Het Neoliberale Geloof 427

BURNING OUR BRIDGES TO THE 21ST CENTURY,
By Dmitry Orlov
Reprinted from ENERGY BULLETIN

The future does not resemble the past – or does it? When the lights go
out, people burn candles and oil lamps, just like they used to before the
electric grid came into existence. No longer accustomed to working with
open flame, they tend to set things on fire, and for a while, until they
regain this experience or until natural selection whittles away the truly
incompetent, the neighborhood is a constant blaze.

When we find out that the supermarket is out of food and that the cupboard
is bare, we hunt, fish, forage, plant kitchen gardens, and start
experimenting with raising poultry and rabbits. Those who are incapable of
doing so, or who feel that such lowly pursuits are beneath their dignity,
become dependent on the charity of those who are more adaptable, or starve.

As modernity runs out of resources (those photons sequestered eons ago in
fossil form, now released as carbon dioxide into the atmosphere) patterns
of life naturally retreat to their pre-modern forms. If there are no more
sneakers from China, we sew moccasins or whittle clogs. If we are
resource-poor but resourceful, we can still weave basket-like shoes out of
birch bark, stuffed with straw for insulation, called lapti. If we are
truly destitute and feckless to boot, then we go barefoot.

It seems commonsense to accept this reversion to norm as natural, and to
strive to have enough of whatever we are going to need, be it tools for
working leather, a stock of paraffin, seeds, fishing tackle, and a myriad
of other similar items that comprised the pre-industrial survival kit. The
last thing we should want to do is to throw these things away at first sign
of economic distress and for trivial reasons. And yet that seems to be the
prevailing pattern.
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