Review: Reinventing Collapse by Dmitry Orlov

…

In comparing the two superpowers as two ideologically different sides of the same flawed empire coin, Orlov confirms the premise that empires fall and the US would fall particularly hard and perhaps quite soon. He takes on the task of breaking it to American readers that the very successes that made them so rich (a few anyway) and so great, will help not at all, and this is where his best jokes are embedded-allowing me to laugh wryly out loud throughout his short book.

Along the way, he reveals pithy insights to explain how the American system works in contrast with the Russian one. For instance the story of the classless society is exemplified by the concept of a middle class


We know about this waste from the film The End of Suburbia and James Kunstler’s Geography of Nowhere and all the other peak oil fellows, but Orlov points out that because we are so identified with owning a car as part of this American middle class identity we will be hard put to let it go. And when we are forced to (due to diminishing and increasingly expensive gasoline supplies) so will go the myth of the middle class. In turn he explains how the Russians lost faith in the classless worker’s paradise because they could clearly see that there was an elite strutting around in cool Armani threads. Meanwhile the lack of consumer goods and trendy fashions meant that a good life for all never became a reality.

And because our ideologically indoctrinated minds are so closed to such deep seated change and so invested in our “can do” innovation, we will, like Napoleon, be unable to retreat from the overextended, oil fueled, debt based economy which is poised to come crashing down, financed as it is by foreign investment that will eventually decide that we are not a good credit risk.

Energy Bulletin