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This is an exceptionally long blog post, divided into three sections.

Most of the punch-you-in-the-head good stuff is in section two.

I haven’t slept all night, and I don’t feel tired, but I shall sleep well soon.

When?

I’ve never answered when. In 2003 I made the precipitous decision to abandon trying to make money, and to store my wealth in the form of reputation capital. It was the Euro that did it; I looked at history, particularly the bimetallic period, and decided that having two reserve currencies was likely to crash the global economy within 10 years. It took me about five minutes to decide: my subconscious has a whim of iron. That’s not saying that I stopped trying to make a living – had Buttered Side Down actually got clients other than Arup I’d be doing alright, but we were just too early. I had over-estimated institutional readiness to face risks. Ironically Buttered Side Down, with its “historic risk management consultancy” pitch might actually do quite well today, but I’m burned out on that kind of thinking and that kind of push. I was just too early, by about two years.

Bring me a client and I’ll sort them out, of course.

Anyway, I decided the safe place to store my wealth was reputation. I set out to work on the hardest problems I could find, and to place the resulting work into the Public Domain whenever practicable, which has turned out to be almost always. I used my unique psychological makeup to peer into dark corners, and I invented useful things. There are three works above all others: the hexayurt, Simple Critical Infrastructure Maps and CheapID. To a fairly close approximation, those works and their corollaries are my creative output for ten years.

There’s a lot of other stuff, stuff that I made sure went right, like The Economist’s Book of the Year, 2003, “Small is Profitable” which I helped edit, or “Winning the Oil Endgame”, which I sometimes jokingly say prevented America from carpet-bombing the rest of the middle east. But I didn’t create those; I labored in obscurity. They’re unspeakably important, but very specialised.

So back to the question: when?

The answer is, I don’t know, but I think it’s soon. I’m an awful one for signs and portents, and I’m an awful one for being years too early. But I did not leave London years before the riots, I left three months before them. That tells me that I’m no longer years too early, I’m heading towards right-on-time. Right on time is that I’ve spent two years building models for handling state failure, and I dropped the entire package into the public domain weeks ago.

“When?” is a tough question. I moved to Ireland for the food – not the potato stew, but the 6m people on land that supported 8m before the age of oil. I moved here for the culture – you couldn’t get a fascism going here with two Hitlers, four Maos and a cocker-spaniel. 400 years of saying “feck” to central authorities has left cultural scars of breathtaking depth, but those scars are character armor, too. You can’t slide a sheet of paper between two stones here, when you see it.

When is soon, probably. We could keep rolling sixes and spin it out another 22 years, but we’re getting to the point where relatively small system shocks could propagate cracks uncontrollably like a fat man falling through ice on a pond. I can’t tell you when, but I can tell you that the US is in trouble, Europe is in trouble, they’ve printed insane amounts of money and it hasn’t stabilized things, assets are being devalued in complex processes which hide inflation and still there are no new jobs. People kick around terms like “stagflation” but what’s happening is simple and subtle: nothing.

We’re treading water. We’re like a shark that’s stopped swimming. We’re a cartoon character, all flailing legs, hovering above the abyss.

And at the bottom of it are those poor bastards in Africa, in rural India, South America, Asia, eating rice and bugs because there’s nothing else to eat. And you’ve ignored them your entire life as the money poured from “we know not where” into the First World Lifestyle, which squandered the wealth which could have fed and housed every human being on earth on an extractive economy which wastes 40% of the food produced and has a billion fat people, including me.

In many ways, I long for a moral cleansing of the world, but it won’t be by the sword, it’ll be one person at a time, with a spade, growing their own food because the assholes that created the Codex Alimentarius are all out their digging in the dirt too.

Don’t you understand? The oil is poison it’s killing our world one gallon of gas at a time. It’s like we’re force-feeding the world cigarettes and complaining when it coughs and turns blue. The hunger side of it is even worse. The indescribable horror of what’s unfolding in Somalia falls on deaf neurons, not just deaf ears. Didn’t we go through all of this 25 years ago with Live Aid?

