Don't Get Too Excited

None of us are ready for the day, so just relax.

The Notre Dame could burn down today. But France will remain.

This essay was originally supposed to be part of yesterday’s installment. I decided to cut it from the final draft for the sake of brevity and publish it as a separate, follow-on piece. If yesterday’s essay was a shot, consider this one a chaser, as we sound a more optimistic tone today, as optimistic as us doomers can be, anyway.

Adam Van Buskirk throws cold water onto the belief a collapse will dramatically re-order society. He cites the Black Death as evidence of how even a cataclysm costing the lives of millions changed so much, yet changed so little:

The Black Death did not bring on any great social reset—in fact, survivors experienced the very opposite. In the chaos of mass death, the state enforced obligations to work and fulfill debts with increasing stringency. Eventually, laborers did gain financially from their increased bargaining power. But this was a slower process that took a generation or two to fully make itself felt, with no immediate dramatic reordering of society.

Van Buskirk makes the ironic observation that the only reason why we even know about the Black Death is because plenty of people survived it and institutions preserved memory of it. It was a terrible thing that happened, no doubt. But it’s precisely in times of chaos that the demand for continuity, institutional strength, and normalcy increases. COVID was a perfect example of this dynamic.

More:

Bureaucracies and other large institutions sometimes survive because of sheer inertia. Most people do not actually have better options than showing up to work, even when the paychecks stop. Afghanistan’s civil servants continued showing up for months after the Taliban victory despite not getting paid.

But in many cases, they also survive because they are actually performing important functions. Someone has to keep the lights on.

Even in the event of civil war or economic crisis, the likelihood of U.S. or Western bureaucratic managerial states collapsing is low. First, as Van Buskirk says, the demand for such institutions goes up, not down, during times of crisis. Second, these institutions are strong (this doesn’t mean they’re virtuous). Third, in an American context, every Fourth Turning has seen the bureaucratic managerial state become bigger and stronger.

On that last note, Neil Howe, the surviving author of the Fourth Turning theory, has noted that the U.S. spends so much on government already, it may have exceeded the point of diminishing returns. That’s a talk for another time, but it’ll be interesting to see how the federal government, specifically, responds to the next existential crisis.

A popular narrative on the Right the last few years has been this idea that complex systems are uniquely vulnerable to breakdown. Van Buskirk convincingly argues it’s actually quite the opposite, that complex systems are resilient and capable of adaptation:

Even during active wars, trade goes on. The Russia-Ukraine conflict is one of the most recent examples. The amount of Russian natural gas flowing through Ukrainian pipelines actually increased in the weeks following the invasion, with Russia paying transit fees to Ukraine in full even as it rained missiles on the country. While conventional state-on-state warfare is reducing cities such as Mariupol to rubble, Ukrainian and Russian bureaucrats are evidently working together, and are clearing payments. These fee payments are presumably being used to purchase military equipment to use against the other.

More important, crisis strengthens those in power:

Despite this overall continuity, serious disruptions in global trade can create downward spirals for huge swathes of society. At a minimum, basic goods become inaccessible as prices stay high. In worse scenarios, societies might have to reorient themselves in major ways to access new markets. But often, these scenarios only reinforce existing institutions.

He cited Cuba and North Korea as examples of how food shortages following the collapse of the Soviet Union didn’t down their regimes. Both countries remain under communist rule 35 years on. Regimes aren’t as weak as we’d like to think them to be. We only do so because humans inherently view strength as a virtue.

Van Buskirk’s most controversial thesis might be that even a nuclear war won’t collapse civilization as is conventional wisdom:

Modern communications might come back online with strange rapidity due to the dispersed and durable nature of cellular networks—today, even extremely unstable regions like Somalia have cell service. Such technologies are autonomous from lower levels in the hierarchy of needs. Residents in cities that were not directly affected might well be posting on Twitter, even as they survive on thin rations of gruel unloaded from a truck each week.

Given the enduring nature of tax and financial authorities, Americans would likely be filing 1040s and paying taxes within a year or two of the event. Just like the Berlin conductor—or the citizens of post-war Nagasaki and Hiroshima, both thriving cities once again—young survivors of the event may well retire years later under quite normal conditions in a rebuilt city, drawing on social security and 401K accounts established before the war.

I’m sure there are people out there who’ll have a problem with what he’s saying here. I’m not sure what to say, other than that the next nuclear war will be far more destructive than what Japan endured at the end of World War II. The caveat to that, however, is that Japan had already endured years of destruction and hardship due to the war by that point. The atomic bombings were just the knockout blows. It wasn’t that Japan recovered from being nuked, they recovered from being beaten down for years, so maybe Van Buskirk has a point.

So what would force a complete re-ordering of civilization? He surmises:

These counter-examples quite neatly answer the question of what events are actually known to radically change society. The real force that reorders society is always human action, driven by political or ideological coordination. Disaster becomes a moment for organized political actors to upset the existing order in a given place, either by foreign conquest or by revolution.

Without some human force ready to make use of disaster, neither plague nor destruction are sufficient in themselves to rewrite how society functions. Where these things occur without a strong existing revolutionary ideology, the status quo recovers with amazing speed. On the other hand, revolutions have succeeded repeatedly without requiring major physical disruptions at all, such as those of Cuba and Iran.

In other words, someone has to be in a position to exploit the situation very quickly. A big reason why revolutions fail is because they simply take too much time getting off the ground. By then, the authorities or other status quo faction has recovered and is able to blunt it down. Revolutions are clearly violent events, but even they don’t result in total collapse of institutions and states, as Van Buskirk points out.

It’s an intellectually stimulating essay, so read it all. Van Buskirk goes on to say there are actually very few examples of civilizational “reset” in history. Surely, collapses aren’t impossible. But even if they do, there’s far greater continuity than appreciated.

For example, France today is known officially as the “Fifth French Republic.” That means, since its republican era began, France has seen its political order collapse and rebuilt four times over. Yet neither France itself nor French civilization, have collapsed. It could be argued the U.S. has, since inception, undergone at least two makeovers of its political order - Civil War and World War II - yet we’re still here. Again, people mistake resiliency for virtuosity. But the reality is that America and its institutions are likely to outlast all of us, and even if there were a collapse, as Van Buskirk says, those who stand to benefit most are already those at the top.

The thing about collapse is that it serves a cathartic, therapeutic purpose. I’ve never met a “collapsitarian” who was happy with how things are going, who felt like they had anything invested in the status quo. I’d know - I was once the type. My change in mindset isn’t the result of feeling better about how things are going - if anything, I feel worse - and certainly not out of satisfaction with the status quo. Rather, it’s simply maturity, a realization that whether I like it or not, I’m invested in the status quo and institutional continuity in some small measure, even if I’m not invested in the political order.

I can’t find it now, but the philosopher John Michael Greer once tweeted that Western civilization may be in decline, but far from collapse. He thinks successor civilizations will emerge 300 or 500 years from now, well beyond our grandchildren’s lifetimes, either way. If his assessment is correct, then the 21st century won’t be a time when the barbarians take it all down. Every century has its catastrophes, and the present will be no different. Just don’t expect some dramatic re-ordering of humanity, like a return to more BASED times, which, depending on who you ask, is somewhere between the Roman Republic and the end of the 19th century. Disappointed?

Don’t be. None of us are ready for the day, so just relax.

That does it for today. What’s your reaction to Adam Van Buskirk’s essay? What do you think it’ll really take for a reset to occur, either to the U.S., Western civilization, or the world as a whole?

Let’s discuss it in the comments section.

Max Remington writes about armed conflict and prepping. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentMax90.

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