Survive- The Economic Collapse

by Piero San Giorgio

  This progress is a dangerous trap. Peace, justice, democracy, and affluence for all are not the norm—not in our world, not in history.

  It is enough to travel in order to discover immense, swarming masses living in extreme poverty, violence, or under the heel of a dictatorship. Gradually, we are going to behold a similar spectacle in the West.

  Before entering the heart of our subject, I would like to take a few lines of this introduction to describe the path that led me to write this book, which may seem alarmist, I admit, but which, in fact, is more relevant than ever.

  Let me introduce myself: Swiss, 42 years old, married with children, culturally Italian by my parents, French by schooling, Swiss by my surroundings, and American by my work. I grew up in the 1970s playing Lego and watching Japanese anime—Grendizer, Harlock, Star Blazers—which embodied a very Japanese vision of the world, including patriotism, self-sacrifice, and teamwork to save Planet Earth from all sorts of problems and invasions.

  From childhood, I have been interested in history, thanks especially to the Once Upon a Time . . . Man series by Albert Barillé. History struck me then as almost nothing but the study of wars and migrations: often violent, cruel, inhuman . . . fascinating.

  Two historical periods especially left their mark on me. First, the Roman era, whose principal tales were recounted to me by my father. Especially intriguing to me was Rome’s fall. Following a convergence of several factors—debt, inflation, loss of confidence in institutions and elites, ever-greater migratory pressure and, finally, destructive invasions—it collapsed, carrying with it a civilization that benefited from advanced technologies and a comfort comparable to what we enjoyed in the 19th century. For the Roman citizen who lived under the Pax Romana, the rapid crumbling of the Western Empire, involving the disappearance of infrastructure such as aqueducts, sewers, hospitals, baths, and roads, must have caused a great trauma. Rome went from a metropolis of more than one million inhabitants in 280 AD to a village of less than 30,000 souls in 600 AD.

  Then it was the period 1914-1945 that fascinated me. Following the economic crisis of 1907, all the groundwork had been laid for nationalism, spoiling for a fight, to collide with imperial ambition. The latter, aided by the world of finance, set off the first round (1914-1918) of what must be considered the beginning of Europe’s decline, indeed, her suicide. And, to the surprise and horror of all, it turned into a true mass slaughter. With the victors’ ambitions unsatisfied and the unjust peace treaty igniting the desire for vengeance among the defeated, the second round was inevitable. Again, the catalyst was a financial crisis. The stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed would pave the way for the next war.

  That Second World War, even more murderous than the first, left almost no one on the surface of the Earth untouched. The destruction and suffering was immense, and, for the first time, the world saw the death of civilians on an industrial scale in the ghettos and camps of Poland, the forests of Russia, the terror bombings of Germany and Japan. They were neither the first nor the last mass crimes in history; but nothing prepared the inhabitant of Europe or Asia in the 1930s and ‘40s for such a degree of violence.

  As a child, I saw the documentaries: images of deported civilians on the roads, in trains, all at the mercy of the whims of war. I told myself that I would never let my family become refugees, never accept being subjugated to powers and events that I could not affect or change.

  So naturally, as a good little boy of the West growing up amid the Cold War, soaked in NATO propaganda, I first became an anti-Communist. Then, when the danger of the bloody, baby-eating Soviets had passed, I melted into the only remaining ideology—liberalism—with its only slogan: make money and consume.

  Welcome to a Better World

  I spent the 1990s between studying marketing and advancing professionally. The work was interesting and well-paid: I was working for American software companies, first in charge of marketing in Switzerland, then Africa, and finally in the emerging markets.

  Stock options and day trading with friends and colleagues, investing in tech stocks and Internet startups: Cisco, Netscape, CommerceOne. . . easy dough, big cars, a big apartment suite, chicks, trips to Africa and the Middle East. . . I was living the perfect yuppie dream. Like so many of my young contemporaries in advertising, finance, or technology, I recognized myself in Octave, the character in Frédéric Beigbeder’s novel 99 Francs. It seemed obvious to me that technology was going to change the world ever more rapidly—and normal that companies with barely any revenue and making no profit should be worth billions on the stock market! In 2000, I founded my own startup. I arrogantly believed that I would become rich and famous by what was about to reveal itself as a bubble! It was a frenzy soon shattered by the stock-market crash and the consequences of the September 11th attacks. My whole fortune, ginned up with financial leveraging—poof! Up in smoke. I awoke to find myself nearly shirtless in my BMW convertible.

  For me, a period of realization had begun.

  With the slowdown, reducing the personnel of my little company from 16 to four, I discovered that work could be difficult, success not as obvious as it had always been, and that the boss, who must pay everybody’s salary out of his own pocket, is all alone.

  Depression

  Being broke and depressed forced me not to go out, to limit my social life, but also gave me time for reflection. This is when I was struck by the flagrant dishonesty of the second Bush administration in justifying its policy of war against Saddam Hussein. It was simply too obvious. I got interested in the details of what went on behind the scenes: the neoconservatives, the military-industrial-oil complex and the financial world. Something smelled fishy: Colin Powell and his bogus vial at the UN, Dick Cheney as a corrupting Dark Sith Lord, Dubya’s “plain ole’ Cowboy” routine. . .

  If they lie to us about something as important as a war, what else are they lying to us about? I went back to my history books and gathered information on the Web. By digging, even without going very deep, you find The Spanish-American War of 1898, the Tonkin incident, the attack on the USS Liberty, the Kennedy assassination, the Bologna massacre, Operation Ajax, Operation Northwoods, the invasion of Panama, the Gulf War, September 11th. . . I swallowed the red pill. Thanks to my experience with the financial milieus of New York, where I worked with some of my clients, my realizations have continued. I began to perceive the manipulation of the markets by arrogant and unscrupulous bankers and traders. I discovered analysts, authors, and commentators denouncing the financial system: Niall Ferguson, Nassim N. Talib, Marc Faber, Gerald Celente, Max Keiser, Pierre Jovanivic, Pierre Leconte, Myret Zaki, Alex Jones, and many more who look behind the headlines and talking points. “So that’s how it works!” It was frightening.

  I quickly understood that all the media babble, the political debates, the economists’ blind dogmatism, the staggering incompetence and powerlessness of the political class, entirely occupied with defending its own privileges . . . all this only serves to distract the public. As the French writer Alain Soral emphasizes, “[T]he higher your level of consciousness, the less you try to get!” In 2005, I benefited from the sale of my business, which had developed into something profitable, and put my entire fortune—quite small now—in gold. It remains the best investment I have ever made. The British and American subprime housing crisis, the Ponzi schemes of Bernhard Madoff and others, the burst bubble of credit default swaps no longer affect me. They are merely the symptoms of an incipient collapse—and one that will soon accelerate.

  During this time, my personal life settled down. Marriage, the first baby. I took advantage of this by resuming salaried work in a solid Internet company; thanks to several trips around the world, to my experience, and a little luck, I find myself in a position that allows me a lot of time free for reading and reflection.

  During a business trip to the U.S., I had another realization, this time economic and ecological: a monstrous traffic jam on the edge of a metropoli
s, hundreds of thousands of commuters bumper to bumper, each one with the air conditioner cranked up to the max; a congested airport with jam-packed airplanes taking off at a rate of one per minute; a night flight over an illuminated city, millions of houses and apartments with the lights on and the air conditioner or heater turned up all the way; millions of people guzzling energy from one shopping center to another, swarming, using billions of kilowatt-hours, gulping millions of barrels of oil every day, all of this multiplied by all the cities of all the countries in the world. An immense complexity. An immense consumption of energy. To paraphrase a famous expression by Emile Henry Gauvreay: we are consuming the planet’s resources to buy crappy items we don’t need, with money we don’t have, in order to impress people we don’t like; and all to end up depressed, unsatisfied, and unhappy.

