Guidestones Rant

[Ninurta]

Even without all the corruption, it's too big to handle now. It will either disintegrate into a feudal system of numerous small kingdoms or it will be tribal cells surviving on the outskirts of the collapsing civilization. If it fails quickly in a big way, I suspect a portion of the technocracy will survive and try to take over what's left, but it will take them a long time to regroup and reorganize.

I think that, as was the case in the Roman Empire, the corruption itself is a sign, a symptom, part and parcel, of the coming collapse. It is a symptom that society has become too big too effectively manage. The corruption is an outward expression of a society too sick to survive.

Medical science has advanced to the point that defective humans are now being artificially preserved who would have, 200 years ago, died in their cribs. Now they are surviving, and passing their defects - many of which are mental defects - on to the next generations... and those defects are spreading, diffusing through the populace, That is one big factor we are seeing expressed among the denizens of the cities currently, facilitating and accelerating the coming collapse.

The collapse will start in the cities, because they are where the overcrowding and rot of humanity is the most obvious and prevalent. They are where the cancer is most visible. Humans were never meant to live like insects in an ant-hill.

The "preppers" living on the outskirts of society will be the last people standing, particularly in North America, but they will eventually succumb as well, when their stored supplies are exhausted and they can no longer resupply because of the collapse of the global trade networks that they have become dependent upon. Those trade networks depend on cities as ports and distribution hubs. When the cities collapse, so do the trade networks.

In many cases, the Prepper's own preparations will be their downfall, as they are seen to be the "haves" among the "have nots",which will make them targets, ripe for the picking. Better to become a nomadic hunter-gatherer than a lone prepper or small cell of preppers tied down at a supply pile as a stationary target, desperately trying to defend their dwindling supplies from the onslaughts of the have-nots.

The same principle applies to folks who will try to grow their own food. If left alone, they could do that successfully in some cases, but the problem is that an agricultural enterprise also ties one down to a single spot that must be defended, while at the same time making them a target for marauders who want to raid their gardens for food that has become too scarce. Mobile hunting-gathering will, for a while, be the only viable option, and folks will realize that too late. Instead, people will put their faith in being tied down to a single spot where their supplies or gardens are, and will thus be stationary targets. That is what modern civilization has conditioned and predisposed people towards.

There is evidence that exact scenario played out during the Bronze Age Collapse in the outlying areas of Europe. Piles of corpses haphazardly thrown into  in hastily dug shallow graves have been uncovered at some ancient European farmsteads.

Predatory marauders, too, will die off, just like everyone else. They will die in pitched battles with people defending their stashes, or they will die as they successfully clear out those stashes, use up the supplies, and starve because there are no more stashes to be found. Living off the land (rather than other people) and maintaining mobility are the keys to survival under such conditions, keys which  most folks will not find. The marauders, living as predators off of the "prepared", are unwittingly exploiting a finite resource too, and when that resource is exhausted, they will die off as well as their victims did.

North America will finally become completely depopulated when the last prepper standing starves to death after having eaten the second-to-last prepper standing, and can no longer resupply because he or she put too much faith in global trade networks, and never bothered to figure out how to live on his or her own without that dependency for resupply. Surviving from scratch is much, much harder than people realize. When you have to make EVERYTHING you use to survive from scratch, from materials you can find in your immediate vicinity. When the last bullet in their stock is fired, what then? How many people can smelt their own iron for hunting gear? How many people can cast their own bronze for the same? Going even deeper, how many can chip out their own stone arrow heads or spear heads in the modern world? Make their own bows or atl-atls out of whatever they have close to hand? How many can create their own cables to restring their fancy compound bows when there is no Walmart to conveniently go to for parts, aluminum or carbon fiber arrow shafts and three bladed broadheads to tip those shafts with?

It will, eventually, become a tooth and claw madhouse, with "madhouse" being the operative word. The corruption and violence we currently see confined mostly to the cities will eventually spread throughout the rest of nations as survival without knowledge of how to survive spreads outward from them.

The Tech Gurus will likely fare no better - how do they restructure a society when they no longer have any of the raw materials or knowledge available to do that with? How do they maintain their iron grip on society when the power generator turbines that power everything they know no longer turn? They, too, will be eaten by the last surviving preppers. Beyond that, they are one of the major sources of the corruption and lunacy which are infecting society - how do they survive when that very corruption, ignorance, and lunacy are what causes the collapse to begin with?

The fictional world of "Mad Max" and "The Road Warrior" would be a luxury suite compared to the realities those people will face.

The Sentinelese Islanders on North Sentinel still have all the knowledge they need, and are entirely isolated from the modern world. They will survive. Some folks in New Guinea are still in that same condition, and they too will survive. A very few tribes in the Amazon will make it, for the same reasons, Those people will likely not even realize that the rest of the world has died. Their only indication will be that the rain forests have stopped dropping dead around them, but they will not understand how or why that happened.

Their lives will just go on as usual, but perhaps a little quieter.

One day, a nomadic hunter-gatherer, a member of one of the tribes that eventually spread back out from those primitive refugia into an empty world, will find a moldering Ipad among the crumbling rock piles that used to be cities. He will briefly wonder what it was for and who made it before he chucks it into the river since it is of no use to him. He will return to camp at sundown, ready to tell the children tales passed down through the generations around camp fires - fantastic tales of giant gleaming thunderbirds of the gods that used to cross the skies overhead, leaving white streaks of cloud in their wake. Such tales will be told as humanity begins the long, multi-millennia climb back up to collapse once again.

Humans are just big, upright, hairless lemmings. They frolic and overpopulate themselves until they outstrip their resources, and then die off en masse over and over again. There is no such thing as a "sustainable resource" when a planet's dominant population has exploded as it has on Earth.

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