Breaking Together: A freedom-loving response to collapse

by Jem Bendell

“This is a prophetic book” Satish Kumar, founder, Schumacher College

The collapse of modern societies has begun. That is the conclusion of two years of research by the interdisciplinary team behind Breaking Together. How did it come to this? Because monetary systems caused us to harm each other & nature to such an extent it broke the foundations of our societies. So what should we do? This book describes people allowing the full pain of our predicament to liberate them into living more courageously & creatively. They demonstrate we can be breaking together, not apart, in this era of collapse. Jem Bendell argues that reclaiming our freedoms is essential to soften the fall & regenerate the natural world. Escaping the efforts of panicking elites, we can advance an ecolibertarian agenda for both politics & practical action in a broken world.

"This book is part of a healing movement that extends beyond what we normally think of as ecological" Charles Eisenstein, author, A New Story

"This book shows that instead of imposing elitist schemes and scams, regenerating nature and culture together is the only way forward" Dr Stella Nyambura Mbau, Loabowa Kenya

"A signpost for people made politically homeless by the craziness of the last few years" Aaron Vandiver, author, Under a Poacher's Moon

“The mother of all 'mic drops' on the myth of sustainable development” Katie Carr, Deep Adaptation Forum

"A new compass for navigating collapse” Pablo Servigne & Raphael Stevens, authors, Another End of the World is Possible

"If you want to save some of the world but hate being told what to do, this book is for you.” Clare Farrell, co-founder, Extinction Rebellion

Contents
Introduction
1 Economic collapse
2 Monetary collapse
3 Energy collapse
4 Biosphere collapse
5 Climate collapse
6 Food collapse
7 Societal collapse
8 Freedom to know
9 Freedom from progress
10 Freedom from banking
11 Freedom in nature
12 Freedom to collapse & grow
13 Freedom from fake green globalists
Conclusion

"Breaking Together constructs a comprehensive, compelling yet nuanced argument that societal collapse is well underway. Professor Bendell skillfully and seamlessly integrates personal reflection and hard data from virtually every domain to provide a unique vision of catagenesis - the creative renewal of post collapse society. He advocates for an ecolibertarian rather than the ecoauthoritarian world that is beginning to emerge. While It’s often a cliché if the reader has but one book to choose to read this year, it should be Breaking Together. That said, please center yourself as you engage with this brilliant, heartfelt, disturbing and often heartbreaking story of the possible futures that will touch everyone of the 8 billion of us." Herb Simmens, author, A Climate Vocabulary of the Future

“Our societies are breaking because of damage to the living systems of our planet. It's time to face this reality and this book helps us do just that. As further collapse unfolds we need a practical alternative to global panic. Jem Bendell has got one - restoring community self-reliance as a global effort." Pooran Desai OBE, CEO, OnePlanet

"Breaking Together provides an impressive and sobering analysis of what is happening in societies and the biosphere, wh

Genres: Nonfiction, Environment, Sustainability, Science, Climate Change, Anthropology, Philosophy

340 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 6, 2023

About the author

Jem Bendell is a professor of sustainability leadership and founder of the Institute for Leadership and Sustainability at the University of Cumbria.

Reviews

[SilentWitness13 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Solid research that is burdened with mountains of unnecessary prose.

An editor should have whittled this down. Far too repetitive. Introduction is longer than a chapter. The underlying message is solid though. Doubtful whether many will make it to the end. Highlights a significant problem with people who are collapse aware. Missed opportunity and will probably end up preaching to the choir which is a real shame.

[Alexander Turner · Rating 5 out of 5]

The author and the book have their faults (some readers may be chased away by his ecolibertarian critiques of COVID policies, I encourage you to push through your discomfort it's worth it!) he is unblinkingly honest about his process, philosophy, and the raw emotional state from which he pulled this book. His emotional honesty is paired with comprehensive scientific honesty about the reality we face as the climate changes around us, and I haven't found anyone else who has progressed so far into the psychological & philosophical implications of the ways climate change will break modern societies.

