Race, Culture and Nation

The Coming Collapse of Civilisation?

Survivalist Tales of Calamity, Catastrophe, Collapse and Conspiracy

Part I

by John Steele and Brian Simpson

Brother shall strike brother and both fall,
Sister's sons slay each other,
Evil be on earth, an age of whoredom,
Of sharp sword-play and shield's clashing,
A wind-age, a wolf-age, till the world ruins:
No man to another shall mercy show.

-- Voluspa, Stanza 39

Winter of the Wolf?

Predictions about human doom and the collapse of civilisation are as old as civilisation itself. Plato, (428-347BC) in the Republic lamented the fact of the decay and degeneracy of Athenian society and he constructed a theoretical political system, modelled on ancient Sparta which he believed would halt this decline. Plato also believed in the hypothesis of Atlantis - a golden age civilisation before his time - which was destroyed. [1]

The Old Testament, of course, has a number of accounts of the destruction of civilisations, the most notable being the genesis flood, which destroyed life on Earth except, allegedly, that life carried by Noah in his ark. The Noah story is a tale of one of the great survivalists - survivalists being rugged individuals who are determined to survive come-what-may, and survivalism is their associated philosophy of life.
The idea that human civilisation is a veneer over our base biological selves has been expressed by many great human thinkers. Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) in Leviathan thought that a dictator was needed to preserve social order. [2] Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), the great Arabic scholar said:

"Civilisation needs the tribal values to survive, but these same values are destroyed by civilisation. Specifically, urban civilisation destroys tribal values with the luxuries that weaken kinship and community ties and with the artificial wants for new types of cuisine, new fashions in clothing, larger homes, and other novelties of urban life." [3]

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) anticipated later eugenist (i.e. science of racial improvement) thinkers, when he said of humanity: "How many people there are who could be described as mere channels for food producers of excrement! They practice no virtue, have no purpose. All they leave behind them is a full latrine." [4]

In modern times, the cultural pessimist Oswald Spengler (1880-1936) in The Hour of Decision, specifically predicted the fall of Western civilisation because of its sickness and degeneracy:

"It must be stated again and again that this Society, in which in our own time the transition from Culture to Civilisation is taking place, is sick, sick in its instincts and therefore in its mind. It offers no defence. It takes pleasure in its own vilification and disintegration." [5]

Continuing along Spenglerian lines William Gayley Simpson in Which Way Western Man? concludes:

"The stark fact is that even we as a people… are very near the end of our run - not merely the United States but whole White Man's world, and the white Man himself… We shall soon be locked in a struggle for sheer survival, and shall hardly escape catastrophe… Sooner or later, in one way or another, our gates will be forced and our city put to the torch and sword. Our civilisation will go up in flames, and the proud White Men who created it… will have to bend his neck to a yoke in order to live. Spengler foresaw with the eye of clairvoyance when he predicted starkly that our "machine-technics will end… and one day will lie in fragments, forgotten - and our railways and steamships as dead as the roman roads and Chinese walls, our giant cities and skyscrapers in ruins like old Memphis and Babylon." [6]

Another school of thought, originating in the strong programme of artificial intelligence sees humanity being replaced by thinking machines, by a process much like the one which we can describe where Nordic (Northern Europeans) are being replaced demographically, by the third World. [7] For other futurists, technological innovations such as nanotechnology (the science of manipulating matter atom by atom) may permit the "democratisation of mass destruction," supplying a technology by which terrorists may annihilate entire cities. [8]

Concerns about a breakdown in global order can also be found among establishment writers. Jewish intellectual Robert D. Kaplan in The Coming Anarchy says: "despite the Enlightenment, many governments - including ours [USA] - remain corrupt and decadent because of the influence of money." [9] Kaplan gives an implicit critique of the new world order in his chapter entitled "The Dangers of Peace". [10] Long periods of peace governed by a world organisation is "not an optimistic view of the future but a dark one." [11] It will produce the "mass man" as described by Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset in "The Revolt of the Masses," (1929) [12] - a pleasure-seeking barbarian. [13] Somke may say, observing the present godless materialistic culture of selfishness in the West, that that moment has arrived.

The Racial Ecological Threat

Other threats lie on the fault lines of the globalised economy and an increasingly threatened bio-system. The socio-biologist E.O. Wilson stated this problem as follows:

"Now more than six billion people fill the world. The great majority are very poor: nearly one billion exist on the edge of starvation. All are struggling to raise the quality of their lives in any way they can. That unfortunately includes the conversion of the surviving remnants of the natural environment. Half of the great tropical forests have been cleared. The last frontiers of the world are effectively gone. Species of plants and animals are disappearing a hundred more times faster than before the coming of humanity, and as many as half may be gone by the end of this century. An Armageddon is approaching at the beginning of the third millennium. But it is not the cosmic war and fiery collapse of mankind foretold in sacred scripture. It is the wreckage of the planet by an exuberantly, plentiful and ingenious humanity." [14]

Contrary to Wilson, the "cosmic war and fiery collapse of mankind" could very well still come even given his biological vision of a degrading world.
At around October 12 1999 the world population reached six billion. It still grows at an annual rate of about 1.4 percent, adding 200,000 people per day. This rate is slowing and in the short term will reach staggering proportions - until the inevitable demographic crash occurs. This short-term growth is in the Black and Asiatic races - Whites and the Nordic sub-race constitute a dwindling percentage of the world's population as the cancers of feminism and anti-White racism leads women to stop having children at all, have below the net reproduction replacement level, or else miscegenate with other races as an atonement for the alleged racial sin of "being White". In any case the process of human population growth has been viewed by some politically incorrect biologists (non-pc because such thought violates egalitarian norms) [15] as a type of planetary cancer; it is argued that the world population growth rate may well be declining, but many malignant tumours also experience a decline in growth rates in the terminal stages.

