Why America will break apart-What Cheap energy has done..

GeneralGreen

link This is a cut from Will America Survive.

What has all this essentially free energy accomplished
in America?
It has enabled the US to transform itself into an egalitarian multicultural society. This type of society has never existed before. Multicultural societies have certainly existed before. Under slavery, the US population contained as many as 20 percent blacks overall, and up to 50 percent in some areas. India contained a variety of different castes, the members of which lived rigidly separate from each other. At its peak, the Roman Empire consisted of up to 40 percent slaves. What is different now is that the various cultures in the US – various races, religions, and cultures – all enjoy the same basic rights of citizenship.
When cheap energy is gone (and the word is WHEN, not IF), the profusion of rights and privileges will disappear. Present-day life in America is not in any sense a “zero sum game.” That someone has a high material lifestyle does not mean that someone else must go without. Because of access to massive amounts of low-cost energy (and the technology to utilize it, of course), everyone can have a lot. Because the population is growing (mainly because of immigration), there are substantial opportunities for increased industrial production and generation/accumulation of wealth. The waste, the species destruction, the pollution, the environmental destruction – for the time being, all of these external costs can be simply pushed off on someone else living in another country or a later generation.When push comes to shove, individuals will protect their family and clan, not a multicultural hodge-podge that no longer possesses a cultural identity at all.

What are rights? Rights are privileges granted to the members of a society, and they last only as long as the society can maintain itself and chooses to enforce those privileges. There are no “inalienable human rights.” Rights exist only in the context of a government and its laws. If your country is conquered, you do not have the right to the air in a jug. Americans enjoy an incredible degree of freedom and rights because America is a very wealthy country. When America falls, all of those rights will be gone. The right to employment or housing without regard to race, religion, gender, or national origin will be gone. The right to a trial by a jury of peers will be gone. The right to freedom of speech will be gone. The right to bear arms will be gone. The right to be free from cruel and unusual punishment will be gone. The right to life will be gone.

Without a government to back them up, statements of “rights” are meaningless. The 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights and all the statements of rights that followed it are nothing more than worthless scraps of paper without a government to back them up. Once food and defense are taken care of, everything else that a government spends money on is discretionary. In a high-energy environment, a lot of attention may be paid to human rights. In a low-energy environment, “rights” of minorities, which are difficult and expensive to enforce, are the first things to go.

When times get hard and there is no longer a near limitless abundance, people will look to any differences as a basis for obtaining more of the limited resources for themselves. Differences in race, differences in religion, differences in language, differences in ethnicity and national origin. This is obvious. Look at the world’s “hot spots.” The war in Rwanda: differences in ethnic groups. The friction in Northern Ireland: religion. The problem in Yugoslavia / Serbia / Kosovo: religion. The problem in Indonesia: race, religion, and ethnicity. The Sinhalese/Tamil problem in Sri Lanka: ethnicity.

The point is not that one race or religion is better or worse than any other. The point is that when push comes to shove, someone has to be killed, and there must be some basis, some rationale for doing this. That’s where differences – any kind of differences – come into play. It doesn’t really matter what race, religion, language, or nationality you were born into. As a human being, you must accept a cause and take a stand, as arbitrary as it may be or seem. Ultimately, you will be called to and must decide to kill for your cause (nation, race, religion) or you will be killed by someone else who is willing to fight for his. You must take a stand for your cause, or you will surely die for someone else’s.
When cheap energy is gone, America will quickly disintegrate. Its population is now too large to subsist on low-energy agriculture. The country will fractionalize as quickly as Yugoslavia did after the collapse of the Soviet Empire. In 1981, Joel Garreau wrote a book entitled, The Nine Nations of North America. Seventeen years later, that book is not far off the mark in identifying the likely states of North America when cheap energy is gone. Those nations are: Hispanic Florida and the Caribbean; the Hispanic southwest and Mexico; French Quebec; the Pacific maritime; New England; the industrial east; the south; the plains; and the nonmaritime west (the Rocky Mountains, midwestern and western Canada, and Alaska).
The population of North America is now too great to support with preindustrial agriculture. When abundant land and cheap energy are gone, the issues will be who will be master, who will be slave, and who will be dead.

