useless eaters

USELESS EATERS
At the end of the Petroleum Age, the sad fact is that most of us are useless eaters. And especially in this country, where Information Manipulation has overtaken manufacturing, almost all economic activity is far removed from survival and instead geared towards maximizing the profit of a few elite groups ( bankers, government types, lawyers ). If you are curious as to why resource extraction is continuing despite the long term cost, that is why. The rich will stay that way regardless of cost, the poor will enjoy the crumbs left over. So both groups will endorse stripping the soil and pumping all the oil and paving over the last field. Even China, with thousands of years of maintaining their farmland through intelligent husbandry, are not immune to this, to a degree.
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I am a useless eater, and chances are that you are one also. If you can’t contribute to the survival of a group without petroleum inputs, you are a worthless eater. Politicians are worse than us but they think they are superior so they will kill the rest of us off in order to survive and their justification will be that we are useless eaters. That justification will not be so hard to make once the oil stops pumping and the weather helps a massive crop failure several years in a row. Yes, you will need all of your fancy weapons to kill off your share of useless eaters. But you had better have a stockpile of grain to go along with all that hardware. You need to plan on massive crop failures.
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Right now, in this society, we are able to survive through near worthless economic activity since the petroleum surplus is doing all of the work that needs to be done. Oil is the equivalent of slaves to the citizens of Rome. When the slaves run out a huge city will be unable to feed itself. However, after the mass die-off, after traditional roles are resumed, there may not be enough people to do everything by hand again. This was a major point in the book “Dies The Fire”. So the line blurs between useless eaters needing to die off and manual labor needed after we restart an agriculture society. Plus, society will always have useless eaters, in the form of children and old people. So we need to be careful how many do actually die off.
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Right now, masses of unemployed youth are a danger to society. Post collapse they are a labor pool, for salvage projects, work on farms and soldiers in the military. There is going to be a lot of old cars good for its contents of metal and wiring and tires. Metal from building that must be abandoned due to their dependence on electricity to be habitable. And wood and insulation. Asphalt and concrete are going to need to be torn up to reclaim farming areas. Water diversion projects after underground irrigation is no longer feasible. And even if tractors are run off of ethanol there is still going to be a need for a lot of human labor to replace most of the old petroleum inputs allowing a farm to be productive. And militaries are going to bloom again as warfare is decentralized from the nation state. Plenty of call for soldiers and an arms industry.
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It is kind of hard to plan on any of this as a lone individual. One person can’t keep enough of the population alive in order to have enough helping hands after society has been transformed. Just don’t be too willing to call for too many folks to be allowed to die off if it is possible. Depending on the time of year, it might be possible to try to direct a project such as getting people to mass plant something like potatoes. Or lay up jerked supplies of meat if a herd is handy. Of raid the nearby grain silo. It just might be to everyone’s benefit if you and others try to keep as many alive as possible for future prosperities sake.
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Young ones are a liability, but only for a short time. They learn very quick and can help out to a certain degree while learning. Old people are a liability now, but after they assume their traditional roles as living in a three generation family unit they will teach the grandchildren and supervise them and be a treasure trove of information that only age and wisdom and experience can accumulate. Young women are breeders, but even after child rearing age they can help as the wise old grandma. The nuclear family is an anomaly, a freak show of the Petroleum Age. Old people are supposed to live in the same house as the parents and infants and be an invaluable resource. Young parents on their own today are nearly worthless and need guidance. Old people should not be abandoned. Luckily, like more traditional ideas such as life time marriages and patriarchal order and apprentices in cottage trades, three generation households will emerge again as the norm.
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Again, very few of us have the skills to survive in a post petroleum society. So lets try not to be too harsh when it comes to other useless eaters. The gal on welfare with three kids is still a valuable breeder. Retired grandpa on Social Security sitting around watching Wheel Of Fortune and Jeopardy is still a valuable source of ideas, even if he was raised as a supervisor in a desk job. He recalls how things used to be done old school and has an idea of how the old skills were applied. A government worker might have no survival skills but even if they are out of shape they might serve as an organizer or superintendent. Remember the astronomer in Lucifer’s Hammer. His only skill was sitting still for hours and watching stars, so they made him a lookout at a guard post. Lawyers and politicians and bankers should just be shot on sight unless they can show a necessary skill such as chemistry or medical practice. Of course, they will fail that so we can happily shoot them after torturing them a bit. Bankers keep a low profile, but lawyers and politicians ( even city councilmen ) are a dime a dozen.
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Dig below the surface. There might be more than meets the eye. If not, take a page from the Yugoslavian conflict. To save ammunition, blunt instruments such as sledge hammers were used to kill the civilian population.
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