A New Zealand reader sends this short piece by Russian-born Dmitri Orlov, the resilience guru, in which he laments how cultural politics in the US get in the way of people talking about what they need to do to survive in the case of a serious economic or civilizational collapse. Orlov is going to the Age Of Limits conference next week. He hopes it goes better than last year’s, which got blown up because of American cultural politics. Excerpt:

I hope that this year we will be able to focus the discussion on the physical, organizational, cultural and psychological problems that must be solved in order for resilient, self-sustaining communities to form. Last year’s conference was the second venue at which I gave that talk. The first one was at the North House Folk School in Grand Marais, Minnesota, on the shore of Lake Superior, an hour’s drive from the Canadian border. There, the talk was very warmly received, by the students and the community elders alike, and resulted in very purposeful discussion. You see, this school is very popular and very successful at teaching a wide range of traditional skills. Many of these skills are directly applicable to creating independent, resilient lifestyles within the setting of a small community. But forming such a community is a problem: real estate is expensive, transportation costs are high, jobs are few and far between and pay less and less, and there is a great deal of financial and regulatory overhead that stands in the way community self-sufficiency. After some brainstorming, a potential solution was hit upon: the school would create a colony for its graduates, allowing successful graduates to become part of it. Since, in turn, the colony would embody the principles taught by the school, it would help strengthen the overall effort. When I gave the same talk a month later at last year’s Age of Limits conference, the reaction was rather different. There was almost no discussion of impediments to implementation or ideas for overcoming them. Instead, the conversation veered off into gender politics, with some amount of booing and hissing from the female members of the audience. You see, the examples I picked, which included, among others, traditional, religious communities with patriarchal gender roles, were said to be ill-suited as models for such a “progressive” group. (By the way, I never proposed that they be used as models, only as examples from which general principles can be uncovered.) Then there followed some harsh (and, to my mind, ridiculous) criticisms of the Amish, who were said to abuse their wives and children. Compared to the focused and productive discussion at Grand Marais, this one turned out to be a complete waste of time. I was flabbergasted by this reaction, only later realizing that I had blundered into an American cultural war zone. I later realized that none of the criticisms raised had the slightest bit of relevance to the topic under discussion.

Orlov goes on to say that America’s “vast landscape of societal failure is obscured behind a verbal veil of political correctness.” It becomes more important to say the “correct” thing than to speak the truth. It becomes more important to see the “correct” thing than what’s right in front of your eyes. I have no idea what Orlov’s politics are, and I don’t really buy his diagnosis of how the rich divide and conquer everybody else by distracting us with the culture war. I don’t buy it mainly because nobody has to make us fight over these things; we want to fight over them, because they’re about something real. The problem is not really that we disagree, but that we are so absolutist about it, to the point of gross imprudence.

A year ago, the TV host Mike Rowe wrote something responding to a fan who saw him on Bill Maher’s show, and wrote Rowe to say that he used to like him, but now that he (the fan) sees that Rowe is a liberal, he won’t be watching him anymore. Rowe’s response was pretty commonsensical. Excerpt:

Bill Maher is opinionated, polarizing and controversial. I get it. So is Bill O’Reilly, which is probably why I heard the same comments after I did his show. (“How could you, Mike? How could you?”) Truth is, every time I go on Fox, my liberal friends squeal. And every time I show up on MSNBC, my conservative pals whine. Not because they disagree with my position – everyone agrees that closing the skills gap is something that needs to happen. No, these days, people get bent simply if I appear on shows they don’t like, or sit too close to people they don’t care for. What’s up with that? Is our country so divided that my mere proximity to the “other side” prompts otherwise sensible adults to scoop up their marbles and go home?

Yes, Mike Rowe: we have nothing at all to learn from people who don’t think and feel and behave exactly like we do. Even if what they have to teach us might save our lives, or at least save us a hell of a lot of money and trouble.

UPDATE: Reader Edward Hamilton, in the combox, reveals once again why he should have his own blog: