Living in a Fading Empire
A brief guide to security and success as we chart a perilous course
Blow up your TV
Throw away your paper
Go to the country
Build you a home
Plant a little garden
Eat a lot of peaches
Try an' find Jesus on your own-John Prine
Why put so much distance between myself and the outside world? Because despite my legendary optimism, I find my society unacceptable. It is dreary, insipid, ugly, boring, wrong, and wicked. Trying to reform it is largely futile; as the Smiths tell us, “The world won’t listen.” Instead, I pursue the strategy that actually works: Making my small corner of the world beautiful in my eyes
I have read a few things by and about Paul Kingsnorth, a former radical ecological writer and activist who is now a professed Christian, living a simple and intentionally anti-modern life in rural Ireland. He grows his own food and homeschools his kids (interview here). Five years ago I would have found that lifestyle curious and interesting, but not appealing. I now consider such a life personally aspirational and-more to the point-a wise and prudent choice for everyone who can manage it.
If the grid goes down or the system is shocked past its limits of resilience you don’t want your survival (and, ideally, your fulfillment and identity) to be reliant upon that grid and that system. I do not think such an event is at all likely in the next decade… but I think the chances of eroding and perverse (harmful) institutions failing-and victimizing people-goes up every day. That is not a hypothetical scenario. That is already a reality for millions of people, in different ways.
Granted, institutional failure and corruption have been factors since there have been institutions. But 100 years ago most people lived on the resources that they and their neighbors produced and only needed large institutions for unusual or momentous occasions: marriage, a criminal accusation, the earning of a medical license. 95% of people were only rarely forced into the clutches of institutions. Now large institutions dominate our lives and the 95% are the people who can’t grow their own food or protect their own homes or manage their own communities. Only 5% of the population is now free from the grip of large organizations most days of their lives: tech companies, pharmaceutical giants, telecoms corporations, licensing agencies, public school districts, state university systems, DMV’s, social media platforms, apps, renters, police, bureaucrats, non-profits. Our lives have enjoyed vast improvements in material well-being. With that improvement has come indulgence, neurosis, addiction… and pathological dependency.
5 years ago I was a tentative Biden supporter and I believed that our institutions were mostly fit to purpose. I regarded anti-institutional skeptics and cultural observers who propagated vast criticisms of our medical and governmental and news media institutions to be exaggerative or incorrect.
Since that time my pessimism about the social and political health of the U.S. has surged. Some of that is due to increasing journalistic and political incompetence, some is due to worsening metrics regarding our mental and community health. Some of it is due to large-scale political developments which have occurred during the current (Biden) administration.
Chiefly among these:
Immigration - immigration has become completely out of control and is the best data point I have available to establish that our executive branch is not fit for purpose and is not being managed by even normal ‘Beltway Insiders’. This is a fast-growing catastrophe (10 million people and counting, including probably disproportionate numbers of career criminals and violent psychopaths) and almost nothing has been done about it. The recent legislation doesn’t even begin to address the issue, in my opinion. I will leave Congress out of this analysis: the executive branch has all the resources and legal authority to manage the border right now, including the power to shut it down. Its failure to do so indicates that the Democrat party has moved even farther leftward and that normal political and national security considerations (routine and ubiquitous among the politicians of the Left even 10 years ago) are not being aired.
Inflation & Debt - economic theory supports deficit spending during wars and recessions and pandemics, in order to increase aggregate demand. That conversely demands that fiscal rectitude and sensible budgeting be implemented during expansionary phases. NO party or president in the past 20 years have paid attention to that demand and our debt is now growing in a dramatic and unrestrained manner. The long-term effects of this are inflation and a weakening of the dollar status and national credibility. This is a certain path to economic ruin and few people are even discussing it, much less trying to work on it. We’re currently mortgaging the future and enslaving younger generations to satisfy the greed of older Americans.
Nothing in America can truly be fixed until we fix our broken money supply. Our monetary system has been corrupt from its inception. It is “built on other’s people’s resources, made for profit by our private banks, enforced by military might on the rest of the world.” It has “created a new gilded age, made homes unaffordable to wage owners, and deindustrialized what was once the world’s most powerful manufacturing base. It has left America running on empty.” And it’s done so at a compound annual rate of 6.5% per year since 1913.
Law enforcement - police have experienced widespread demoralization and politically-driven budget issues, and while those are less serious than they were two years ago (and the crime increase may be tapering off) it is a certainty that any polity which refuses to imprison thieves and aggressors is breaking its social contract and endangering it population.
There’s also the issue of politicized federal law enforcement and the prospect of eventual police action against benign speech or expression or organizing. That is not yet a daily reality in the U.S. but many powerful people ardently wish it was.
It IS a daily reality in Germany, Ireland, Canada, and Great Britain.
This essay gives a much better synopsis of our social and political trends and their alarming valences than I could. I highly recommend it:
So… what can be done?
Obviously voting and volunteering and educating yourself and communicating with different kinds of people have a beneficial social effect and are all necessary for the functioning of a healthy democracy. Do these things!
