Collapse Stage One: The screams of despair from a Guardian reporter

By Carolyn Baker of Speaking Truth to Power

Hallelujah! One British reporter is waking up and smelling the coffee. That would be Charlie Brooker in his July 13 Guardian piece "The Very Fabric of Society Is Breaking Down Around Us. What The Hell Is There Left to Believe In?" This man, sounding as if his hair were on fire, rants:

It's all gone wrong. Our belief in everything has been shattered by a series of shock revelations that have shaken our core to its core. You can't move for toppling institutions. Television, the economy, the police, the House of Commons, and, most recently, the press ... all revealed to be jam-packed with liars and bastards and graspers and bullies and turds.

Welcome to empire Charlie. You remind me of Lili Tomlin when someone asked her when she left her birthplace city of Detroit, and her response was, "When I realized where I was." Good for you Charlie, you're not totally psychically numb. Now the next question is, where will you go from here?

Charlie could not be more dead-on about society. Its fabric is completely unraveling, and that epic saga is just getting warmed up. I reacted like you, Charlie, when I discovered things like Peak Oil and the hard evidence of human species-created climate change. What you're witnessing is the mind-numbing ineptness of your government, or anyone else's, to deal with the unraveling, for governments, with their perverse corporate liaisons, after all, are the lifeblood of the empire that is disintegrating. Hence, they are the last entities capable of offering sane responses to the unraveling.

But I would caution you not to spiral down into terminal cynicism, like most of your mainstream media associates. The word cynicism, after all, is related to an ancient Greek term synonymous with the word "dog", and some say it referred specifically to a dog chewing a bone endlessly, even after the marrow was gone.

So what's a person with their hair on fire who's finally come to terms with the collapse of Western civilization to do? First, since you're in the UK, you may want to check out the blog of a fellow Brit named Rob Hopkins, who founded the Transition Town network in Totnes. In fact, you may want to interview him and have a long conversation about his take on all of this. I wouldn't tell you that the Transition model is a magic bullet which will prevent the unraveling because the unraveling now has life of its own. What I will tell you is that it's likely to inspire you to reframe collapse not as a disaster, but as an opportunity on myriad levels. This is not to say that it does not entail pain and suffering for the human and all other species; rather, I'm suggesting that it is both the pain and the opportunities within them that offer us nothing less than an evolutionary threshold. We have in front of us the possibility of reweaving from the threads of the unraveling, a new fabric that we can believe in.

An American president recently ran his campaign using the slogan "change we can believe in." Presently, however, I don't see a lot of Americans or the world holding its breath. As you've pointed out: There hasn't been much change, and there certainly is little in the political arena to inspire our belief because as you've noted, "even language itself seems unreliable."

Your article underscores the vacuousness of governments and the political process. Even before the French Revolution, people seeking change in the Western world have petitioned their governments for it. The unraveling, however, has rendered that approach essentially meaningless. What it has necessitated is a change in personal and community behavior and the creation of vibrant, local economies of scale in which people no longer wait for empire to give what it cannot give, but pick up the threads of an unraveled civilization and weave it themselves according to what their unique place and population require.

Some folks, myself among them, would offer the possibility that the unraveling serves a deeper, metaphysical purpose having to do with a shift in human consciousness. To that end, I have written Sacred Demise: Walking The Spiritual Path of Industrial Civilization's Collapse which suggests an emotional and spiritual roadmap for navigating the unprecedented changes ahead.

Thank you for your incisive, courageous piece which verbalizes what so many are only thinking or perhaps haven't yet consciously registered. I don't believe that as you suggest, we can weave new structures quickly, and I certainly hope that what we weave are not "institutions", but I do believe that many of us are weaving a new paradigm for our species which may allow us to discover the true depths of our humanity.