Mister Potato Head waves bye-bye to those who choose to stay behind in the Old Paradigm, signs "so-long-it's-been-good-to-know-ya'" to those like a couple cited in a comment on The Oil Drum who declared that "they didn't wish to be the "sort of people" who stored potatoes," and when the commenter pointed out to them that "they'd actually be wise to have a bit of food stored in their home for unforeseen circumstances and offered to pay for it myself," "his wife simply said "we'd rather die" and that ended that discussion."It would, wouldn't it?
Discovery channel has come up with a show for those who would rather live: it's called The Colony, "where real people from a wide variety of backgrounds and skills will be challenged to rebuild their own civilization in a devastated world."
The Catacombs is looking to build a New Paradigm from a civilization not yet devastated but already endangered in a world that needs changing if it is to provide a decent life for our progeny yet unborn.
The Catacombs intends to be a community-driven Paradigm Change site, not a hunker-down, rugged individualist survival bolthole, and it is the creation of similar communities this site hopes to promote.
We are looking forward, not Looking Backward
, to the "resplendent vision of life in a socialist utopia" that was Edward Bellamy's fever dream looking forward to the year 2000. Bellamy would have felt right at home at a Bilderberg conference, or sharing a glass with Gramsci, perhaps. A conclave here at The Catacombs would favor G.K. Chesterton over Bellamy and be more confortable sharing a locally brewed beer with Wilhelm Ropke.Preparations for August 1st's Valley-wide "Great Seed Swap" continue apace. Down here, we're the sort of people who store spuds, seeds and what-have-you, the sort of people who jerry-rig repair materials when store-bought isn't possible, the sort of people who believe with William Faulkner
what he stated in Stockholm in December of 1950 when awarded the Nobel Prize for literature: "I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance."We wouldn't "rather die" than store potatoes. We will endure, we will prevail long past the time when the foolish, infantile and narcissistic suburbanites have died and their way of life become extinct. It is they who look backward: we look ahead; we are going forward.
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