teachers are stressed. Probably, the students are too. In both cases in some instances, discipline is lacking. For example, the student talking on the cellphone in class doesn’t demonstrate obvious classroom discipline. But neither does the teacher. It is difficult when stress builds up to such an extend and disorder becomes so prevalent, to resurrect order beyond a certain point. And subliminally, more and more people are approaching a critical level, a breaking point. Beyond this point is war.

Tom Ludlow: We good?
Scribble: You know this is some bullshit, right? These dudes is monsters, man. I mean if they can't fuck it, rob it, or kill it they don't want it.

War is not necessarily a bad thing. The strongest survive. The chaff is burned away. It is a culling of our species to allow those that remain to survive on the remaining resources. If you are an intelligent, rational, sophisticated and civilised human being – and you’re averse to the idea of your own imminent demise – then war is necessarily a very bad thing. It’s avoidable. If we change our behaviour we can avoid bloodshed on a massive scale. Let us remember that less than a decade after the Great Depression, and a decade before, the World endured 2 World Wars. We are fast approaching another ‘Depression’ scenario. Where the collective mindset is bleak, where many people have no jobs, where more and more people are destitute, sick, suffering. The disenchanted and disenfranchised soon outnumber the haves. And human nature can collectively operate on a scale of massified individual self-interest.
What then happens to the common good?

Captain Jack Wander: [after Ludlow tears down his wall] This is my power. This is my crown. I'm the king of secrets, Tom. I know which city councilmen is doing lines. I know who likes boys, I know who's selling contracts, I know who beat his wife. I own them, even the chief. He's in my pocket, Tom. How do you think I've been able to protect you all these years? What do you think is it you're doing? All these missions. How do you think you're able to touch the untouchables? I'm going to be chief. I will be chief! I will be mayor! This is our world, Tom! So let's take it!
Tom Ludlow: Is that why you put a hit on Washington? Why you tried to kill me? So you can keep stuffing money in your wall?
Captain Jack Wander: But this is our money. The unit's. Who do you think paid for Silky's defense, through all those law suits? Who's going to pay for your retirement? I'm just correcting a flaw in the system, Tom. This is about cops helping cops. And if a teacher, or a fireman, could do it, they would do it too.
What happened to just locking up bad people?
We're all bad, Tom.
Tom Ludlow: You were my best friend.
Captain Jack Wander: You were family.

The view from my bicycle is not that we are all bad. It is not difficult, however, to believe that we are. Hansie Cronje is a good case study for our ability to forgive others, and ourselves – to see the good in them, or to curse their faults. There is no doubt that overall, Hansie was far more good, far more heroic than otherwise. But our capacity to spurn our heroes says a lot about our own self-loathing, our own ego needs – as the character Jack demonstrates in Lord of the Flies. Only by threatening his opponent – Ralph – can Jack gain converts and power. It is an activity Jack revels in despite what amounts to mutually assured destruction – because Jack is intoxicated with the idea of maintaining power. In order to rally his troops, Jack convinces the children that follow that there is a monster on the island. Although they have already killed the monster [Simon] Jack exploits their fear, making the ‘monster’ immutable, and also inputable on anything he deems appropriate. By using fear as an instrument, the boys feel compelled not to disobey lest Jack identifies any of them – a dissembler – as the monster. And so, as with Hitler, to gain confidence with their leader voluntary acts of self-interested brutality – acts of violence on any perceived enemy, are considered acts of loyalty, fealty, even friendship.

The Long Emergency represents a dark time in human history. A time of austerity, of hardship. It is a time of starvation, of disease, of civil disorder and anarchy on a global scale. It is a time of fear and uncertainty, of deprivation. How we handle our fear will determine how many of us emerge, and whether we can emerge unscathed. We have now entered the first few paragraphs of the first chapter of The Long Emergency. The world has begun to change forever. It will never be this free, this full of choices, or small ever again. The world is growing larger, and with it, all the troubles of this world that we have turned our backs from. The view from my bicycle is that together – not in cars but on bicycles – we can start to address the vast chunks of our conundrum, and begin to intuit what sustainable energy and sustainable living will actually be at the epilogue of The Long Emergency.

Marine Officer: What are you guys doing?