Malcolm X attributed the problem between blacks and whites to the fact that the white race is inherently evil. The source of racial strife, racism, and slavery is not genetic: all races have practiced slavery. The source of racial strife, and the source of religious, linguistic, and ethnic strife, is economics. In a low-energy, land-poor setting, the dominant group in any area will be homogeneous, from racial, linguistic, religious, and cultural perspectives.

Given that the answer to the question is “No,” a second question may be asked. Will the surviving small industrial population be “Out of America.”? The answer here would also appear to be “No.” By its policy of massive immigration of foreign cultures – races, languages, and religions – it is no longer a viable culture at all, but a fractionated multicultural mess that will hold together only as long as the “free” energy of fossil fuels holds out. It is not a people. It is an out-of-control, growth-addicted, energy-addicted, incredibly wasteful and destructive industrial cancer that is destroying not only itself but also its host – planet Earth. Its democratic form of government – a wonderful idea for a homogeneous population in a low-population-density, low-energy setting -- has slowly paralyzed as the population has been converted to a balkanized hodge-podge of competing races, languages, religions, and cultures. No single culture is in charge any longer. In a sense, the planet is a ship with 229 captains (countries), and the United States is a ship with no captain at all.

GeneralGreen

When cheap energy is gone,
America will quickly disintegrate. Its population is now too LARGE to subsist on low-energy agriculture. The country will fractionalize as quickly as Yugoslavia did after the collapse of the Soviet Empire.
The point is not that one race or religion is better or worse than any other. The point is that when push comes to shove, someone has to be killed, and there must be some basis, some rationale for doing this. That’s where differences – any kind of differences – come into play.
Without a government to back them up, statements of “rights” are meaningless.
What are rights? Rights are privileges granted to the members of a society, and they last only as long as the society can maintain itself and chooses to enforce those privileges. There are no “inalienable human rights.” Rights exist only in the context of a government and its laws. If your country is conquered, you do not have the right to the air in a jug. Americans enjoy an incredible degree of freedom and rights because America is a very wealthy country. When America falls, all of those rights will be gone. The right to employment or housing without regard to race, religion, gender, or national origin will be gone. The right to a trial by a jury of peers will be gone. The right to freedom of speech will be gone. The right to bear arms will be gone. The right to be free from cruel and unusual punishment will be gone. The right to life will be gone.
When cheap energy is gone (and the word is WHEN, not IF), the profusion of rights and privileges will disappear.
Southern California and Florida are now Hispanic colonies. Many US cities are black, Asian, or foreign-language enclaves. Immigrants by the thousands, hundreds of thousands, and millions are swarming over the land, diluting and destroying the Anglo-Saxon culture that established the country and made it great. America is rapidly self-destructing. It is an overpopulated, multicultural, polyglot, multireligion, multiracial that has lost its identity, sense of purpose, and determination to survive, and will soon cease to exist.

Jack · Dark Lord Joined: Aug 11, 2004 Posts: 5085

Please accept my compliments on an interesting post. I would not argue with any of your conclusions.
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Olle · Tar Sands Joined: Jun 28, 2006 Posts: 91 Location: Sweden

What a load of horse crap! Evil or Very Mad

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eXpat · Intermediate Crude Joined: Jun 08, 2006 Posts: 971

Nice post, I like your analysis. That can be applied too, to most countries nowadays IMHO.
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Cashmere · Light Sweet Crude Joined: Mar 27, 2008 Posts: 1971

Good post.
IMO, stressful times will cause the accentuation of differences.
Don't get caught up in the "we'll come together" kum-baya crap. Won't happen.
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jlw61

Spoken like a subject and not a citizen. The concept of "inalienable rights" says that people, not governments, have rights and the people give rights to the government to govern for the greater good. This is not a difficult concept, which is why it is so widely dismissed along with "don't spend what you don't have" and "don't eat more than you need".

People have these rights at birth, they do not need government's permission to have them, government must have the permission of the people to strip those rights. People who allow themselves to be subjigated by their government have given up their rights.

Most democracies in the world forbid their citizens from owning guns, this means the democracies are a sham and the citizen is only free so long as the government allows it. The founders of the US understood that government, if given the opportunity, will strip the rights of the people. That is why they said that all citizens have the right to bear arms. The armed citizen that is feared by government is the best protection against government excess.

