The Fall of The West

I. The Era Of Pretense

II. The Era Of Impact

III. The Era Of Response

IV. The Era Of Breakdown

V. The Era Of Dissolution

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I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

~ Percy Bysshe Shelley; Ozymandias (1818), Full Poem

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God of our fathers, known of old,
   Lord of our far-flung battle-line,
Beneath whose awful Hand we hold
   Dominion over palm and pine—
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!

The tumult and the shouting dies;
   The Captains and the Kings depart:
Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,
   An humble and a contrite heart.
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!

Far-called, our navies melt away;
   On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
   Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!

If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
   Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe,
Such boastings as the Gentiles use,
   Or lesser breeds without the Law—
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!

For heathen heart that puts her trust
   In reeking tube and iron shard,
All valiant dust that builds on dust,
   And guarding, calls not Thee to guard,
For frantic boast and foolish word—
Thy mercy on Thy People, Lord!

~ Rudyard Kipling; Recessional (1897), Full Poem

I. The Era Of Pretense

Lavish Corporate Towers Hiding Crumbling Infrastructure: A gleaming corporate district at twilight, with towering skyscrapers and high-rise offices that project an image of prosperity and success, representing the Era of Pretense in the Twilight of the Industrial Age. The glass facades of the buildings reflect the sunset, creating a golden glow that distracts from the decay creeping in at ground level. At street level, sidewalks are cracked, with weeds pushing through, and potholes mar the once-smooth roads. Homeless people and broken-down vehicles occupy the shadows, contrasting starkly with the luxury cars and well-dressed corporate elites who pass by, ignoring the decay. Billboards and digital screens display hollow messages of progress and endless growth, masking the reality of stagnation beneath the surface. The scene conveys a society clinging to an illusion of affluence and progress while the foundational elements begin to rot away.

I’ve mentioned in previous posts here on The Archdruid Report the educational value of the comments I receive from readers in the wake of each week’s essay. My post two weeks ago on the death of the internet was unusually productive along those lines. One of the comments I got in response to that post gave me the theme for last week’s essay, but there was at least one other comment calling for the same treatment. Like the one that sparked last week’s post, it appeared on one of the many other internet forums on which The Archdruid Report features, and it unintentionally pointed up a common and crucial failure of imagination that shapes, or rather misshapes, the conventional wisdom about our future.

Curiously enough, the point that set off the commenter in question was the same one that incensed the author of the denunciation mentioned in last week’s post: my suggestion in passing that fifty years from now, most Americans may not have access to electricity or running water. The commenter pointed out angrily that I’d claimed that the twilight of industrial civilization would be a ragged arc of decline over one to three centuries. Now, he claimed, I was saying that it was going to take place in the next fifty years, and this apparently convinced him that everything I said ought to be dismissed out of hand.

I run into this sort of confusion all the time. If I suggest that the decline and fall of a civilization usually takes several centuries, I get accused of inconsistency if I then note that one of the sharper downturns included in that process may be imminent. If I point out that the United States is likely within a decade or two of serious economic and political turmoil, driven partly by the implosion of its faltering global hegemony and partly by a massive crisis of legitimacy that’s all but dissolved the tacit contract between the existing order of US society and the masses who passively support it, I get accused once again of inconsistency if I then say that whatever comes out the far side of that crisis—whether it’s a battered and bruised United States or a patchwork of successor states—will then face a couple of centuries of further decline and disintegration before the deindustrial dark age bottoms out.

Now of course there’s nothing inconsistent about any of these statements. The decline and fall of a civilization isn’t a single event, or even a single linear process; it’s a complex fractal reality composed of many different events on many different scales in space and time. If it takes one to three centuries, as usual, those centuries are going to be taken up by an uneven drumbeat of wars, crises, natural disasters, and assorted breakdowns on a variety of time frames with an assortment of local, regional, national, or global effects. The collapse of US global hegemony is one of those events; the unraveling of the economic and technological framework that currently provides most Americans with electricity and running water is another, but neither of those is anything like the whole picture.

It’s probably also necessary to point out that any of my readers who think that being deprived of electricity and running water is the most drastic kind of collapse imaginable have, as the saying goes, another think coming. Right now, in our oh-so-modern world, there are billions of people who get by without regular access to electricity and running water, and most of them aren’t living under dark age conditions. A century and a half ago, when railroads, telegraphs, steamships, and mechanical printing presses were driving one of history’s great transformations of transport and information technology, next to nobody had electricity or running water in their homes. The technologies of 1865 are not dark age technologies; in fact, the gap between 1865 technologies and dark age technologies is considerably greater, by most metrics, than the gap between 1865 technologies and the ones we use today.

Furthermore, whether or not Americans have access to running water and electricity may not have as much to say about the future of industrial society everywhere in the world as the conventional wisdom would suggest. I know that some of my American readers will be shocked out of their socks to hear this, but the United States is not the whole world. It’s not even the center of the world. If the United States implodes over the next two decades, leaving behind a series of bankrupt failed states to squabble over its territory and the little that remains of its once-lavish resource base, that process will be a great source of gaudy and gruesome stories for the news media of the world’s other continents, but it won’t affect the lives of the readers of those stories much more than equivalent events in Africa and the Middle East affect the lives of Americans today.

As it happens, over the next one to three centuries, the benefits of industrial civilization are going to go away for everyone. (The costs will be around a good deal longer—in the case of the nuclear wastes we’re so casually heaping up for our descendants, a good quarter of a million years, but those and their effects are rather more localized than some of today’s apocalyptic rhetoric likes to suggest.) The reasoning here is straightforward. White’s Law, one of the fundamental principles of human ecology, states that economic development is a function of energy per capita; the immense treasure trove of concentrated energy embodied in fossil fuels, and that alone, made possible the sky-high levels of energy per capita that gave the world’s industrial nations their brief era of exuberance; as fossil fuels deplete, and remaining reserves require higher and higher energy inputs to extract, the levels of energy per capita the industrial nations are used to having will go away forever.

It’s important to be clear about this. Fossil fuels aren’t simply one energy source among others; in terms of concentration, usefulness, and fungibility—that is, the ability to be turned into any other form of energy that might be required—they’re in a category all by themselves. Repeated claims that fossil fuels can be replaced with nuclear power, renewable energy resources, or what have you sound very good on paper, but every attempt to put those claims to the test so far has either gone belly up in short order, or become a classic subsidy dumpster surviving purely on a diet of government funds and mandates.

Three centuries ago, the earth’s fossil fuel reserves were the largest single deposit of concentrated energy in this part of the universe; now we’ve burnt through nearly all the easily accessible reserves, and we’re scrambling to keep the tottering edifice of industrial society going by burning through the dregs that remain. As those run out, the remaining energy resources—almost all of them renewables—will certainly sustain a variety of human societies, and some of those will be able to achieve a fairly high level of complexity and maintain some kinds of advanced technologies. The kind of absurd extravagance that passes for a normal standard of living among the more privileged inmates of the industrial nations is another matter, and as the fossil fuel age sunsets out, it will end forever.

The fractal trajectory of decline and fall mentioned earlier in this post is simply the way this equation works out on the day-to-day scale of ordinary history. Still, those of us who happen to be living through a part of that trajectory might reasonably be curious about how it’s likely to unfold in our lifetimes. I’ve discussed in a previous series of posts, and in my book Decline and Fall: The End of Empire and the Future of Democracy in 21st Century America, how the end of US global hegemony is likely to unfold, but as already noted, that’s only a small portion of the broader picture. Is a broader view possible?

Fortunately history, the core resource I’ve been using to try to make sense of our future, has plenty to say about the broad patterns that unfold when civilizations decline and fall. Now of course I know all I have to do is mention that history might be relevant to our present predicament, and a vast chorus of voices across the North American continent and around the world will bellow at rooftop volume, “But it’s different this time!” With apologies to my regular readers, who’ve heard this before, it’s probably necessary to confront that weary thoughtstopper again before we proceed.

As I’ve noted before, claims that it’s different this time are right where it doesn’t matter and wrong where it counts. Predictions made on the basis of history—and not just by me—have consistently predicted events over the last decade or so far more accurately than predictions based on the assumption that history doesn’t matter. How many times, dear reader, have you heard someone insist that industrial civilization is going to crash to ruin in the next six months, and then watched those six months roll merrily by without any sign of the predicted crash? For that matter, how many times have you heard someone insist that this or that policy that’s never worked any other time that it’s been tried, or this or that piece of technological vaporware that’s been the subject of failed promises for decades, will inevitably put industrial society back on its alleged trajectory to the stars—and how many times has the policy or the vaporware been quietly shelved, and something else promoted using the identical rhetoric, when it turned out not to perform as advertised?

It’s been a source of wry amusement to me to watch the same weary, dreary, repeatedly failed claims of imminent apocalypse and inevitable progress being rehashed year after year, varying only in the fine details of the cataclysm du jour and the techno-savior du jour, while the future nobody wants to talk about is busily taking shape around us. Decline and fall isn’t something that will happen sometime in the conveniently distant future; it’s happening right now in the United States and around the world. The amusement, though, is tempered with a sense of familiarity, because the period in which decline is under way but nobody wants to admit that fact is one of the recurring features of the history of decline.

There are, very generally speaking, five broad phases in the decline and fall of a civilization. I know it’s customary in historical literature to find nice dull labels for such things, but I’m in a contrary mood as I write this, so I’ll give them unfashionably colorful names: the eras of pretense, impact, response, breakdown, and dissolution. Each of these is complex enough that it’ll need a discussion of its own; this week, we’ll talk about the era of pretense, which is the one we’re in right now.

