Without a Paddle: The Sacred Cow of Mutual Aid in the Age of Climate Collapse

"You want extra foma with that latte?"

Sarah, a woman in her forties living in Pittsboro, North Carolina, has a plan. When the next storm comes—and there will be a next storm—everyone in her house will wear life jackets. There's a canoe in the carport, ready for deployment. "Now if you have to run out of the house real quick and run toward the canoe," she tells her daughter, "you'll have half a chance in hell."

Half a chance. Not a good chance. Not even a fighting chance. Half a chance in hell.

This is mutual aid at the scale of one household, stripped of its noble rhetoric and reduced to its essential function: the performance of agency under conditions of terminal systemic abandonment. Sarah's life jacket plan isn't resilience—it's surrender with props.

The Sacred Cow Feeds on Desperation

Mutual aid has become the last socially acceptable form of grief in a collapsing world. It demands moral labor from the powerless while absolving the powerful of responsibility for creating the conditions that necessitate such labor in the first place. We're not just slaughtering the sacred cow of mutual aid mythology—we're examining what it's been feeding on.

The mythology goes like this: communities coming together, caring for each other, building the world we want to see in the shell of the old. Prefigurative politics made manifest through free fridges, supply runs, and disaster response. The beautiful resilience of people who refuse to let each other drown.

The reality is Sarah buying life jackets because FEMA might not come. Her daughter Ellaina, barely out of college, making "constant disaster preparedness" her primary focus because Hurricane Helene taught her that institutions fail and communities scatter when the water rises high enough.

This isn't mutual aid. This is grief in motion—a mother's attempt to simulate sovereignty under conditions where sovereignty has been systematically withdrawn. The canoe in the carport isn't preparation; it's a prop in a political theater where hope must be performed because revolution is no longer on the table.

The Arithmetic of False Hope

The noble adage "if one can eat, then two can eat" has a hard mathematical limit on how many times you can divide by two. At some point, sharing becomes a mutual death sentence. Yet mutual aid mythology assumes infinite divisibility of care, infinite capacity for sacrifice, infinite resources that can be stretched through good intentions alone.

A defunct mutual aid group recently documented their dissolution on Reddit: twenty volunteers, months of organizing, countless committee meetings, and the result was one meal a month for 150 homeless people. Not revolutionary organizing. Not systemic change. One meal a month. Before burnout consumed the organizers and the group collapsed entirely.

"The fact that we could just pick up and drop our so-called neighbors because we got tired is a problem in its own right," wrote the former organizer. But dropping out is built into the structure of mutual aid. It only works as long as volunteers feel good about themselves. When the emotional rewards stop, the aid stops too.

This is the dirty secret of mutual aid: it's designed around disposable altruism. The system depends on burning through volunteers like kindling, then replacing them with fresh recruits who haven't yet learned the math of futility. Every successful food drive becomes evidence that "the community can handle it"—justification for cutting more public services.

The Life Jacket as Metaphor for Everything Wrong

Sarah knows her life jackets won't save her family from climate collapse. She's not deluded. She's trapped between acknowledging complete helplessness and doing something that feels like agency. The life jackets are her umbrella moment—Wile E. Coyote pulling out a parasol as the boulder falls.

But this performance of rational preparation serves a function beyond psychological comfort. It demonstrates that individuals can take responsibility for their own survival during climate disasters. Sarah's "success" at keeping her family alive becomes proof that communities can handle extreme weather without systemic intervention.

Where exactly is she planning to paddle that canoe? To the grocery store that's also underwater? The hospital that's been evacuated? The mutual aid distribution center that got washed away? The life jacket plan makes perfect sense if you're thinking about surviving in flood water. It makes no sense if you're thinking about surviving societal collapse.

Yet this is precisely the scale at which mutual aid operates—individual solutions to systemic problems, performed with enough moral intensity to obscure their fundamental inadequacy.

When Volunteers Become Fuel

Behind every mutual aid success story are burned-out organizers who gave more than they could sustainably give, then got quietly replaced by the next wave of well-meaning folks. The Reddit confession detailed this with brutal honesty: "We shoved so much pointless work onto her, and those who stepped up to help her out burned out quickly as well."

