Collapse 2020 Vol. 1: Fall of the First Global Civilization describes many undiscussed underlying reasons for the impending collapse of society. An economic business principle referred to as the #right-to-repair plays a major role. To be more precise, the “right to repair” is a subset of the much larger problem: “ability to repair”. Here is a short clip from the book that discusses this.
Only 150 years ago, the average person was a farmer. They were very independent. They produced most of their own food, clothes and many tools. What ever they needed that they couldn’t make themselves, they got from local suppliers through direct bartering and could observe how the goods were made. Most important, the TECHNOLOGY of most of the items they interacted with was very simple. It was within their ability to understand it, and they often fixed it if something went wrong. The structure of their society was also very simple. They personally knew most of the people their goods came from and they could VISUALIZE in their mind ALL the processes related to their life. They had rituals that explained the seasons, when the rain came, when to plant, when to harvest etc.. This situation persisted until the industrial revolution brought people into cities during the 1800s.
During the industrial revolution, society learned the use of power tools and the principle of SPECIALIZATION OF LABOR. As society moved through the industrial revolution through the 20th century, we went from the horse to space craft. We went from horse based communication to the internet. We went from a barter society to internet purchasing, internet banking, high tech intensive medicine, thousands of complex products that people completely don’t understand, home ownership, home and yard maintenance, automobiles and roadway networks, and TV with news showing instant coverage of every possible process on the planet. I’m sure you can add a hundred other complications to this list.
So, how then does modern society expect humans to understand all of this? The responsibility is placed on EDUCATION. We send people to school before they even become adults! The problem is, how do we possibly expect a human brain, optimized by evolution for hunting and gathering in a simple world, to deal with all of this? More evolution? Not likely. Biological changes in animals take many thousands or hundreds of thousands of years. The result is, most people in today’s world are completely unable to envision the complexity of machines and processes in their minds. When that happens, when things BREAK, when systems that require many machines to work together rapidly with high precision break down, humans no longer have the ability to keep their society going. That’s the dilemma we are now facing.
This is where current social activism demanding industry support the RIGHT to repair products can make a major impact on the impending collapse described in Collapse 2020. World leadership and society in general don’t understand this. They don’t realize the importance of requiring industries to design products in a way that the population, itself, can fix or repair things and systems when they break. If society doesn’t do this, then we’ve created the edge of the cliff that it can tumble over and be unable to easily recover from.
More information about this movement can be found at Repair.org .
