What Is “The Crumbles”?

Disaster movies and popular prepper culture both tend to lean into the idea of “the collapse” – the big day where everything is fine at the start of the day, and industrial society has gone by the end of the day. This is extremely cool on screen, and it’s certainly the way that local disasters like floods and wildfires can operate, but on the larger, societal scale, things tend to be a little more insidious than that.

One of my favourite podcasters, Robert Evans of It Could Happen Here, clued me in a few years ago to the concept of The Crumbles, and it’s one that I’ve seen everywhere I looked ever since.

The basic concept is this:

Our society is an extremely complex system, and small problems all build on one another in a feedback loop, each problem increasing the likelihood of other problems occurring, increasing the severity of those problems, and reducing our ability to respond.

As a result, a constant parade of seemingly-unrelated problems drag us down, one step at a time, into disaster. Here’s the episode in question, if you want to listen to it:

Evans himself describes the process of The Crumbles like this:

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, America was already experiencing a severe shortage of doctors and other qualified healthcare workers, which was made much worse by the plague – he references a study from April 2nd, 2021, which says that 1 in 5 healthcare workers have considered quitting because of coronavirus. The number of doctors and other healthcare professionals who did quit thanks to the horrendous conditions caused by COVID is in the thousands, and more than 3,600 of them also died in the first year of the pandemic, reducing numbers further.

This puts more strain on the healthcare system, which reduces the ability to catch and contain future outbreaks, reduces the ability to treat those outbreaks, makes the response to a natural disaster more patchy, and increases the possibility of the healthcare system buckling completely under the weight of some future disaster. All of these things increase the stress on the people working in these roles, pushing more of them to quit, which makes the whole thing worse, which drains away more doctors, and on and on it goes.

“This is how The Crumbles works,” he says. “Problems feed into calamities and become catastrophes.”

It’s a concept that innately makes sense to those of us living in the UK at this point in time, I think. If you want a local example, consider this summer – climate change caused a mammoth heatwave across mainland Europe in the summer of 2023, causing widespread wildfires which not only destroyed crop fields, homes and economic centres in Europe, but also released a huge amount of carbon into the atmosphere that was previously locked away in trees and topsoil across Europe. This means less food to go around in Europe, and less to sell to the UK, so the prices tick up, and at the same time it means that future heatwaves and wildfires are more likely and likely to be more severe.

At the same time, the intense pressure generated by that heat on the mainland pushed a low-pressure front across the UK for almost the entire growing season, and UK farmers saw their crop yield drop considerably as a result of the freakishly rubbish growing season. Guess what that does to food prices and availability?

This all comes in the midst of an ongoing cost-of-living crisis in which everything is becoming more expensive and more unreliable by the day; the Government has just announced that it can’t afford climate change mitigation strategies, and the global average temperature is likely to exceed +1.5C of warming for the year. Everything feeds into everything else; a shock in one place reduces our ability to meet challenges somewhere else, and that combines with a third oncoming issue to create a much larger disaster than would otherwise have occurred.

None of it seems to come suddenly, which is where a lot of apocalypse and collapse obsessives fall down – they’re expecting The Event to come crashing into us all at once, but The Crumbles is a long game, and it wears things down slowly until they just crumble away.

So Everything Is Just Going To Get Worse Forever? What Can We Do?

It can seem completely overwhelming when you look at it all at once – but there are concrete steps that we can all take to try to adapt to the crumbles. There are steps that we can take alone, and steps that have to be taken together, but they CAN be taken, and here’s how.

Start Prepping

An unexpected and surprising thing for me to recommend, I’m sure. No doubt you’re clutching your pearls.

Obvious as it might seem, though, preparing ourselves is the first step to meeting our crumbling infrastructure and worsening environment. We need to be able to survive the shocks that will be coming, or else there’s no point trying to do anything grander.

You can start by reading the How To Start Prepping In The UK article on this site, or the deep-dives into individual things like making an audit, storing food, or water – but the main thing is to just start.

If you have no space, focus on just three days of essentials – the first three days of supplies is infinitely more valuable than the supplies that come afterwards, as you are most likely to need a cushion of around that size. If the cut-off lasts longer, the first three days gives you the time to explore your options and link up with your neighbours, and gives you a chance to find your way out of trouble.

Having your own house in order is also one of the best things you can do for your neighbours and your community – if supplies are low and there isn’t much to go around, you won’t need to take any, since you’ve already got some. You’ll be one less mouth to feed, one less person lining up for a bag of rice and some bottled water. If you have enough that you can help the single mum next door or the old couple across the street, even better, but it starts with making sure you’ve got enough to survive on as the first priority.

Start Talking To Your Neighbours

You might be the most popular person in town, but just in case you aren’t, I’ll quickly run down how to build a relationship with the people around you in our atomised, divided world. Plenty of people have been isolated enough by work and their neighbourhood that it’s no mean feat to just “make friends with your neighbours.”

If you’re a local celebrity and everyone adores you then feel free to skip this section.

