I have been reading Re-inventing Collapse by Dmitry Orlov along with his talk - the 5 stages of Collapse - a grueling experience. To dig into what he says demands that you surrender many of your long-established truths about daily existence and indeed about humanity. It split me in two - one part was saying - this is great, yes he’s really seeing clearly into the way we are living - the other part was saying - oh, so you mean we’re fucked, really, really fucked.

As I really took this stuff on, I felt cold fear in the pit of my stomach - something I have experienced in a car crash - but never from a book.

So I recommend that you open a bottle of red wine (or whatever works for you) when you start to read. You’ll need it when the implications of what you read get too horrendous.

Usually I find that a book’s contents are kind of integrated with the rest of my thinking - the ideas are a closer examination or an extension of my known landscape. This book is different and much harder to deal with - the landscape is revealed to be other - almost nothing is what it seemed.

After four days I’m still coming to terms with it. The Life Beyond Capitalism website now seems out-moded - it looks like we’ll get that anyway from the first 2 of the 5 stages - Financial and Commercial Collapse.

But I’m also moving away from the fear of what could happen to a more hopeful view. As Dmitry puts it - we can “Find ways to live happy, fulfilling lives as this doomed system crumbles around us”. If you know what’s likely to happen, it’s easier to deal with.

Where to now? I’m starting to work on what to do next. Do let me know if you’d like to discuss this. Email me at mike[at]lifebeyondcapitalism.com

The 5 stages of Collapse talk is at http://www.energybulletin.net/node/47157

In his great inaugural speech, he talked about the economy - "Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age."

Which says Yes there are problems now - but doesn't question the overall legitimacy of the Capitalist way of doing things.

Indeed he later said - "Nor is the question before us whether the market is a force for good or ill. Its power to generate wealth and expand freedom is unmatched, but this crisis has reminded us that without a watchful eye, the market can spin out of control - and that a nation cannot prosper long when it favours only the prosperous. The success of our economy has always depended not just on the size of our gross domestic product, but on the reach of our prosperity; on our ability to extend opportunity to every willing heart - not out of charity, but because it is the surest route to our common good."

Its power to generate wealth is indeed unmatched - that's what the aim of Capitalism is - more money. And actually it has not proved in the past to have been the "surest route to the common good". That's the dis-credited high tide lifting all boats theory!

And expanding freedom is not what Capitalism does - particularly for those at the bottom of the pile. And even if you are at the top of the pile, it doesn't bring the happiness it promises - read Affluenza.

For me, the interesting question now is - is this nevertheless the first step towards seeing Capitalism for what it actually is? His speech has a clarity and a lack of dogma that augurs well for future reductions in the power of the purely economic view of everything.

Capitalism needs to be phased out as we collectively see more and more clearly how it works - this could be a definite move forward - it's now a question of action to meet the rhetoric.

I recently gave a talk at the amazing Temporary School in Mayfair. It's housed in a traditional Mayfair mansion which hasn't been used for 15 years or so. The silk wallpaper is still there but not the the heating.

The initial idea was to talk about business from a non-traditional viewpoint based on my experience of running a company that wasn't primarily about the money.

Searching for a title, I came up with "Setting up a Post-Capitalist Enterprise - Unlearning Capitalism". And spent the following few days really looking into it. And it moved my thinking forward unexpectedly - and the talk was more about the whole context for business and why we need a better one - than about the nuts and bolts of a start-up.

The most useful book was "Beyond Civilisation - Humanity's Next Great Adventure" by Daniel Quinn (who wrote Ishmael). It really helped to define a kind of line that needs to be drawn between the way our civilisation is barely functional in terms of people and the planet - and where we could go as a species.

The other area that helped was the perspective of how long we've been around and how we are the product of a lot of hard work on the part of something. And that we have just got here. If you compare the 4 billion year history of the Earth to a 40 year old human, the Industrial Revolution started 2 minutes ago!

Hope you enjoy the talk - also the content is being set up in the qWiki - a sort of structured Wiki with the juicy bits from the talk!