Survive collapse with this one neat trick

(empire is for jerks, anyway)

Capitalism tried to make whether you were a kind or horrible person not matter any longer. It abstracted out all the things we create and provide and need, turned it into numbers, and tried to hide from us whether things were produced by abused children or sold to us by child-abusing billionaires. You could be a jerk, an asshole, a child-abuser, a rapist, a murderer, and regardless you could still buy whatever you wanted and sell whatever would turn you a profit, and no one would ever know the difference.

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Yesterday, my mother-in-law bought heating oil for our house.

We already had enough to get us through any potential final frosts, but she, for whom a warm house is more a crucial matter of health than of comfort, decided the supply we share between us needed to be topped up now.

She was wise to do this. In fact, she’d ordered it delivered only a few hours before it was announced on local news that the prices would double, and so we’d just barely missed paying much, much more for it than we did.

Like many very old houses here, we use a central furnace to keep ourselves warm. The system was installed by her brother-in-law who built a wind-powered electrical system in his own ancient farmhouse in the north of this country decades before this was a thing.

Our own heating system is hardly “green,” of course, and much more vulnerable to geopolitical shocks than I prefer. We’ve weatherized, changed out old windows for much more insulated ones, and have generally gotten quite good at conserving heat, but we’re hardly near anything approximating self-sufficient.

My mother-in-law is 83 years old. Born in this very house during the Nazi occupation of Luxembourg, she grew up in circumstances modern city-dwellers associate with the 19th century, rather than the 20th. Water came from a well and you shat in a shack outside no matter the time of year. Half the house was a barn where pigs, a cow, and chickens lived in the colder months, and she, her brothers, her parents, and a grandmother shared the rest of it.

They raised and grew almost all their own food, which was good, because there wasn’t anything like a grocery store within less than a day’s walk. They preserved their surplus, smoked their own hams, and made their own sauerkraut every autumn to get them through the winters. What they didn’t grow, they traded for with the other families in this village or bought at occasional markets in larger villages nearby, all from people they knew well and cared about, even if they didn’t necessarily like everything about them. And all this was considered a very, very good life.

Now, her son and her son-in-law occupy most of the house (expanded a decade ago). The barn is long gone, and so is the outhouse. She lives in a comfortable, modern apartment on its ground floor with windows that look out upon a koi pond. Water and electricity are both pumped in via government infrastructure, she’s got satellite television and high-speed internet (that she never uses), and what she grows now in her part of the garden is more for the pleasure of growing it, rather than necessity.

The two men who occupy the majority of the house do all the work that’s being done on the property, now, but that work’s nothing like it was when she grew up here. They have four jobs between the two of them, none involving manually labor of any sort. Publishing, writing, architectural design, government consulting: none of their jobs could possibly have been called meaningful “work” back when she was born. And while autumn once meant bringing in the livestock for the winter, it now means moving pots of rare medicinal plants from a greenhouse outside to indoor south-facing windows.

As I said, because she manages the heating decisions for the entire house, she ordered more heating oil for us and it was delivered yesterday. It was a very wise decision, and also one neither I nor my husband could really have made with such foresight. She’s been heating this house for decades, has seen the way prices and distribution changes according to the world’s war-weather. She knows these cycles far better than I do, because she’s lived them.

The kind of wisdom she has about such things comes only from lived knowledge. Some of it was taught to her by her own parents and grandparents, certainly, but only by using what they’d taught her over decades of life did it actually become truly useful.

I, on the other hand, got very little from my parents except relentless examples of how not to thrive in life. Sure, the lessons I learned from their innumerable fuck-ups were instructive in their own right, but they don’t really help much in this time of capitalism’s latest catabolic crisis.

Perhaps, the fact that I wasn’t even taught to drive as a teenager maybe helped in some way now. I still don’t know how to drive, and I’m nearing 50, but that lack of knowledge at least gave me a reason to learn the joys of walking long distances, traveling by bike, and getting really good at public transit. So, now that petrol prices will make driving a punitive necessity for millions, perhaps it’s best I never got around to it.

Perhaps the other things I didn’t get from them helped, too. Without anything approximating stability, love, comfort, and even acknowledgment of existence from them, I discovered you had to go find and create those things, instead.

When you’re eight and neither of your parents have even remembered that kids don’t know how to make their own dinner or that they probably even need to eat once a day, you learn pretty quickly to feed yourself. Not well at first, of course, but eventually, in your teenage years, you get good at cooking and then later become a chef for a few years and now you can make absolutely anything so well that every restaurant you go to feels like a big disappointment.

When you can’t just assume things will be provided for you, you learn you have to provide for yourself. This, I think, is how I learned that you can survive almost anything by being a nice enough person, because you cannot actually always provide for yourself and you need others to help you with that. Be a jerk, or take instead of asking for them to share, and they’re not going to care if you live or die. But be genuinely kind, even and especially when you’ve got almost nothing, and you’ll find help when you need it.

And then, later, you learn that the abject failures that you called “mom” and “dad” were failures specifically because they never learned that lesson. Their lives were awful, but they just left it at that. No reason, they imagined, to make anyone else’s life better when my own life’s shit.

And because you learn that’s how they thought and why they didn’t even bother, you then decide to try the opposite approach. Sharing even when you’re poor, cheering someone up even when you’re miserable, telling someone life will be okay even when you cannot believe that for yourself — you try these things, because that’s what you wished they’d done, and it turns out it’s actually a really good way to be.

Sure, you make mistakes. You trust the wrong people sometimes, give of yourself and your limited resources to people who actually already have much more than you and were just trying to see what they could bilk you for. You do work for others that didn’t need the work done for them and were just being lazy. And you stay around certain people because you mistook what they called love for what actually was love. And you learn from this the same way a woman learns through buying heating oil at the wrong time to buy it at a better time.

So, I’ve learned what I could, mostly from trying not to be as useless and destructive to others as my parents were for their children. And I thing what I’ve learned is as important for this time of collapse as what my mother-in-law learned.

We both learned resilience and the ever-expanding relationship between autonomy and community. Taking care of what you can for yourself and those who rely upon you is where you start first. You grow and raise and create what you can, which is often a lot more than most of us imagine is possible.

Then, you exchange for what you cannot provide for yourself by sharing what you have extra of. You find out what others need that you can give them, and get what you need from others, by not being an awful person.

Capitalism, of course, tried to make that last bit not matter any longer. It abstracted out all the things we create and provide and need, turned it into numbers, and tried to hide from us whether things were produced by abused children or sold to us by child-abusing billionaires. You could be a jerk, an asshole, a child-fucker, a rapist, a murderer, and regardless still buy whatever you wanted and sell whatever would turn you a profit, and no one would ever know the difference.

Fortunately, though it will be a really difficult time for millions and likely billions, capitalism is eating itself faster and faster and it’s going to go away. Empire, too, at least this current iteration of it. This newest crisis of oil, caused by two asshole murderers who thought killing a third asshole murderer would make the whole world forget what odiously awful people they really are, will cause shocks throughout the entire fragile system from which it won’t ever recover.

Fortunately, because every crisis of capitalism is an opening for us, the ones who figured out that being kind is a lot better than being unkind, sharing is a lot better than hoarding, asking for is a lot better than taking, and doing the opposite of what people who harmed us did is the really the best way for us all to live.

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