Eras of pretense are by no means limited to the decline and fall of civilizations. They occur whenever political, economic, or social arrangements no longer work, but the immediate costs of admitting that those arrangements don’t work loom considerably larger in the collective imagination than the future costs of leaving those arrangements in place. It’s a curious but consistent wrinkle of human psychology that this happens even if those future costs soar right off the scale of frightfulness and lethality; if the people who would have to pay the immediate costs don’t want to do so, in fact, they will reliably and cheerfully pursue policies that lead straight to their own total bankruptcy or violent extermination, and never let themselves notice where they’re headed.

Speculative bubbles are a great setting in which to watch eras of pretense in full flower. In the late phases of a bubble, when it’s clear to anyone who has two spare neurons to rub together that the boom du jour is cobbled together of equal parts delusion and chicanery, the people who are most likely to lose their shirts in the crash are the first to insist at the top of their lungs that the bubble isn’t a bubble and their investments are guaranteed to keep on increasing in value forever. Those of my readers who got the chance to watch some of their acquaintances go broke in the real estate bust of 2008-9, as I did, will have heard this sort of self-deception at full roar; those who missed the opportunity can make up for the omission by checking out the ongoing torrent of claims that the soon-to-be-late fracking bubble is really a massive energy revolution that will make America wealthy and strong again.

The history of revolutions offers another helpful glimpse at eras of pretense. France in the decades before 1789, to cite a conveniently well-documented example, was full of people who had every reason to realize that the current state of affairs was hopelessly unsustainable and would have to change. The things about French politics and economics that had to change, though, were precisely those things that the French monarchy and aristocracy were unwilling to change, because any such reforms would have cost them privileges they’d had since time out of mind and were unwilling to relinquish.

Louis XIV, who finished up his long and troubled reign a supreme realist, is said to have muttered “Après moi, le déluge”—“Once I’m gone, this sucker’s going down” may not be a literal translation, but it catches the flavor of the utterance—but that degree of clarity was rare in his generation, and all but absent in those of his increasingly feckless successors. Thus the courtiers and aristocrats of the Old Regime amused themselves at the nation’s expense, dabbled in avant-garde thought, and kept their eyes tightly closed to the consequences of their evasions of looming reality, while the last opportunities to excuse themselves from a one-way trip to visit the guillotine and spare France the cataclysms of the Terror and the Napoleonic wars slipped silently away.

That’s the bitter irony of eras of pretense. Under most circumstances, they’re the last period when it would be possible to do anything constructive on the large scale about the crisis looming immediately ahead, but the mass evasion of reality that frames the collective thinking of the time stands squarely in the way of any such constructive action. In the era of pretense before a speculative bust, people who could have quietly cashed in their positions and pocketed their gains double down on their investments, and guarantee that they’ll be ruined once the market stops being liquid. In the era of pretense before a revolution, in the same way, those people and classes that have the most to lose reliably take exactly those actions that ensure that they will in fact lose everything. If history has a sense of humor, this is one of the places that it appears in its most savage form.

The same points are true, in turn, of the eras of pretense that precede the downfall of a civilization. In a good many cases, where too few original sources survive, the age of pretense has to be inferred from archeological remains. We don’t know what motives inspired the ancient Mayans to build their biggest pyramids in the years immediately before the Terminal Classic period toppled over into a savage political and demographic collapse, but it’s hard to imagine any such project being set in motion without the usual evasions of an era of pretense being involved Where detailed records of dead civilizations survive, though, the sort of rhetorical handwaving common to bubbles before the bust and decaying regimes on the brink of revolution shows up with knobs on. Thus the panegyrics of the Roman imperial court waxed ever more lyrical and bombastic about Rome’s invincibility and her civilizing mission to the nations as the Empire stumbled deeper into its terminal crisis, echoing any number of other court poets in any number of civilizations in their final hours.

For that matter, a glance through classical Rome’s literary remains turns up the remarkable fact that those of her essayists and philosophers who expressed worries about her survival wrote, almost without exception, during the Republic and the early Empire; the closer the fall of Rome actually came, the more certainty Roman authors expressed that the Empire was eternal and the latest round of troubles was just one more temporary bump on the road to peace and prosperity. It took the outsider’s vision of Augustine of Hippo to proclaim that Rome really was falling—and even that could only be heard once the Visigoths sacked Rome and the era of pretense gave way to the age of impact.

The present case is simply one more example to add to an already lengthy list. In the last years of the nineteenth century, it was common for politicians, pundits, and mass media in the United States, the British empire, and other industrial nations to discuss the possibility that the advanced civilization of the time might be headed for the common fate of nations in due time. The intellectual history of the twentieth century is, among other things, a chronicle of how that discussion was shoved to the margins of our collective discourse, just as the ecological history of the same century is among other things a chronicle of how the worries of the previous era became the realities of the one we’re in today. The closer we’ve moved toward the era of impact, that is, the more unacceptable it has become for anyone in public life to point out that the problems of the age are not just superficial.

Listen to the pablum that passes for political discussion in Washington DC or the mainstream US media these days, or the even more vacuous noises being made by party flacks as the country stumbles wearily toward yet another presidential election. That the American dream of upward mobility has become an American nightmare of accelerating impoverishment outside the narrowing circle of the kleptocratic rich, that corruption and casual disregard for the rule of law are commonplace in political institutions from local to Federal levels, that our medical industry charges more than any other nation’s and still provides the worst health care in the industrial world, that our schools no longer teach anything but contempt for learning, that the national infrastructure and built environment are plunging toward Third World conditions at an ever-quickening pace, that a brutal and feckless foreign policy embraced by both major parties is alienating our allies while forcing our enemies to set aside their mutual rivalries and make common cause against us: these are among the issues that matter, but they’re not the issues you’ll hear discussed as the latest gaggle of carefully airbrushed candidates go through their carefully scripted elect-me routines on their way to the 2016 election.

If history teaches anything, though, it’s that eras of pretense eventually give way to eras of impact. That doesn’t mean that the pretense will go away—long after Alaric the Visigoth sacked Rome, for example, there were still plenty of rhetors trotting out the same tired clichés about Roman invincibility—but it does mean that a significant number of people will stop finding the pretense relevant to their own lives. How that happens in other historical examples, and how it might happen in our own time, will be the theme of next week’s post.

II. The Era Of Impact

Industrial City Plunged into Darkness Amidst a Massive Blackout: An industrial cityscape at night, shrouded in darkness following a sudden, massive blackout, symbolizing the Era of Impact in the Twilight of the Industrial Age. The once-bright skyline is now barely visible, with only a few flickering emergency lights illuminating the streets. Factories and power plants are lifeless, their towering smokestacks casting long shadows against the dimly lit horizon. People wander the streets in confusion, using flashlights and makeshift torches to navigate the eerie landscape. Abandoned vehicles clutter the roads, and traffic lights hang dark, swinging in the wind. The air is thick with tension and uncertainty, as citizens grapple with the reality that their technological systems--once seen as unshakable--have failed. The scene conveys a sense of vulnerability and shock as the infrastructures that supported the industrial age come crashing down.

Of all the wistful superstitions that cluster around the concept of the future in contemporary popular culture, the most enduring has to be the notion that somehow, sooner or later, something will happen to shake the majority out of its complacency and get it to take seriously the crisis of our age. Week after week, I field comments and emails that presuppose that belief. People want to know how soon I think the shock of awakening will finally hit, or wonder whether this or that event will do the trick, or simply insist that the moment has to come sooner or later.

To all such inquiries and expostulations I have no scrap of comfort to offer. Quite the contrary, what history shows is that a sudden awakening to the realities of a difficult situation is far and away the least likely result of what I’ve called the era of impact, the second of the five stages of collapse. (The first, for those who missed last week’s post, is the era of pretense; the remaining three, which will be covered in the coming weeks, are the eras of response, breakdown, and dissolution.)

The era of impact is the point at which it becomes clear to most people that something has gone wrong with the most basic narratives of a society—not just a little bit wrong, in the sort of way that requires a little tinkering here and there, but really, massively, spectacularly wrong. It arrives when an asset class that was supposed to keep rising in price forever stops rising, does its Wile E. Coyote moment of hang time, and then drops like a stone. It shows up when an apparently entrenched political system, bristling with soldiers and secret police, implodes in a matter of days or weeks and is replaced by a provisional government whose leaders look just as stunned as everyone else. It comes whenever a state of affairs that was assumed to be permanent runs into serious trouble—but somehow it never seems to succeed in getting people to notice just how temporary that state of affairs always was.

Since history is the best guide we’ve got to how such events work out in the real world, I want to take a couple of examples of the kind just outlined and explore them in a little more detail. The stock market bubble of the 1920s makes a good case study on a relatively small scale. In the years leading up to the crash of 1929, stock values in the US stock market quietly disconnected themselves from the economic fundamentals and began what was, for the time, an epic climb into la-la land. There were important if unmentionable reasons for that airy detachment from reality; the most significant was the increasingly distorted distribution of income in 1920s America, which put more and more of the national wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer people and thus gutted the national economy.

It’s one of the repeated lessons of economic history that money in the hands of the rich does much less good for the economy as a whole than money in the hands of the working classes and the poor. The reasoning here is as simple as it is inescapable. Industrial economies survive and thrive on consumer expenditures, but consumer expenditures are limited by the ability of consumers to buy the things they want and need. As money is diverted away from the lower end of the economic pyramid, you get demand destruction—the process by which those who can’t afford to buy things stop buying them—and consumer expenditures fall off. The rich, by contrast, divert a large share of their income out of the consumer economy into investments; the richer they get, the more of the national wealth ends up in investments rather than consumer expenditures; and as consumer expenditures falter, and investments linked to the consumer economy falter in turn, more and more money ends up in illiquid speculative vehicles that are disconnected from the productive economy and do nothing to stimulate demand.

