I’m writing this on Sunday, posting it on Monday in advance for Tuesday’s publication. Since Monday is the official July 4th
holiday I only have to work a few hours picking up food and then I can go home. By writing this now I can get home before it gets too hot. I bring this up not so you can feel great sorrow at my harsh taskmasters forcing me to labor on a holiday, because you care as much as I do for the details of your much more miserable existence, but to bring up what you might have already noticed. I was having a lot less links embedded in my articles due to some weird errors at Google. I would place my cursor on the word to highlight as a link and the cursor would jump back to the last link, placing the new one in the middle of the old. As you might imagine this was very frustrating when you are on a strict time limit. I don’t know if I’ll have the same problem Monday morning [ update-still the same problem- I'm placing link after the word ]. It seems odd that a tech company has these sorts of problems, especially since the ads pay both our bills ( but much more theirs than mine ). They still haven’t fixed the old problem of a scheduled article failing to publish on time. But I guess it all ties into failure to maintain during a collapse (Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
)*
As you are painfully aware, I loudly proclaim to all who foolishly read my drivel that we are all going to die quickly, painfully and en masse. While I’m glad that this separates me from the crowded lemming group, all of whom bleat with assurance that all is well, do not panic, remain calm, that is not why I do it. I love being different, it amuses me that this also means I’m correct while everyone else is wrong, but I won’t take up the opposing view merely to be different for its own sake. The sad fact is that the bulk of people are wedded to the past. I imagine that this is a survival trait. Humans can adapt, but only after a crisis forces them to. In this way, we evolve to suit circumstances but also are able to retrain ourselves culturally to stick with what is working at the time. The Catholic Church ( The Catholic Church through the Ages: A History
) looks silly right now advocating unrestricted population growth in a time of overpopulation but for almost two thousand years this was actually the recipe for power and profit, so it made perfect sense. The survival trait of using what worked in the past has yet to be changed through crisis to what will work in the future. Which underlines why no one but a select few, obviously those not in power, will adapt ahead of time to the probable future. That is also a survival trait. The majority stick with what has worked, ensuring present survival, and a few prepare for each possible crisis to ensure at least enough breeding pairs survive regardless of what happens. That has been your Cliff notes on why no one gives a crap to prepare.*
Arguing over who is right about what the future will bring is basically just mental masturbation ( Mental Masturbation
). No one can be 100% sure they are correct. That said, I try anyway. Why? Because I feel that this is a matter of life or death. Going the Yuppie Path Of Prepping will ensure that you make no mistakes, that you have the best gear, that you are stockpiled to survive splendidly in comfort. I cannot argue that a concrete bunker in the middle of a huge wilderness, armed with semi battle rifles, eating from a huge garden watered by a natural stream is a bad idea. It isn’t a bad plan at all. I applaud Rawles ( Patriots: A Novel of Survival in the Coming Collapse
)for his foresight and extreme hard work for getting started back when it was a very affordable plan. But as smart as he was, you are an idiot to emulate his success. You don’t have the time, and it ain’t cheap anymore. He was apart from the crowd when he started, and following him makes you the crowd that follows the old successful plan. And right now is the time to part from the crowd. To guess the future instead of doing what worked in the past. As I said, the Rawles Way is the Best Way. It is the Cadillac of survival plans. But you have already seen the future in Katrina and the Gulf Of Mexico oil spill. Katrina showed that the infrastructure can’t be repaired. The GOM oil spill isn’t scary just because of the pollution ( some say, same as happened before, others say the oceans will die-I don’t know myself ) but because it shows that the type of oil wells we are becoming more and more dependent on can’t be fixed or don’t work right.*
The US has been in collapse for forty years. The Western Civilization model has been in collapse almost as long if you go by energy use per capita. Which is where the semantics of collapse ( Collapse
) comes into play. I admit to being fast and loose with definitions. I myself am just as guilty of obscuring the facts by writing under deadline and saving explanations out of expediency. I argue with almost every other survival author that we are in for a cliff edge collapse. Perhaps I should have been using the term die-off rather than collapse. You can indeed have a long term, multi-generational collapse. And its inhabitants barely notice events. They see trees instead of a forest. And collapse can be normal. The ascent up was business as usual, generations of continued prosperity. And the descent down becomes normal, the expectation being of one generation after another being a bit less well off than the last. Perhaps that is why I see the probability of collapse where others see a possibility. I was raised at a time when it started falling apart. To me there never was any prosperity and descent is the norm. I have been arguing about the shape of the collapse when I should have just been concerned with the die-off. So allow me to point you to Greer ( The Ecotechnic Future: Envisioning a Post-Peak World
) to understand the collapse, but caution you that the collapse is part of the whole picture which includes die-off.*
The long collapse model builds into its assumption that the past will be the future. Collapse is a long process, so plant a garden ( The Curious Garden
) and insulate and all will be fine. We will gradually descend into a village orientated, decentralized farming life. This is like arguing that evolution in animals is a long and slow process full of small incremental steps. One generation has short stubby legs useless for swimming and in twenty generations the fish has walked out on to the beach. Yet many authors have written more than a few papers arguing that evolution is more about sudden cataclysms ( 101 Cataclysms: For the Love of Cats
) that wipe out the vast majority and leave just a few survivors that had been freaks amongst their “normal” brothers until the disaster made their “useless” trait a survival tool. What makes you think humans are any different? Only our survival traits are mental/cultural rather than physical abnormalities. Now, on to the historical oddity known as Collapse Cold Case ( I just made that up-feel free to use it as another reason to love me ).*
Okay, going back to the semantics issue, I should have called it the Die-Off Cold Case, but that has absolutely no zing to it. No pizzazz. Although if we acronym it, DOCC does sound better than CCC. Well, pick whichever. The dead corpses of histories past civilizations leave behind mysteries. No one knows exactly how/why it happened. I guess energy decreases, but then everyone boos and hisses and gets all ugly. Oh, look, Jim is showing his butt again, Peak Oil ( The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil
). I respond, energy whether wood, solar or petroleum, just means Peak Food but you have already gone out on a limb to mock me and neither facts nor logic shall sway you. You’ve made up your mind to join the slow descent camp- the staircase down rather than the long gradual ramp leading to the waterfall. But ask yourself this. Why have all the past civilizations left no clues? Yes, they had long drawn out collapses. But then why were no records available? Why weren’t clues left beyond the barest puzzle pieces that only left a mystery? If the descent was gradual, and the inhabitants able to adapt to the slow changes, why did no one leave records? Why? Because everything was destroyed!*
All manufacturing, all government, all bookkeeping. All farming ceased, all but a few refugees dead, all wealth looted from invaders. All civilizations crashed at the end. All was destroyed as the last survivors ate their seed corn. All remaining wealth was immediately plundered and/or picked over through the ages. Overpopulation is a survival tool, to build vast work projects to tame Mother Nature and the armies to protect it or steal adjoining lands to add to it ( and at the end to just steal to survive a while longer ). But overpopulation also means that one too many harvests failing brings the whole crashing down as everyone starves. We’ve already been in a slow collapse ourselves. The only question is when do the famines and mass die-offs start us over the waterfall.
END
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4 comments:
That is why so many post apocalyptic novels have convenient side bar “flu” to drop the population down to a manageable size without too much fuss.
Of course, unless you want to turn it into a ghost story, the protagonist must be immune to the disease. And since the flue usually is introduced at the front end of the novel, it is fairly obvious to the reader that the primary good guy must live.
Although there is usually a paragraph weeping for the loss from these deases. They are usually quite liberating. In the case of Kunstler’s book this flu allows a hobbyist carpenter-folk musician to become mayor of the town, fire one-shot kills from horse back with a pistol, and bed down with a young lady half his age without any marital inconveniences.
I will grant you that apocalyptic novels that start with a pandemic as their primary causal agent have a case for special pleading. But which historical national level government can they point to where the plague/disease itself actually caused the collapse of said national (versus local) government? A number of governments (Spain in the late 16th to early 17th being very well documented) were disproportionately injured by the Black Death. But the disaster was at a localized level, and only affected the greater system over time (lower population, lower taxes…). Oddly enough (visa vi Mr. Kunstler) the common people who survived these plagues often did have it a little bit better because their labor was more in demand: but they were not rebuilding entire economies from scratch.
Brilliant and cogent analysis as always, Mr.D. For semantical purposes, I like to use the Avalanche Model, myself. To Whit: Who cares about a little snow on the mountain behind you? Yeah, we're stuck in the valley until the Gooberment can plow us out, but that's okay, we've stockpiled enough supplies to see us through the Winter, if need be. But the Snow keeps falling and falling, and one day, something causes it to start to slide. First a little snow, then some more, then some more, You hear a noise, stick your head out the window, and see tons of snow heading straight to your house. IF you survive the devistation, everything you planned on is now buried beneathe 50 feet of debris, and you've just got the clothes on your back. But the problem is that You are not alone in your disaster. There are Avalanches happening all around the world, taking out everything, including the Gooberment. Then what do you do? At least, that's how I see the future unfolding.
once again you hit the nail on the head. I don't know what has transpired but you have been writing some seriously heavy weight stuff the last couple of weeks.
I don't think preppers spend to much time languishing in the past. They, for the most part live in the future state of anxiety.
What concerns me is Now. Does impending doom bring about the "Eat,drink and be merry"
response or does it bring about a perpetual state of deep blue funky? A severe clinical depression should not be the price a person pays for a healthy self interest.
somebody once said" We are all in the gutter but some of us are looking up at the stars" I think prepping to the exclusion of everything else is masturbation. All foreplay and no screwing.All prepping and no living.I think there is a analogy in there someplace.
The Catholic Church doesn't advocate having children without regard to being able to raise them.
As for "overpopulation?" We've gone over that Malthusian stuff before, Lord Bison.
Economic and physical laws take care of bubbles of all sorts, whether they are housing bubbles, or soap bubbles. The bubonic plague wiped out a third of Europe. That third of the population would have been a third of the population whether it was 25,000 or the 25,000,000 that it was.
We can work with economic laws, and have everyone work to sustain himself and his family, or we can work against them, as over 40% of the population does, either getting their income from the State through "working" for it, or not working at all.
If people are able to support kids on their own dime, bless their hearts. As for those who are bearing children and cannot afford to do so without leeching off the sow of the State, well, that problem will rectify itself soon enough.
As Pogo Possum said, "Those who do the most jawin' about birth control are darned sure to get themselves borned first."
Humans, as Julian Simon said, are the ultimate resource. We can innovate, we can adapt, and we can improve. But we have to choose to do that, working with economic, moral, and physical laws. We don't exist on this world for the sake of having lots of physical possessions. There's plenty of stuff to go around. But we can't bring ourselves to mind our own labor, and not steal from others. That fact won't change whether there are 6 thousand or 6 billion people on earth.
The overpopulation folks remind me a lot of the gun-control folks. They think changing the environment will solve the worst problems of the world. It won't. The worst problems in the world lie in the human heart. And that won't change if there are fewer hearts in the world.
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