The Intersection of Mutual Aid and Collapse Awareness

In Collapse Club, we're starting to investigate "emergency preparedness" and "mutual aid" as ways to build resilience for ourselves and our communities. There is a lot of literature and lived experience around both topics: Here are some emergency preparedness guides, and here are some mutual-aid toolkits.

What is missing from these resources, by and large, is "collapse awareness." The difference between preparing for a disaster and preparing for collapse is that you expect to recover from a disaster. Collapse is different. We're not maneuvering to survive a temporary problem after which things will return to normal. Instead, we are preparing for the steady degradation of the way we live, punctuated by sudden crises, which will become more frequent and more severe.

As Michael Dowd liked to say: "Collapse is not a problem to be solved, it's a predicament to be lived through."

We know this, but a lot of people don't. So it becomes a question of how the collapse community should approach emergency preparedness, and especially mutual aid where working with other people is the whole point.

In the "Preparedness Support Group," we've heard from many people who say it's good to become part of existing networks without mentioning "collapse." Churches, gardening groups, and mutual-aid groups, etc., can be welcoming, even if their activities and

discussions are not explicitly related to collapse.

In the French branch of Deep Adaptation, "Adaptation Radicale," their discussions reached the same insight:

"The fact that the majority of participants in our workshops identified with the Deep Adaptation perspective gave significance to the idea that mutual aid was necessary to prepare for collapse. However, a number of people also asserted that collapse should not be the sole and primary perspective; that it was also important to conceive of these mutual aid networks outside of this horizon, to give them a more ordinary, everyday dimension."

We've heard in a couple of places that the most important thing when joining a new group is to be reliable: show up and keep showing up. The rest will proceed naturally of its own accord, including broaching the topic of collapse, if it becomes appropriate.

And anyway, from a practical perspective we don't need mutual-aid groups to be collapse-aware. When someone is mucking out your house after the flood waters have gone, you don't care if they believe in collapse or not. They are there for you, doing work that you need done, and that's what matters. And when, for example, you look in on an elderly neighbor, neither one of you cares what your views are about collapse or anything else. It's about kindness and service to others.

Still, it's a bit disappointing when people seem to be unaware of something that is so important to our own view of the world. The "cognitive dissonance" of living in the world as if everything is normal takes a toll. But that's what we have Collapse Club meetings for! And the various flavors of Deep Adaptation meetings. (Here's a calendar.) In these spaces, we can fortify ourselves with like-minded souls who understand.

And then we turn to face the world.