That’s what happened in the 1920s. All through the decade in the US, the rich got richer and the poor got screwed, speculation took the place of productive investment throughout the US economy, and the well-to-do wallowed in the wretched excess chronicled in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby while most other people struggled to get by. The whole decade was a classic era of pretense, crowned by the delusional insistence—splashed all over the media of the time—that everyone in the US could invest in the stock market and, since the market was of course going to keep on rising forever, everyone in the US would thus inevitably become rich.

It’s interesting to note that there were people who saw straight through the nonsense and tried to warn their fellow Americans about the inevitable consequences. They were denounced six ways from Sunday by all right-thinking people, in language identical to that used more recently on those of us who’ve had the effrontery to point out that an infinite supply of oil can’t be extracted from a finite planet. The people who insisted that the soaring stock values of the late 1920s were the product of one of history’s great speculative bubbles were dead right; they had all the facts and figures on their side, not to mention plain common sense; but nobody wanted to hear it.

When the stock market peaked just before the Labor Day weekend in 1929 and started trending down, therefore, the immediate response of all right-thinking people was to insist at the top of their lungs that nothing of the sort was happening, that the market was simply catching its breath before its next great upward leap, and so on. Each new downward lurch was met by a new round of claims along these lines, louder, more dogmatic, and more strident than the one that preceded it, and nasty personal attacks on anyone who didn’t support the delusional consensus filled the media of the time.

People were still saying those things when the bottom dropped out of the market.

Tuesday, October 29, 1929 can reasonably be taken as the point at which the era of pretense gave way once and for all to the era of impact. That’s not because it was the first day of the crash—there had been ghastly slumps on the previous Thursday and Monday, on the heels of two months of less drastic but still seriously ugly declines—but because, after that day, the pundits and the media pretty much stopped pretending that nothing was wrong. Mind you, next to nobody was willing to talk about what exactly had gone wrong, or why it had gone wrong, but the pretense that the good fairy of capitalism had promised Americans happy days forever was out the window once and for all.

It’s crucial to note, though, that what followed this realization was the immediate and all but universal insistence that happy days would soon be back if only everyone did the right thing. It’s even more crucial to note that what nearly everyone identified as “the right thing”—running right out and buying lots of stocks—was a really bad idea that bankrupted many of those who did it, and didn’t help the imploding US economy at all.

It’s probably necessary to talk about this in a little more detail, since it’s been an article of blind faith in the United States for many decades now that it’s always a good idea to buy and hold stocks. (I suspect that stockbrokers have had a good deal to do with the promulgation of this notion.) It’s been claimed that someone who bought stocks in 1929 at the peak of the bubble, and then held onto them, would have ended up in the black eventually, and for certain values of “eventually,” this is quite true—but it took the Dow Jones industrial average until the mid-1950s to return to its 1929 high, and so for a quarter of a century our investor would have been underwater on his stock purchases.

What’s more, the Dow isn’t necessarily a good measure of stocks generally; many of the darlings of the market in the 1920s either went bankrupt in the Depression or never again returned to their 1929 valuations. Nor did the surge of money into stocks in the wake of the 1929 crash stave off the Great Depression, or do much of anything else other than provide a great example of the folly of throwing good money after bad. The moral to this story? In an era of impact, the advice you hear from everyone around you may not be in your best interest.

That same moral can be shown just as clearly in the second example I have in mind, the French Revolution. We talked briefly in last week’s post about the way that the French monarchy and aristocracy blinded themselves to the convulsive social and economic changes that were pushing France closer and closer to a collective explosion on the grand scale, and pursued business as usual long past the point at which business as usual was anything but a recipe for disaster. Even when the struggle between the Crown and the aristocracy forced Louis XVI to convene the États-Généraux—the rarely-held national parliament of France, which had powers more or less equivalent to a constitutional convention in the US—next to nobody expected anything but long rounds of political horse-trading from which some modest shifts in the balance of power might result.

That was before the summer of 1789. On June 17, the deputies of the Third Estate—the representatives of the commoners—declared themselves a National Assembly and staged what amounted to a coup d’etat; on July 14, faced with the threat of a military response from the monarchy, the Parisian mob seized the Bastille, kickstarting a wave of revolt across the country that put government and military facilities in the hands of the revolutionary National Guard and broke the back of the feudal system; on August 4, the National Assembly abolished all feudal rights and legal distinctions between the classes. Over less than two months, a political and social system that had been welded firmly in place for a thousand years all came crashing to the ground.

Those two months marked the end of the era of pretense and the arrival of the era of impact. The immediate response, with a modest number of exceptions among the aristocracy and the inner circles of the monarchy’s supporters, was frantic cheering and an insistence that everything would soon settle into a wonderful new age of peace, prosperity, and liberty. All the overblown dreams of the philosophes about a future age governed by reason were trotted out and treated as self-evident fact. Of course that’s not what happened; once it was firmly in power, the National Assembly used its unchecked authority as abusively as the monarchy had once done; factional struggles spun out of control, and before long mob rule and the guillotine were among the basic facts of life in Revolutionary France.

Among the most common symptoms of an era of impact, in other words, is the rise of what we may as well call “crackpot optimism”—the enthusiastic and all but universal insistence, in the teeth of the evidence, that the end of business as usual will turn out to be the door to a wonderful new future. In the wake of the 1929 stock market crash, people were urged to pile back into the market in the belief that this would cause the economy to boom again even more spectacularly than before, and most of the people who followed this advice proceeded to lose their shirts. In the wake of the revolution of 1789, likewise, people across France were encouraged to join with their fellow citizens in building the shining new utopia of reason, and a great many of those who followed that advice ended up decapitated or, a little later, dying of gunshot or disease in the brutal era of pan-European warfare that extended almost without a break from the cannonade of Valmy in 1792 to the battle of Waterloo in 1815.

And the present example? That’s a question worth exploring, if only for the utterly pragmatic reason that most of my readers are going to get to see it up close and personal.

That the United States and the industrial world generally are deep in an era of pretense is, I think, pretty much beyond question at this point. We’ve got political authorities, global bankers, and a galaxy of pundits insisting at the top of their lungs that nothing is wrong, everything is fine, and we’ll be on our way to the next great era of prosperity if we just keep pursuing a set of boneheaded policies that have never—not once in the entire span of human history—brought prosperity to the countries that pursued them. We’ve got shelves full of books for sale in upscale bookstores insisting, in the strident language usual to such times, that life is wonderful in this best of all possible worlds, and it’s going to get better forever because, like, we have technology, dude! Across the landscape of the cultural mainstream, you’ll find no shortage of cheerleaders insisting at the top of their lungs that everything’s going to be fine, that even though they said ten years ago that we only have ten years to do something before disaster hits, why, we still have ten years before disaster hits, and when ten more years pass by, why, you can be sure that the same people will be insisting that we have ten more.

This is the classic rhetoric of an era of pretense. Over the last few years, though, it’s seemed to me that the voices of crackpot optimism have gotten more shrill, the diatribes more fact-free, and the logic even shoddier than it was in Bjorn Lomborg’s day, which is saying something. We’ve reached the point that state governments are making it a crime to report on water quality and forbidding officials from using such unwelcome phrases as “climate change.” That’s not the action of people who are confident in their beliefs; it’s the action of a bunch of overgrown children frantically clenching their eyes shut, stuffing their fingers in their ears, and shouting “La, la, la, I can’t hear you.”

That, in turn, suggests that the transition to the era of impact may be fairly close. Exactly when it’s likely to arrive is a complex question, and exactly what’s going to land the blow that will crack the crackpot optimism and make it impossible to ignore the arrival of real trouble is an even more complex one. In 1929, those who hadn’t bought into the bubble could be perfectly sure—and in fact, a good many of them were perfectly sure—that the usual mechanism that brings bubbles to a catastrophic end was about to terminate the boom of the 1920s with extreme prejudice, as indeed it did. In the last decades of the French monarchy, it was by no means clear exactly what sequence of events would bring the Ancien Régime crashing down, but such thoughtful observers as Talleyrand knew that something of the sort was likely to follow the crisis of legitimacy then under way.

The problem with trying to predict the trigger that will bring our current situation to a sudden stop is that we’re in such a target-rich environment. Looking over the potential candidates for the sudden shock that will stick a fork in the well-roasted corpse of business as usual, I’m reminded of the old board game Clue. Will Mr. Boddy’s killer turn out to be Colonel Mustard in the library with a lead pipe, Professor Plum in the conservatory with a candlestick, or Miss Scarlet in the dining room with a rope?

In much the same sense, we’ve got a global economy burdened to the breaking point with more than a quadrillion dollars of unpayable debt; we’ve got a global political system coming apart at the seams as the United States slips toward the usual fate of empires and its rivals circle warily, waiting for the kill; we’ve got a domestic political system here in the US entering a classic prerevolutionary condition under the impact of a textbook crisis of legitimacy; we’ve got a global climate that’s hammered by our rank stupidity in treating the atmosphere as a gaseous sewer for our wastes; we’ve got a global fossil fuel industry that’s frantically trying to pretend that scraping the bottom of the barrel means that the barrel is full, and the list goes on. It’s as though Colonel Mustard, Professor Plum, Miss Scarlet, and the rest of them all ganged up on Mr. Boddy at once, and only the most careful autopsy will be able to determine which of them actually dealt the fatal blow.

