A Vote for No Confidence
“Don’t go left. Don’t go right. Go deeper.”
— Jim Wallis
Few people living in a failing empire realize it. Those living in the late stages of the Roman Empire likely didn’t realize that empire would one day be no more; they just noticed their Dinari bought them less bread than it used to and that aqueducts and roads weren’t being repaired as quickly as they once were. People are typically too preoccupied by near-term concerns — paying for their homes, ensuring food on the table, dealing with social conflict — to prepare for long-term threats, that is, until those threats become too big to ignore, when the store shelves run empty, the water taps and fuel supplies run dry, and the public’s protectionary forces like police and soldiers cease to protect the public. When these top-down imperial systems cease functioning, people must develop their own, bottom-up ones or perish.
Empire collapse is a historical constant. Every empire throughout history has collapsed: Mesopotamia, Assyria, Greece, Rome, Mongol, Ottoman, etc. The only empires that haven’t collapsed are the present-day ones. But if one were to believe those who suggest the average imperial lifespan is a mere 250 years, the American Empire is not long for this world. For its part, America is diligently filling out all of the required fields for imperial collapse: inflation (aka currency debasement), rampant domestic poverty, increasing wealth disparities, social chaos, impotent political leadership, and engagement in numerous unpopular, unwinnable wars in far off lands. Based on the rhetoric of current political and business leaders there’s no reason to believe that this collapse will be avoided. If anything, the status quo leaders (and would-be leaders) assure collapse.
In days of yore, empire collapse wasn’t necessarily a death-sentence for subjects of that empire. There was a limited amount of control imperial leaders could exert on their subjects due to the slowness of communication, travel, and resource distribution. Consider that it took several months for the English to realize American colonialists had formally seceded from the British empire, because that’s how long it took for messages to traverse the Atlantic Ocean.
With limited oversight and dependencies, olden imperial subjects more or less did their own thing: growing their own food, pumping their own water, making their own stuff, fighting their own local skirmishes with neighbors, and installing their own leadership structures. Sure, imperial forces could roll into town and steal food, exact taxes, conscript men into foreign conflicts, and overthrow local leaders — but they couldn’t do so easily, frequently, or quickly. So when the Assyrian, Roman, and Mongol Empires fell, their subjects basically went on living, albeit without as much access to the goods, infrastructure, and information the empire once provided.
When these erstwhile empires and their top-down systems of control collapsed, bottom-up systems emerged pretty rapidly, because, again, these systems were already in place. Food was already grown near homes. Water was already drawn from nearby wells, rivers, lakes, and springs. Preindustrial humans did not rely on imported petroleum, nor a global multimodal transportation network to deliver all of their resources — including manufactured goods, food, and water — from far off lands as they do today. Preindustrial humans also didn’t require an empire, nor social media influencers to tell them how to live. With fairly stationary populations — ones that were culturally and ethnically homogeneous — social order wasn’t dictated by governmental oversight and policing or by commercial-agenda-promoting fashion.
Modern telecommunications and transit changed everything, significantly increasing the ability of imperial leadership to control their subjects. These modern tools meant centralized imperial leadership could instantaneously deploy orders and resources to subjects and external foes. When Pearl Harbor was attacked, FDR didn’t have to wait most of a year — roughly the time a message takes to sail from Hawaii to Washington — to find out about it and declare war on Japan. The attack, declaration of war, and mustering of retaliatory forces more or less happened on one infamous day.
The accelerated movement of information, people, and goods enabled modern empires, most notably the American Empire, to create real dependencies and exert real control over their subjects. Today, when disaster strikes one corner of the empire, relief can quickly be brought in from another corner. When resources are scarce in one part of the empire, they can be brought in quickly from another, and vice versa. When a disagreeable nation stops supplying the empire important stuff like petroleum, the empire can quickly pool resources to wage war on that nation, topple or replace its leaders, or generally force compliance. When there’s social strife and division, the empire can quickly manipulate media to distract the public into subservience.
Subjects of the American Empire are entirely dependent on the empire for physical and social survival, which is why its collapse will be especially painful. Most modern Americans have no idea how to live without imperial direction and providence. They don’t know how to grow food, or often know how to even cook it. They don’t know where their water comes from, except a tap or a bottle. They take no part in manufacturing or procurement of goods: their stuff is often assembled by Asian hands, made of plastic from Middle Eastern petroleum and rare earth metals from Africa — all of which is shipped across oceans. Their food is grown in California or Mexico with water taken from Colorado and other exotic locales. The ostensibly unifying force of a coherent American culture has been largely replaced by divisive and constantly-shifting social media messaging that validates imperial corruption and violence. Family, elders, priests, and shamans have been mostly replaced by courts, police, celebrities, and mental health professionals.
I find the current presidential election frenzy in the US to be a bit, well, idiotic (American IQ is on the decline, so that tracks). It makes no sense to believe that the people who created and benefit from today’s most pressing problems — be it climate change, poverty, industrial warfare, sickness and disease, or the replacement of families and communities with government and commercial institutions — will fix those problems.
Furthermore, both presidential candidates have held or been directly adjacent to the office in the last eight years — years they both spent enriching the already rich, tapping the non-rich for all they were worth, robbing the health of everyone, and generally promoting social, economic, and environmental annihilation. Trump didn’t bring jobs back to America, nor did he make the country great again (perhaps because his Eisenhauer-era-tinged “again” was always a chimera). The Biden-Harris administration went backwards on virtually every issue Democrats purport they care about: the environment, extreme poverty, public health, freedom of speech, etc. And they did nothing for the economy except issuing $11.6 trillion of debt that doused inflationary fires with gas. Speaking of gas, the Biden-Harris administration has the distinction of holding power when the country extracted more oil than it ever had before, even as it cheerleaded energy-security-motivated forever wars in Israel and Ukraine. Harris’ about face on fracking suggests nothing will change here, unless you count “getting much worse” as change.
I’m reading a book entitled, Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects. Author Dmitry Orlov lived through the collapse of the USSR. He lived in the USA for many years, only to eventually resettle in Russia. Orlov sees an American Empire collapse as very likely, but it will not be nearly as smooth of the Soviet collapse. Though the USSR was ostensibly an industrial empire, it was not a particularly efficiently run one. The State’s providence was always lacking, and early into the empire’s history, Soviet Russians realized they were on their own for many things. For example, Soviet Russians grew a large percent of their food in small gardens called “dachas”, and as recently as 2011, dachas were responsible for 40 percent of Russian food production. Most Americans can’t grow mold.
In a section about politics, Orlov sums up why I don’t care about imperial politics such as the US’s impending presidential election:
Why should essentially powerless people want to engage in a humiliating farce designed to demonstrate the legitimacy of those who wield the power? In Soviet-era Russia, intelligent people did their best to ignore the Communists: paying attention to them, whether through criticism or praise, would only serve to give them comfort and encouragement, making them feel as if they mattered. Why should Americans want to act any differently with regards to the Republicans or the Democrats?
In light of all of this, my recent focus is on thinking through the particulars of a post-collapse society: what will me and my kids eat? Where is our water coming from? Where will we protect ourselves from environmental and social threats? Who are the people we will want around? While I can’t afford a fancy prepper bunker and food cache, I would not take offense at being called a prepper — a term that seems infinitely better than unprepper, Democrat, or Republican.
Trump or Harris? The options might as well be cyanide or arsenic? It’s all poison. I say do as Candide did and mind your garden, ideally harvesting before the grocery stores run dry.
