[Book Review] Breaking Together

Stumbling onto the truth is painful for those invested in the lie of infinite-economics

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“Breaking Together” could bare a valuable alternative title if written slightly differently: Eco Fascism and 21st Century Collapse. It is best described as “wealthy Davos boomer discovers what Ted Kaczynski figured out 40 years ago.” It was published in the summer of 2023 and makes for good reading adjacent to The Ecotechnic Future.

The focus of the text is environmental, but acknowledges the very real limits to growth imposed by limited energy reserves. As energy becomes more expensive (petroleum, solar, etc.) the cost inevitably must slow, halt, and reverse the growth of industrial and post-industrial civilization.

The author is a leftist elite progressive with tinges of Champaign Socialist in his writing. In terms of collapse theory and reasonable responses, he is very late to the party. With all of that in mind, the author appears to have realized that the inevitable decline and collapse was created by the social organizations he spent most of his life sponsoring. Likewise, the author is also extremely well read on the subject and highlights some critical puzzle-pieces in uncovering why, and how the structural collapse is now occurring.

This author is one of the founding members of Extinction Rebellion (the semi-violent leftwing extremist environmental organization) and has a great deal of experience with the Globalist Elite types such as Klause Schwab. The authors assertion that environmental instability, population collapse, and the reduction of cheap energy availability will cause catastrophic failures is generally built on a strong logical foundation. Likewise, the author accurately describes the ways in which the Globalist Elites, unnamed special interests and the broken monetary system will contribute.

“Kicking the can down the road” only works for so long. Unfortunately, the fiat monetary system cannot sustain a prolonged period without growth. So it is not possible to “power down” post-industrial civilization without toppling monetary interests. Thus the perpetual statements that “in another ten years it’ll be too late to stop climate change” occur not because they are true, but because the monetary interests want that to be true.

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According to the author, Jem Bendell the collapse began somewhere around 2005 to 2010. The following fifty to hundred years will be viewed by historians as the period where the hegemonic Pax Americana began failing as the monetary systems struggle to remain functional in a hostile deflationary environment: more expensive energy reduced productivity and reduced population, yet still demanding growth.

Eventually the current global systems will fail. The Kung-Flu pandemic is heavily referenced in terms of cracking the system more quickly and violently than originally thought.

The author also acknowledges and explains the effects of “Elite Panic.” That is, the Globalist Elites are just as much on the same roller coaster as the rest of us. Their panic has led to their funding violent leftwing organizations through various non-profits and PACs. The Pandemic Response from 2020 to 2023 demonstrated that the Elites do not have secret all-knowing cabals; they instead flail wildly when confronted with a difficult reality. Often panic among the elites causes more harm than the original catastrophe they’re trying to deal with. Incompetence in the majority of their number due to DEI initiatives and the like has only made things worse.

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The author spends about two cumulative chapters whinging about how sorry he is that he might make people feel sad by publishing this book. Two additional cumulative chapters are spent talking about “indigenous sustainable methods for survival” and deconstructing the neoliberal view of the world (both environment and human culture). The natural world is not a mechanism that can be tuned. The author highlights that human civilization is a part of the global ecology and as the global ecology shifts, human civilization and post-industrial civilization will shift with it.

Additionally, the author seems to denote “moral civilization” synonymously with neoliberal civilization and is incapable of the reasoning through the Darwinian results of his proposals. Namely the surviving civilizations will be the strong civilizations. Might is Right in this context. The author likes to blame “patriarchal” civilization while ignoring the fact that matriarchal civilizations are universally doomed to failure. The author also fails to accurately distinguish between the ways in which small groups of humans can behave cooperatively while large groups are inevitably competitive.

While slogging through all of the neoliberal framing is frustrating, the actual meat of the book is well worth the read. The book provides meaningful insight on the psychology of the elites, their fears, and how they respond to various threats. It also helps to clearly articulate how the proverbial collapse will take place.

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Expressing all of this in a purely materialistic neoliberal worldview leaves specific holes “doing the right thing without a guarantee of success” that the author tries to justify. Easily justified within a spiritual worldview, but the author is a materialist to the core.

In a general sense, the information is good and provides insight into the minds of our establishment elites and their intellectually hollow and violently left-wing pawns. One hilarious shortcoming found within the text is the authors conceptualization of “the collapse of civilization”. For most of us, we are already living it, and have been living it all our lives:

• Quality of life declines.

• Resources become scarce.

• Life Expectancy falls.

• Quality of food and homes dramatically deteriorate.

• Supply lines deny critical resources from time to time.

These are all just facts of life for people below the age of 30. It feels like for the author, his idea of “the collapse of civilization” consists of being unable to take a yearly vacation to Greece and sip Champaign with other academic and monetary elites. A travesty to be sure, but a good step up from what real people are already living through.