In the midst of all this uncertainty, there are three things that can, I think, be said for certain about the end of the current era of pretense and the coming of the era of impact. The first is that it’s going to happen. When something is unsustainable, it’s a pretty safe bet that it won’t be sustained indefinitely, and a society that keeps on embracing policies that swap short-term gains for long-term problems will sooner or later end up awash in the consequences of those policies. Timing such transitions is difficult at best; it’s an old adage among stock traders that the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. Still, points made above—especially the increasingly shrill tone of the defenders of the existing order—suggest to me that the era of impact may be here within a decade or so at the outside.

The second thing that can be said for certain about the coming era of impact is that it’s not the end of the world. Apocalyptic fantasies are common and popular in eras of pretense, and for good reason; fixating on the supposed imminence of the Second Coming, human extinction, or what have you, is a great way to distract yourself from the real crisis that’s breathing down your neck. If the real crisis in question is partly or wholly a result of your own actions, while the apocalyptic fantasy can be blamed on someone or something else, that adds a further attraction to the fantasy.

The end of industrial civilization will be a long, bitter, painful cascade of conflicts, disasters, and accelerating decline in which a vast number of people are going to die before they otherwise would, and a great many things of value will be lost forever. That’s true of any falling civilization, and the misguided decisions of the last forty years have pretty much guaranteed that the current example is going to have an extra helping of all these unwelcome things. I’ve discussed at length, in earlier posts in the Dark Age America sequence here and in other sequences as well, why the sort of apocalyptic sudden stop beloved of Hollywood scriptwriters is the least likely outcome of the predicament of our time; still, insisting on the imminence and inevitability of some such game-ending event will no doubt be as popular as usual in the years immediately ahead.

The third thing that I think can be said for certain about the coming era of impact, though, is the one that counts. If it follows the usual pattern, as I expect it to do, once the crisis hits there will be serious, authoritative, respectable figures telling everyone exactly what they need to do to bring an end to the troubles and get the United States and the world back on track to renewed peace and prosperity. Taking these pronouncements seriously and following their directions will be extremely popular, and it will almost certainly also be a recipe for unmitigated disaster. If forewarned is forearmed, as the saying has it, this is a piece of firepower to keep handy as the era of pretense winds down. In next week’s post, we’ll talk about comparable weaponry relating to the third stage of collapse—the era of response.

III. The Era Of Response

Community-Led Repair Efforts in a Decaying Industrial Town: A once-thriving industrial town where local citizens have taken matters into their own hands, attempting to repair and repurpose abandoned factories and buildings, symbolizing the Era of Response in the Twilight of the Industrial Age. Makeshift scaffolding and DIY repair structures line the crumbling walls, as people--young and old--work together with tools salvaged from old workshops. Families are planting community gardens in the empty lots where factories used to stand, growing food to sustain themselves amidst the economic hardships. Solar panels, handmade from recycled materials, are mounted on rooftops as an attempt to bring energy back to the town. The atmosphere is one of determination and resilience, with neighbors working side by side, showing a spark of hope and ingenuity as they try to reclaim their town from the grip of decline.

The third stage of the process of collapse, following what I’ve called the eras of pretense and impact, is the era of response. It’s easy to misunderstand what this involves, because both of the previous eras have their own kinds of response to whatever is driving the collapse; it’s just that those kinds of response are more precisely nonresponses, attempts to make the crisis go away without addressing any of the things that are making it happen.

If you want a first-rate example of the standard nonresponse of the era of pretense, you’ll find one in the sunny streets of Miami, Florida right now. As a result of global climate change, sea level has gone up and the Gulf Stream has slowed down. One consequence is that these days, whenever Miami gets a high tide combined with a stiff onshore wind, salt water comes boiling up through the storm sewers of the city all over the low-lying parts of town. The response of the Florida state government has been to issue an order to all state employees that they’re not allowed to utter the phrase “climate change.”

That sort of thing is standard practice in an astonishing range of subjects in America these days. Consider the roles that the essentially nonexistent recovery from the housing-bubble crash of 2008-9 has played in political rhetoric since that time. The current inmate of the White House has been insisting through most of two turns that happy days are here again, and the usual reams of doctored statistics have been churned out in an effort to convince people who know better that they’re just imagining that something is wrong with the economy. We can expect to hear that same claim made in increasingly loud and confident tones right up until the day the bottom finally drops out.

With the end of the era of pretense and the arrival of the era of impact comes a distinct shift in the standard mode of nonresponse, which can be used quite neatly to time the transition from one era to another. Where the nonresponses of the era of pretense insist that there’s nothing wrong and nobody has to do anything outside the realm of business as usual, the nonresponses of the era of impact claim just as forcefully that whatever’s gone wrong is a temporary difficulty and everything will be fine if we all unite to do even more of whatever activity defines business as usual. That this normally amounts to doing more of whatever made the crisis happen in the first place, and thus reliably makes things worse is just one of the little ironies history has to offer.

What unites the era of pretense with the era of impact is the unshaken belief that in the final analysis, there’s nothing essentially wrong with the existing order of things. Whatever little difficulties may show up from time to time may be ignored as irrelevant or talked out of existence, or they may have to be shoved aside by some concerted effort, but it’s inconceivable to most people in these two eras that the existing order of things is itself the source of society’s problems, and has to be changed in some way that goes beyond the cosmetic dimension. When the inconceivable becomes inescapable, in turn, the second phase gives way to the third, and the era of response has arrived.

This doesn’t mean that everyone comes to grips with the real issues, and buckles down to the hard work that will be needed to rebuild society on a sounder footing. Winston Churchill once noted with his customary wry humor that the American people can be counted on to do the right thing, once they have exhausted every other possibility. He was of course quite correct, but the same rule can be applied with equal validity to every other nation this side of Utopia, too. The era of response, in practice, generally consists of a desperate attempt to find something that will solve the crisis du jour, other than the one thing that everyone knows will solve the crisis du jour but nobody wants to do.

Let’s return to the two examples we’ve been following so far, the outbreak of the Great Depression and the coming of the French Revolution. In the aftermath of the 1929 stock market crash, once the initial impact was over and the “sucker’s rally” of early 1930 had come and gone, the federal government and the various power centers and pressure groups that struggled for influence within its capacious frame were united in pursuit of a single goal: finding a way to restore prosperity without doing either of the things that had to be done in order to restore prosperity. That task occupied the best minds in the US elite from the summer of 1930 straight through until April of 1933, and the mere fact that their attempts to accomplish this impossibility proved to be a wretched failure shouldn’t blind anyone to the Herculean efforts that were involved in the attempt.

The first of the two things that had to be tackled in order to restore prosperity was to do something about the drastic imbalance in the distribution of income in the United States. As noted in previous posts, an economy dependent on consumer expenditures can’t thrive unless consumers have plenty of money to spend, and in the United States in the late 1920s, they didn’t—well, except for the very modest number of those who belonged to the narrow circles of the well-to-do. It’s not often recalled these days just how ghastly the slums of urban America were in 1929, or how many rural Americans lived in squalid one-room shacks of the sort you pretty much have to travel to the Third World to see these days. Labor unions and strikes were illegal in 1920s America; concepts such as a minimum wage, sick pay, and health benefits didn’t exist, and the legal system was slanted savagely against the poor.

You can’t build prosperity in a consumer society when a good half of your citizenry can’t afford more than the basic necessities of life. That’s the predicament that America found clamped to the tender parts of its economic anatomy at the end of the 1920s. In that decade, as in our time, the temporary solution was to inflate a vast speculative bubble, under the endearing delusion that this would flood the economy with enough unearned cash to make the lack of earned income moot. That worked over the short term and then blew up spectacularly, since a speculative bubble is simply a Ponzi scheme that the legal authorities refuse to prosecute as such, and inevitably ends the same way.

There were, of course, effective solutions to the problem of inadequate consumer income. They were exactly those measures that were taken once the era of response gave way to the era of breakdown; everyone knew what they were, and nobody with access to political or economic power was willing to see them put into effect, because those measures would require a modest decline in the relative wealth and political dominance of the rich as compared to everyone else. Thus, as usually happens, they were postponed until the arrival of the era of breakdown made it impossible to avoid them any longer.

The second thing that had to be changed in order to restore prosperity was even more explosive, and I’m quite certain that some of my readers will screech like banshees the moment I mention it. The United States in 1929 had a precious metal-backed currency in the most literal sense of the term. Paper bills in those days were quite literally receipts for a certain quantity of gold—1.5 grams, for much of the time the US spent on the gold standard. That sort of arrangement was standard in most of the world’s industrial nations; it was backed by a dogmatic orthodoxy all but universal among respectable economists; and it was strangling the US economy.

It’s fashionable among certain sects on the economic fringes these days to look back on the era of the gold standard as a kind of economic Utopia in which there were no booms and busts, just a warm sunny landscape of stability and prosperity until the wicked witches of the Federal Reserve came along and spoiled it all. That claim flies in the face of economic history. During the entire period that the United States was on the gold standard, from 1873 to 1933, the US economy was a moonscape cratered by more than a dozen significant depressions. There’s a reason for that, and it’s relevant to our current situation—in a backhanded manner, admittedly.

Money, let us please remember, is not wealth. It’s a system of arbitrary tokens that represent real wealth—that is, actual, nonfinancial goods and services. Every society produces a certain amount of real wealth each year, and those societies that use money thus need to have enough money in circulation to more or less correspond to the annual supply of real wealth. That sounds simple; in practice, though, it’s anything but. Nowadays, for example, the amount of real wealth being produced in the United States each year is contracting steadily as more and more of the nation’s economic output has to be diverted into the task of keeping it supplied with fossil fuels. That’s happening, in turn, because of the limits to growth—the awkward but inescapable reality that you can’t extract infinite resources, or dump limitless wastes, on a finite planet.