  Malaise

  Contrary to the first cosmonauts, who felt small compared to planet Earth, I began to feel that the latter was too small in relation to man. I was reminded of Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance (1982), with the music of Phillip Glass. I discovered authors like Jared Diamond, David Holmgren, Richard Heinberg, James Howard Kunstler, Dmitri Orlov, Graeme Taylor, and many others who analyze the problems connected with diminishing resources, overpopulation, climate change, and ecological change, which are likely to impact human activities in the coming years. Among them, Chris Martenson deserves special mention; his book The Crash Course is an impressive work of economic popularization, which shows clearly the connection between the economy, energy from natural resources, and the environment. (These are the subjects I will be covering in the first two parts of this book.)

  However, whereas these authors do a good job of describing the problems, the solutions they propose amount essentially to “encouraging awareness” and “changing our way of life.” Yes, but what if that change does not happen?

  The stakes being so high, full of good will and naïve hope, I joined a little think-tank that wished to influence local politics. A big failure. The differences between individual members, the inertia of the political world, the relative futility of contributing to a blog, constant slander and manipulation of the political and media establishment are barriers that require a lifetime of efforts and militancy to be overcome. Well, if I couldn’t change the world, at least I could change myself, and maybe save my own skin. And, with the second baby arriving, that of my family as well.

  Continuing my research and reflections, in 2007, I discovered the American world of survivalism and prepping with its rule of the three Gs: Gold, Guns, and a Getaway. My attention was directed especially to the works of James Wesley Rawles. His Survivalblog.com and his books How to Survive the End of the World As We Know It and Patriots were revelations. To this American survivalist icon, I owe the idea of rolling up my sleeves and getting a project started, which is the source of this book and which I will relate in the third and fourth parts.

  So, I actively began preparing myself in 2007 for the possibility that we would go through some very difficult years in the near future. When our third baby girl arrived, I bought and equipped a farm, trained myself for survival and interviewed others who were doing similar things. By documenting these processes, I gradually acquired know-how, experiences, and ideas that have led me to try to convince those around me. To my surprise, the reception I got was not as hostile as I had expected. On the contrary, my friends and colleagues also felt that something was rotten in the state of Denmark, and that all their tomorrows were not going to be as rosy as they might have thought after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

  In my free time, I began offering counseling services to help friends get their projects started. By word of mouth, ever more people began contacting me to verify the quality of their survival strategy, to check whether there was any solution to their concerns, to identify an ideal spot of refuge, or to be put in touch with more specialized instructors in specific areas. The time I spent with them added to my experience, and I learned about some interesting examples of preparation that I will share with you.

  As you can see, this book is my very Eurocentric, and even Swisscentric, vision of how to survive the economic and social collapse that may occur in the coming decade. To develop this vision, I have depended heavily on a synthesis of works by numerous authors who are cited either in the book itself or in the bibliographical section.

  This book is not, however, a do-it-all manual. First of all, nothing can be guaranteed 100 percent, least of all survival. Furthermore, the number of fields relevant to the subject is colossal. I do hope this book will be a point of departure in your quest for knowledge and know-how, while giving you an essential basis for survival in whatever future scenarios. Finally, I have compiled large bibliographies for each chapter, which offer you a wide choice of good books to consult.

  To close this introduction, I must emphasize that I do not wish for an economic collapse and the end of the world. Not being an adept of the Mayan Calendar, taking seriously neither the Book of Revelations nor the prophecies of Malachy nor the revelations of Fátima—although the coincidences are troubling—I am not trying to indulge in gloom and doom. If you want to do so yourself, go see a disaster movie. I do not think The End of the World is coming. I think that it will be the end of a world, of our world.