It's a long read, but it was worth it to spend time with someone who has gone so courageously ahead in feeling through the brittleness and fragility of modern life, and the inevitability that it all must eventually crack under the weight of greed.

His 4R framework from his "Deep Adaptation" paper is a gem worth wrestling with.

A favorite quote
"I'm discovering I don't need hope. Instead of hope, I have a sense of what is important to life, whatever may come. Which for me is mostly about truth, love and courage.... hope can sometimes be a lie to postpone letting reality change us."

[Rod · Rating 1 out of 5]

A long rant. I struggled through 12 chapters of repetitive ramblings. I just could not face the thirteenth chapter and conclusion. His warnings on economics and climate change may have merit but are lost in the wordyness. Should be edited down to no more than a quarter of the present text. The author also seems very self absorbed. His views on Covid vaccination and masking policy are very questionable.

[Hamilton Carvalho · Rating 2 out of 5]

Chapters 3-6 are the good ones. Bendell gets right the Limits to Growth dynamics that is already happening in the world. Yes, collapse has begun and the suffering is inevitable. The rest of the book is filled with Bendell's particular reading of elites, the monetary system and the usual anti-capitalist critique you find in Marxist authors. I don't buy it. I also don't buy his utterly wrong interpretation of the COVID pandemic and associated research. This is not a book to change minds of broader audiences (unfortunately! What a squandered opportunity!). This is also not a practical book for people interested in devising better preparation (in terms of public policy, for instance) for the upcoming chaos. We will still need the State for that; good luck if you think ecolibertarian communities will cut it. Good luck also with Utopian and puerile concepts such as the "Great Reclamation". It is not gonna happen. And the author is so repetitive... Anyway, human societies are doomed (the dots are there to be connected) but I think few people will be interested in looking into the abyss correctly described in this and other books. Who cares?

[Giacomo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting perspective overall and definetely good spiritual advice: let the possibility of a societal collapse sink into you deeply.
I particularly liked the passages on indigenous cultures, positing most pre-modern humans as a keystone species not destroying but actually enriching our ecosystems and the way the author draws on the work of graber and wengrow.
It is a bit hard for me to fully accept the perspective of "it is too late to do anything to avoid collapse" and a lot of the facts quoted given that the chapter on COVID response flirts way too much with conspiratorial thinking and baseless claims on vaccines and lockdowns.

[Suzanne Wise · Rating 4 out of 5]

A difficult book to review. It was a difficult read from a literary perspective. So detailed and self absorbed and far too long. It is also a difficult book to read because it is so inevitably depressing.

I persevered and finished because I was looking for an answer to the question how should we prepare and live knowing that societal collapse has begun, is accelerating and cannot be stopped. There were little answers or suggestions provided other - love of freedom and live simply seemed
To be the key suggestion.

He makes much of the fact that it is pointless to move to the countryside and become self sufficient and be a ‘prepper’ yet it sounds as if he may have done just that. It is not clear.

Some of his treatises and political thought processes were lost on me and his later chapters on COVID I found bizarre.

But having said all that everyone should read this book. Its core message of inevitable societal collapse is critically important. If only there was a shorter version to increase the likelihood of broader readership.

[Andrej Drapal · Rating 3 out of 5]

Breaking Together is astonishingly controversial. How and why?

If you start reading the last three chapters, you should agree with Jem, where he explains his eco-libertarian stance. Eco-libertarianism stands against the "present hierarchies of globalization." It is against state interventions. He even cites examples from which it is clear that the utopian ideology of technocrats of "modernity" is the cause for the overall societal collapse he envisages in previous chapters. This aligns with the liberal view of von Mises, Hayek, Nozick, and some (not many) other recent economists and philosophers and is elaborated in my book Homonism. But if you start reading from the beginning, as I did, it is capitalism and only capitalism that is responsible for the catastrophe we are experiencing.

