Holding each other by the fall: How can we turn climate anxiety into relief?

Jem Bendell made his name five years ago when the frustrated climate scientist posted a fifty-page PDF on his website, Deep Adaptation, about how even with the revolutionary rise of bamboo toothbrushes and fair trade silver bellyscratchers, we probably can't avoid the collapse of the climate and therefore society, so it's worth thinking about how we can prepare for it.

Importantly, it is not a question of dealing with a severe crisis in the functioning of a society that lasts a few weeks or months, but of a radical deterioration in the situation (i.e., the Earth's carrying capacity) over a few decades and then a few thousand years. So the type of preparation that makes little sense is how we can stockpile tinned beans and water disinfectant tablets and then protect them from our hungry neighbours—like what many preppers are doing.

Those who have the money for a luxury bunker in New Zealand can try, but we are left to acknowledge that in such a complex and prolonged social collapse, saving material values and security seems impossible. Bendell and his Deep Adaptation are concerned with what we can do to soften the seemingly inevitable fall. What certainly seems possible: mental preparation and saving moral values.

The beginning of the confrontation

The publication of the text and then book, Deep Adaptation, was of huge significance to many. I joined the Hungarian green movement in 2002, and by around 2010 it was clear to me that for complex social and political reasons we would not be able to stop overconsumption, and that the climate and the economy and society based on it would collapse. Accordingly, the climate grief, climate depression and climate anxciety that we found the words for a few years ago has long been my default position. When the essay was published, many people, especially climate scientists, said out loud, relieved: yes, at last now we are not bullshitting each other, we are finally talking about what we need to talk about.

Bendell's second book, Breaking Together, was published in May of 2023 and picks up where he left off five years ago. I started reading it because I'd heard it helps build optimism and a sense of future from a new, more stable foundation.

I report: the promise has been fulfilled.

In the first half of the book, his team of academics explore with unnerving thoroughness how far we are from collapse in seven areas: economics, monetary systems, energy, biosphere, climate, food supply and social systems. To save the reader's time, I'll summarise: in all seven areas, they conclude that the process is underway and that reversal is unlikely.

He says it's like a spinning top that is upset from one state of equilibrium (spinning and stable) and enters another state of equilibrium (upset and stable). The initial stage, the wobble, starts slowly, is less noticeable and can't really be reversed. The drastic phase is fast.

A rebuilding of optimism is promised for the second part. A thorough demolition of hope is needed, he said, to ensure that those who still think "We can survive without polar bears like as we can do without dinosaurs", should not live in total delusion until they fall on their faces. One of Bendell's key messages is that it is important to burst the bubble of false hope.

In the past, I preferred to keep my acquaintances in error, saying that at least they would feel better than me until then. Bendell says this is wrong, because it is very important that people are not caught unprepared for the collapse of consumer society, because then they will panic, they will be manipulated, they will make things worse. So, painful as it is, it is worth realising the gravity of the situation.

I agreed with him.

What exactly is the "gravity of the situation"?

Bendell doesn't write much about that. For two reasons. One is that he's a scientist, and taking scientists seriously is not a good thing for predictions. The other is that he mentions several times that a lot of the details depend on how humanity will react. He still gives some points to make ourselves a picture.

In 2016, at the Paris climate talks, when it was agreed that global average warming should be kept at 1.5 degrees by 2100, 2 degrees was the catastrophic scenario. Now it is the best possible scenario. He talks a lot about the extent to which this will reduce the productivity of our most important crops and the other problems that will be compounded, such as how much less arable land we will have, how much less water scarcity we will have in much of the world. What the many weather extremes mean for human health and working capacity. How much all this could cost humanity economically.

Bendell notes that there have been five major extinctions on Earth so far, only one caused by an asteroid, the other four by rising CO2 levels.

All of them were slower rises than the one we've triggered. 

But he does not write much about what life will look like in a society that has much, much less money to maintain the institutions of the welfare state, with external and internal tensions that also raise questions about where and to what extent we will be able to maintain the state as a protective, regulating institution.

It does not say much about how many billions the world's population could fall by in how many years or decades, and what this will look like for us in Europe. And about 'little things' like what might happen to the nuclear power stations that will need rivers of great size and well-functioning, strong states to operate safely for a very long time to come.

Obviously, this will look different in Britain, which is relatively defensible and defends its own (perceived) interests without hesitation, than in the rich but less defensible northern, western European states, and different in southern Europe, which is already desertificating and cannot be protected from refugees from the south. How this will play out in North Africa and the Middle East? Who dares to talk about that?

