http://www.survival-spot.com/survival-blog/argentina-collapse/

What’s especially sobering about this is that Argentina used to be a rich, well-off country. It makes for scary but essential reading for all of us sitting comfortably in the so-called advanced world.

I suspect there will be some form of authoritarianism that emerges. However, I wonder about the nature of such a potential regime. I suspect it will be more based on religious or quasi- religious ideas than technocratic language and that it may well have a deeper reservoir of support than a mere technocracy would be able to have. In turn, it may actually be able to be less heavy handed than your posts would imply.

At the end of the day I believe the voice that will speak to the people will not be one that has intonations derived from Al Gore or the contemporary “Global Warming” crowd.

I’ve had similar ideas myself, but have lived long enough to see the results of such ideas work out in reality and realized the fundamental flaws in schemes such as yours. These flaws don’t proceed from a weakness of character, but from a misunderstanding of the nature of human thought. Now I like your blog and your out-there scanning of reality. I admire your power of creative thinking and the breadth of your interests. I envy your powers of expression and the depth of your knowledge. But you need to realize the limits of human thinking. The power of our thinking can make us drunk with splendid visions and we can imagine ourselves so very easily as the equal of the gods. But the nature of reality is such that our very best thinking can only model it in the sketchiest way.

The real, living world has reached it’s present state partly through the operation of two simple facts: the enormous depth of time in which life has existed on this planet, and the constancy, inevitability and universality of death. Evolution has through these two facts produced a material reality that is so fantastically complex, random and unpredictable that it can never be modeled except in the crudest way — the only accurate model of the world is itself. But we don’t see that! We fasten on what we know and fail to see the vastness of our ignorance. A great illustration of that is how long it’s taken technology to produce machines that can move around a complex terrain unaided. The value of computers has partly been to reveal the extent of our ignorance by allowing us to attempt such things as AI.

This is a long-winded way of me getting to my point which is that no group of wise men or women has ever existed or can ever exist who could control the physical environment of a society for any more than the shortest time: weeks or perhaps months at the outside as in the case of space travel. It’s simply too complex! And no society can exist with such a requirement for its survival. That survival must depend on us throwing ourselves at the mercy of the environment we live in a fairly profound way. And simple knowledge of how hierarchies work shows how badly they handle complex tasks, like living in a complex and delicate world. By taking advantage of the massive flows of energy which have resulted from the discovery of fossil fuels we have bent the rules for a long time — several hundred years — but it’s over! Heroic materialism is dead.

Our “success” in dealing with the coming crash will be measured solely by those descendants who may be walking the earth in one thousand years time and the thoughts and tools they will be using. I tell you, those people will be almost exclusively local, tribal and immediately practical in their focus. The objects they use will have with few exceptions been locally made. They may well have a developed intellectual life and quite complex knowledge of the wider world, but it will be of no practical use to them because their power will be largely that of their muscles and those of their domesticated animals.

I cannot see in any way how politics of the type you envisage have anything to contribute to that future — I should say that I had similar ideas to you until I realized how blinded by contemporary fashions in thinking I’d been. Naturally we are the children of our time — and place — but when the civilization we live in is dying, we must get clear of such entanglements if we are to have any place in the future.

And even if only one country embraces it, that still won’t really resolve the issues because the sustainable transition has to be global. The surrounding Powers would in fact probably try to strangle any such new government in its cradle, as was the case with the USSR.

As I noted, if we are lucky with our “ecotechnic dictatorship”, it will be something along the lines of a cybernetic socialism run according to quasi-democratic principles – think Allende’s Chile with Web 3.0. If we are unlucky, it will be more like something out of 1984 or the film Equilibrium.

I also suspect that the later that an ecotechnic dictatorship is actually implemented in the pre-Crash period, the more coercion will be needed to actually keep it from falling apart (because of its greater “potential gap” on Tainter’s complexity curve), and hence the more it will resemble the 1984 Party / prole totalitarian model.