“You didn’t find me, you collapsed a building on me.” – Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows
How do you get a philosophy student off the front porch? Tip him for the pizza.
Finished my taxes. All went well – I’m actually getting some of my money back. In truth, I was pretty close to posting some memes. This weekend at the Wilder house was just one filled with, “meh, let’s order pizza and relax because we don’t feel like doing much” across the board. So, we relaxed, at least until it was time to do my annual tango with TurboTax®.
I almost decided to post some of the more amusing memes I’d found across the Internet, but had so far not found a time or place to use. But, just as the clock headed reached 10 ‘til midnight, the muse struck me like a bag of wet sushi fish in a net stocking owned by a stripper named Destiny who is missing two fingers on her left hand.
How does civilization end?
Lots of people talk about an eternal decline. That’s a wishful thought, I guess. It’s the Bladerunner dystopia where everything is cheaper and coarser, ever more crowded, and ever less human. I guess the bright side of the Bladerunner fate is an endless supply of robot clones of Sean Young back before she went crazy and decided to live on a diet of Twinkies® and gin.
Be glad I didn’t make you look at Old Cat Lady Sean Young.
To be clear, that’s mainly what we’re seeing.
- Gangs of “youths” in Chicago rioted this weekend because it’s Chicago, they outnumber the police, and they can do anything and their chances of getting arrested are about the same as Kamala Harris having an idea that didn’t die of loneliness.
- Power grids that went from reliable to “maybe” because people decided investing in infrastructure was homophobic or something.
- A shrinking middle class, and less clear ways for most people to join it, especially the kids. My generation, Gen X, has a significantly smaller share of the national wealth than the Boomers did at my age. And the Zoomers and Millennials?
- Economic disruption – inflation and shortages jumped up when the papering-over of the economic problems of a made-up currency that was spent as fast as possible by both Left and Right could no longer be papered over. Even today, there is no thought to try to fix things, because that would stop the party and we know politicians love to party.
- Moral decay and the loss of civic virtues that would make Caligula look like a prude. When late-stage Rome would have said, “Whoa, dude, you’re going too far,” it’s time to think about where we are.
There are more things, but making longer lists makes me better at making longer lists but doesn’t really tell the story, and you have a search engine. The idea is that all of these things that are happening right now are going to lead us down a trail where each day, things get a bit duller, a bit uglier, and bit more unreliable, and a bit shabbier. The United States (and other Western countries) exhibit a long, slow decline into the eventual status where everything is not only expensive, but it also sucks.
I congratulated someone for a great exit sign once. “Nice going!”
Again, that’s an optimistic case. It assumes that we’re making progress, and we’ll keep making progress, but a that progress will be spread over more and more people, like trying to make 300,000,000 peanut butter and jelly sandwiches out of a single jar of jelly. That is the way that most civilizations have ended, with a whimper and not a crash.
But 2023 is a different story, and faces different problems. The first, and biggest is energy and “peak” minerals. I’ve written about this dozens of times, but our current civilization is one of the first built entirely around single-use materials, the most important of which is energy. Each barrel of oil pumped and used cannot be reused later – it’s gone. And, I assure everyone reading this, that biotic or abiotic, there is a finite amount of oil that can be extracted that makes economic and thermodynamic (provides more energy than it takes to extract).
I did sit on a block of ice too long once, got polaroids.
We go after the easy resources first, oil that seeps up under its own pressure – drill down 20 feet and Jed’s a millionaire. In 2023 we’re using high tech and energy intensive methods to frack oil and drilling miles down in miles of water.
There are other materials that this applies to, as well. The Romans could build wooden warships, and the trees could grow back. Sure, we can reuse the steel from our ships, and do. But when it comes to minerals like phosphorus, lithium, copper, and PEZ™, there are absolute limits to the quality deposits required. And with something like phosphorous, there is no replacement, since it is an element vital to life and we can’t replace it with soybeans or turkey bacon. Once these inputs stop, like my first marriage, it’s over.
The second idea is that our current civilization isn’t regional like Rome or China or Dave’s Tribe of Wandering Dudes. The civilization of the world today is just that. Outside of parts of Africa, South America, and Detroit, what we have is truly a single world civilization. It’s all interconnected. Russia declares war on the Ukraine? Wheat prices go up. If there’s an attack on Taiwan? Large swaths of semiconductors are off the menu.
I hear that’s a robot’s favorite dish – silicon carne.
When Rome collapsed, only Rome collapsed, and people in China or South America didn’t have a clue. If any part of the world collapses today? The rest of the world will be degraded as well – perhaps enough to take everything down with it, since we work in a world without substitutes.
The final idea (for now) is that nobody really agrees with anybody. This is not a new development. But in 1940, the war in Europe really didn’t hurt the United States – we could make almost everything we needed (except pesky things like rubber and bananas) and were doing fine. The world is at war? No one cares.
Now, the economy is tightly coupled – one nation to another, these wars matter. Since 1945, the (general) peace has been kept, and what conflicts were allowed were just large enough to make profits for Boeing® or General Dynamics™ but not large enough to mess with anything that mattered. But if China takes Taiwan? A huge number of semiconductors are no longer available on the international market, and those are used in everything from washing machines to cars to tanks to watches to . . . you get the picture. And the reason you get the picture is because of thousands of semiconductors transporting the data directly to you.
A cop pulled Chuck Norris over once. The cop got away with a warning.
One break? Poof.
I think it’s much more likely that, instead of a gradual slide down into poverty, that one morning we wake up and find a huge chunk of the economy doesn’t work at all anymore, because the inputs are gone. COVID was a stress test for this, and we failed. Our just-in-time economy may bump profits, but it removes the idea of a resilient economy.
Oops!
The good news, though, is if the world experiences a prolonged and significant collapse? No more taxes! Well, at least no more taxes until Warlord Lance the First, of Modern Mayberry, wants his share.
