MoFo MC January: Collapse (2009)

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"Meet Michael Ruppert, a different kind of American. A former Los Angeles police officer turned independent reporter, he predicted the current financial crisis in his self-published newsletter, From the Wilderness, at a time when most Wall Street and Washington analysts were still in denial...Sitting in a room that looks like a bunker, Ruppert recounts his career as a radical thinker and spells out the crises he sees ahead. He draws upon the same news reports and data available to any Internet user, but he applies a unique interpretation. Ruppert doesn't hold back at sounding an alarm, portraying an apocalyptic future. Listening to his rapid flow of opinions, the viewer is likely to question some of the rhetoric as paranoid or deluded, and to sway back and forth on what to make of the extremism. Smith lets viewers form their own judgments."

- From the film's website


The most intriguing thing that people find about this film is that it is not only a documentary on a respected person's thoughts towards his country he thinks is collapsing in numerous ways but it also extends that theme to the person himself and questions the limits of radical thinking. Obviously this type of thinking doesn't automatically lead to paranoia or delusions, but what if he's right? Does our response to him come from fear, like in a horror film? What about other less "delusively-labelled" radical thinkers, do they fall in the same niche? Who can we take seriously these days?

I'll be commenting more specifically when I actually watch the whole thing



Well, before I begin I think maybe a little background is in order. In 1983 I was 12 years old and was contemplating suicide. Why would a 12 year old healthy American boy contemplate suicide? Was I abused as a child? Was I raised the wrong way? Was I put on the toilet backwards? No. I was tired. How could a 12 year old be that tired? It wasn't a physical tiredness, it was a weight on my entire being that I have carried with me for my entire life.

People when they spend more than just a few moments with me often say I have a "bad attitude" and am "to negative". I tend to disagree with those assertions, I just think most of the people on this planet have it wrong and it tires me to the core of my being to see what has become of the world and most of the people that live on it.

To say that I agree with Michael Ruppert would just be ridiculous. I am Michael Ruppert and I am one of the 100 monkeys, or at least I hope to be. I sincerely hope he gets to spend the rest of his life enjoying his dog and listening to the Rock & Roll music he says he enjoys. Because when this thing truly does come to a head, its going to be people like him that we will need to turn to, to find a new way. A better way to treat each-other and to actually live together.

Does this make me some kind of convert or some kind of follower? I guess. Labels, I think, will become about as pointless as Capitolism someday if what I think is going to happen happens. So, go ahead, call me whatever you need to so you can move on and forget about this nut job that wrote this little article.

I too am not interested in arguing his facts or his theories. There's just no point. I agree with him, plain and simple. And sometimes you just gotta stop fighting and move on. I have a place to live for the time being and now we're going to start collecting seeds. I think that's best, don't you?
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We are both the source of the problem and the solution, yet we do not see ourselves in this light...



The main problem with "Collapse" is that it's a little hard to get a handle on since we are talking about one man's vision of the world; either you agree or disagreed with his logic. Cinematically, it's kind of a static, a talking head interview with someone off screen supplying questions; jazzed up archival images and a single graph (I've seen that same graph before in "An Inconvenient Truth" but Gore had a much better presentation that involved a skyjack). Although the setting does mischievously suggest a benevolent interrogator loosening him up before the fingernail guy arrives. The only thing I can say unequivocally is ... this guy smokes way too much.

The film was hoot, his analysis is structurally sound. There are hundreds of other sources and books to back each and every one of his claims. Official documents that would support his claims are carefully wrapped in the flag and locked away as state secrets. So it comes down to a matter of faith. Either the 1% do this in their great wisdom to protect "you" and "your way of life", or they hide the facts from the 99% who would quite rightly lynch them sending their children who were killed or maimed for life in a foreign land, just so they could sell a 50$ slice of pizza in the canteen.

Does the CIA run drugs? You can step outside you house, take a look at your watch--the spy satellite orbiting overhead will also read the time (and ask you to get that mole looked at while we're on the subject), and yet the drones don't notice the opium fields and harvest time in Afghanistan? Which trucks and planes they're loaded onto? Where they're headed? Bologna.