Question: when will the economy crash?

Answer: have you looked at Sudan?

Now, who’s going to get up to work in the morning, and pretend that what they’re doing matters?

I know putting a roof over your head is important. I’ve neglected it at times, over-reached, friends have bailed me out, caught me, but hopefully at some point I’ll pay my debts, small as they are, completely. If you’ve got kids, it’s right to put them first, to do what you’ve gotta do, and let the world take care of itself.

But we’re losing it. These narrow windows of self-interest, backed up by armed guards just off the side of your screen, are fighting secret wars to keep capitalism safe, the rich richer, and those dying from poverty far from our front door, but… why, why those secret wars are being lost.

It’s our failure to quickly quash resistance in Iraq and Afghanistan that’s caused this. And I say “ours” advisedly, because unless I’m much mistaken, your country was in there too, come for the terrorism and stay for the oil. An oil well, a good one, produces oil for an extraction cost of $2 or $4 a barrel, and sells at well over $100 – an almost unimaginable return on investment. So much money it pays to drill mile deep holes in mile deep water to get the oil out. An oil well is a fountain of gold, but it poisons the world. And that’s what our whole civilization is – an oil rainbow on a puddle, a shimmering illusion of permanence as we torch the environment for… more plastic crap while other people’s children starve.

I’m sorry. Last person out, turn the lights off.

I haven’t managed to square my actions with the truth.

Some dumb bastard (sorry Curtis) asked me for a plan. “You can do it, Vinay.”

No, no I can’t. But I think I can do something better.

What can we do about the state of the world?

I think I can draw a line through available data that tells us how to get a future we all can live with, the future we deserve.

I had to tear down most of my mind to get to here, because it requires letting go of our model of how the future is created, and doing something else, and connecting the main evolutionary drives of the human race directly to the machinery which will solve our real problems.

Here’s what we’ve got.

What can I do?

I believe we could lose a couple of billion people this decade. Ten years from now there might not be five billion humans left. A collapsing reserve currency could stop the international food trade dead for two years, and starve hundreds of millions or even a billion people. To this add War, most likely a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan, or god forbid nuclear terrorism against America or Israel, either of which might desecrate much of the world in insane retaliation depending on the manner and nature of the attacks. It could be a rough decade. Everywhere the choice will be “guns or butter” because not every cultural mandate can be carried in lean times of economic contraction. In the good times, at least in America, we had “both/and” thinking, both social programs and military spending. Now we are going to have to choose, and I hope to god the calculus is correct, and we get an America able to play its part in a democratic peace, and not a a yet-more-unbalanced tyrant. Maybe this will happen. Maybe not.

We have to heal the cultural split which opened between civil society and the military during the 1960s, when our defenders became our enemies. I’ve seen these guys up close, and they are excellent people. The leaders of the military-industrial complex that I have met so far are as subtle and thoughtful human beings as humanity has to offer, trapped in an impossible situation by the sudden advent of the nuclear age, where we went from Spear Politics + Rifles to Spear Politics + Nuclear Missiles over the course of 20 years from 1945 to 1965. Culturally, neither we nor they have had time to catch up to the realities of the nuclear age, and now we must give the order to stand down. We must not see the increasing pressure on the shared global environment (including forces like climate change) give rise to a new generation of military tensions which can (and eventually will) escalate into nuclear or worse wars. You can see it between India and Pakistan, you can, if you dare, see it between America and China or even between Russia and Europe. These are all flashpoints that could escalate, and it is our job to bring such a strong peace and such a strong demand for peace, not by harassing our own side’s military, but by making common cause with citizens of other countries to heal the world so that not one person in the world will every believe it is their duty to use a nuclear weapon ever again.