Asked "What does the severity of the situation mean?", Bendell said he was trying to live as if he could count on a relatively comfortable, secure, permanent life free from severe deprivation until 2028.

This confrontation with reality is very serious work and it requires a lot of reflection. What do we do when a life lived with dignity is no longer possible? Do we want to have children? If we already have children, what do we say to them?

A dear friend of mine said, "I read Oxfam's 10-year strategy and didn't it tell me that my child will still surely have his insulin to survive in ten years' time."

How can a new optimism be built from here, and what is Bendell's proposed strategy?

Let's start with what is not.

What's the problem with anti-elitism?

Throughout Bendell's book, the strongest underlying tone is anti-elitism, that no trust should be placed in any elite. They will not solve the problems with their international agreements, fusion power plants that might work one day, carbon capture technologies, colonies on Mars, or by spreading silver particles in the atmosphere to cool the planet. He provides ample evidence to support his view.

He is also sharply critical of the big environmental organisations who are afraid to admit that "this ship has sailed" —and while they have plenty of issues that fit into the "preparing for collapse" paradigm, they still talk in terms of the paradigm that if we got our act together a bit more, the situation could be saved. So they're just feeding people with lies, too.

As a former spokesperson for Greenpeace in Hungary, I also had to agree with this, and sadly so.

From there, however, I could not agree more with Bendel.

There is a beautiful tradition of being anti-establishment on both the right and the left, and it has spawned a lot of nonsense too. Bendell knows this elite well from the inside, he has been an invitee to the Davos conferences for years, when he says that there is nothing to hope for from them, he is surely right. But when he also writes about the great environmental organisations and how dangerous it is that they would help a fascist, authoritarian regime to power, I could only wonder in what simulation he is living in? The German Green Party is surely the best in the whole Western world, and Berlin, famously left-wing and bio-yoga matracking, has just called back to power the Christian Democrats, the CDU, who campaign on aggressive car identity politics.

Bendell's understandable frustrations with elitism have unnecessarily affected his clarity of vision.

He writes at length about how the elite's COVID epidemic management (authoritarian crisis management that fundamentally ignores people's freedom and well-being) cannot serve to address ecological and social collapse, for example. And he could easily cite examples of how governments and banks have subsidised the business elite instead of the rent-groaning precariat.

I can also understand how it might have felt good to compare COVID measures with masks, seals and vaccines to the blunders of medieval plague epidemic management based on unscientific superstitions—but perhaps the analogy would have held up better if Bendell had sung the spiritual, anti-COVID idols of his otherwise much-loved esoteric friends in this context.

Unburdening our hearts

But that does not make the remaining, crucial part of his statements any less good and important.

When he says that we should look for and build small communities, instead of dealing with the pseudo-solutions of the elite, and that we should look for the way forward in freedom-loving, anarchistic environmental paradigms, he is certainly right. Because in times of severe crisis, it is these communities that look out for each other, that take responsibility for each other, that can best provide security for their members. And Bendell is particularly good at thinking about where and how we can unburden ourselves of the many serious ills that can grip our souls at this point in human history.

The hearts of many of us are clenched with accusation, anger, bitterness at how humanity could have been so stupid, selfish, and evil that, despite decades of scientific warnings, it has prioritised consumption and economic growth over avoiding a comprehensive and highly certain collapse. Bendell makes a convincing case in his book that this is not the fault of "human nature", and that it is not technical civilisation, the discovery of fossil fuels, or population growth that is to blame, but capitalism. Specifically, it is the economic system based on money issued on credit, and which is bound to grow fatally because of the interest rates charged on it. This system imposes itself on our lives, on our thinking, with such force that one cannot really blame man for not being able to break it. Bendell says that if the elites weren't scheming, we would have broken it long ago—and I think the infinitely complex and abstract world of economics and monetary policy is not lost on the average person not because the elites won't let it, but because it's so damn difficult.

But it all doesn't matter anymore.  The point is that it may help me, and others, to live with the situation a little, not to blame myself, ourselves and each other less for the collapse of the world, but to blame the elites and the banks for their monetary system with a good theoretical grounding.

The liberating power of "it doesn't matter anymore".

That " doesn't matter anymore" is one of the most liberating things about the book, and I've observed it for myself in the few months since I read Breaking Together. I already knew that "it doesn't matter anyway", but the book helped me to build emotional detachment from events that made me feel worse.