The gimmick currently being used to keep fossil fuel extraction funded and cover the costs of the rising impact of environmental disruptions, without cutting into a culture of extravagance that only cheap abundant fossil fuel and a mostly intact biosphere can support, is to increase the money supply ad infinitum. That’s become the bedrock of US economic policy since the 2008-9 crash. It’s not a gimmick with a long shelf life; as the mismatch between real wealth and the money supply balloons, distortions and discontinuities are surging out through the crawlspaces of our economic life, and crisis is the most likely outcome.

In the United States in the first half or so of the twentieth century, by contrast, the amount of real wealth being produced each year soared, largely because of the steady increases in fossil fuel energy being applied to every sphere of life. While the nation was on the gold standard, though, the total supply of money could only grow as fast as gold could be mined out of the ground, which wasn’t even close to fast enough. So you had more goods and services being produced than there was money to pay for them; people who wanted goods and services couldn’t buy them because there wasn’t enough money to go around; business that wanted to expand and hire workers were unable to do so for the same reason. The result was that moonscape of economic disasters I mentioned a moment ago.

The necessary response at that time was to go off the gold standard. Nobody in power wanted to do this, partly because of the dogmatic economic orthodoxy noted earlier, and partly because a money shortage paid substantial benefits to those who had guaranteed access to money. The rentier class—those people who lived off income from their investments—could count on stable or falling prices as long as the gold standard stayed in place, and the mere fact that the same stable or falling prices meant low wages, massive unemployment, and widespread destitution troubled them not at all. Since the rentier class included the vast majority of the US economic and political elite, in turn, going off the gold standard was unthinkable until it became unavoidable.

The period of the French revolution from the fall of the Bastille in 1789 to the election of the National Convention in 1792 was a period of the same kind, though driven by different forces. Here the great problem was how to replace the Old Regime—not just the French monarchy, but the entire lumbering mass of political, economic, and social laws, customs, forms, and institutions that France had inherited from the Middle Ages and never quite gotten around to adapting to drastically changed conditions—with something that would actually work. It’s among the more interesting features of the resulting era of response that nearly every detail differed from the American example just outlined, and yet the results were remarkably similar.

Thus the leaders of the National Assembly who suddenly became the new rulers of France in the summer of 1789 had no desire whatsoever to retain the traditional economic arrangements that gave France’s former elites their stranglehold on an oversized share of the nation’s wealth. The abolition of manorial rights that summer, together with the explosive rural uprisings against feudal landlords and their chateaux in the wake of the Bastille’s fall, gutted the feudal system and left most of its former beneficiaries the choice between fleeing into exile and trying to find some way to make ends meet in a society that had no particular market for used aristocrats. The problem faced by the National Assembly wasn’t that of prying the dead fingers of a failed system off the nation’s throat; it was that of trying to find some other basis for national unity and effective government.

It’s a surprisingly difficult challenge. Those of my readers who know their way around current events will already have guessed that an attempt was made to establish a copy of whatever system was most fashionable among liberals at the time, and that this attempt turned out to be an abject failure. What’s more, they’ll have been quite correct. The National Assembly moved to establish a constitutional monarchy along British lines, bring in British economic institutions, and the like; it was all very popular among liberal circles in France and, naturally, in Britain as well, and it flopped. Those who recall the outcome of the attempt to turn Iraq into a nice pseudo-American democracy in the wake of the US invasion will have a tolerably good sense of how the project unraveled.

One of the unwelcome but reliable facts of history is that democracy doesn’t transplant well. It thrives only where it grows up naturally, out of the civil institutions and social habits of a people; when liberal intellectuals try to impose it on a nation that hasn’t evolved the necessary foundations for it, the results are pretty much always a disaster. That latter was the situation in France at the time of the Revolution. What happened thereafter is what almost always happens to a failed democratic experiment: a period of chaos, followed by the rise of a talented despot who’s smart and ruthless enough to impose order on a chaotic situation and allow new, pragmatic institutions to emerge to replace those destroyed by clueless democratic idealists. In many cases, though by no means all, those pragmatic institutions have ended up providing a bridge to a future democracy, but that’s another matter.

Here again, those of my readers who have been paying attention to current events already know this; the collapse of the Soviet Union was followed in classic form by a failed democracy, a period of chaos, and the rise of a talented despot. It’s a curious detail of history that the despots in question are often rather short. Russia has had the great good fortune to find, as its despot du jour, a canny realist who has successfully brought it back from the brink of collapse and reestablished it as a major power with a body count considerably smaller than usual. France was rather less fortunate; the despot it found, Napoleon Bonaparte, turned out to be a megalomaniac with an Alexander the Great complex who proceeded to plunge Europe into a quarter century of cataclysmic war. Mind you, things could have been even worse; when Germany ended up in a similar situation, what it got was Adolf Hitler.

Charismatic strongmen are a standard endpoint for the era of response, but they properly belong to the era that follows, the era of breakdown, which will be discussed next week. What I want to explore here is how an era of response might work out in the future immediately before us, as the United States topples from its increasingly unsteady imperial perch and industrial civilization as a whole slams facefirst into the limits to growth. The examples just cited outline the two most common patterns by which the era of response works itself out. In the first pattern, the old elite retains its grip on power, and fumbles around with increasing desperation for a response to the crisis. In the second, the old elite is shoved aside, and the new holders of power are left floundering in a political vacuum.

We could see either pattern in the United States. For what it’s worth, I suspect the latter is the more likely option; the spreading crisis of legitimacy that grips the country these days is exactly the sort of thing you saw in France before the Revolution, and in any number of other countries in the few decades just prior to revolutionary political and social change. Every time a government tries to cope with a crisis by claiming that the crisis doesn’t exist, every time some member of the well-to-do tries to dismiss the collective burdens its culture of executive kleptocracy imposes on the country by flinging abuse at critics, every time institutions that claim to uphold the rule of law defend the rule of entrenched privilege instead, the United States takes another step closer to the revolutionary abyss.

I use that last word advisedly. It’s a common superstition in every troubled age that any change must be for the better—that the overthrow of a bad system must by definition lead to the establishment of a better one. This simply isn’t true. The vast majority of revolutions have established governments that were far more abusive than the ones they replaced. The exceptions have generally been those that brought about a social upheaval without wrecking the political system: where, for example, an election rather than a coup d’etat or a mass uprising put the revolutionaries in power, and the political institutions of an earlier time remained in place with only such reshaping as new necessities required.

We could still see that sort of transformation as the United States sees the end of its age of empire and has to find its way back to a less arrogant and extravagant way of functioning in the world. I don’t think it’s likely, but I think it’s possible, and it would probably be a good deal less destructive than the other alternative. It’s worth remembering, though, that history is under no obligation to give us the future we think we want.

IV. The Era Of Breakdown

A City Overrun by Nature and Lawlessness: An urban landscape falling into chaos as the Era of Breakdown takes hold in the Twilight of the Industrial Age. Buildings that once housed bustling offices and thriving businesses are now covered in graffiti, broken windows, and ivy creeping up their facades. Abandoned vehicles block the streets, their tires flat and rust spreading along their bodies. Groups of people roam through the city, some scavenging for supplies, while others form makeshift barricades to protect their territories. Streetlights no longer function, casting the city into darkness at night, lit only by fires set in metal barrels. In the background, broken power lines hang limply, and vines climb over everything as nature begins to reclaim the urban space. The atmosphere is one of decay, fear, and uncertainty, as society’s infrastructure crumbles and people struggle to survive amidst lawlessness.

The fourth of the stages in the sequence of collapse we’ve been discussing is the era of breakdown. (For those who haven’t been keeping track, the first three phases are the eras of pretense, impact, and response; the final phase, which we’ll be discussing next week, is the era of dissolution.) The era of breakdown is the phase that gets most of the press, and thus inevitably no other stage has attracted anything like the crop of misperceptions, misunderstandings, and flat-out hokum as this one.

The era of breakdown is the point along the curve of collapse at which business as usual finally comes to an end. That’s where the confusion comes in. It’s one of the central articles of faith in pretty much every human society that business as usual functions as a bulwark against chaos, a defense against whatever problems the society might face. That’s exactly where the difficulty slips in, because in pretty much every human society, what counts as business as usual—the established institutions and familiar activities on which everyone relies day by day—is the most important cause of the problems the society faces, and the primary cause of collapse is thus quite simply that societies inevitably attempt to solve their problems by doing all the things that make their problems worse.

The phase of breakdown is the point at which this exercise in futility finally grinds to a halt. The three previous phases are all attempts to avoid breakdown: in the phase of pretense, by making believe that the problems don’t exist; in the phase of impact, by making believe that the problems will go away if only everyone doubles down on whatever’s causing them; and in the phase of response, by making believe that changing something other than the things that are causing the problems will fix the problems. Finally, after everything else has been tried, the institutions and activities that define business as usual either fall apart or are forcibly torn down, and then—and only then—it becomes possible for a society to do something about its problems.

It’s important not to mistake the possibility of constructive action for the inevitability of a solution. The collapse of business as usual in the breakdown phase doesn’t solve a society’s problems; it doesn’t even prevent those problems from being made worse by bad choices. It merely removes the primary obstacle to a solution, which is the wholly fictitious aura of inevitability that surrounds the core institutions and activities that are responsible for the problems. Once people in a society realize that no law of God or nature requires them to maintain a failed status quo, they can then choose to dismantle whatever fragments of business as usual haven’t yet fallen down of their own weight.

