The Storm Network

Pablo Servigne wants you to meet your neighbors, even if it's hard.

"The link between neighbors isn't easy because we don't always choose them. We have to learn to get along with people we don't like at first glance, with people who don't have the same ideas as us. That's super hard in our society," he said in a recent seminar with Adaptation Radicale, the French branch of Deep Adaptation.

But links with neighbors are the key to an effective collapse response, and to a better life in the present day. Instead of "survivalism" (retreating into a bunker with a gun), Servigne advocates what he calls "supervivalism," the creation of dense networks of social connections.

He said:

"Survivalism pushes to the extreme the harmful aspects of our society: materialism and competition. It's believing we're going to save ourselves with the best backpack, knife, water filter, supplies, and by a giant 'every-man-for-himself'. People who go into that reduce their social links, and science has shown that's hyper vulnerable. You cut the grass under your feet, you prevent yourself from living in the long term.

"Supervivalism is the inverse posture, the counterpoint: Preparing for crises is enjoying life. It's having more friends, more neighbors. If crises don't arrive or take time to come, we'll have improved our lives. If you prepare for crises by cutting links, you're in the wrong direction—not only making yourself vulnerable but destroying society."

Servigne has just published a book (in French only, so far), in which he lays out a strategy for transforming society. It's called 'The Storm Network: A manifesto for popular mutual aid.' Human nature, Servigne says, tends toward cooperation, especially in times of crisis, and we need to nurture that. (The name "Storm Network" is derived from an idea of Joanna Macy's, who identified your "rough weather network" as the people you could absolutely rely on in a crisis.)

The publisher's blurb for the book says:

"Imagine yourself caught in a major crisis: Who do you call first? Who will you help first? These people form your Storm Network : a dense web of connections that keeps you afloat in adversity. What if we expanded these networks? What if, in the face of coming storms, social connection became our best strategy? This book proposes a gentle but determined revolution: preparing for storms of all types not by withdrawing, but by mutual aid, trust, and solidarity. We could call this "supervivalism." Better still, this posture would allow us to improve our lives now, without waiting for crises."

Servigne has created an institute to develop and promote his ideas about mutual aid. The group's work is to put into practice the ideas in his 2017 book 'Mutual Aid: The other law of the jungle." They are developing three kinds of networks: 1) a network of researchers, to create tools that enhance citizen mutual aid; 2) a network of institutions—professional aid and relief workers who want to work with citizen groups, and 3) a network of citizens, to create self-organizing groups that engage in mutual aid practices. See here for an English translation of their website, and here for the original French.

Servigne's previous books about collapse and collapse response include:

• Mutual Aid: The Other Law of the Jungle, 2017, with Gauthier Chapelle
• How Everything Can Collapse: A Manual for Our Times, 2020, with Raphaël Stevens (in which the authors coined the term "collapsologie.")
• Another End of the World Is Possible: Living the Collapse (and Not Merely Surviving It), 2021, with Raphaël Stevens & Gauthier Chapelle

I was able to attend Servigne's seminar with Adaptation Radicale, thanks to my colleague Julien Lecaille. What follows are excerpts from the talk, translated from the French using Claude.ai. The original video is available on YouTube with subtitles in French and auto-translated into English.

Collapse Club will be following carefully the development of The Storm Network. We hope to participate when the public programs are rolled out.

❤️ DB

Excerpts from remarks by Pablo Servigne at a seminar with Adaptation Radicale, 16 October 2025, translated from the French with Claude.ai.

Myths of Catastrophe

When there's a catastrophe, people help each other. Scientists have known this for 50-60 years, but very few, and they publish in English and nobody believed them because Hollywood films said the opposite.

There are four or five myths relayed by the media when there's a catastrophe:

• Myth 1: Looting and antisocial behavior - FALSE. There is some but very little. The vast majority of behaviors are prosocial.
• Myth 2: Panic - NOT AT ALL. Scientists have even given up the word panic, except to designate the panic of elites — people who have power who send in the military because they panic about losing their power. It's a scientific word: "elite panic." But people don't panic. There's calm, there's self-organization.
• Myth 3: Passive victims - FALSE. It's false to consider humans as passive people who wait for the State to intervene. There's a lot of leadership, ideas, activity, solidarity.
• Myth 4: Crowds are stupid - FALSE. All the research now shows that there's a lot of intelligence in crowds. This reverses a mythology and a pillar of our liberal society.

Mutual Aid in Catastrophe

When a catastrophe arrives, lots of incredible things happen. Catastrophes are a window on human nature. It shows us things we humans are capable of doing. When normality breaks, incredible things happen.

This mutual aid in emergency time is incredible—there's altruism, there are sacrifices.

• In the Twin Towers on September 11th, people calmly descended dozens of floors in acts of great courage, carrying wheelchairs of disabled people. Firefighters went back up knowing they were going to die, to save people.
• At the Bataclan [a terrorist attack in France in 2015], people interposed themselves, took bullets to save strangers.
• When we ask people why they saved Jews, they answer: "I didn't think. It's just like that. It's a question of humanity."

When the human being is put in a condition of intuition and spontaneity, without thinking, we turn off the rational brain — they're more altruistic, more prosocial than people in conditions of rationality and reflection.

The Fade of Solidarity

This surge in emergency-time fades. After the emergency, when we return to normal, the spontaneity of the beginning wears away. We see old tensions return, selfishness, every man for himself. If we do nothing, it collapses.

That's why we need to put in place rules in the group of stabilization and stimulation of prosociality or mutual aid or altruism. For example: punishing cheaters, rewarding altruists, the reputation mechanism.