Ruppert mentions the rising levels of bankruptcies of state institutions and yet if you tune into the current Republican Presidential race, everyone single one of them will say the main thing we need to do is cut taxes to the bone: We are spending way too much money on education, on health care, on infrastructure, in a phrase: our future on this little blue planet.

In the final analysis there's nothing really to get that discouraged about. Ruppert believes money is the root of all evil. Corporations are institutions dedicated to maximizing profit. The conglomerates dealing with the natural world resources are plundering them to the point of extinction. The levels of systemic insanity in our world should be increasingly obvious to everyone.

All the problems facing humanity and the planet all have simple, tinker toy solutions: the only reason why we are not applying them is someone down the line makes tons of money just the way things are right now and they move heaven and earth to keep things just the way they are.



Saw this yesterday. Good movie; just the right length, well-shot, and I thought the director asked the right follow-up questions at the right time. I think his opting to let Ruppert just roll most of the time was the right call, too.

Lots of more specific thoughts about this that I'll share tomorrow when I've got a little down time. I assume nobody's interested in a detailed political discussion, so I won't go dissecting all sorts of things. There are a few things he says (or doesn't say, rather) that I want to highlight, but just a few. I found myself more intrigued by the man himself, and the way Smith draws him out.

Anyway, more soon.



Okay, so: Collapse! Righto.

The Film
Well-shot, music and archival footage used to great effect. The man in a dark room smoking a cigarette detailing conspiracies with his sleeves rolled up is such an incredible cliche (despite its tremendous specificity), but I rather doubt that any of it is at all staged. Ruppert really does embody the cliches.



I was pleasantly surprised at how often Smith asked exactly the follow-up I wanted him to. He lets Ruppert ramble on most of the time, which is a wise choice because his passion for this topic is most enthralling when he's allowed to build up a head of steam. But he did need the occasional course correction, ineffective as they all were. Smith really strikes a deft balance here, I think, and his little notes of skepticism make the film tolerable for those who don't agree with most of its content. It keeps the film in the realm of an actual documentary about Ruppert, rather than letting it become a commercial for his ideas.


The Ideas
First off, the stuff he gets right: I think he's dead-on with the monetary policy stuff. It seems like all conspiracy theorists, crazy or sane, have come to an agreement on this point. It's kind of amusing how, whether they're talking about 9/11 or peak oil, they all feel strongly about monetary policy.

I think his advice, apart from hoarding physical gold, is decent enough, too. It's good to buy seeds and learn how to grow your own food. I love that kind of self-sufficiency; my dad grows some food in his backyard. Best-case scenario, it becomes an extremely valuable skill. Worst-case scenario, it's a rewarding hobby. I wouldn't be building bunkers, but learning to farm? Fine advice either way. This alone makes Ruppert hard to dislike: even if he's wrong, it's unlikely what he's saying is going to ruin anyone's life other than his own. He isn't Harold Camping, in other words.

The stuff I think he gets wrong is a little more significant, but I'll keep it fairly short and focus just on the things that I thought particularly noteworthy or obvious. His worries about population growth, which I've talked about in other threads, are unfounded. At best the issue is blown wildly out of proportion and at worst it seems more likely we'll actually face the opposite problem. I think he's a little muddled about reserving banking, too: he says minimum deposit requirements create money out of thin air, but having a loan on the books isn't the same as having cash reserves. The risk is part of the calculation.



Those are fairly minor quibbles, though, that would lessen his warnings but not eradicate them. The thing that I think is more significant, and might present an actual hurdle for his theories, is nuclear power, which he dismissed rather casually. He really only listed two problems with it, and both are pretty thin. The first was that there's a lot of regulation of the industry slowing the process. This is completely true, but in the context of a discussion about the collapse of society, it's not a problem. It's kind of like saying there's a problem with a guy standing in front of a fire exit, forgetting that if there's a fire, he's going to move. If properly motivated, we can clear this sort of thing up tomorrow.

