"A Collective Manual-in-progress for Outliving Civilization." The following quote from the introduction got me thinking:

For many people, the word civilization calls to mind words like "refined, safe, convenient, modern, advanced, polite, enlightened and sophisticated." Of course, these words are the words that civilized people use to describe themselves. For example, if you look up the word "Christian" in the thesaurus, you will find words like "fair, good, high-principled, honourable, humane, noble, right, virtuous" and other words that Christians might use to describe themselves, but which hardly apply to the Crusades, the Witch-Burnings, or other such atrocities carried out by self-described Christians.

For a more unbiased definition of civilization, we can consider historian Lewis Mumford’s use of the word civilization "to denote the group of institutions that first took form under kingship. Its chief features, constant in varying proportions throughout history, are the centralization of political power, the separation of classes, the lifetime division of labor, the mechanization of production, the magnification of military power, the economic exploitation of the weak, and the universal introduction of slavery and forced labor for both industrial and military purposes."

Whenever I talk about the predicted "crash of civilization", many people assume I am being pessimistic. Maybe this is because we in America are among the tiny percentage of the world population who benefit materially from the current way of things, and thus take the myopic view that our way must be the best way.

Is it pessimistic to believe in the collapse of an evil empire? Maybe so, if you happen to depend on that empire for your survival or way of life. But are there better ways to live? I have to believe that there are.