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The primary flaw in the text is the authors hyper-focus on environmentalism without considering other factors. The cycles of civilization. The dramatic and significant biological and intellectual differences between peoples. The breakdown of the gender contract. The failure of political hegemony. Ultimate resource scarcity and economic scalability: most industries function on narrow margins. If demand for resources drops, we cannot just turn down the amount produced. Industry is all-or-nothing because the profit margins are so thin. It would not be economical to produce only a quarter of the currently produced cobalt or gold or cellphones. Either it is done at a large scale, or it isn’t done at all.

While the environmental aspect of collapse is very real, the fact that there are many other structural failures occurring all at once cannot be solely laid at the feet of ecology. Rather, the cycles of civilization have lined up with a time of ecological change and energy scarcity to create a very difficult upcoming century for our species.

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Ultimately though, the author isn’t wrong or misinformed. Just weak spirited. He is hidden in an economic bubble he’s terrified of emerging from. We ARE running out… of a lot of things. The author (a UK resident) fully expects his government will begin rationing food within the next 10 or 15 years due to shortages. A scenario many of us acknowledge as entirely plausible. Without propping up from the financial sector, the UK would be entirely bankrupt as the people living there do not produce sufficient goods or services to purchase calories from the rest of the world.

If the financial system fails, so does his society. So does most of the West. Hence the panic. While this is a neoliberal progressive book, rewriting a few paragraphs here and there and running a find-replace function on the text for a few specific words would easily turn it into an eco-fascist book. Something to keep in mind is that when some one speaks the truth, the political veneer used to frame it should be easily alterable depending on context. As an example, the following alterations would describe the same ideas but improve the framing:

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“Privileged” → “Oversocialized”

“Imperial Modernity” → “Post-Industrial Society”

“Indigenous” → “Culturally Traditional”

“Global South” → “Traditionalist Strongholds”

“Money Power” → “[Financial Oligarchs]”

“Capital” → “Monetary Parasites”

“Capitalism” → “Parasitic Banking” or “Parasitic Bankers”

“Eco-Libertarian” → “Eco-Fascist”

“Patriarchy” → All of these sections can be removed as they are entirely ancillary to the arguments made and add nothing of substance to the text aside from left-wing framing.

“Eco-Authoritarianism” → “Ecological Progressivism”

Remove all of the whining about “making people sad” with the context of the book. The only people who will feel upset by the content are the globalist boomers like the author who are entirely unprepared for upset to their worldview.

“Colonial” → “Heroic” or “Imperial”

“Ecological Justice” → remove references and replace with “Civilizational Darwinism” emphasizing that weak and over-reliant cultures will die out.

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One thing that the author acknowledges; breaching a taboo subject in the neoliberal worldview, is the role humanity plays as its own ecosystem. Humanity is just another part of the global ecosystem and alterations made externally are reflected internally. Something that a number of modern analysts have noted. Still, while the the book acknowledges these subjects and goes into extreme depth, it fails to look at the most important questions with the sort of forward-thinking fearlessness required in a time of change:

What to do next.

Ultimately the book is a long discussion of the exact mechanisms of breakdown and how those mechanisms are likely to play out. Of course within a neoliberal reference frame of “human dignity” and “global egalitarianism.” Those of us who grew up in the modern world are well aware that such concepts will become passé as soon as folks run out of food.

More interestingly is the possibility of demographic and social-collapse short-circuiting resource limits. Historically it has been that human societies collapse at roughly 70% of carrying capacity. If that is the case then it is very likely a significant global restructuring is going to occur, in many cases violently, over the next century. The global population will be halved primarily due to sociological stresses, and something entirely different will emerge on the other side. The author is extremely well informed, but has a difficult time seeing past the prism of his own idealism.

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For a perspective on “after the collapse” the book “The Ecotechnic Future” may be excellently paired literature.

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The authors concerns are all predicated on the end of cheap energy. Energy availability is inevitably, slowly, contracting at this stage of history… but that may not be the end of civilization. The author published his book just before a critical experiment was tested by CalTech. An orbital satellite was used to beam solar energy to the surface of the planet using microwaves. If that method proves to be energy-positive and scalable, we are looking at another 250 years of economic expansion. Gigantic solar collectors could be put into orbit to beam energy back to the surface via lasing cavity. Ultimately, heat dissipation limits would be the next big issue, the waste-heat of society at present growth rates may boil the oceans in 250 years or so.

The social collapse and restructuring must still take place, but the eternal-growth-economic-model may remain effective for a while longer. There have been a lot of doom-speakers in the past, and our civilization may yet thread the needle to achieve the impossible. Faustian Civilization does have a history of doing so successfully in the past… and none of the doom speakers have noticed this potentially enormous energy source in their works so far. Of course, it is likely that we will not thread the needle and instead sink into a post-industrial dark age.