Bendell's confusion stems from his inability to discern the concept of capitalism from the crony capitalism that rests on state interventions. The post on the relation between lobbying and branding should clarify this distinction, so I will not repeat it here. Should Bendell explain the capitalism he is criticizing as a state-regulated top-down antiliberal system we are living in, I would almost agree also with him. Almost agree because he commits another mistake by being obsessed with capitalism. His evaluation that climate cannot be regulated top-down is just and correct. Still, should he take the libertarian position he is defending seriously, he should have figured out that the present state of nature was not created top-down but is an emergence of zillions of uncoordinated actions of zillions of agents in nature, humans the least. His mistake is that from the very beginning, he takes the collapse as an axiom. He lives in a typical confirmation bias as it is not hard to find various proofs for a collapse if you do not question the collapse itself.

The bottom line about Bendell is thus rather superficial. He says what doomsters should do; he is going in the right direction with the final chapters about the eco-libertarian position but fails entirely to blame capitalism, as it is capitalism we live in.

[Haley Baldwin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book does a wonderful job of exposing the capitalist delusion that we can keep growing and maintaining our modern lifestyles if we simply leverage technology and government policy to save ourselves and the planet.

While the realities in the book are hard to hear, they were oddly comforting for me after years of questioning how mainstream environmentalists can continue to tell us “we can turn this all around” if we simply do X, Y, and Z.

Jem Bendell does a great job of breaking down all of the areas of our society that are set to or are already collapsing. The final chapters were comforting as he explains ways that we can prepare ourselves, seek love and community, and soften the inevitable blow of what is to come.

This book is important and I hope more people discover it.

[Richard Friedericks]

A must read, but a good editor would have helped.

[Gavin Esdale · Rating 4 out of 5]

NOT an easy read, but a largely compelling and heartfelt one.

[Trevor · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a deeply depressing book. And the worst of it is I think he is right. Not only is unlikely that we will ever actually get around to doing anything to prevent climate change, but it is too late now anyway. He gives economic, financial, environmental, energy, production – oh god, what else? – reasons why we can’t and won’t change course. He explains that even before Covid things were getting bad, in fact, worse than bad. We appear to be on track to meet virtually none of the sustainable development goals of the UN – but not only are we not going to meet them, we are going backwards. And all of the crises that are about to hit us are all going to arrive at more or less the same time – pretty much over the next decade. This is part of what the Breaking Together of the title means. Even if you are more optimistic – and that would imply you haven’t been paying attention, but let’s go with optimistic, rather than stupid – it would seem to be beholden on you to point out which mechanisms or processes we are about to implement that will ‘turn this ship around’.

He talks about batteries and says there doesn’t appear to be enough rare earth materials to make enough batteries to save us. This apparently is also true of nuclear power and just about anything else. Anyway, we are already using lots of renewables now – so, fossil fuel usage, that’s going down, right? All those solar panels must have replaced some fossil fuels, right? Oh dear, it seems not… We are addicted to cheap energy and there seems no chance we are going to go cold turkey until the global inferno makes that inevitable.

I found his strange libertarianism to be, well, strange. That’s the other meaning of his title – we need to come together in the breaking that is about to happen, so we ‘break together’, but in a world of freedom-loving individuals working as a community. This sounds about as likely as pigs learning to fly over the next few years, but hey, let the man have his dreams.

The more likely outcome is that people will become increasingly selfish. The world is falling around our ears, but we better not let those poor people from elsewhere come here and take what’s ours. So, more walls, more torture of asylum seekers, and more asylum seekers fleeing our forever wars – think Syria, Yemen, Palestine, Ukraine, and so on and so on and so on. It seems bizarre to me that we are prepared to allow the world to become uninhabitable so that a few billionaires might one day become trillionaires, but there you are, this has now become our planetary ambition.

Part of me would really love for this book to not be right – that things like carbon capture and storage wasn’t a fairy tale and Steven Pinker, Bill Gates Paul McCartney are onto something and everything is getting better and better all the time. If you think so, perhaps this isn’t the book you need to read right now.

