OUR PROBLEM IS EVERYTHING: “This kind of talk means that people like me are labelled a doomer… I prefer to describe myself as a reluctant realist, as somebody who has actually done something that so few seem willing to do — undertaken the emotional labour of looking deep into the abyss, grieving for our situation and then accepting it.” – #TalkCollapse with @MrJackLowe
Insightful new article: https://jacklowe.com/2024/09/30/slow-down-the-future-is-already-here/
Just Collapse 
Great piece of writing. Thank you. You sound almostl exactly like me in every way (in relation to this). I’ve followed Bendell since 2019 (among many others), and it was XR who properly woke me up. I went through hell in 2019, coming to terms with it all. Do you know the ‘How to Enjoy the end of the world’ (or HTETEOTW’) videos on ytube, by Sid Smith?I think virtually unknown, but the best and most highly accessible exanation I’ve come across for literally all of it. Have tried to share the series (and his previous lecture of the same title) numerious times, but I think it gets stopped. Not surprising in the least. I wish I knew of how to physically meet up with like-awakened people, locally. I’ve never really made progress with it. No one really is on the Deep Adaptation ‘map’, for example, near me (in Scotland). All the bestJem (yes, another one) Bowd
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Jack starts out really well, and it is refreshing to see such percipient honesty about these most consequential of matters.
But he then goes off into the some shoals of – he’s, I’m gonna use that hackneyed word here – off into “denial,” as I’ve seen so many, many do, even you good folks at Just Collapse.
Lack of agency means lack of agency, not a license to self-award merit badges for isolated acts of “slowing down.” The yeast in the vat did not “slow down “ – that was not a biological possibility. They continued frantically consuming the stores of waste their species had produced.
Humans have become a fossil fuel species. Jack cannot go live under a rock and save his kind or the future of his kind. War, and the insane manufacture of the weapons of war, emerges now as it has always emerged for this predator species. Whatever Jack, and by extension anyone, including you, of good heart and sound mind, imagines can be done against the omnicidal death machine – the “supersystem” in my words – cannot but be microscopic in effect. The human predicament that Jack correctly identifies is not a choice or a trifle, necessitating Dear Abby advice on how to put a smile back on your face – it’s the iron law of social reality.
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We think you misunderstand Jack’s position (and ours). There is no stopping or slowing the ‘omnicidal death machine’ – this has a life of its own, everyone included. What some can do, whilst they/we have agency, is slow down, opt out, and/or act of socio-ecological justice. We might choose, for example, to #TalkCollapse, protest for peace, protect local ecology, lend a helping hand to neighbours, donate food to homeless etc etc. This eases things for some, but we would never claim that it stops or changes the trajectory.
It is a privileged position to proclaim ‘no agency’ while, at the same time, living a life that includes free time to express opinions on the internet. No agency to achieve what?
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I don’t think there’s any misunderstanding on my part.
Of course it is a privileged position to express opinions on the fossil fuel internet. You hold that privilege; I hold that privilege. We have had enormous privilege to ride all the energy slaves all of our inherited fossil fuel l lives – despite this absolute injustice. None of that collective history can be “eased,” and whatever small actions we do changes nothing about the trajectory, so why focus on the illusion of “easing”?
Our agency to achieve a “just collapse” does not exist. Our agency to protest goes nowhere, as Jack found out. Our agency to “speak truth to power” goes nowhere if power laughs at protest, and locks up people for long stretches at the drop of a mic.
Isn’t free time to speak your mind the last kind of agency, however ineffective?
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Pretty sure we explained this before – there is no such thing as a singular ‘just collapse’ and there is no ‘win’. A #JustCollapse is instead made up of small and partial acts of justice – acts that are already occurring all over the world. To put it another way, if someone is lying destitute in a gutter, one can act to ease their suffering and hardship. This small act won’t turn global collapse around, but it will ease the descent for this one person.
When trying to understand Just Collapse, it is important not to read us as making the kind of heroic claims many climate-environmental activists make.
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