It is our job to do this. Civil society must address the ongoing economic genocide of the poor and the destruction of the biosphere and the massive tensions which exist between countries or governments will inevitably continue the global gridlock, and the gridlock will eventually lead to more war.

When President Obama was elected, he asked the public to push, to keep the pressure up on Washington, to get the radical agenda through. The public then sat back on its ass, and Obama has aged ten years and burned most of his backbone just holding the line against Republican wolves. Lackluster support may have cost us the Leader of the Free World we could have believed in. Anonymous snipes at minor enforcers and structural hypocrites, but thus far has not stepped up to offer up a constructive alternative to the activities of the organizations they are taking down.

All I can say is, find something to do. Figure out what your will is, what you’re here to change, and change it. Our old models, of forming groups with complex structures, are not producing change. The UN has ossified into a shell and does little innovation in most areas. Above all, the climate process is gridlocked, deadlocked and lethal. Get behind somebody who might know what they are doing, and push.

I only have two bits of advice for you. Number one, stop smoking. Number two, stop watching television. I don’t know a single person who watches a lot of TV, not one, because people who have a TV habit cannot keep up.

So back to the question of human rights. We must square the circle: if we are to have Freedom, what do we do about those who want to poison the world with a little dioxin-filled incinerator at the bottom of the garden, or a mercury-leeching gold mine in the Amazon? How do we say no to people with foolish needs? Are we to rely on the power of the State to police what we consider distasteful, yet demand Freedom for ourselves? No, we cannot do this, not yet.

Here’s my advice for you. Do everything you can do to solve the world’s real problems. Look mercilessly at what needs to be done, and with some beneficence at yourself, but get moving. We’ve sat around in consensus circles until the cushions are tired and nothing on remotely the scale required to change the world has happened. While that has been going on, the nerds have been prototyping a new form of human interworking called do-ocracy or open source. This approach has started to out-compete the biggest and smartest of the corporations. It’s spreading into physical plant and distributed manufacturing. But we haven’t figured out how to get leverage on politics, or how to head this awful global trouble off at the pass.

I don’t know whether what I’ve said is going to be meaningful to you or not. It’s very hard to get far enough out to get a truly global perspective, and once you are that far out, there seem to be only two choices: platitudes, or the full, but often incomprehensible, truth.

I am Vinay. I have always erred on the side of the incomprehensible truth. I’m not sure how many of you can hear me, or understand what I have to say. This is a planetary emergency. You have been activated. You’ve been activated since you were born. You just have to remember that you are a fully-empowered agent of human evolution, the planet you were born on is dying, and species-level pathologies formed around the creation of the nuclear weapon, interfacing with deeper scars left by bad religious theology have wedged us into a no-win global political deadlock that could kill us all, along with all future human beings, and every living thing that walks, swims, flies or crawls upon this earth. Go forth.

Put it into high gear. You’ve got nothing to lose, and it’s only the media that’s telling you that you have. Tyler Durden was an optimist. Saul Alinsky wasn’t that radical. John Boyd was a man of peace.

You are the benediction. Go forth and bless the world by getting off your ass, and damn the consequences of stepping out of synch with the culture around you so that you can directly face and address the real problems of the world.

Vinay Gupta

Director, Hexayurt Project

Tuesday August 16th 2011, 8AM from the long side.

I will be at Uncivilisation, the Dark Mountain Festival in Hampshire, England on Saturday August 20th 2011 from 3:45PM – 5:15PM.

We can no longer afford to ignore the sacred

Modern industrial civilisation leaves no space for the sacred narrative. Does it matter? Given the resistance many of us feel towards both institutionalised religion and New Age spirituality, can we find ways of speaking which make room for the return of the sacred? Vinay Gupta belongs to the Indian tradition of the ‘kapalika’, or ‘bearers of the skull bowl’, and the Nath Sampradaya, an ancient yogic sect. He will be in conversation with Dark Mountain co‐founder Dougald Hine.

Here is what I had to say at last year’s Dark Mountain Festival.