The second objection he raises isn't really an objection at all: he says it takes a lot of energy to create a nuclear power plant. I have no reason to doubt this, but it seems obvious to me that, however much it takes, it ends up producing a whole heck of a lot more. He offers no specifics on this point, and it felt too casually dismissive.

The rest, people can decide for themselves. I'd only make the observation that we live in an age of limitless information, and there is no shortage of facts. No longer is ignorance just the result of not knowing things: it is increasingly made up of knowing some things and not others. When you have a trillion dots, anything you draw on top is going to connect them.


The Man
I noticed some interesting things about Ruppert, personally, apart from the content of his claims. The first is negative: the way he responded to questions. A few others here have pointed out the amusing moment where Smith asks him about human ingenuity, he talks about something else, and Smith has to remind him what the topic was. It's presented as a funny little example of how wrapped up he gets in talking about this, and how digressive he can be. And it is. But what's more significant is that he didn't answer the question even after the reminder. He does the same thing when asked why he should be treated differently than people saying the same thing 30-40 years ago. It doesn't feel like he's dodging the questions, really, so much as the mere act of being asked seems to confuse him. He's a dervish of monologue, and even scant dialogue seems to completely throw him off his game.

The second thing is his tendency to say "we" and "us" when it felt a lot more likely he was just talking about himself, as if he were trying to talk himself into believing he were heading up an actual movement. This dovetails with the third thing...

...his emotional moment where he talks about community. It's easy to psychoanalyze this, so easy it has to make you wonder if it's entirely fair or accurate. The obvious conclusion seems to be that the man is simply lonely, and doesn't have anyone, so thinking about society starting over and forming close-kint communities resonates with him on a deep level. It even explains the desire to turn a "me" into an "us."

And that's where we get into the foibles. Being behind on his rent, a divorce, accusations of sexual harassment. It does paint the picture of a troubled man. Logically, I acknowledge that this tells us nothing about the veracity of what he says, but personally, it does paint a picture of someone whose obsession has probably irrevocably damaged his life. Whether or not that obsession is justified, it certainly is an obsession. And the result on a personal level gives the film's title its second meaning: it can be seen both as a warning of societal collapse, or the clinical documentation of the result of one man's mental collapse.

Either way, fascinating stuff.




Very curious about what WT and Mark think about this. For some reason I feel compelled to guess that WT will sort of like it and Mark will like it significantly more. Like, in this sense, referring to the general thrust of the content rather than it's quality as a film. Which, in a film like this, is pretty much 50% of the production.



I only saw it once but I was half asleep. My first impression was that this guy smokes way too much but he probably figures the world is nearing an end anyway so it doesn't matter. As far as being basically one interview I can say that the editor did a swell job in b-roll and both Ruppert and the interviewer were engaging enough to hold attention otherwise. The one thing I'm not sure I agree with is that the doc establishes Ruppert in a personal collapse and while I can see where that comes from in the film and despite his personal issues, it being built in such a way as a thriller would be, there is a Joe Rogan podcast Ruppert appears on and while his ideology is steadfast his tone is far more like Ron Paul's laid back "I've been warning you about this for years" and I infer from this that he's much more naturally calm than depicted here. I will probably go into detail about that in my next post.

I'd say first time through I'd buy into 90% of what he talks about. And I still say Yoda is slightly wrong about overpopulation but hey whatever



Thanks. That's an interesting insight; that he's not usually this animated. Smith probably whipped him up a little, then; a fair point. But it's hard not to look at some of these accusations, and his position in general, and not conclude that his obsessions have probably adversely affected the rest of his life. "Collapse" might be too strong a word, admittedly, though when you're basically positive that Dick Cheney is taking a personal interest in you, you've definitely got to use some kind of negative word to describe it.

Re: overpopulation. I'm intrigued by "slightly wrong," but don't want to derail this thread. If you get the urge to talk it out any option works for me; new thread, profile comments, PM. But I'll second the "hey whatever" aspect of it. It wasn't a particularly huge part of the film, anyway, and his thesis is that we're on the brink of this thing, so even if the population is stabilizing or slowing it wouldn't change the general thrust of his case.



