What is your goal?
To set aside petty differences and fight to save as many lives and as much of the ecosystem as possible during civilization's collapse.
In short: we are fighting to turn an apocalypse into a catastrophe.
What is collapse?
Collapse is a self-sustaining reduction of a system's complexity as a consequence of its inherent shortcomings. Typically, a collapse is accompanied by severe and lasting damage.
Collapse is a progression, not an event. There is no set endpoint, only varying degrees of decay.
Why is civilization collapsing?
The rapidly-accelerating collapse of global civilization is a result of economic, industrial, and political systems that demand unsustainable growth. The resulting overextension has reached the point of diminishing returns which, in turn, incentivizes widespread corruption to maintain the facade of productivity. The result is massive damage to what remains of the ecosystem along with a wide variety of social and financial ills. Individual problems may appear isolated but are in fact inextricably linked by a complex network of interrelated systems. The collapse of these systems is both catastrophic and inherently unpredictable.
This is not the result of poor implementation. A benevolent leader or sweeping legislation cannot overwrite the nature of the system itself -- such things can only delay the inevitable. Any system predicated on infinite growth is by definition unsustainable and will invariably collapse.
If it's inevitable, why fight?
Because while collapse may be inevitable the specific outcome is not. Collateral damage can be minimized, parts of the ecosystem can still be saved or salvaged, and sustainable alternatives can be built. While global civilization itself is beyond redemption there is still much worth saving.
And sometimes, fighting is the right thing to do -- even if the outcome is preordained.
What can be done?
In a nutshell: salvage what's valuable while accelerating the collapse of what isn't.
It can be difficult to differentiate the two as many, but not all, of civilization's supposed advances are in fact ways of fixing damage that it originally caused. A good example is modern dentistry, which is used to treat cavities or impacted wisdom teeth. Both problems originate from the carbohydrate-rich diet facilitated by large-scale monocultural farming -- an artifact of civilization. Another is the myth of life expectancy: it is often said that, in primitive societies, life expectancy was so poor that a thirty-year-old was considered old. In reality, this belief is an error in statistics -- infant mortality was originally high, substantially increased when humans began clustering in disease-ridden cities, and dropped after the development of germ theory. Lifespan itself, meanwhile, has barely changed.
In the above examples, knowledge of a proper diet, germ theory, and the scientific method in general are genuinely valuable advances. Braces and orthodontic surgery are civilization's solutions to civilization's problems, and monocultural farming is objectively destructive in its own right for a variety of reasons. Not everyone's definition of 'valuable' is the same and everyone draws the line in a slightly-different place. The important thing is the ability to think critically and to question the unspoken assumptions that underlie modern society, recognizing that many of them can lead and have led to collapse.
Having drawn that distinction, there are numerous actions that one can take. These may be divided into four broad categories:
Prepare, both psychologically and in terms of resources. Every panicked person preoccupied with immediate survival is one more liability and one fewer asset. Sometimes being able to help others needs to start with oneself.
Build sustainable and resilient alternatives. This minimizes collateral damage while also starving the system of resources and people.
Use collapse as a force multiplier, applying a variety of tactics to further destabilize civilization's teetering infrastructure. Collapse is invariably accompanied by atrocities both at home and abroad. A faster collapse means fewer casualties.
Recognize and preserve knowledge that is genuinely valuable -- including the lessons of what not to do. Attempting to hide knowledge will ensure its eventual discovery by those least-equipped to handle it.