[Mewis · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book gave me a better understanding of the astounding times we happen to be born in.
I think the world would be a better place if more people would dare to engage the way Jem does. The chapters on collapse are elaborate. But compelling, if you care about the irreversible collapse of our society at least.
You can pick your collapse chapter of interest here. https://schumacherinstitute.org.uk/wp...

The second part of the book needs some trigger warnings. Every few chapters he mentions something that sounds contentious to me.

I still loved it. Here are some notes on his discussion of human nature and freedom from banking.

''One of the key effects of waking up to the predicament of modern societies is that people with a similar Western upbringing to myself begin to sense how the dominant culture that we accepted or admired is actually ‘omnicidal’''

''...being alive in a limited way - as a purely separate individual in competition with all else. This perspective was spread and intensified over centuries by expansionist monetary systems. Therefore, it was not the expression of freewill by humans that led to ecocide, but a systematic manipulation of our minds that led to the destruction.''
''“nature shrinks as capital grows.”
''Slavoj Zizek when he says “do not blame people and their attitudes. The problem is not corruption or greed, the problem is the system that pushes you to be corrupt.”
“you think you know what it is to be human, but you don't. All you know is how a human behaves in a power-over paradigm.**''
''If we wanted to understand the true nature of the Zebra, we shouldn’t study them in a zoo. Nor should we think human nature is what it appears to be in the zoo of modern life.''
''The greenness of the pill describes both our waking to the living world and the role of the money-power in its destruction. But there is another aspect to this opening of our eyes.'' “Our whole culture, our whole civilisation, in so far as it is involved in time and living only for a future, is nuts, it's not all here. We are not awake, we are not completely alive now.”

If you want to risk (dramatically) shifting your view on the world, please read.

Week well spent. :)

[Liquidlasagna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Introduction

1 Economic collapse
2 Monetary collapse
3 Energy collapse
4 Biosphere collapse
5 Climate collapse
6 Food collapse
7 Societal collapse

8 Freedom to know
9 Freedom from progress
10 Freedom from banking
11 Freedom in nature
12 Freedom to collapse & grow
13 Freedom from fake green globalists

Conclusion

/////

However, there is indeed another form of misanthropy, or people-hating, which can arise in environmentalism, as people become more anxious about the state of the planet. It is more subtle, involving a general denigration of humanity or the human condition, so people conclude we need to be controlled for our own good. This sentiment is not marginal to power and is facilitating the recent growth of authoritarian views within parts of the Western environmental movement. In my book Breaking Together, I explain how it is a fear-driven and illogical response which risks making matters worse as we go deeper into an era of societal disruption and collapse.

Jem Bendell

/////

she's freaky

though i think Jordan Peterson's views on authoritarianism, would probably agree wholly with parts of her worldview

aka

The Authoritarian Fear Mongers are hatching

[Andra Vltavín · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a brazen, uncomfortable, and yet deeply loving interdisciplinary and scientific view of the current situation of society. It details the ecological, cultural, financial, and political crises we are facing and urges people to get out from underneath imperial obligations as quickly as possible.

If all you read is the introduction, your life may still be forever changed. I will be integrating this book and the implications for the next few years for a long time.

If at all possible, develop the skills and community you will need to survive and thrive without the modern conveniences of "imperial modernity." It's well past time to adapt. It's time to radically change.

I recommend this book for everyone, but especially for people looking for what to do given the worsening situation in every arena of life, especially as a result of money and its impact on climate.

As a nit-picky thing, I do wish that Bendell spent less time on being bitter about being cancelled. I get it--that was likely a terrible experience, but it feels like it's time to move on.

[John Mertz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Breaking Together is an important book, but it’s not easy to read. The topic is hard and unsettling. There is a lot to unpack and understanding the nuances fully is not that easy. And for those of us who believe the world will never turn away from fossil fuels, the idea that a collapse has already begun is deeply disturbing. None of me wants to believe this, but part of me certainly does. Regardless of how the warming climate plays out, I believe there is much wisdom in the message that we all need to be more caring and considerate of ourselves and others.

