Michael C. Ruppert interview

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In Collapse, a 2009 documentary directed by Chris Smith featuring ex-LAPD officer, Michael C. Ruppert, the former cop makes an analogy based on the sinking Titanic. There were three types of people on board, he says. According to Ruppert, the first type refused to believe the ship was sinking and sat in the bar enjoying the luxurious apertifs. The second panicked and went crazy trying to save themselves. The third, Ruppert says, asked, 'How can we build a lifeboat?'

It's this type of person Ruppert is trying to reach in Collapse, now out in the UK, and in his work at large. He is focusing on pragmatic, invested people who are looking for ways to survive, what he believes, is the end of civilisation as we know it. All sound a bit dramatic? Maybe. But his facts and figures are irrefutable. We caught up with the surprisingly optimistic doomsday merchant to hear his spin on our current systems of control and production.

HUCK: How has your life has changed since the documentary was released in America last year?
Michael Ruppert: Well I paid the rent this month, which is good. I haven’t seen any income from the movie because it’s been pirated more than two million times around the world. That’s just a sign of the way everything is changing throughout the economic environment... I’m certainly much more credible than I used to be, I’m getting a lot more respect… And I have Collapsenet.com. We’ve just passed 2000 members in 51 countries and that’s an amazing confirmation to me. I’ve had a sense, since the movie’s come out, that millions of people around the world are not only aware of what’s going on but they’ve been waiting for a message like this. That’s the biggest woohoo for me.

What do you say to critics who dismiss you for not having the authority of a certified scientist or economist, for example?
Well first of all simple arithmetic is all that’s needed to understand the issues. Anyone who pretends that the issues require more than the ability to think critically and [understand] simple arithmetic are obfuscating the problem, they’re hiding the problem… I am a very seasoned investigative journalist. I mean my first book Crossing the Rubicon has a thousand footnotes in it from the Harvard business school library. I’m a recognised journalist, my calls were returned from the White House press office and all over the world… Journalism is the art of bringing disparate facts together and painting a picture of something… No scientist has disputed anything I’ve said in the movie.

Do you face that kind of criticism a lot?
No actually, not now at all. If I appear prescient in the movie, which came out in 2009, I appear - I wanna phrase this so I don’t sound in love with myself – prophetic now. As all of the things I have predicted have come, and are coming, true. The DVD contains deleted scenes of which the director Chris Smith said, “Oh that’s not gonna happen, I’m not gonna put that in the movie,” and of course it has all happened - all of the predictions that I made both in the movie and in the book Confronting Collapse. So you know, the best evidence is reality matching predictions.

Do you think your background in the LAPD did give you some kind of invaluable insight?
It gave me training because when a police officer, or a detective, prepares a case for presentation in court the facts have to be very clear, they have to be very accurate and they have to be verifiable, according to legal standards. So that’s the same standard I used to become an investigative journalist. None of my investigative journalism stories have ever been challenged or sued because the truth is always a perfect standard.

There’s an argument that the kind of apocalyptic language you use encourages the, “If we’re all screwed, why bother?” attitude. Do you think there’s a danger this documentary will just make people more apathetic?
No. It is clear that some people aren’t going to survive, and the great [challenge] now is to determine or influence how many will survive and what kind of quality of life they will have on the other side… Everything I do I kind of apply the question: “What will be left for children born two generations from now, what will we be leaving them?” And that has been the incredible short-sightedness of human development and evolution to this point we have just been profligate wasters of everything and now, you know, those in their twenties and thirties are left with this god awful mess that could have been prevented and still be, hopefully, mitigated. We spent your futures.

So is it a call to arms and for direct action?
Absolutely, and not everyone’s going to answer it. I have never been delusional or quixotic enough to think that somehow the whole human race is going to agree with everything [I say], but it’s clear to me since the movie that there is a global awakening - there is a shift in human consciousness that is well underway. It just hasn’t been recognised by the mainstream yet. I guess I have to say that the mainstream is starting to recognise it because I’m starting to do [mainstream entertainment and press].

Do you feel positive about the future?
Okay, um, [sighs]. I’m happier now than I have been my whole life, and that’s because I am becoming aware of how many people are listening and how many people do get it and I focus on that. I’m hopeful that human consciousness may evolve so we don’t wind up with the worst-case scenario. Do I feel positive that something good and positive is emerging? Yes, absolutely. I don’t have any positive sense that we’re going to be able to preserve an infinite growth paradigm. Nor would I want to. Or that we’re all going to be able to go on living the way we used to.

Civilisations, since time memorial, have collapsed. What do you make of the argument that we’re inherently doomed and Man’s arrogance is not to blame?
Civilisations have always collapsed, and that’s not going to change I don’t think. Especially as long as we keep living in what can be defined as a growth model. My point clearly in my book, and in the movie, is that it’s the way money works - it’s an infinite growth monetary paradigm that dooms us to this cycle. There is no such thing as infinite growth and the boom and bust cycle may be a rhythmical thing, but this is part of the evolution in consciousness that I’m calling for.

But do you think people use that as an excuse to avoid taking responsibility for their actions?
Yes. There is a great book called Deep Survival by Laurence Gonzales, who I love, and [he explores that] there are always certain people who will think, “There’s nothing we can do, we just have to be the way we are and do what we do and there’s nothing to change.” And those are the ones, if you take the analogy I use in the movie, that are the same as the group on the Titanic who refused to believe the ship was sinking. But then there was the other group that said: “Show us how to build lifeboats.” And what makes me so positive and happy now is that I’ve just become aware that there are so many millions of people who feel like this around the world. We’re not some minority of perverts, you know, lurking somewhere doing things that are shameful, and we might well be the cutting edge of human evolution.