But this post is not about civic participation or education… it’s about personal protection in an insecure future. It’s about making sure that you and your family and livelihood remain safe and viable in a future experiencing significant social fragmentation or collapse.
It is quite likely that national systemic change is impossible at this point. Too many uneducated people, too many citizens in active addiction, too many criminals going unpunished, too many workers living off the labor of others-these are the kinds of problems that, once having reached critical mass, can only be rectified by sweeping the entire structure down to the foundations and beginning again. I am not advocating for that but I AM advocating that you put yourself and your family in the best possible situation and reduce your chances of being burdened, hurt, victimized, and exploited by a system which may become increasingly broken and malign.
I recommend Magena Heart’s Substack for detailed information on living independent and natural lifestyles. This is not meant to be a how-to guide. I’m still figuring that out, frankly. It is (like all of my writing) a place to organize my thoughts and solicit feedback.
Personal health is fundamental to any goal or project and there are many trends and temptations eroding our collective mental and physical health. Here are some pieces about that:
This series (A Guide to Treating Symptoms of Mental and Physical Illness) will feature one or two more pieces, coming soon.
A guide to building community is coming soon (probably tomorrow). It’s just some notes and recommendations and observations written by one unattached, middle-aged proletarian who has become increasingly convinced of the value of church, volunteering, and organization, for myself and for others.
Some final notes:
The future will be most secure for those who own some property outright and the best property will be fertile and rural. The ability of any American government to intrude upon your life and control your behavior will be maximal for renters, wage-workers, and (especially) those in debt or on fixed incomes.
The goal should be to remove your daily survival from the paper money system as much as possible. You should be able to produce and store food quickly, and have room for others should the need arise.
Independent sources of power (generators, solar panels, battery caches) might be useful.
You will want to be armed and proficient with your weapons. You should have your armory secured and have a great deal of personal ammunition. Relying on the government for personal safety has never been a wise choice and has always rankled the ethos of American independence and if law enforcement becomes neutered (as it largely has in many large cities already) or politicized or overwhelmed by scapegoating or incompetence you will want the ability to defend your family and your property.
There are too many scary potentials to name, and their particulars don’t matter. A major social collapse will see the downing of the electrical generation and distribution system and a reversion to a 1900-era lifestyle within 1-2 months (accompanied by massive conflict and deprivation and social fracture; we have about 5x more people in this country than we did in 1900). A minor social collapse will see the erosion of the currency and the disappearance of effective law and order, plus the weakening of banking and payroll systems… but remote work will still be available and you’ll still be able to use your smartphone and buy things online. A local social collapse will be acute and possibly catastrophic for those affected (rioting, arson, blackouts) but order will be restored by the regional and national institutions within weeks.
You want to be prepared for all and any of these, and that means protecting yourself from the two greatest threats to human flourishing: deprivation, and predation.
Deprivation - you want to be as self-sufficient as possible, with stores of food and electricity and water available and the easy options to produce or acquire more. Batteries, ammunition, medication, machine parts… are all goods which rely on complex supply chains. You will want these essentials available in the event that those supply chains fail, possibly for good. A water source and the established ability to grow food will be premium features.
Predation - you want to be able to protect yourself from a rapacious state, criminals, mobs, and the desperate. This requires a defensible (rural) position and a secure property and weapons and weapons proficiency. You will want to have your friends and family close by, and you will need several military-age males. You want to have a primary structure and a backup (garage, barn, RV) if possible.
America has always held out the promise of a boundless future and the possibility for fierce independence. Those hardy individuals determined to make their own way and distrustful of financial and political power (notably including my ancestors, the Scots-Irish) have functioned as a bulwark for the nation against foreign enemies and toxic domestic centralization, and a corrective for the course of the nation. They have loomed large in our cultural and political life and they are still closely-bound with what we imagine to be our history, and the American dream.
I am not an apocalyptically-inclined person and I do not seriously fear social collapse… but the things that one should do in preparation of this eventuality (build communal ties, ready your property, move out of the city, make yourself proficient at personal defense, organize your neighbors, simplify your economic consumption) are all GOOD THINGS to do anyway, both for yourselves and for our society. It’s possible that the people who I’m sympathetic to cannot win the culture war or bend institutions to their will or reinstitute standards and rational procedure in agencies. If that’s the case then reliance upon those institutions will become a major liability. Even if it does not those institutions and every other aspect of our country will be strengthened and improved by networks of locally-based and healthy citizens. That is the implicit dream upon which our country was founded, although we rarely seem to mention it these days.
A nation without an active and predominant ethos of personal independence and freedom is not America, regardless of our flag or institutions. A nation without a network of healthy, local communities is not America. A nation without productive farmland and the capacity for local self-defense is not America. A nation of people without any resilience of self-sufficiency is no longer America. The bad news is that there’s no easy fix for our problems and healing will require changing the lives of millions of people. The good news is it’s in our hands (mine and yours) today. If you want to rejuvenate your country, improve your corner of it. If more of us do this, mindfully and wisely, this nation can again be a shining city on a hill.
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An interesting piece which mentions the grassroots Hungarian ‘Civic Circles’ campaign of national rejuvenation, which I’m deeply interested in:
