Muddling through the Transition

Opening up means asking - to who, under what conditions. Most comments are simply tribal reflexive so far: red/blue, prepper/unprepared, subsistence existence/urban luxury, quasi-religious incantationists/full-on science. None of that is frankly very useful.

Some heretical thoughts:

• We know what we can Export but there's not much notion of How long-term. If FF is goneburger or too unstable, we may need to swallow our principles and think about a nuclear-propelled shipping service (maybe shared with Oz, which has plenty of U). Air freight may be a stop-gap but obviously cannot handle thousands of tonnes a week....and electric planes are a science fiction proposition for long-haul. City-hops, maybe.
• We need plenty of imports of raw materials or finished goods we simply cannot easily get ourselves: most metals, cotton, rice, sugar are examples of the former; chips, capacitors, tractors, trucks, machine tools, locomotives of the latter. Again, Oz is the obvious partner here.
• Few commenters including Goldsmith of the article and many on this august site, have much idea about how to preserve social cohesion and at the same time have some progress towards a new configuration during the transition that is a'comin' down the pike. It's simply ridiculous to expect the laid-off media types to 'learn to code', the tourist-trap woikers to light out for the nearest subsistence farm, the teeming masses of South Auckland and Northland to be Educated quickly or value-added enough to become SME entrepreneurs, the youngsters in the meshes of what passes for Education to look forward to - well - anything much in their fondly hoped-for future. We'll frankly be lucky to see a fraction of any of this, and disconnection does tend to lead to social unrest if history is any guide. Yet cohere, somehow, we must.
• No-one has much of a way through any of this. The talking-down we endure from the Covid Crew is one pole to be avoided, as are the Sermons from the Mount from those convinced that the way that works for their tiny fiefdom, is The Way, the Truth and the Life we must henceforth all Obey, at the other pole. As always, muddling through some sort of emergent middle is what we'll end up doing, assuming the centre holds. If it doesn't, look out below. In these circumstances, philosophers are far more useful than the Experts and the Zealots. Leonard Cohen became an advocate for 'Love is the only engine of survival' in his songs and life, and Alain de Botton, via a long series of books about How to Live in our fractured times, are two I recommend.