Why do you think some people deny the ecological and environmental crises?
I don’t care… I mean it’s getting harder by the day to deny the fact that human industrial civilisation is collapsing all around us and on my website, Collapsenet, I’ve followed events in the UK very closely, and you guys are having your asses kicked - you can rephrase that - with energy shortages. I wonder how many excess deaths there are going to be in Britain this winter? I mean it was 50,000 one year, 68,000 after that and 100,000 people might freeze to death this winter because they don’t have the money for heat. And I haven’t seen those numbers published.

What do you kind of think about the mainstream media?
It’s changing very, very quickly. People are losing faith in governments and the mainstream media, which are intertwined, as they’re all controlled and run by corporations. I live in Los Angeles, which is a big media centre, and the whole entertainment industry is changing rapidly because they realise that nobody’s buying the same bollocks they’ve been sold all these years any more. The product isn’t selling and nobody’s got any money when we’ve got 40 million unemployed in this country and God knows how many in Britain and all media is under a huge economic change right now - cash flows are changing in motion picture, television, music, everywhere and people are suffering. There’s a huge crack and new forms of art are emerging… Media will go where they know they can make a sale, they will change their tune in a heartbeat. They’re in a relationship with politicians and bankers and especially mainstream advertising, but now they’re changing and it’s a great opening moment, it’s a wedge. The more people who understand this, and get their foot in the door with mainstream media, the faster the change becomes.

What do you think about an organisation like Wikileaks, for example, as an agent of transparency?
Cheers! High-five! Bravo! The more, the better. As people see the changes coming, and the structures falling on their own corrupt weight, the more they get on the band wagon for change. But the other part of that is governments are just no longer credible – who believes? I’m in touch with people all over the world and this is not just in the states or the UK. Australia’s amazing, I love the Aussies - they’re just so loud about it. This is great, this is a time of revolution, and that’s what we need.

People are kind of scared by radical thinking and can feel alienated. Do you think the image of the ‘paranoid conspirasist’ dampens the credibility of people like you?
Well I was in New York City for a week recently and New Yorkers say, “We don’t see anything happening here,” and my response is that the two most narcissistic cities in the United States are Washington DC and New York City. I say to them, “All over the world school districts are shutting down, libraries are closing, police departments are laying off policemen, fire departments are shutting down, cities are being abandoned, street lights are being turned off, roads are turning back to gravel, people are freezing to death and people cannot afford food. Are you gonna tell me because you don’t see it in New York City it’s not happening out there?" That very much reminds me of Marie Antoinette. And boy, New York shut up. They just stopped in their tracks. It’s much better now because so many people are being beaten into a state of reasonableness. All of the people who have lost their homes, their jobs, their pensions, their cars, their electricity - suddenly they’re suddenly a lot more open minded about this stuff. And those demographics are only going to increase.

Do you see any relationship between the rise of terrorism and the collapse of systems of control and production?
Terrorism has, let’s leave aside the discussion as to whether it was a de facto development or intentional, but terrorism has served an Orwellian purpose, of strengthening the power of military establishments and governments. I know that in my country, our military expenditures account for 25 per cent of GDP. So if the objective of terrorists is to bring about the collapse of the western world, ha! It’s happening anyway… In Britain you’re facing the most enormous defence cuts I’ve ever seen. That’s causing quite a row in parliament right now and in NATO and it’s upsetting everybody here in the states. Terrorism I think will fade, and I think it will become of much less concern as people become more concerned about day-to-day survival. Terrorism was a luxury of a world that had excess resources to spend on terrorism.

You say in the film: “Localised food production is the most fundamental key to human survival in the collapse of industrial civilisation.” Does that mean you’re anti-globalisation?
I’m totally anti - well I don’t have to be anti-globalisation because globalisation is dead anyway. We’re about to embark on an era of unmitigated, unbridled trade wars, which will result in the inevitable dismantling of globalisation. It is not possible to ship goods around the world with energy that is now becoming more expensive and harder to find. There is no logical point of shipping sardines from Australia to be canned and tinned in a market here in the United States. Or strawberries from Chile or whatever. And that applies to all goods. Globalisation has been a dead man walking for a number of years now, I recall writing that in 2004.

In your opinion, what can people do on a grassroots level to try and improve the future for their children and the next generation?
The most important thing to me right now is just to save people’s lives. This collapse is happening faster than I had anticipated; it’s going to be very stark and abrupt. And if you take Maslow’s ‘hierarchy of needs’ theory, we need air first, then water, then food. And local food production is the first step in survival… All over Britain are transition towns, you know, that are actively involved in that process. There’s some great perma-culture. And local food production is the one thing that I would say everybody needs to focus on now. After we figure out how we eat let’s figure out the rest.

What are your personal plans for the future?
I am now becoming very active in my own process of lifeboat building. I’m not going to go into great detail because I don’t want people to follow me or paparazzi me you know, but I am getting very – I’m getting my hands dirty with eating local food and planting, and soil restoration and sharing things locally. It’s becoming very clear now that “environmentalism” is no longer a lefty, feel good, warm fuzzy blanket thing, it’s about saving your own ass. Which gives it a whole different meaning. The deeper I get into changing that, the happier I get, because I’m discovering new ways of people and life that I didn’t have before.

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Michael C. Ruppert interview (text) by Shelley Jones is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.