Why the collapse meme will fail.

It’s interesting at present. I no longer am following the olympics much — the corruption does stick in one’s craw — but underneath that there is a meme about coming collapse. The good Cappy manages to sum up what many people are thinking.

1.  If you assume the government is gone, and it is a genuine collapse, there are two areas or “groups” that will cease to exist by the end of the week – people in the inner city and suburbanites.  The reason why is both are dependent upon other people’s production and a highly sophisticated system of electronics, sanitation and food transportation for their survival.  There aren’t going to be “roving bands of inner city youth” making their way across the badlands because without gas, electricity, public transportation, etc., they not only will not be able to move, they won’t have food coming into the city.  It would be ugly.  The suburbs are the same thing.  Suzie Q Suburbanite Princess is not going to have the foresight to get out of the city and daddy’s platinum card as well as his Beamer isn’t going to work when there’s no electricity.

2.  Moderate sized towns will also fail.  “Moderate” I mean anything around 50,000 even if they’re nestled against a mountain.  The animal population just plain isn’t big enough to support that population in terms of food.

Now, many people who think this way are looking at the amount of debt that the large social welfare democracies have at present — and wonder when no one will lend, because the debt is not payable. Or they wonder how a society will survive that does not have enough children. And what will happen when the social trust that allows civilizations to survive is lost.

But that social trust really is not that dependant of laws. It is to a nation’s advantage to have non corrupt courts and a government that is not run as a predatory gang — but the Southern Chinese managed to build a reasonable civilization while dealing with that and a bunch of British pushing Indian Hemp and Opium at them.  The civilization was held inside the family.

Where Cappy is half correct is that those without a defensible family will suffer. . If there is no government, you need a tribe or a coalition of families that form a community. That will allow trade. With a corrupt and predatory government, at a certain level of oppression, it becomes rational to cut the government out of life — go Galt, go cash only, use barter, and (if possible) become a no go area.

In most pioneer areas, these conditions exist or have always existed: in mountain areas from Appalachia to Afghanistan they have always existed.

If you do have a functional family and you can band together, you can make series of villages and survive. You can have a night watch: a militia. Here smaller towns help. Living in areas where there is ample fuel or it never gets that cold helps. Having a local technological base helps, as does hydroelectric power, a functional charitable, amateur society (which runs everything from sports to the orchestra) and a shared culture.

If you have that, you can survive as a city. Hong Kong has.

Without those things, in particular a healthy family system or patriarchal system, your chances of survival become bleak. [You will not enjoy that decline]. The patriarchal system is a default for survival because it encourages self organization into functional units. Feminism and post modernism, which require much more effort to maintain, will be luxuries we lose.

I hope we do not hit that level of stress. I like living in a rich society where the poor have a problem with obesity, not starvation. But if we do, the collapse and survivalist meme will not survive. But the modern fetish for identity politics will die first.