I'll be posting a list of what other topics he discusses in the podcast. As far as the population is concerned, and regardless of whether or not we are overpopulated or not, I think he's accurate about the die-off. That's what I felt was relevant. I'm not sure what you meant when you said we'd face the opposite problem.



Oh, I see. I was talking about his implication that the population is just going to keep growing and contribute to the problems; that was sort of implied by the population growth chart and the way he was talking about. If you were just talking about the idea that the shortage will lead to a lot of death until it hits some level consistent with the new energy paradigm, then I don't disagree. At least, not with the internal logic of the claim.



I saw this a couple of days ago now, but I'm still unable to get in order what I think of it and get it down.

Needless to say I agree with some of what he said. Especially that the political parties/system is going to have to change to stay more relevant.

I thought the whole thing was fascinating and I was gripped from start to finish.



Yeah, I was too. It was nice to hear what I've felt inside me for so many years be put succinctly into thought and words for all to hear. And who better to do it than someone like him that has seen the underbelly of this system we tend to hold dear?



Yeah, I was too. It was nice to hear what I've felt inside me for so many years be put succinctly into thought and words for all to hear. And who better to do it than someone like him that has seen the underbelly of this system we tend to hold dear?
I just wish more people knew it too



I always feel that joy and delight, too. But then it's followed by the horrid realisation that I (we) might be right. One of the things about being 'the lone nutter' about things of this magnitude is the, admittedly, small comfort that you might be wrong.



If you could agree that there are basically three types of people: leaders, followers and loners, then you might agree that each type might interpret Rupert differently;
if you don't agree, that just means that you are more aware of your unique finger print and that ideas and the ways of the world are so complex that if we were to pick the smartest think tank to run it, it would still be mission impossible.



The doc was very well made. Ruppert's personality carried the film from start to finish, even as his info deserved skepticism.

I think he's basically right, but I think a collapse will be more gradual than suggested. I know little about Ruppert besides what the doc tells but I've read a bit about the alleged sexual harassment, as well as his involvement with 9/11 Truth. The doc was uneven in that regard, and even felt downright exploitative of him at times. He's clearly passionate about his beliefs and quite articulate but I was somewhat taken aback by how bipolar he ultimately came across as. And I'm speaking from experience with MDDs.

Ignoring the stuff that would cast doubt made me feel the director was trying to clean up a bit too much, focusing on the man & his beliefs at the expense of full disclosure. I think that was done partly so as not to detract from the sensationalism, but also partly to preserve the flow of Ruppert's thought process itself.

I still think it is very much worth seeing.
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I do find it pretty interesting that this doc was supposed to be about the CIA dealing drugs (something which I think many now know is a fact by the way) and then devolved (? is that the right word) into this thing that is inside many of us.

Personally, I don 't care about his past. No one has a clean cupboard or past. He's no more mentally unstable than I am.

I think the director ignored the stuff that would cast doubt because we all know all that song and dance and are tired of hearing it. He wanted to focus on the man and his message. Even if he turns out to be completely batshit insane. Who cares? I never once heard him tell me to go and buy guns and prepare to repel boarders. He talked about surviving and restoring things.

I think you're dead on though Deadite, not only will the natural resources last longer than he thinks but the prices will continue to rise. So most likely I see a collapse that takes so long to occur that by the time the general population even realizes what's going on, most of them will be screwed.

And I feel like its my duty to sort of state the obvious. He claims that "everything will be on the table". I disagree. The rich will still be running things. They just most likely, won't be doing it where we can get at them. They will always need a labor force so some of them will try to keep chunks of population protected so they'll always have people to do their work for them.

A good reason to be Mexican or Chinese by the way. Most of these people already work for very little wages and live in squalor so they have a much larger head start when it comes to adapting to a total collapse of a society. I mean, I know Americans are an industrious and ingenious people but starting behind is starting from behind. And no level of ingenuity is going to make up for a lifetime of living on the brink. Some of us will catch up, because some of us accept that this sort of thing is likely to happen. But how many will perish if things get really bad? In America? Millions, I'd wager.

Anyway...