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Empires always collapse, because ultimately the imperial economic structure is not sustainable. At its core is a psychology of resource entitlement -- "conspicuous consumption" and so forth. What I mean by this is that citizens feel entitled to ignore the consequences of their market structure and production/commerce methods on other people. Poverty (locally and abroad) is seen as a mysterious problem that can be easily ignored.
The citizens of an empire set out with the sense of entitlement to do or consume whatever they can acquire by money or bullying. Eventually that greed collides with the limitations of human labor, technology, resource scarcity, or even the laws of physics. At that point there is discord, because the driving motor of "prosperity at all costs" possesses inertia. The psychology of resource entitlement does not change easily.
From the imperialist perspective, the idea that the status quo can decline is unthinkable.
I do not believe in a "Just God" who will reach down from the sky to smite unrighteous nations. Though the doomsday rhetoric of Peak Oil often sounds a lot like the doomsday rhetoric of "the Rapture" -- both are frequently riddled with schadenfreude -- the former has a special quality not possessed by the latter: it is unquestionably inevitable.
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glowroper linked to this article on Peak Oil published recently in Rolling Stone. I want to excerpt it not because I fully endorse these predictions, but because they are entirely within the realm of the possible. Economic peak has happened before many times, and there is no reason why citizens of the present world order should believe that our empire is somehow immune.
I don't share the author's pessimism, but I do know that if Americans do not grasp the full gravity of the situation, and change their behavior accordingly, there's a good chance that many of these dire predictions will come true.
The citizens of an empire set out with the sense of entitlement to do or consume whatever they can acquire by money or bullying. Eventually that greed collides with the limitations of human labor, technology, resource scarcity, or even the laws of physics. At that point there is discord, because the driving motor of "prosperity at all costs" possesses inertia. The psychology of resource entitlement does not change easily.
From the imperialist perspective, the idea that the status quo can decline is unthinkable.
I do not believe in a "Just God" who will reach down from the sky to smite unrighteous nations. Though the doomsday rhetoric of Peak Oil often sounds a lot like the doomsday rhetoric of "the Rapture" -- both are frequently riddled with schadenfreude -- the former has a special quality not possessed by the latter: it is unquestionably inevitable.
glowroper linked to this article on Peak Oil published recently in Rolling Stone. I want to excerpt it not because I fully endorse these predictions, but because they are entirely within the realm of the possible. Economic peak has happened before many times, and there is no reason why citizens of the present world order should believe that our empire is somehow immune.America is in a special predicament due to a set of unfortunate choices we made as a society in the twentieth century. Perhaps the worst was to let our towns and cities rot away and to replace them with suburbia, which had the additional side effect of trashing a lot of the best farmland in America. Suburbia will come to be regarded as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. ...
Our lives will become profoundly and intensely local. Daily life will be far less about mobility and much more about staying where you are. Anything organized on the large scale, whether it is government or a corporate business enterprise such as Wal-Mart, will wither as the cheap energy props that support bigness fall away. The turbulence of the Long Emergency will produce a lot of economic losers, and many of these will be members of an angry and aggrieved former middle class. ...
As industrial agriculture fails due to a scarcity of oil- and gas-based inputs, we will certainly have to grow more of our food closer to where we live, and do it on a smaller scale. ...
As these things occur, America will have to make other arrangements for the manufacture, distribution and sale of ordinary goods. They will probably be made on a "cottage industry" basis rather than the factory system we once had, since the scale of available energy will be much lower -- and we are not going to replay the twentieth century. Tens of thousands of the common products we enjoy today, from paints to pharmaceuticals, are made out of oil. They will become increasingly scarce or unavailable. The selling of things will have to be reorganized at the local scale. It will have to be based on moving merchandise shorter distances. It is almost certain to result in higher costs for the things we buy and far fewer choices.
The successful regions in the twenty-first century will be the ones surrounded by viable farming hinterlands that can reconstitute locally sustainable economies on an armature of civic cohesion. Small towns and smaller cities have better prospects than the big cities, which will probably have to contract substantially. ... Some kind of urban entities will exist where they are in the future, but probably not the colossi of twentieth-century industrialism.
I don't share the author's pessimism, but I do know that if Americans do not grasp the full gravity of the situation, and change their behavior accordingly, there's a good chance that many of these dire predictions will come true.
