Thursday, April 18, 2013

REVIEW—The Five Stages of Collapse by Dmitry Orlov

The writing of this book was a rotten job, but it was absolutely necessary. If someone had to do it, I am very glad that it was Dmitry Orlov. Without his wit, alacrity and experience, the task of beating the horse of the Cartesian approach to understanding our dying world to death would have resulted in something unbearably maddening, dry and uninspiring. In this book he sneaks some LOLROF side-splitters in when you least expect them. One gathers from Orlov’s painstaking efforts, the futility of looking to outdated constructs and philosophies for understanding and relief from a crisis that demands complete innovation and inspiration.

Reading closely, one sees Orlov carefully planting seeds of reconciliation with our planet and each other throughout—as a fundamental baseline. He arrives at places outside the box of the current meme by using methodologies and analyses that are sacramental within the meme. That’s an achievement. Perhaps in his next book he will stand on that ground more forcefully and tell us what he sees. We don’t need to understand collapse right now as much as we need to survive it. And that is where Dmitry Orlov rises through the rubble and gives us magnificent gems like this: “At the rock bottom of human survival, there is no individual and there is no state; there is only the family, or, if there isn’t, there is something that’s not quite human—or there is nothing at all.”

Michael C. Ruppert

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

@Rupppert

So is Dmitry one of your hundred monkeys or are you one of his?

Dr. Doom said...

I think Mike's review is honest to a fault. It would have been nice to see a bit more discussion of the book. I'm buying one regardless, just reviewing all-too-brief Ruppert review.

BTW, Carolyn Baker did a great job with her review. She's preaching the choir here, of course.

Stanislav Datskovskiy said...

Dmitri, have you read Edward Goldsmith's "The Great U-turn: de-industrializing society"?

I stumbled across this piece in a dead-tree store yesterday, and every page in this well-researched and enlightening book reminds me of your ideas.

Jean-Paul Printemps said...

I like that Ruppert eschews the Cartesian approach. Truly we are dealing with something that is off the chart!