Winter is Coming

It’s May and spring is giving way to summer, at least where most of you are. But a chill wind is blowing. Can you feel it? It’s collapse.

I’m not the only doomsayer here—collapse has been on everyone’s lips recently, it’s in the air. Neema Parvini has been working on a book on cyclical history. Keith Woods is about to drop a video on this topic. We can’t stop talking about it.

Cyclical history has been a meme on the radical right for some time, maybe since the beginning.[1] Spengler is the one everybody talks about, but he’s not the only one by far—cyclical history was just known as “history” for the first few thousand years of the discipline. Around the turn of the 20th century you had many others apart from Spengler, foremost among them Brooks Adams and Vilfredo Pareto.

Until the 21st century, most of the Adamses and Paretos who told you that progress is bullshit and your civilization is dying, have given what we could call qualitative accounts of civilizational cycles. But a new crop of doomsayers has grown up in recent years who are more hard-nosed and square-headed. They are no less interesting, and tend toward quantitative accounts. Among these are Joseph Tainter and John Michael Greer.

The latter go well with the former, even though Tainter calls the qualitative accounts “mystical”, which is gay. But we live in a time where if something can’t be measured it doesn’t exist,[2] and fashion trends are such that qualitative analysis is not scientifically respectable. So these and others like Peter Turchin and Andrey Korotayev have focused mostly on material conditions and economic explanations in order to be taken seriously by other scientists.

Greer is an interesting character in his own right, and is very much barking up the same tree as Tainter. In his brilliant paper How Civilizations Fall: A Theory of Catabolic Collapse,[3] he goes beyond Tainter to give an account that ties environmentalism in with other economic models. His account runs something like this:

Human societies tend to produce more than they can maintain as they grow more complex. But the problem is that as complexity increases you get a) increased maintenance costs, and b) decreasing marginal returns. So eventually the costs of maintaining infrastructure outweigh the benefits, and the obvious solution is to let some of this infrastructure go to waste—and then go back to producing more shit. This solves the problem, at least for a while. This is a normal social cycle and not necessarily fatal, but what is fatal is when society meets its maintenance costs with non-renewable resources, whether this be slave labour from an empire too big to maintain, or half a billion years’ worth of sunlight in the form of finite tree juice. Even so, collapse rarely happens all at once. Decline is not usually catastrophic but a kind of ratcheting down effect. Rome wasn’t built in a day, nor was it dismantled in a day—Rome fell and then got back up and fell and got back up for centuries. Each collapse lowers maintenance costs by throwing out some amount of infrastructural capital, so maintenance costs are reduced. Collapse is not total, but nor is the problem really solved—the next crisis is inevitable. This is Greer’s “stairstep” model of collapse, which he calls “catabolic” after the mechanism whereby cells harvest energy by metabolizing large molecules into smaller ones.

Greer puts a fairly precise date on when America entered into catabolic collapse. This happened in 1974, the year deindustrialization started the heartland on its way to becoming the rust belt. After an adjustment period, things got better during the 1980s, and this was extended by the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the tapping of Alaskan oil reserves. At this stage, even if the middle class experienced a downgrade in quality of life, most people could support a family on a single income and had full time work. Even by 1995, only 10% of people were in what we now call the “gig economy”.

The second stage of collapse started in the early 2010s and was precipitated by an economic crisis. Within a few years the gig economy had swelled to include about 1 in 3 workers, and is now over half.[4] Rather than getting a reprieve as we did in the 90s, this round of catabolism has been accelerated by the rise of nationalism, which has sent elites into a defensive tailspin. In a hysterical reaction to Trump and Brexit, the COVID psyop burnt through $16 trillion of “relief” globally in 2020 alone, almost all of US GDP that year.

This has been exacerbated by the fact that we are past peak oil, meaning that all the low hanging caloric fruit has been exhausted. Shale oil reserves are a fraction of even remaining crude oil reserves. Dirty fossil fuels like tar sands require nearly as much fossil fuels to extract as they yield, and solar and wind power are basically fossil fuels in disguise—these require rare earth metals and other expensive materials so that when the energy life cycle of the product is considered, they yield very little return. Nuclear energy is a great technology but to meet global energy demand with nuclear we would need to build 15,000 state-of-the-art reactors. There are less than 500 today.

Things don’t look much better on the consumption side—the way we live is just absurdly unsustainable. Even before COVID, we consoomed more fossil fuels in transport than from the energy grid, and since 2020 this has exploded. Traffic peaked in 2008, suggesting that since then people simply have not been able to afford to drive like they once could. China had been shutting down factories long before 2020 because it could not meet energy demand. For the past 200 years or so we have tried to replace nature with Nature 2.0, and like a junkie, this was great while we glutted ourselves but in the long run it has been fatal.

Are you blackpilled yet?

Don’t be.

This is not a blackpill but a cold shower. Admitting that the first cold snap in autumn is not the last is not a blackpill—it’s just being an adult and facing the facts. And part of facing the facts is planning for the future. An evolutionary bottleneck, a purifying fire, is a good and necessary thing—it’s part of a natural ecosystem that has produced everything we are and love. We Europeans are what we are because our ancestral environment forced this long-term planning on us. We are what we are only because our ancestors never got blackpilled, got on with the job, and started planning for winter long before it was here.

This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to fix our problems. A nationalist coup in even a small country would go a long way to bolstering nationalist efforts globally, would provide financial, legal, and infrastructural support for nationalist efforts abroad. A small victory like this might even prove decisive. Restoration and contingency planning are not opposed, but work in tandem. But it would be profoundly negligent to put all our eggs in the restoration basket—this is part of being antifragile.

Nor should we romanticize collapse. If we don’t re-tribalize and re-localize immediately, when collapse comes you will probably die. Your family will probably die. But your folk won’t. Europeans alone are the bearers of Faustian culture. No one else can lift the Bow of Ulysses, and when we become exiles in our own lands, neither the Chinese nor anyone else will be able to maintain what we have built. Après nous, le déluge. And when the deluge does come, it will sweep away all civilized peoples. You may die, city dweller, but there are 700 million ethnic Europeans on the planet—your folk will survive.

We nationalists talk a big game about how the folk matters more than the individual. Right now, our folk are suffering runaway degeneration both moral and genotypic. The heroic view is the amor fati view, the view that not only does not fear but cherishes the purifying fire, if fire must come. You may not see the open horizon on the other side of it. Your family may not see it. But your folk will. After winter, spring.

Indeed, at hearing the news that ‘the old god is dead’, we philosophers and ‘free spirits’ feel illuminated by a new dawn; our heart overflows with gratitude, amazement, forebodings, expectation—finally the horizon seems clear again, even if not bright; finally our ships may set out again, set out to face any danger; every daring of the lover of knowledge is allowed again; the sea, our sea, lies open again; maybe there has never been such an ‘open sea’.[5]

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[1] Matthew Rose traced the birth of the alt right to the publication of Spengler’s Decline of the West in an article I’ve referenced before: The Anti-Christian Alt-Right, in First Things.

[2] This was a constant refrain I heard when I used to debate new atheist types.

[3] https://www.ecoshock.org/transcripts/greer_on_collapse.pdf

[4] Brian Wallace. The History and Future of the Gig Economy.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/history-future-gig-economy-brian-wallace

[5] Nietzsche, Gay Science, book V, §343.