That’s a more important action than it might seem at first glance. It doesn’t just put an end to the principal cause of the society’s problems. It also frees up resources that have been locked up in the struggle to keep business as usual going at all costs, and those newly freed resources very often make it possible for a society in crisis to transform itself drastically in a remarkably short period of time. Whether those transformations are for good or ill, or as usually happens, a mixture of the two, is another matter, and one I’ll address a little further on.

Stories in the media, some recent, some recently reprinted, happen to have brought up a couple of first-rate examples of the way that resources get locked up in unproductive activities during the twilight years of a failing society. A California newspaper, for example, recently mentioned that Elon Musk’s large and much-ballyhooed fortune is almost entirely a product of government subsidies. Musk is a smart guy; he obviously realized a good long time ago that federal and state subsidies for technology was where the money was at, and he’s constructed an industrial empire funded by US taxpayers to the tune of many billions of dollars. None of his publicly traded firms has ever made a profit, and as long as the subsidies keep flowing, none of them ever has to; between an overflowing feed trough of government largesse and the longstanding eagerness of fools to be parted from their money by way of the stock market, he’s pretty much set for life.

This is business as usual in today’s America. An article from 2013 pointed out, along the same lines, that the profits made by the five largest US banks were almost exactly equal to the amount of taxpayer money those same five banks got from the government. Like Elon Musk, the banks in question have figured out where the money is, and have gone after it with their usual verve; the revolving door that allows men in suits to shuttle back and forth between those same banks and the financial end of the US government doesn’t exactly hinder that process. It’s lucrative, it’s legal, and the mere fact that it’s bankrupting the real economy of goods and services in order to further enrich an already glutted minority of kleptocrats is nothing anyone in the citadels of power worries about.

A useful light on a different side of the same process comes from an editorial (in PDF) which claims that something like half of all current scientific papers are unreliable junk. Is this the utterance of an archdruid, or some other wild-eyed critic of science? No, it comes from the editor of Lancet, one of the two or three most reputable medical journals on the planet. The managing editor of The New England Journal of Medicine, which has a comparable ranking to Lancet, expressed much the same opinion of the shoddy experimental design, dubious analysis, and blatant conflicts of interest that pervade contemporary scientific research.

Notice that what’s happening here affects the flow of information in the same way that misplaced government subsidies affect the flow of investment. The functioning of the scientific process, like that of the market, depends on the presupposition that everyone who takes part abides by certain rules. When those rules are flouted, individual actors profit, but they do so at the expense of the whole system: the results of scientific research are distorted so that (for example) pharmaceutical firms can profit from drugs that don’t actually have the benefits claimed for them, just as the behavior of the market is distorted so that (for example) banks that would otherwise struggle for survival, and would certainly not be able to pay their CEOs gargantuan bonuses, can continue on their merry way.

The costs imposed by these actions are real, and they fall on all other participants in science and the economy respectively. Scientists these days, especially but not only in such blatantly corrupt fields as pharmaceutical research, face a lose-lose choice between basing their own investigations on invalid studies, on the one hand, or having to distrust any experimental results they don’t replicate themselves, on the other. Meanwhile the consumers of the products of scientific research—yes, that would be all of us—have to contend with the fact that we have no way of knowing whether any given claim about the result of research is the product of valid science or not. Similarly, the federal subsidies that direct investment toward politically savvy entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, and politically well-connected banks such as Goldman Sachs, and away from less parasitic and more productive options distort the entire economic system by preventing the normal workings of the market from weeding out nonviable projects and firms, and rewarding the more viable ones.

Turn to the historical examples we’ve been following for the last three weeks, and distortions of the same kind are impossible to miss. In the US economy before and during the stock market crash of 1929 and its long and brutal aftermath, a legal and financial system dominated by a handful of very rich men saw to it that the bulk of the nation’s wealth flowed uphill, out of productive economic activities and into speculative ventures increasingly detached from the productive economy. When the markets imploded, in turn, the same people did their level best to see to it that their lifestyles weren’t affected even though everyone else’s was. The resulting collapse in consumer expenditures played a huge role in driving the cascading collapse of the US economy that, by the spring of 1933, had shuttered every consumer bank in the nation and driven joblessness and impoverishment to record highs.

That’s what Franklin Roosevelt fixed. It’s always amused me that the people who criticize FDR—and of course there’s plenty to criticize in a figure who, aside from his far greater success as a wartime head of state, can best be characterized as America’s answer to Mussolini—always talk about the very mixed record of the economic policies of his second term. They rarely bother to mention the Hundred Days, in which FDR stopped a massive credit collapse in its tracks. The Hundred Days and their aftermath are the part of FDR’s presidency that mattered most; it was in that brief period that he slapped shock paddles on an economy in cardiac arrest and got a pulse going, by violating most of the rules that had guided the economy up to that time. That casual attitude toward economic dogma is one of the two things his critics have never been able to forgive; the other is that it worked.

In the same way, France before, during, and immediately after the Revolution was for all practical purposes a medieval state that had somehow staggered its way to the brink of the nineteenth century. The various revolutionary governments that succeeded one another in quick succession after 1789 made some badly needed changes, but it was left to Napoléon Bonaparte to drag France by the scruff of its collective neck out of the late Middle Ages. Napoléon has plenty of critics—and of course there’s plenty to criticize in a figure who was basically what Mussolini wanted to be when he grew up—but the man’s domestic policies were by and large inspired. To name only two of his most important changes, he replaced the sprawling provinces of medieval France with a system of smaller and geographically meaningful départements, and abolished the entire body of existing French law in favor of a newly created legal system, the Code Napoléon. When he was overthrown, those stayed; in fact, a great many other countries in Europe and elsewhere proceeded to adopt the Code Napoléon in place of their existing legal systems. There were several reasons for this, but one of the most important was that the new Code simply made that much more sense.

Both men were able to accomplish what they did, in turn, because abolishing the political, economic, and cultural distortions imposed on their respective countries by a fossilized status quo freed up all the resources that had been locked up in maintaining those distortions. Slapping a range of legal barriers and taxes on the more egregious forms of speculative excess—another of the major achievements of the Roosevelt era—drove enough wealth back into the productive economy to lay the foundations of America’s postwar boom; in the same way, tipping a galaxy of feudal customs into history’s compost bin transformed France from the economic basket case it was in 1789 to the conqueror of Europe twenty years later, and the succesful and innovative economic and cultural powerhouse it became during most of the nineteenth century thereafter.

That’s one of the advantages of revolutionary change. By breaking down existing institutions and the encrusted layers of economic parasitism that inevitably build up around them over time, it reliably breaks loose an abundance of resources that were not available in the prerevolutionary period. Here again, it’s crucial to remember that the availability of resources doesn’t guarantee that they’ll be used wisely; they may be thrown away on absurdities of one kind or another. Nor, even more critically, does it mean that the same abundance of resources will be available indefinitely. The surge of additional resources made available by catabolizing old and corrupt systems is a temporary jackpot, not a permanent state of affairs. That said, when you combine the collapse of fossilized institutions that stand in the way of change, and a sudden rush of previously unavailable resources of various kinds, quite a range of possibilities previously closed to a society suddenly come open.

Applying this same pattern to the crisis of modern industrial civilization, though, requires attention to certain inescapable but highly unwelcome realities. In 1789, the problem faced by France was the need to get rid of a thousand years of fossilized political, economic, and social institutions at a time when the coming of the industrial age had made them hopelessly dysfunctional. In 1929, the problem faced by the United States was the need to pry the dead hand of an equally dysfunctional economic orthodoxy off the throat of the nation so that its economy would actually function again. In both cases, the era of breakdown was catalyzed by a talented despot, and was followed, after an interval of chaos and war, by a period of relative prosperity.

We may well get the despot this time around, too, not to mention the chaos and war, but the period of prosperity is probably quite another matter. The problem we face today, in the United States and more broadly throughout the world’s industrial societies, is that all the institutions of industrial civilization presuppose limitless economic growth, but the conditions that provided the basis for continued economic growth simply aren’t there any more. The 300-year joyride of industrialism was made possible by vast and cheaply extractable reserves of highly concentrated fossil fuels and other natural resources, on the one hand, and a biosphere sufficiently undamaged that it could soak up the wastes of human industry without imposing burdens on the economy, on the other. We no longer have either of those requirements.

With every passing year, more and more of the world’s total economic output has to be diverted from other activities to keep fossil fuels and other resources flowing into the industrial world’s power plants, factories, and fuel tanks; with every passing year, in turn, more and more of the world’s total economic output has to be diverted from other activities to deal with the rising costs of climate change and other ecological disruptions. These are the two jaws of the trap sketched out more than forty years ago in the pages of The Limits to Growth, still the most accurate (and thus inevitably the most savagely denounced) map of the predicament we face. The consequences of that trap can be summed up neatly: on a finite planet, after a certain point—the point of diminishing returns, which we’ve already passed—the costs of growth rise faster than the benefits, and finally force the global economy to its knees.

The task ahead of us is thus in some ways the opposite of the one that France faced in the aftermath of 1789. Instead of replacing a sclerotic and failing medieval economy with one better suited to a new era of industrial expansion, we need to replace a sclerotic and failing industrial economy with one better suited to a new era of deindustrial contraction. That’s a tall order, no question, and it’s not something that can be achieved easily, or in a single leap. In all probability, the industrial world will have to pass through the whole sequence of phases we’ve been discussing several times before things finally bottom out in the deindustrial dark ages to come.