It’s best to start small – just a simple hello in the hallway will do, to start with. If you’re asked to take in a parcel for your neighbours, do it. Try to say hello to the people you see around – they see you around, too, and they know you live in the area, so a “hello” will probably get a smile, at least.

Don’t be afraid of small talk – I love my neighbours and those friendships are absolutely based around bumping into one another on the street and just chatting about… nothing, really. Small talk is how you get to know someone, especially in a no-stress environment. It allows connections to build slowly and at their own pace.

This is just the ground work, and it can progress to asking how people are, offering to help with whatever they’re dealing with at the moment, and getting to know them pretty quickly – then when it comes time to have birthday parties or barbecues, you can invite them, and before you know it, you’re fast friends with the people in your area. You have more in common with them than you think, and once you’ve found it, you’re on the right tracks!

Going to community events and volunteering for community groups is another surefire way to get involved with the community and make friends. It’ll involve some of your time, sure, but it’ll be worth it – the connections you’ll make and the skills and relationships you’ll gain will be invaluable. Plus, involvement in the community has been proven to boost mental health, which is always a bonus. Which reminds me, point two:

Get Involved With Your Community

Around me, there is a zero-waste food collective who collect food from supermarkets and cafes that is at or past its sell-by date, and so can’t be sold any more. Instead of the food going into the bin, they sort it into bags, distribute it to centres around the city, and give it out to anyone who wants it. It’s not a food bank, and there is no means-testing or anything like that. It’s just a group of people who want to make sure food doesn’t go in the bin.

Volunteering with something like that would be an incredible way to forge ties with the community. If you found something like that to volunteer with, you wouldn’t just have a new hobby, you’d have a place with an organisation specialising in moving food to where it needs to be, which is a ready-made answer to a number of disaster-related problems. Plus, all of the people you’d be forming connections with are the sorts of people who volunteer at food-distribution centres, and those tend to be good sorts.

It doesn’t have to be food-related – there will be charities and mutual aid organisations in your area that cover lots of different things, from homeless outreach to legal aid and tree-planting, and if you can’t find one, you can always start one of your own. You might just find your new reason for getting up in the morning.

What’s The Difference Between Mutual Aid and Charity?

Mutual Aid is becoming a buzzword in all sorts of circles, but it can be an ill-defined one, and is often confused with charity. There are a few key differences, and mutual aid is much more powerful. I’ll try to explain it here:

Charity is when a person or group with plenty, gives to those who have less – you are hungry, and I have a multipack of cookies, and I give you a few cookies. This immediately addresses your cookie shortage, but when I go, that’ll be the end of the cookies, and you’ll go hungry again.

Mutual Aid is when a community rises up to meet its own needs, and address the cause of their current problem themselves – you are hungry, and so you meet up with a few friends and sort out baking your own cookies. You sort out an oven, a recipe, and sources of flour, sugar and other ingredients, and you bake your own. Now you have cookies, completely independent of me and my multipack, and when I leave, you and your friends will still be able to bake your own cookies when you get hungry.

The other key difference between charity and mutual aid is that mutual aid seeks to build dual power. Dual power essentially means that functions or services normally provided from outside the community are instead provided by the community itself – think of a mining community that goes on strike, so their bosses attempt to starve them and cut off their healthcare to force the strikers into a bad deal. If the community has built its own ability to feed itself and meet its medical needs, then the external force (the bosses) won’t be able to starve them into submission, and the community will be able to stand strong.

This is the key to facing The Crumbles. If our problems are all interconnected, and they all feed on one another to grow to larger sizes, then the ability to cut them back down to size is absolutely essential. With some things, like climate change, the problem is too large for any one community to face – but with many others, the actual on-the-ground reality of a crisis can be mitigated or even resolved by coordinated community action.

This is actually how most disaster first-response goes: in surviving Hurricane Katrina, political scientist Daniel Aldritch noticed that the help that he’d received that made the most difference had come from local people, rather than official emergency response. He went on to investigate this more deeply and found that the vast majority of disaster first response and recovery comes not from the official authorities, but from the immediate community.

From the linked article:

“Aldrich’s findings show that ambulances and firetrucks and government aid are not the principal ways most people survive during — and recover after — a disaster. His data suggest that while official help is useful — in clearing the water and getting the power back on in a place such as New Orleans after Katrina, for example — government interventions cannot bring neighborhoods back, and most emergency responders take far too long to get to the scene of a disaster to save many lives. Rather, it is the personal ties among members of a community that determine survival during a disaster, and recovery in its aftermath.

When Aldrich visited villages in India hit by the giant 2004 tsunami, he found that villagers who fared best after the disaster weren’t those with the most money, or the most power. They were people who knew lots of other people — the most socially connected individuals. In other words, if you want to predict who will do well after a disaster, you look for faces that keep showing up at all the weddings and funerals.”

It seems like a tall order – “the world is collapsing so start making friends with your neighbours”, but it honestly can’t be understated: the antidote to The Crumbles is to fight against our isolation and build the sorts of connected societies that humans have been relying on since the Stone Age.

It probably won’t be the police that pull you out of the rubble – it’ll probably be the guy that lives across the road.

Good luck out there. Tell your neighbours I said hi.

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