Joe Brewer is a complexity researcher and evangelist for the field of culture design. The spoken audio is from a Kosmos Live podcast, "on cultural design and midwifing a new era".
Video Transcript: Collapse is not like what's shown in Hollywood movies. Collapse doesn't happen in 10 to 15 minutes of violent outbreak in a movie scene. Collapse happens across decades to hundreds of years. The Roman Empire took about 300 years to collapse. This Western, industrial civilization is already in the process of collapsing. The United States as an empire is already past its peak and going into decline. If we recognize that collapse is longer timescales than we normally think about and that it's already underway, this allows us to let go of the feeling that we need to stop it from happening because we can't stop it from happening, but at the same time, collapse doesn't mean total annihilation of all things. Collapse means this system goes away and there's a silver lining to that. So we need to recognize these two things: collapse is already happening and is inevitable, and there are elements of collapse that are necessary and good for the future even though there's a paradox because those collapse processes are going to create previously unprecedented scales of suffering and loss, which is why we have to embrace this grieving process, but those of us who want to be designers of change in this time have to develop the capacity to be in that paradox.
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