Still, I’m going to shock my fans and critics alike here by pointing out that there’s actually some reason to think that positive change on more than an individual level will be possible as the industrial world slams facefirst into the limits to growth. Two things give me that measured sense of hope. The first is the sheer scale of the resources locked up in today’s spectacularly dysfunctional political, economic, and social institutions, which will become available for other uses when those institutions come apart. The $83 billion a year currently being poured down the oversized rathole of the five biggest US banks, just for starters, could pay for a lot of solar water heaters, training programs for organic farmers, and other things that could actually do some good.

Throw in the resources currently being chucked into all of the other attempts currently under way to prop up a failing system, and you’ve got quite the jackpot that could, in an era of breakdown, be put to work doing things worth while. It’s by no means certain, as already noted, that these resources will go to the best possible use, but it’s all but certain that they’ll go to something less stunningly pointless than, say, handing Elon Musk his next billion dollars.

The second thing that gives me a measured sense of hope is at once subtler and far more profound. These days, despite a practically endless barrage of rhetoric to the contrary, the great majority of Americans are getting fewer and fewer benefits from the industrial system, and are being forced to pay more and more of its costs, so that a relatively small fraction of the population can monopolize an ever-increasing fraction of the national wealth and contribute less and less in exchange. What’s more, a growing number of Americans are aware of this fact. The traditional schism of a collapsing society into a dominant minority and an internal proletariat, to use Arnold Toynbee’s terms, is a massive and accelerating social reality in the United States today.

As that schism widens, and more and more Americans are forced into the Third World poverty that’s among the unmentionable realities of public life in today’s United States, several changes of great importance are taking place. The first, of course, is precisely that a great many Americans are perforce learning to live with less—not in the playacting style popular just now on the faux-green end of the privileged classes, but really, seriously living with much less, because that’s all there is. That’s a huge shift and a necessary one, since the absurd extravagance many Americans consider to be a normal lifestyle is among the most important things that will be landing in history’s compost heap in the not too distant future.

At the same time, the collective consensus that keeps the hopelessly dysfunctional institutions of today’s status quo glued in place is already coming apart, and can be expected to dissolve completely in the years ahead. What sort of consensus will replace it, after the inevitable interval of chaos and struggle, is anybody’s guess at this point—though it’s vanishingly unlikely to have anything to do with the current political fantasies of left and right. It’s just possible, given luck and a great deal of hard work, that whatever new system gets cobbled together during the breakdown phase of our present crisis will embody at least some of the values that will be needed to get our species back into some kind of balance with the biosphere on which our lives depend. A future post will discuss how that might be accomplished—after, that is, we explore the last phase of the collapse process: the era of dissolution, which will be the theme of next week’s post.

V. The Era Of Dissolution

Small Communities Amidst the Ruins of Civilization: A landscape where small, self-sustaining communities have formed among the ruins of a once-mighty industrial civilization, symbolizing the Era of Dissolution. In the shadow of crumbling skyscrapers and rusting infrastructure, clusters of simple shelters and makeshift greenhouses have been set up, creating pockets of life amidst the decay. People grow vegetables in raised garden beds, collect rainwater in barrels, and use solar panels cobbled together from salvaged materials. There is a sense of peace and resilience, as these communities adapt to a world without the conveniences of the industrial age, focusing on small-scale farming, bartering, and traditional crafts. The sky is clear, and the air is quiet, save for the sounds of nature and the soft murmur of voices. This scene illustrates a world where society has dissolved into smaller, localized units, embracing a simpler, self-reliant way of life as the remnants of industrial civilization fade into the background.

The last of the five phases of the collapse process we’ve been discussing here in recent posts is the era of dissolution. (For those that haven’t been keeping track, the first four are the eras of pretense, impact, response, and breakdown). I suppose you could call the era of dissolution the Rodney Dangerfield of collapse, though it’s not so much that it gets no respect; it generally doesn’t even get discussed.

To some extent, of course, that’s because a great many of the people who talk about collapse don’t actually believe that it’s going to happen. That lack of belief stands out most clearly in the rhetorical roles assigned to collapse in so much of modern thinking. People who actually believe that a disaster is imminent generally put a lot of time and effort into getting out of its way in one way or another; it’s those who treat it as a scarecrow to elicit predictable emotional reactions from other people, or from themselves, who never quite manage to walk their talk.

Interestingly, the factor that determines the target of scarecrow-tactics of this sort seems to be political in nature. Groups that think they have a chance of manipulating the public into following their notion of good behavior tend to use the scarecrow of collapse to affect other people; for them, collapse is the horrible fate that’s sure to gobble us up if we don’t do whatever it is they want us to do. Those who’ve given up any hope of getting a response from the public, by contrast, turn the scarecrow around and use it on themselves; for them, collapse is a combination of Dante’s Inferno and the Big Rock Candy Mountain, the fantasy setting where the wicked get the walloping they deserve while they themselves get whatever goodies they’ve been unsuccessful at getting in the here and now.

Then, of course, you get the people for whom collapse is less scarecrow than teddy bear, the thing that allows them to drift off comfortably to sleep in the face of an unwelcome future. It’s been my repeated observation that many of those who insist that humanity will become totally extinct in the very near future fall into this category. Most people, faced with a serious threat to their own lives, will take drastic action to save themselves; faced with a threat to the survival of their family or community, a good many people will take actions so drastic as to put their own lives at risk in an effort to save others they care about. The fact that so many people who insist that the human race is doomed go on to claim that the proper reaction is to sit around feeling very, very sad about it all does not inspire confidence in the seriousness of that prediction—especially when feeling very, very sad seems mostly to function as an excuse to keep enjoying privileged lifestyles for just a little bit longer.

So we have the people for whom collapse is a means of claiming unearned power, the people for whom it’s a blank screen on which to project an assortment of self-regarding fantasies, and the people for whom it’s an excuse to do nothing in the face of a challenging future. All three of those are popular gimmicks with an extremely long track record, and they’ll doubtless all see plenty of use millennia after industrial civilization has taken its place in the list of failed civilizations. The only problem with them is that they don’t happen to provide any useful guidance for those of us who have noticed that collapse isn’t merely a rhetorical gimmick meant to get emotional reactions—that it’s something that actually happens, to actual civilizations, and that it’s already happening to ours.

From the three perspectives already discussed, after all, realistic questions about what will come after the rubble stops bouncing are entirely irrelevant. If you’re trying to use collapse as a boogeyman to scare other people into doing what you tell them, your best option is to combine a vague sense of dread with an assortment of cherrypicked factoids intended to make a worst-case scenario look not nearly bad enough; if you’re trying to use collapse as a source of revenge fantasies where you get what you want and the people you don’t like get what’s coming to them, daydreams of various levels and modes of dampness are far more useful to you than sober assessments; while if you’re trying to use collapse as an excuse to maintain an unsustainable and planet-damaging SUV lifestyle, your best bet is to insist that everyone and everything dies all at once, so nothing will ever matter again to anybody.

On the other hand, there are also those who recognize that collapse happens, that we’re heading toward one, and that it might be useful to talk about what the world might look like on the far side of that long and difficult process. I’ve tried to sketch out a portrait of the postcollapse world in last year’s series of posts here on Dark Age America, and I haven’t yet seen any reason to abandon that portrait of a harsh but livable future, in which a sharply reduced global population returns to agrarian or nomadic lives in those areas of the planet not poisoned by nuclear or chemical wastes or rendered uninhabitable by prolonged drought or the other impacts of climate change, and in which much or most of today’s scientific and technological knowledge is irretrievably lost.

The five phases of collapse discussed in this latest sequence of posts is simply a description of how we get there—or, more precisely, of one of the steps by which we get there. That latter point’s a detail that a good many of my readers, and an even larger fraction of my critics, seem to have misplaced. The five-stage model is a map of how human societies shake off an unsustainable version of business as usual and replace it with something better suited to the realities of the time. It applies to a very wide range of social transformations, reaching in scale from the local to the global and in intensity from the relatively modest to the cataclysmic. To insist that it’s irrelevant because the current example of the species covers more geographical area than any previous example, or has further to fall than most, is like insisting that a law of physics that governs the behavior of marbles and billiards must somehow stop working just because you’re trying to do the same thing with bowling balls.

A difference of scale is not a difference of kind. Differences of scale have their own implications, which we’ll discuss a little later on in this post, but the complex curve of decline is recognizably the same in small things as in big ones, in the most as in the least catastrophic examples. That’s why I’ve used a relatively modest example—the collapse of the economic system of 1920s America and the resulting Great Depression—and an example from the midrange—the collapse of the French monarchy and the descent of 18th-century Europe into the maelstrom of the Napoleonic Wars—to provide convenient outlines for something toward the upper end of the scale—the decline and fall of modern industrial civilization and the coming of a deindustrial dark age. Let’s return to those examples, and see how the thread of collapse winds to its end.

As we saw in last week’s thrilling episode, the breakdown stage of the Great Depression came when the newly inaugurated Roosevelt administration completely redefined the US currency system. Up to that time, US dollar bills were in effect receipts for gold held in banks; after that time, those receipts could no longer be exchanged for gold, and the gold held by the US government became little more than a public relations gimmick. That action succeeded in stopping the ghastly credit crunch that shuttered every bank and most businesses in the US in the spring of 1933.

