Reply #35: Going the other direction- [View All]

[malakai2]

"People who have lived in dysfunctional nations might be better off than those who have not. The conservative U.S. "American Family Values" crowd may begin to wonder why recent immigrant communities seem to be better off than they are, and it will be because immigrant communities have more experience dealing with economic adversity, and have the social tools to create communities that are able to fend for themselves when the government fails them."

I could easily see a situation where travel becomes difficult and expensive, and necessarily limits resources to what's available within a small radius, sufficient to feed a strong general sentiment of "we" and "they." If people don't understand the root causes of whatever hardships they are facing, they will perceive the causes (and solutions) incorrectly. I have this suspicion that as shortages of resources (oil, rain, food, electricity, etc.) become acute on a global scale, nations with established force projection will fight to the death for those resources. Because we haven't outgrown the nationalistic "we" and "they," I think a lot of Americans would take a look at those communities and see someone else using "our" stuff, not someone else working within a sustainable system, then go get the stuff, by whatever means necessary. I can easily imagine "they" being cast as any group that is readily identifiable, on the basis of nationality, locality, religion, wealth, and so on. That's just on a large scale.

On a smaller scale in the US, I suspect the balance of farmers versus raiders would change quite a bit more in favor of the raiders than it is today. A lot of people would probably find it easier to go steal food or goods than to produce it themselves. Coupling that with a suspicion of "outsiders" (however you define it...see above) could make for some ugly relationships between states or even communities. Keep in mind, with regard to whatever resources were generally easy to find and use before the fossil fuel age, we've picked all that low-hanging fruit. Fossil fuels have made it possible for us to pick fruit all the way up the damn tree. If fossil fuels go away, or become such an expensive commodity as to have effectively gone away, things taken for granted before 1945, or 1862, or 1804 may not be available to us. Think about metal ores, mineral ores, aquifers (also, consider wells drilled into aquifers that would allow contaminants quick access from the surface), edible wildlife, timber, surface water (lakes and marshes, on early maps, that were drained for development of one sort or another), the list goes on. Getting to what's left of the finite stuff will be vastly more expensive, and restoring or restoring the renewable stuff to an earlier condition will be impossible without portable, dense energy storage on par with oil. And then of course, there is the population issue, which will greatly exacerbate all of this.

So I see America doing pretty much whatever it takes to maintain its collective lifestyle for as long as possible, with a few other major players doing the same, at the expense of these other nations. When (if) that goes out of style (worked from the Brits and Ottomans in recent times all the way back through written history), then we start fighting amongst each other here at home, if we haven't started already.