  Read this book, do your own research, develop your own views, and take note of Henri Poincaré’s saying: “Doubting everything, like believing everything, is a solution which dispenses us from thinking.” Then, roll up your sleeves and get to work!

  I must also advise the reader that some of the advice contained in this book is only applicable if and when a chaotic situation without the rule of law arrives. I encourage you to inform yourself about all laws in force in your country and to respect them scrupulously, especially concerning firearms, the practice of medicine, agriculture, and urbanism. If you end up in jail, none of this will help you! I cannot accept responsibility for your actions or harm caused to yourself or third parties by the application of advice or principles read in this book. The author and publisher are not responsible for any action taken by a reader. Do not hesitate to consult a specialist or doctor if you have doubts.

  At the end of each chapter, you will find a little work of fiction, set off in a different font, which is designed to illustrate, imaginatively, some of the points treated in the chapter. Obviously, these texts are fictional and represent neither the advice nor the wishes of the author.

  *

  “Grandfather, is it true that men went to the moon?”

  “Yes, it’s true. It was a few years before my grandfather was born. The Americans did it with a rocket as high as that mountain over there. It made a noise louder than a thousand thunderbolts!”

  “Ooooh!” the children exclaimed in unison, seated in a circle around the big fire that warmed them. They looked at the old man with rapt and admiring attention.

  “What is a rocket, Grandfather?” one of them asked.

  “Shhh!” said one of the bigger children.

  “It’s a big tube of metal with a pointy end that flies through the sky and among the stars, like a giant rifle bullet. . .”

  “Are there still Americans?” asked one of the older children. “Of course,” said another, “they aren’t all dead.”

  “No, in fact,” continued the old man, his wrinkles visible in the light of the den, “there must be quite a few of them in their mountains, which are larger than ours. Who knows what our mountains are called?”

  “The Alps!” responded the children in unison.

  “Very good, children. Yes, in my father’s time, long before there was a hurricane season, there were many marvelous things! I remember when I was a child playing with images that moved on a screen. And then, there were so many people in the world, and you could travel anywhere easily on machines that flew through the air. People bought things with little plastic cards. They knew how to treat almost any disease. They threw away everything—even unspoiled food!”


  “Grandfather, why aren’t things like that anymore?”

  “Oh, that, children, that’s a story I’ll tell you tomorrow. Alright, everybody to bed! You’ve got to gather your strength for tomorrow, because tomorrow you go to school. . . You are lucky to go to school! Beyond the big river, in the plain, there is no school, and the children live in the ruins of the big cities where there are horrible monsters. Alright, up you go to bed!”

  When the children had left, a young woman came to help the old man get up.

  “Oh, thank you, dear. My leg has never recovered from that old fracture. . .”

  “Thank you for taking care of the little ones this evening, grandfather. But you know, you should not exaggerate like that with your stories. Machines flying like birds—really now!”

  Part I: Risks and Impacts

  Overpopulation

  <
  albert bartlett

  physicist

  /1998/

  <
  francis bacon

  _new atlantis

  /1627/

  <
  george orwell

  [attributed]

  Planet Earth is several billion years old. In the course of this very long period, many species have appeared, developed, and evolved. The overwhelming majority has disappeared, sometimes due to sudden mass extinctions, but more often through their inability to adapt to changes in their biological niche, their habitat.

  Man—Homo sapiens—appeared only a few hundred thousand of years ago, which represents a minuscule fraction of time in geological terms. In a short period, he has had such an influence on the terrestrial system that certain scientists have proposed establishing a new geological period beginning in 1784, the year of James Watt’s steam engine. They call this new period the Anthropocene, or Age of Man, and it would succeed the Holocene which began 10,000 years ago. The idea is not senseless, even if it may seem arrogant, especially when we see man’s inability to foresee and protect himself from natural catastrophes like hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes. . . In any case, we must note that no other known species has ever, for better or for worse, left such a mark on its environment. This would not be so if humans were not so numerous.