It’s the end of the world as we know it, but that’s just fine.

Readership: All
Author’s Note: This essay is based on a conversation NovaSeeker had with LastMod. Novaseeker started drafting this post on 2021 May 29, but left it unfinished. In his absence (due to work), and given the importance of the subject matter, Jack has taken the liberty of finishing this post.
Length: 1,400 words
Reading Time: 5 minutes

“The setting sun, and the music at the close, as the last taste of sweets, is sweetest last, is writ in remembrance more than long things past.”

William Shakespeare

Introduction

In a previous post, The Roman Life Script (2021 May 28), a comparison was made between the downfall of ancient Rome, and the current situation in the West. As we know from history (or the lack thereof during this time period), the implosion of the central power of Rome and being conquered by the Goths led to a few hundred years of historical listlessness, what has since then been referred to as the Dark Ages. Governments shrunk into fiefdoms. Religion was confined to monasteries. The recording of history stalled. The music, arts, and philosophy sputtered to a standstill. At the grass roots level, the majority of people had extremely short life spans (~26 years), and spent most of it in basic subsistence farming, localized small manual trades, and recidivism.

The comparison of ancient Rome and modern western culture inevitably leads to the question of whether the present decadence and decline will be followed by a period of hard-scrabble peasantry ruled by warlords.

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What would a Second Dark Ages be like?

Cameron and Lastmod painted a picture of a bleak atomized world, but still functional on the most basic level.

cameron232 wrote,

“Predicted by some to be like the worst aspects of Brazil, India and the EU. Best guess is non-elite white people will exist as hicks in the countryside.”

lastmod wrote,

“Agree in principle. After the Roman Empire “collapsed” sure, the immediate effects were great… but many parts of the empire continued to “function” normally in practice despite the lack of central authority depending on the province, ability of the local governor and loyalty to him in that area… the startings / stirrings of the feudal system.

Even after the surrender of Nazi Germany. Many a bureaucrat still had work… most people did still have jobs. sure, cleaning the ruins of the bombed out medieval cities, cigarettes for about a year became legit currency alongside Reich Marks and the new Deutsch mark. People suffered in lack of housing, electricity, rationing… but things did stabilize… It took another decade to get to the standard of living [up before the] 1939 invasion of Poland…..

Even in Venezuela, dire situation… but the lights are on albeit sometimes partially. People are up looking for work, their daily commodities… It hasn’t become “Mad Max”.

Even the grinding to a halt of the Soviet era of Russia and Eastern Europe. Stores empty, the whole stinking mess falling apart, still food to be found… a transition… very little (if any starvation). More of a “rusting apart” if you will…

Probably more like Orwell’s “1984” in some way or ways. People housed… basics, well… holding. Elevators no longer repaired. “Take the stairs brother, its good exercise!” Ramshackled slums, there was beer and sex still to be had (that will never go away). Just a “falling apart” if you will.

There will be a more turmoil to come… open street fighting, production halted. I pray it doesn’t turn into a “Cultural Revolution” a la China 1966-1968. The suffering caused by that was a scale of an actual civil war. Millions died, and the system didn’t care. (It actually played both sides advocating it.) It was “meant” to purge the intellectuals, the middle class, the ones with some ambition, people who would be a nuisance to “the people” and of course the old, the sick, the disabled…

A total collapse of the USA on all levels would throw the world into such chaos, the elite cannot and will not allow that.

It will be a sad trapping of “what once was” but I don’t foresee a “Mad Max” world.

A technological elite, their support and layer of people who do okay and serve them… and a massive multi-colored poverty that may have food, access to beer, sex, porn, and stupid things like a lottery or “bread and circuses” type of thing. Most freedoms will be gone or so watered down…

The elite cannot have 99.99% of the population working in brotherhood on communes. They don’t want that! They know they could be easily overthrown. It will be a slow decline, weeding out, idiocracy kind of thing.”

img-1783680943-6a50cfaf438392.36429935.jpgA scene from Mad Max: Fury Road (2015).

A Second Dark Ages is Unlikely

The US certainly won’t last forever, but its demise isn’t coming very soon. There are several reasons for that.

  • No other culture is poised to take over the same global role in a cultural sense. China? Nope. Confucianism doesn’t sell outside East Asia, it isn’t attractive, accessible, popular. China is well poised to eject the U.S. from predominance in Asia, but not to replace the U.S. as the singular global hegemon. Islam? Nope. Same reason.
  • No other civilization has the military heft to unseat the U.S., and that military hefty isn’t going to simply implode, either. Someone will control the vast amount of disproportionate, raw power that the U.S. military has, whether it is the U.S. or a successor to the U.S. state, not someone else.
  • The name of the game, in terms of power, is moving beyond the “nation state” phase of the game. It hasn’t moved past it quite yet, but that’s where it’s going. States will continue to exist, but the real power will be (and in many ways already is) operating at a level above the nation-state level, and manipulating nation-states via its power. Nation-states, and the military and cultural power that they project, will be permitted to continue more or less as long as it serves the actual power holders, who are globalist/supra-national in scope and identity, for that to be the case.

Much more likely scenarios involve the internal change of the U.S. from its current arrangements, socio-politically, to a successor arrangement by means of generational change which creates a situation of far greater political consensus, and allows long-standing American “particularities” to be dismantled. This would occur in a consensual way, again by means of a stronger future political consensus, once the Boomers and most of Gen X are gone, and the U.S. military will support the changes because the succession will be consensual and evolutionary in nature. The successor entity may still be called the United States, or it may be called something else, but its internal composition will be completely different politically, constitutionally, and demographically. And the successor will remain a strong nation-state, perhaps still the strongest individual one, while no longer being an absolute global hegemon, while the emergent international order will be once again multi-polar in nature.

The successor will not be utterly different from what came before, but still identifiable as “American” in comparison to other cultures. It will not be a white, middle-class society, but a mostly brown, mostly underclass society underneath a small, mostly white and Asian, techno-expertised overclass which rules on behalf of the ownership class. The overall ordering will emphasize unity, diversity, equity and so on, as the governing ideology and framework for public morality, and will be nominally electoral in a republic/democracy vein, while the actual power is monopolized by the small expertised group on behalf of the owners — as it largely already is today. The role of moderated/influenced/controlled news, entertainment and social media in constructing and maintaining this successor will be paramount, and is already manifest in its early stages.

Christianity will persist in the successor in some form. My best guess on that is that there will be a “mainstream” form that is tolerated and an “underground” form that is technically legal and tolerated but widely and deeply discriminated against privately in the new social and moral frameworks. The latter will therefore be a small group. The former may remain a sizeable group (if much smaller than it was historically) if it is capable of adopting the new emergent social/moral paradigms — if it isn’t, it will fade in importance.

None of that is set in stone, and what actually happens will of course not be exactly like that. But some version of that is much more likely than an absolute displacement of the United States by a totally different successor civilization from another part of the world.

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