In it's purest sense, the people would have the right to own machine guns, rocket launchers, and such... since the more powerful weapons are quite expensive to own, only the wealthy and the collectives would be able to own them in bulk. This is not actually a bad idea on paper, but the execution would require a lot of thinking and education, and perhaps some laws to control it.

Putting weapons of great distruction into the hands of a central government is really crazy, unless you have a situation where the individual states/provences have their own military power... then it's a little less crazy. The best government is an unarmed government... unfortunately since there are multiple governments in the world, many who would love to see their neighboring country fall under their control, that's not a practicle matter at this time.
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RedStateGreen

I've thought that America would balkanize for a long time now, once things get really bad. We'll see what happens.
It might not even happen for cultural reasons; as transportation gets more and more difficult, we may just not be able to get to each other.

I don't think people from other countries realize how huge America is as a nation physically. When oil is $300 or $400 a barrel, will those from Hawaii make the long sail or hideously expensive air voyage to get to the mainland? If they did, they certainly wouldn't travel days to get to the east coast.
One day soon, we will only know about each other through the internet, as only the rich will be able to travel, if at all.
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Jack · Dark Lord Joined: Aug 11, 2004 Posts: 5085

socrates1fan · Heavy Crude Joined: Jun 04, 2008 Posts: 284

Your post is quiet interesting but in all honesty I must disagree.
I don't believe we are all going to start skipping about in joy but you are also forgetting that it isn't 1756.
I believe that as regions become more isolated the rights of the people will not be determined by government but rather local authority and the people themselves. Many people that are of different cultural groups were born in the US and born into US culture. As cultures mix there is the assumption that they can easily be torn apart. It isn't all West Virginia(sorry to those from W Virginia) where people still have ridiculous social divisions. Millions of Americans of different groups worked together in the great depression just fine, and even then, though crime rates were high smaller groups had the same rights they did before. What would make the people from my generation(or at least around here.) suddenly consider themselves white or black,etc instead of midwesterners or Americans? I can see such as scenerio for maybe the baby boomers but not for my generation or the next generation.
I don't think the country will divide but I think governments in regions will be formed under a federal district. I feel that many districts would evolve including one that had the states each touching the great lakes and the southwest being its own district.

kpeavey · Expert Joined: Oct 04, 2004 Posts: 1244

That's some straight shooting from the hip.
Individual rights will become a thing of the past, at least for a little while. Freedom will be laid at the feet of whoever feeds the masses. While rebellion may take hold, I think there is a fair chance it will result in fractionalization of the Republic. Without the energy and resource inputs, the chances of recombining the fractions into a single nation are slim at best. We have seen the best the US can be. It's all downhill from here, although we may hold together for a little while longer.

Gun ownership will be among the first rights stripped from the people. While it may seem to be a good idea to a government seeking to draw order from chaos, the long term effect is that the people will simply fashion their own weapons.
Take transportation, energy and industry out of the equation, battles become smaller and localized. The tactics and objectives change from ideals to driving off an oppressor to defense of local resources.
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GeneralGreen

nutmeg · Tar Sands Joined: Dec 16, 2007 Posts: 49

you mean no more gay pride parades and welfare checks for single mom "snow hos?" No more rainbow flags and celebrating diversity?
Aaaggghhhh, drill in ANWAR, drill here drill now, we must save multiculturalism and diversity!

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Rage · Tar Sands Joined: May 06, 2008 Posts: 25

in response to jlw - rights exist for the people to give the government becasue of the integrated high energy culture that we live in. Pretend that the US Government was gone. Small tribal bands form a hierarcy of authority. The rights of an individual mean less within the band because of the limited nature of the band, and the rights of the band don't exist from the perspective of another competing group.

When it comes down to it, are your rights any more valuable then mine? To you they are but to me mine are. If there are limited resources available, and my right to eat is being trampled because you are eating then I have a few choices - look elesewhere for food, take some of your food, die. If I've looked everywhere and I'm starving then I have two choices, take some of your food, die. If I listen to my instinct for self preservation then I have one choice - take some of your food. You of course have some choices as well. Share your food or hoard your food to yourself. If you should choose to share, you would do so with the expectation that there is going to be more food in your future. There is a surplus of food and therefore energy. If you do not choose to share we have conflict. Now darwin chimes in.....