Carolyn Baker Reviews “The Final Empire” Part 1 By William Kotke

Dandelion Salad

by Carolyn Baker
Speaking Truth to Power
Friday, 01 February 2008

My intention in reviewing this stunning book is to share how it has illumined my understanding that collapse and vision are not separate, but that in fact, they travel together and need each other. That is to say that collapse makes vision possible, and vision makes collapse the most desirable option of all as we confront the earth community’s current dilemma.

Disaster is not approaching,
It has arrived.
It is happening now.
Blessings and Grace are not approaching
They have arrived.
They are here now
I say I believe in Grace
But I think, feel and move as though
Only Damnation is real.
Or if Grace does exist,
It is for someone else.

I close my heart to pain
But it doesn’t help,
I cannot circumvent disaster.
But in closing my heart to disaster
perhaps I can circumvent Grace.

Can I bear the burden
Of knowing disaster and Grace,
Each in its own awful fullness?

James Hillman says our problem
Comes down to a failure of imagination.
I need an image, a picture…
Who would I be
If I were willing to risk believing
That Grace is real?

~By Paul Tierney~

It has repeatedly been my experience that when a book is supposed to enter my life, it does. Often it falls off the shelf into my lap, and at other times a friend suggests it, or the author him/herself sends me a copy for review. William Kotke has written articles for this website, and his Final Empire has been reviewed elsewhere, most notably by Dan Armstrong. However, the timing of my requesting a review copy of the book from him could not have been more momentous. As a result, I am not only reviewing the book, but using the review as an opportunity for sharing a recent shift in my perspective that may make this the most important article I’ve ever written in my life. It is written in two parts: The first contains Kotke’s extraordinary analysis of why civilization is collapsing and must collapse, and the second offers his vision of what is possible when empire has been eliminated.

My intention in reviewing this stunning book is to share how it has illumined my understanding that collapse and vision are not separate, but that in fact, they travel together and need each other. That is to say that collapse makes vision possible, and vision makes collapse the most desirable option of all as we confront the earth community’s current dilemma.

For at least the past two years I have been writing and speaking about the collapse of empire/ civilization, along with a chorus of other voices such as Matt Savinar, Mike Ruppert, Dmitry Orlov, Catherine Austin Fitts, Richard Heinberg, James Howard Kunstler, and Tim Bennett and Sally Erickson. I name only a few of us, mindful that ours are not the only voices speaking from the depths of exhaustive research and personal experience. And now in the first month of 2008, the world is beginning to witness a dramatic unraveling of civilization. The spectacle has begun with the convergence of what I have been naming for years as the “Terminal Triangle”: Peak Oil, climate change, and global economic meltdown. A number of related issues such as population overshoot, species extinction, and global pandemics, abide in the mix, but the “Big Three” are now juxtaposed in what appears to be the beginning of the end of life as we have known it on planet earth.

William Kotke has brilliantly articulated what I would not only describe as an “encyclopedia of collapse” but has skillfully depicted a vision of possibility imbedded within the core of apocalypse. The introduction and first chapter of this masterpiece can be read online, but they do not include what I believe are the book’s fundamental underpinnings consisting of Chapter 9, “The Cultural Dynamics Of Empire” and Chapter 10, “The Psychology Of Empire”, nor do they contain Kotke’s elaboration of the exquisite vision he holds for the earth community.

…continued

see

The Plan By William Kotke (Survival; resources)