indifference pays 1 of 3

INDIFFERENCE PAYS

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note: the Bronze Age Civilization Collapse series of videos click here A well done half dozen, short, simply and  VERY good at covering systematic collapse and complex systems for the layman. 
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This last January there was something like a dozen school shootings nationally in three weeks.  One every other day.  And very few people gave two wet farts.  For myself, I saw one headline “two killed, one injured” and clicked away-not enough to worry about.  I mean, come on!  More Muslim radicals were imported that day than students killed.  Why SHOULD there be a hue and cry?  I suppose at one time I would have been considered a callous monster for thinking thus, but the sad fact is that none of us really truly cares about anyone or anything except for themselves.

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Care about your Significant Other?  Do you?  Or do you care how they effect YOU?  Be honest.  We’ve all been burned so many times by “love” that the only safe bet left is to only love ourselves.  However, this is not a crisis of culture.  Bad cultures do not cause collapse, collapse causes culture to disintegrate.  Yes, I know, all civilization collapses have similar moral/culture/philosophical phases.  I contend that resource surplus causes the luxury of caring to occur.  Lack of resources cause apathy and indifference as a coping mechanism.  We’ll get to that in a bit.

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Now, that is how civilizations form, break up and shatter.  Tribes do NOT work the same way.  Because tribes are economically in equilibrium, decentralized, equalitarian, they endure booms and busts.  Any group beyond tribal size that develops classes, that has an elite and the exploited, follows the growth and crash paradigm.  Tribes can boom and bust, as is the nature of resource availability, but as everyone is each others safety net they can recover after enduring.  Nations always go bust because the safety net of the elite is the production of the masses.  All the surplus is concentrated and once resources contract the elites institutions cannot survive on less.

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In a kingdom, the peasants go hungry first.  Then the soldiers.  And once the soldiers are weakened they cannot force the peasants to continue starving.  Then the whole structure collapses.  In a tribe, since all males are warriors and everybody eats the same-good or bad-there is no revolt or exploitation.  Or, to look at it through a modern lens, a family on the farm all tighten their belt if there was a crop failure.  But if dad worked in town, he would just be laid off in an economic downturn and the family would go hungry.  Just not the business owners family.  Until they were the only ones eating.  Can you guess what happens next?

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Collapses are in fact not overnight affairs.  Nor are they stair steps of adaptability.  They are waterfalls.  Slowly downhill ( the river portion ) for a long time prior to plunging off the cliff.  You don’t have people eating one day, then not the next followed by a revolution that night.  Even when everyone is eating you have severe economic contraction which undermines all sectors of the kingdom.  Dictatorship 101 is Feed The Fu--ers.  Stalin was an idiot who spent twice the resources suppressing people he should have just used to feed them, but then he also played the Long Game of urbanizing and industrializing peasant farmers and moving the ethnic composition of the empire to his liking, so perhaps I’m being unfair.

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Hitler made sure the civilian population ate well almost through the entire war until the transportation infrastructure became too fractured ( and remember, through all the unrest and near civil war in Germany, Hitler was popularly installed and kept in office.  He was of the people, not the elite, and he put people to work so they could eat ).  There seems to be some question if Mao ever really starved 50 million Chinese ( there was probably a media propaganda campaign akin to that which led us into Vietnam or which blamed Putin on Hilary losing ).  There was weather related famine which was mostly alleviated.  It could have been worse ( and, nine out of ten dams in China today were built during his rule, during a time of widespread poverty so they were largely manual labor built-the hydro projects preventing future crop failures ).

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People eat right up until they can’t, in any decently run country.  Food is the last thing to collapse.  But until that collapse, everything else is being allowed to collapse ( through lack of choice ).  Look at America today.  We all eat, although what we eat is the equivalent of Haitian Mud Pies.  Corn is the least nutritious grain ( of the majors that feed the world ) and soy is a toxic whore of a bean.  And both make up most of our diets.  If that isn’t enough to kill us, add in near complete medical industry incompetence ( except trauma care which we excel at due to decades of combat care experience ).

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Add in pollution of the food we eat ( what we inject into our livestock and what we spray on our crops ).  We are eating because we have maximized industrial food through maximum pollution of that food.  It is better than not eating, but just.  A system not overpopulated and not running out of resources would NOT eat like this.  We didn’t, either, back before the economic collapse started fifty years ago.  No one can argue our economy isn’t humped.  By every indicator-Bitcoin leading the batch-we have no real economy left and only bankers glittery unicorn farts are left.  Again, with enough resources and without overpopulation, we would not accept the economy we have.

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Rome didn’t force the farmers off the land until the end, through over taxation.  They were already feeding the urban masses bread and entertaining them with circuses.  To feed them, taxes were raised again and again.  Until taxes forced many farmers to abandon the land and join the city bread lines.  Rome had chosen to centralize the farms through consolidating control to the Senate, and importing more grain for the welfare.  Both could not be cut ( elite profits on one hand and preventing unrest on the other ).  Those working ( not owning ) the farms had no incentive to stay and the land owners had no incentive to cut profits.

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You just have the perfect storm that arrives through all the other poor choices ( not that they were really choices-in an economic collapse choices are all bad.  You make things worse no matter what you do ).  So, you can’t just assume everyone will be fed, because we have to to stop revolt.  The food stops when the perfect storm arrives.  And it always arrives.  We’ve veered off from the cultural attitude of indifference being caused by economics.  We’ll get there.  Continued.

END ( today's related link http://amzn.to/2EzLY1X )

 

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