I do believe things will get progressively worse for humans on this planet, but that doesn’t have to mean we will be worse as individuals. We don’t need to behave badly. We might find that helping one another, being nice to one another, and loving one another are good outcomes from a bad situation. Here’s hoping!

[Andrew Russell · Rating 4 out of 5]

A difficult book but Important for those striving for a better world

A challenging but important read for anyone who cares about the future of our planet. It does not shy away from the dark truths about our current situation, but they also offer some helpful pointers for how we can respond to the collapse of the world we currently know.

The book is divided into two parts. The first part explores the many ways in which we are destroying our planet, from climate change to environmental pollution. The author does a good job of presenting the facts in a clear and concise way, from research carried out by a multidisciplinary team which provide an interconnected understanding of why we continue to destroy our own home.

The second part of the book offers some suggestions for how we might respond as society collapses. The author points to some fundamental changes to our way of life, and they offer some specific examples of what we can do to make a difference.

Overall, this a sobering but necessary read. It is not an easy book to get through, but it is important to face the truth about our current situation if we want to create a future for ourselves and our planet.

[Leanne Hunt]

This is a tough book to read due to its very serious content. It deals with the inevitable breakdown and collapse of our society as a result of ecological disaster. However, it is not intended to be an apocalyptic warning; rather, it aims to help readers think clearly about what is worth preserving and how to let go of what is not worth preserving, in order that we may transition into a new kind of world with the least amount of trauma. I read the book as part of my research for a dissertation on the ecological crisis. I may never have considered reading it if i had not been focused on the topic but I'm glad I did. The subject matter of the book opened my eyes to a lot of problems underlying the economics that currently hold the world's systems in place.

[Thomas Mucha · Rating 2 out of 5]

Jem Bendell provides a compelling and important message but the way he delivers it is lacking.
The book could be half the length if he employed a decent editor and didn't talk about himself as much.
He also provides a very limited view of what to do next. The few examples of people embracing his philosophy end up living lives available only to the privileged or those free of obligations.
Despite his constant expressions of concern that people will reject his ideas because of their radicalness, it is really his writing that will put people off.

[Andy Gibb · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first half is a useful summary of where we're at in the polycrisis. The role of debt and money in the financial collapse is really clear, in a way I've not seen before. Also the Covid fiasco. The author and I diverge in the second section since I am definitely a misanthrope. Yes, humans did once live harmoniously with the environment. No, they won't again since the genie is out of the bottle. Too many people have seen that a monopoly on violence guarantees a monopoly on everything else. Hence the dismal failures of 10,000 years of agricultural civilisation. That genie ain't going back.

[Daniel Kent · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some great arguments and great personal experiences (the phone call with Epstein, wow), some terrible arguments (climate change is the result of patriarchy? Ha!), and some thin commentary on religious traditions.

[Freiya · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good and interesting book.
But quite repetitive and overly wordy.

[Ezra · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was a slog. I already knew about most of the stuff he was writing about so I didn't really learn anything new. I also didn't care for how the writer kept dropping all the times he's been at Davos or all the important people he'd been around. There's also a weird digression into the nature of consciousness and whether free will actually exists. This is an interesting philosophical question but I don't think it belongs in a book about ecological and societal collapse. This kind of made it feel like he was just throwing stuff in to show how well-read he was. It's like if a Professional Managerial Class elite found religion and wanted to tell you about it.

His connection with Extinction Rebellion might be relevant, since they seem to be doing a lot of ineffectual vandalism. I don't see how this tactic will help them achieve their aims but good luck to them, I guess.

At the very end he makes a throwaway comment that Zeus was the Greek god of the sun. He wasn't - Helios was the Greek sun god. Zeus was more like a storm or lightning god. I think this shows a lot about what this book is like.

2 out of 5, would not recommend