These mechanisms were put in place by humans. We're very good at that because it's been hundreds of millions of years that we base ourselves on that. Our ultra-social species survives thanks to that.

The Problem with Rescue Services

Before the arrival of rescue services, lots of things self-organize among the victims, and with people who arrive from outside to help. All of that swarms with incredible initiative, solidarity and bottom-up horizontal processes.

When rescue services arrive with aid—with verticality—they can arrive with condescension, the "cowboy effect": "cordon off, move aside, we're the pros." They can deconstruct all the links that were created. That's observed a lot in humanitarian work and crisis management.

The current research project at URD ("Urgency, Rehabilitation, Development," Servigne's research institute) aims at two things:

1. Enable citizens to respond better to crises before rescue services arrive, and,
2. Articulate with rescue services—we need to change the rescue services' doctrine so they arrive with horizontality and humility.

There are lots of countries that do that super well. We're pretty bad in France.

"Liberal" Mythology

The liberal mythology that founded our society 300-400 years ago has this conception: nature is bad, human nature is bad. Nature is only competition and aggression. By extension, human nature is bad.

According to the liberal conception — I'm referring to Hobbes, one of the founding fathers of liberalism — it was a very disappointed vision of human nature because Europe had just suffered decades of religious war. The liberals said "No, we will stop organizing a society based on morality. We will organize it just on the economy and our shared selfishness. Knowing that we're all awful, we're going to create the State as sole guarantor of cooperation."

Our mythology is that nature is red with fire and blood—everyone kills each other—and there are small pockets of cooperation thanks to civilization, the State, and old white men who bring those institutions.

This mental landscape has fabricated our doubly violent societies, with horizontal violence — competition on a plane where the strongest wins — and vertical violence — pyramidal hierarchical organization where we need a chief and people who obey.

Putting these two constructs together leads to authoritarianism and fascism.

Cooperation and Competition

However, what we show in 'Mutual Aid' [2017] is that nature is NOT a landscape of fire and blood. Nature is full of mutual aid, cooperation, mutualism, symbiosis, and also a bit of competition; coexistence, non-link, links. It's dynamic — these links of all colors, different intensities that go out: blink. We can have links of cooperation or competition with the same species depending on the environment.

The great rule: When there's a hostile environment, there's mutual aid cooperation. When there's an environment of abundance, competition emerges.

For four billion years, ALL living organisms are caught in one or several mutually beneficial interactions. Mutualisms, symbioses — we're made of that. Cells with nuclei, animals, plants — it all came from symbiosis, cooperation between cells. It's a strategy of the living to survive in the long term.

Nature is a green landscape with small bubbles of competition. Competition exists for questions of territory or reproduction, but most of the time animals avoid fighting. Competition is mutually harmful. It's a relationship "lose/lose." Many animals have developed ritualized behaviors — they show their muscles but without fighting because it's risky, stressful.

Competition, yes, when it lasts five minutes and when we pretend, if possible. For example, at the Olympic Games, athletes arrive at the games with massage, great baths, everything. They fight for five minutes, then come back to massage and good food. Great competition!

It's always the dominants who say competition is good because they have nothing to lose. If you put everyone in competition all the time — all the unemployed, retirees, companies, schools, universities, workers — it's hell. It's ulcer, cancer. It destroys individuals and societies. Competition destroys links. It's a force of dissociation.

Nature framed that for 4 billion years. If it hadn't, there would be no nature. Competition destroys everything.

Once we've put on these glasses, we can see catastrophe phenomena more serenely. It gives back confidence in us, in nature, and we see other living beings not as resources to exploit but as allies.

A World of Subjects

We are linked with non-human creatures. They are our allies. It's obvious. You don't want to consider them as a resource. We need to stop considering them as objects. They're subjects.

Once you consider things or organisms as subjects, all our empathy circuitry turns on and we can talk to trees, to mountains, to rivers. That's natural for us. It's really very easy. So it's changing cosmogony.

I say that because we mustn't laugh — it's not utopian. Lots of people talk to their car or their motorcycle. It's very natural for humans to do that. It's that which makes the world magical, which marvels, makes the world wonderful — we transform all objects into subjects and it's magnificent.

Our civilization did the reverse. It transformed all subjects into objects. So we cut them, massacre them, sell them, rape them, pillage them, we don't care. They're no longer living beings, they're objects. Even among humans, that's how genocides happen.

Rationality was also at the basis of many massacres. I say that because often people say "Yeah, but the spiritual is religion. Religions have caused thousands of deaths." Yes, okay. But no, it's pyramidal hierarchies that did stupid things.

Investing in Peace

In hostile environments, mutual aid emerges spontaneously. In environments of abundance, competition emerges. This is harder to understand.

We're in abundance in France — we live well, we're rich. We each have 400 energy slaves thanks to oil. We're all Pharaohs. Being super rich, I have 400 energy slaves to feed me, heat me, make nice videos, read books, write books—big luxury!

We can afford to tell our neighbor "I don't care about you. I don't need you." It's a luxury to say that. Only the rich can say that. When we need each other, we can't afford that.

In environments of abundance there can be instances of mutual aid, but because there are behaviors of competition, hoarding, and violence, violent people win fastest. They choose short term, they succeed, they hoard, they screw others. They take a dominant position and create pyramidal hierarchical structures to maintain domination.

Investing in violence wins in short term but loses in long term. Investing in peace loses in short term because we get massacred by the violent, but it's investing in the long term.