Roosevelt’s policies didn’t get rid of the broader economic dysfunction the 1929 crash had kickstarted. That was inherent in the industrial system itself, and remains a massive issue today, though its effects were papered over for a while by a series of temporary military, political, and economic factors that briefly enabled the United States to prosper at the expense of the rest of the world. The basic issue is simply that replacing human labor with machines powered by fossil fuel results in unemployment, and no law of nature or economics requires that new jobs can be found or created to replace the ones that are eliminated by mechanization. The history of the industrial age has been powerfully shaped by a whole series of attempts to ignore, evade, or paper over that relentless arithmetic.

Until 1940, the Roosevelt administration had no more luck with that project than the governments of most other nations. It wasn’t until the Second World War made the lesson inescapable that anyone realized that the only way to provide full employment in an industrial society was to produce far more goods than consumers could consume, and let the military and a variety of other gimmicks take up the slack. That was a temporary gimmick, due to stark limitations in the resource base needed to support the mass production of useless goods, but in 1940, and even more so in 1950, few people recognized that and fewer cared. It’s our bad luck to be living at the time when that particular bill is coming due.

The first lesson to learn from the history of collapse, then, is that the breakdown phase doesn’t necessarily solve all the problems that brought it about. It doesn’t even necessarily take away every dysfunctional feature of the status quo. What it does with fair reliability is eliminate enough of the existing order of things that the problems being caused by that order decline to a manageable level. The more deeply rooted the problematic features of the status quo are in the structure of society and daily life, the harder it will be to change them, and the more likely other features are to be changed: in the example just given, it was much easier to break the effective link between the US currency and gold, and expand the money supply enough to get the economy out of cardiac arrest, than it was to break a link between mechanization and unemployment that’s hardwired into the basic logic of industrialism.

What this implies in turn is that it’s entirely possible for one collapse to cycle through the five stages we’ve explored, and then to have the era of dissolution morph straight into a new era of pretense in which the fact that all society’s problems haven’t been solved is one of the central things nobody in any relation to the centers of power wants to discuss. If the Second World War, the massive expansion of the petroleum economy, the invention of suburbia, the Cold War, and a flurry of other events hadn’t ushered in the immensely wasteful but temporarily prosperous boomtime of late 20th century America, there might well have been another vast speculative bubble in the mid- to late 1940s, resulting in another crash, another depression, and so on. This is after all what we’ve seen over the last twenty years: the tech stock bubble and bust, the housing bubble and bust, the fracking bubble and bust, each one hammering the economy further down the slope of decline.

With that in mind, let’s turn to our second example, the French Revolution. This is particularly fascinating since the aftermath of that particular era of breakdown saw a nominal return to the conditions of the era of pretense. After Napoleon’s final defeat in 1815, the Allied powers found an heir to the French throne and plopped him into the throne of the Bourbons as Louis XVIII to well-coached shouts of “Vive le Roi!” On paper, nothing had changed.

In reality, everything had changed, and the monarchy of post-Napoleonic France had roots about as deep and sturdy as the democracy of post-Saddam Iraq. Louis XVIII was clever enough to recognize this, and so managed to end his reign in the traditional fashion, feet first from natural causes. His heir Charles X was nothing like so clever, and got chucked off the throne after six years on it by another revolution in 1830. King Louis-Philippe went the same way in 1848—the French people were getting very good at revolution by that point. There followed a Republic, an Empire headed by Napoleon’s nephew, and finally another Republic which lasted out the century. All in all, French politics in the 19th century was the sort of thing you’d expect to see in an unusually excitable banana republic.

The lesson to learn from this example is that it’s very easy, and very common, for a society in the dissolution phase of collapse to insist that nothing has changed and pretend to turn back the clock. Depending on just how traumatic the collapse has been, everybody involved may play along with the charade, the way everyone in Rome nodded and smiled when Augustus Caesar pretended to uphold the legal forms of the defunct Roman Republic, and their descendants did exactly the same thing centuries later when Theodoric the Ostrogoth pretended to uphold the legal forms of the defunct Roman Empire. Those who recognize the charade as charade and play along without losing track of the realities, like Louis XVIII, can quite often navigate such times successfully; those who mistake charade for reality, like Charles X, are cruising for a bruising and normally get it in short order.

Combine these two lessons and you’ll get what I suspect will turn out to be a tolerably good sketch of the American future. Whatever comes out of the impact, response, and breakdown phases of the crisis looming ahead of the United States just now—whether it’s a fragmentary mess of successor states, a redefined nation beginning to recover from a period of personal rule by some successful demagogue or, just possibly, a battered and weary republic facing a long trudge back to its foundational principles, it seems very likely that everyone involved will do their level best to insist that nothing has really changed. If the current constitution has been abolished, it may be officially reinstated with much fanfare; there may be new elections, and some shuffling semblance of the two-party system may well come lurching out of the crypts for one or two more turns on the stage.

None of that will matter. The nation will have changed decisively in ways we can only begin to envision at this point, and the forms of twentieth-century American politics will cover a reality that has undergone drastic transformations, just as the forms of nineteenth-century French monarchy did. In due time, by some combination of legal and extralegal means, the forms will be changed to reflect the new realities, and the territory we now call the United States of America—which will almost certainly have a different name, and may well be divided into several different and competing nations by then—will be as prepared to face the next round of turmoil as it’s going to get.

Yes, there will be a next round of turmoil. That’s the thing that most people miss when thinking about the decline and fall of a civilization: it’s not a single event, or even a single linear process. It’s a whole series of cascading events that vary drastically in their importance, geographical scope, and body count. That’s true of every process of historic change.

It was true even of so simple an event as the 1929 crash and Great Depression: 1929 saw the crash, 1930 the suckers’ rally, 1931 the first wave of European bank failures, 1932 the unraveling of the US banking system, and so on until bombs falling on Pearl Harbor ushered in a different era. It was even more true of the French Revolution: between 1789 and 1815 France basically didn’t have a single year without dramatic events and drastic changes of one kind or another, and the echoes of the Revolution kept things stirred up for decades to come. Check out the fall of civilizations and you’ll see the same thing unfolding on a truly vast scale, with crisis after crisis along an arc centuries in length.

The process that’s going on around us is the decline and fall of industrial civilization. Everything we think of as normal and natural, modern and progressive, solid and inescapable is going to melt away into nothingness in the years, decades, and centuries ahead, to be replaced first by the very different but predictable institutions of a dark age, and then by the new and wholly unfamiliar forms of the successor societies of the far future. There’s nothing inevitable about the way we do things in today’s industrial world; our political arrangements, our economic practices, our social instutions, our cultural habits, our sciences and our technologies all unfold from industrial civilization’s distinctive and profoundly idiosyncratic worldview. So does the central flaw in the entire baroque edifice, our lethally muddleheaded inability to understand our inescapable dependence on the biosphere that supports our lives. All that is going away in the time before us—but it won’t go away suddenly, or all at once.

Here in the United States, we’re facing one of the larger downward jolts in that prolonged process, the end of American global empire and of the robust economic benefits that the machinery of empire pumps from the periphery to the imperial center. Until recently, the five per cent of us who lived here got to enjoy a quarter of the world’s energy supply and raw materials and a third of its manufactured products. Those figures have already decreased noticeably, with consequences that are ringing through every corner of our society; in the years to come they’re going to decrease much further still, most likely to something like a five per cent share of the world’s wealth or even a little less. That’s going to impact every aspect of our lives in ways that very few Americans have even begun to think about.

All of that is taking place in a broader context, to be sure. Other countries will have their own trajectories through the arc of industrial civilization’s decline and fall, and some of those trajectories will be considerably less harsh in the short term than ours. In the long run, the human population of the globe is going to decline sharply; the population bubble that’s causing so many destructive effects just now will be followed in due time by a population bust, in which those four guys on horseback will doubtless play their usual roles. In the long run, furthermore, the vast majority of today’s technologies are going to go away as the resource base needed to support them gets used up, or stops being available due to other bottlenecks. Those are givens—but the long run is not the only scale that matters.

It’s not at all surprising that the foreshocks of that immense change are driving the kind of flight to fantasy criticized in the opening paragraphs of this essay. That’s business as usual when empires go down; pick up a good cultural history of the decline and fall of any empire in the last two millennia or so and you’ll find plenty of colorful prophecies of universal destruction. I’d like to encourage my readers, though, to step back from those fantasies—entertaining as they are—and try to orient themselves instead to the actual shape of the future ahead of us. That shape’s not only a good deal less gaseous than the current offerings of the Apocalypse of the Month Club (internet edition), it also offers an opportunity to do something about the future—a point we’ll be discussing further in posts to come.

A Rural Community Powered by Renewable Energy and Tradition: A rural village that symbolizes the Ecotechnic Retrotopia at the End of the Industrial Age, where small-scale, sustainable living has become the norm. The village is built with eco-friendly materials like wood, clay, and stone, blending seamlessly with the surrounding landscape. Windmills and solar panels power the community, while rainwater harvesting systems provide clean water. People tend to permaculture gardens, raising crops and livestock in a way that regenerates the soil and respects the ecosystem. Traditional skills, such as blacksmithing, weaving, and carpentry, are practiced alongside innovative green technologies, creating a fusion of old and new knowledge. The scene radiates warmth and community spirit, showing a world where people live in close connection with nature, guided by both ancestral wisdom and modern ecological understanding.

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[A penny for the Old Guy]

I

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us — if at all — not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

II

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death’s dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are In the wind’s singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer
In death’s dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat’s coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer —

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom

III

This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man’s hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

It is like this
In death’s other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.

IV

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death’s twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

V

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o’clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

                For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow

                Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow

                For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

~ T.S. Eliot; The Hollow Men (1925), Full Poem

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