When the CDU (Christian Democratic Union)came back in Berlin, where I live, one of the first things they did was to reopen the car-free part of Friedrichstrasse to cars. In 2023, when legitimately frustrated teenagers, protesting against government inaction, regularly glued themselves to the road in zero and 35 degree temperatures to withstand attacks from cagers who hated them, it showed unfathomable cynicism and stupid puffed-up evil, and my emotional reaction was in line with it.

Now I'm more able to think and feel that it doesn't matter anyway. This ship, Noah's ark, has sailed. Even if I happily pedalled a few times a week on the car-free Friedrichstrasse, it doesn't change the point. If the Green Party could have given us the Lord Mayor (it would have been a Lady Mayor), it wouldn't have made much difference. They don't plan to chop down capitalism either, because that's not what their voters want. Some streets would heat up less in summer, public transport would be better, but that's all. These are important things to fight for, but for the sake of my mental health I have to learn to live with the fact that the situation is getting worse and will only get worse.

Bendell says that society is already sensing that the collapse has begun and the visceral reaction of denial is well observed. I think that's why people are increasingly starting to vote for leaders of the populist parties, because those who feel the world is crackling and crumbling around them will vote for those who can convincingly promise the illusion of control. They can't do anything about a comprehensive ecological and economic collapse either, but they can feed the reflex of denying reality. "It's not that the wells in the lowlands, deep enough for centuries, have dried up, the problem is the transgender lobby. But we will protect you" Then all will be well. They can’t control the collapse, but they might be able to control the gays, the people of color, and the women.

The world where it's okay to be nice to each other

Bendell's book has helped me to contextualize and accept a little better that I am living in one of the relatively early stages of this horrific social transformation.

Which is very important, because if you accept something bad in your life, you're much more likely to be able to feel good around it.

The most important and powerful statement in Breaking Together is just that. Facing and accepting the seriousness of our situation is important not only from a social point of view, but also on an individual level. He does not use this analogy, but it is obvious: it is like receiving a diagnosis of a terminal illness. Once you get past the denial stage, you realise that a lot of things are not important: careers, competition, money. What is important is to be with your friends and family more. To connect with others. To spend more time on hobbies that really bring you joy.

Such a situation, such a consciousness, helps you to appreciate much, much more what life, not consumer society, can give you now. That the beech trees are green in summer and yellow in autumn, and that they exist at all, and how beautiful they are. That we can drink cocoa in the morning and fill the bathtub with hot water in the evening. There is theatre, and there are oranges in the shop.

Walking barefoot in the green grass. The cool, crisp spring air on our skin as we cycle along the quayside, and the café at the end of the road where we can pay for a cappuccino and a croissant. Our friends who are here, but may not be around in ten years.

Bendell says that "doomsters" are happier, and he's certainly right about that.

He also says that it is this context that has enabled many to recognise and say that love is more important than life. It is more important to be free to love, to give love, than it is to be free to know what will happen to us in ten, twenty, thirty years' time, and those who have been able to change at least a few small switches in their lives to reflect this are happier and less depressed about the future. Many people have left their jobs as programmers, for example, to become bakers. A blockchain backend programmer will be less needed in a power cut, a baker will always be needed. There is more joy in that anyway. It's okay to earn less: it's good to learn to be happy with less.

Anyone who has read articles in mediocre magazines about the regrets of the dying and the advice they would give to their younger selves will not be surprised.

The understanding that this society will slowly (in a decade or two or three) or quickly (in a few years) collapse in its present form and be replaced by a much worse world can be transformed into a gift.

Survivors of various disasters often report that those days and weeks were in some ways the best time of their lives: because they were freed from the expectation of the social order otherwise in place to keep their distance from each other, to compete and be in solidarity with each other, and that was wonderful. Obviously a thousand times smaller, but I have seen the same thing manifest itself many times in the flood defences along the Danube. I couldn't stop for a minute, because someone would come up and offer me water, lemonade, beer, cake, sandwiches, pancakes, goulash soup. People were liberated, because now they could be nice to each other without it being considered "awkward".

This is one good reason to accept the fact of the collapse and not just see it as a bad thing. Maybe a brave new world is coming where we are free to care for others.

Blanka Vay is Hungarian, was a blockchain CEO, a communication manager at Greenpeace, founded the green party in Hungary, and organised house occupation with homeless people. Otherwise active in feminist, queer issues. Introverted. Mostly nice. Currently lives in a dirty house project in the German countryside.