Public Projections of Private Despair - C-Realm Vault #89

C-Realm Vault Episode 89 — originally released April 20, 2014

This episode, recorded on KMO's 46th birthday two weeks after the suicide of Michael C. Ruppert, is one of the clearest early documents of KMO's departure from the Peak Oil collapse milieu — and one of the most personally candid things he ever put on tape.

After closing out a conversation with Ilargi of the Automatic Earth on European sovereign debt and the student loan crisis, KMO turns to Ruppert's death. He begins with his own history — his father's suicide in 1998, the damage it did to his family — before recounting his single unpleasant encounter with Ruppert, who contacted him in 2010 proposing an interview and then erupted at a minor miscommunication.

The real subject of the episode, though, is Guy McPherson. KMO identifies the Ruppert-McPherson relationship as a case study in how collapse figures amplify one another's certainty, flatten complex adaptive systems into simple doom trajectories, and build audiences among people too angry at genuine injustice to scrutinize the claims being made on their behalf. He names this — explicitly — as the creation of a death cult.

For listeners of the Getting Over Collapse project: this is the episode where the vocabulary was already in place. The analysis developed across subsequent years, but the core diagnosis is here, in real time, twelve years before KMO sat down to write the book.