The system runs on this burnout. It needs people to be grateful for inadequate solutions because grateful people don't demand adequate ones. Every volunteer who flames out becomes evidence that "people stepped up" rather than evidence that we've abandoned citizens to fend for themselves.

Most insidiously, the volunteers themselves often don't realize they're providing political cover for the systems that created the need for help in the first place. They think they're building community resilience when they're actually demonstrating that emergency services can be privatized through emotional labor.

Sarah's daughter Ellaina embodies this perfectly. At nineteen, she's already experienced institutional abandonment so complete that teenagers became the disaster response during Hurricane Helene. Students with no water or adequate food took in displaced community members because no one else would. This isn't mutual aid success—it's using children as crisis management.

Now Ellaina says disaster preparedness "has had to become one of my primary focuses." She never wanted this responsibility, but the system requires her to accept it or watch people die. The choice between complicity and powerlessness isn't really a choice at all.

The Foma Economy

With Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut taught the world "foma"–harmless untruths, intended to comfort. Since then we've commodified our existential comfort. Order it like a coffee modification: "I'll take one medium climate optimism, extra foma, with a shot of community resilience." The barista doesn't even blink anymore when you ask for extra foma with your latte.

Mutual aid has become premium foma—expensive, labor-intensive self-deception that lets privileged people feel revolutionary while doing charity work. The coffee shop serves as the perfect venue for this transaction, where people sip five-dollar drinks while discussing supply runs for the homeless, turning crisis response into lifestyle branding.

The mythology sells because the alternative—we are at the mercy of forces completely beyond our control—is too horrible to organize a life around. Better to believe that caring harder will save us. Better to perform hope than admit despair. Better to buy life jackets than acknowledge that we're all drowning.

The Revolutionary Horizon That Isn't

From a scientific socialist perspective, mutual aid is at best political theater and at worst counter-revolutionary spectacle. You can't mutual aid your way out of fossil capitalism. The community fridge feeds some people and gives politicians an excuse to cut SNAP benefits. The disaster relief collective helps flood victims and provides cover for dismantling FEMA.

Every successful "better than nothing" solution makes the "something actually adequate" solution less politically viable. The more resilient communities become at managing crisis, the more crisis gets normalized as acceptable background conditions.

Sarah isn't building dual power or establishing new modes of production. She's learning how to die slightly more slowly. When every flood becomes training for the next flood, the logic assumes continuity—of disaster, of suffering, of endless individual responsibility for systemic failure.

The tragedy isn't that Sarah believes in mutual aid. It's that she has no better option. Revolutionary politics has been so thoroughly abandoned that buying life jackets for your household counts as radical preparation. The horizon of possibility has shrunk to the distance between your house and your canoe.

Half a Chance in Hell

Sarah's life jacket plan contains a devastating honesty that mutual aid mythology lacks: she knows it probably won't work. She's not promising salvation, just a slightly better death. "Half a chance in hell" acknowledges the mathematical reality that most mutual aid rhetoric obscures—we are not equally positioned to survive what's coming.

The canoe in the carport is a perfect metaphor for mutual aid itself: a tool designed for calm water, deployed in a tsunami, by people who know it's inadequate but have nothing else. The performance of preparation becomes more important than actual preparedness because actual preparedness would require admitting the scale of what we're facing.

When institutions abandon their basic functions, individuals get blamed for not being adequately self-reliant. When self-reliance proves impossible, communities get blamed for not caring enough about each other. When community care burns out under impossible demand, the helpers get blamed for not being sufficiently committed.

This is the psychic cost of living through collapse with no revolutionary horizon: you must perform hope while knowing it's performance. You must care for others while watching care itself become a political weapon wielded against you. You must buy life jackets for your family while knowing that life jackets don't stop drowning—they just make the drowning take longer.

The sacred cow of mutual aid isn't sacred because it works. It's sacred because admitting it doesn't work means facing the abyss without foma. Without the comforting lie that individual acts of care can substitute for systemic change. Without the performance that keeps us sane while everything burns.

Sarah knows she's in a canoe without a paddle. The question is whether the rest of us are ready to admit we're in the same boat.