Available fresh water is less than one-half of one per cent of all Earth's water. However global consumption is doubling every 20 years which is over twice the rate of human population growth. Already over one billion people lack access to adequate fresh water supplies and by current trends, by 2025, demand for fresh water will be 56 per cent more than presently available. Prepare for water wars. [16]

The problem of expanding population though is strictly speaking a short-term problem: in the longer-term there is precisely the opposite problem of a "birth dearth" which threatens to collapse world population numbers after the present "demographic wedge" of population ages. In his brilliant book, The Empty Cradle [17] Phillip Longman documents that declining birth rates across the world - including China - threaten the continuation of industrial society, and indeed civilisation itself. As he puts it:

"…the unprecedented fall in fertility rates over the last generation… is now spreading to every corner of the globe. In both hemisphere, in nations rich and poor, in Christian, Taoist, Confucian, Hindu, and especially Islamic countries, one broad social trend holds constant at the beginning of the twenty-first century: As more and more of the world's population moves to crowded urban areas, and s women gain in education and economic opportunity, people are producing fewer and fewer children." [18]

Contrary to the poet T.S. Eliot, the world may die, not with a bang or a whimper, but perhaps with… silence.

Environmental Catastrophe or Environmental Conspiracy?

Freedom Movement thinkers are in general sceptical about the thesis of global warming largely because the main scientific body which has presented a series pf reports on the top - Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - is UN-based and backed. Rightly, such thinkers as the Freedom Movement in Australia and the US see the UN as conspiring to undermine the sovereignty of nations and freedoms such as private gun ownership. However the IPCC also believes that 1+1 =2 - so we should not act as a mindless Pavlovian knee-jerk response and reject a scientific thesis without considering all of the evidence.
In effect the IPCC merely summarised scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals rather than did scientific research itself. It is possible that all of these scientific papers are all wrong but if they are correct even in part, there could be some dire effects. Predictions of a melting of the Western Antarctic ice shelf, putting most coastal cities under water are almost certainly incorrect, but predictions of extreme weather patterns and an increase of say, bushfires, may not be. Even though the IPCC has recently been damaged by a statistical investigation by NASA and leading US scientists that the infamous "hot key stick" curve (i.e. that the 20th century had the highest temperatures in 1,000 years) is flawed, these sceptical scientists still concluded that the thesis of global warming was still correct. Consequently it is important to still keep an open mind on this matter.

As another example, the US National Center of Atmospheric Research was once sceptical about the alleged phenomena of ozone depletion. However it now maintains that by the year 2031, if ozone continues to be depleted at the same rate, human beings will have to become a nocturnal species as it will simply be too dangerous to work outside without protective space suits. Crops will die and massive starvation will sweep the land. Whether one accepts such a claim as likely or not should depend upon a study of the available scientific evidence rather than merely dismissing such claims without reasoned scientific argument, as some 'Freedom' websites do. If we are to reach the young, rather than deliver warmed up sermons beloved to aging members, it is necessary to deal with the issues that they are concerned about within a scientific and rational framework rather than one based on abuse and politics. Leave that to our enemies.

Will Technology Save Us, Always?

The champions of globalism and endless economic growth share a common religious faith with some Freedom Movement thinkers in the saving graces of technology. But the idea that technology will always find an answer is not itself a scientific thesis. For a start, according to "Jevron's paradox" an increase in the efficiency of resource use results in an increased use of resources. [19] Humanity may well be on a technological treadmill, forever having to run faster to stay in the same place. Stephen Leeb and Glen C. Strathy observe in their book The Coming Economic Collapse, [20] that there is an inescapable truth about technology: technological progress over the last few decades has begun to decline (or as economists put it in their jargon, begun to face diminishing returns and increasing marginal costs). In other words, relatively less is got by way of progress from an increasing effort. [21]
There are in short, limits to economic growth and technological development. The fact that the Club of Rome said this should not mindlessly force us to accept the contrary thesis of "no limits to growth" - because bad guys also support that as well! The bad guys use whatever they can and make use of any situation to advance their aims. There are non-Left publications which argue for the limits to growth thesis so again a knee-jerk dismissal is not scientific. [22] Lawrence Dennis in his book, The Coming American Fascism although not arguing for a political position which we would support, was right in seeing the limits of growth as dooming liberal capitalism for this system, bound with orthodox debt finance, necessarily requires a market expanding in exponential progression for its continual existence. But this is a scientific impossibility. [23]

In conclusion we should be cautious in accepting environmentalist claims about the imminent threat to civilisation. It is true that behind such claims is often a political agenda. But on the other hand, behind the opposite pro-growth, technological optimist viewpoint is the same agenda. All that can be done by rational scientific thinkers - and following Major Douglas (an engineer) - this is what Social Crediters should be - is to assess the evidence and data at hand and formulate a provisional opinion.

In other papers in this series, we shall attempt to do this with the topics of peak oil and avian flu. Civilisation is a fragile order and we do not do service to truth by taking the easy low-IQ option of dismissing questions of calamity, catastrophe and collapse without due consideration. What if the pessimists are right? If they could be, it is prudent to at least make some attempts to prepare for disaster if that be our fate.

References:

1. Plato, Timeaus and Critias
2. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651)
3. Ibn Khaldun, Muqaddimah (Prolomena)
4. We saw this remark quoted in a newspaper article but have not been able to independently verify it.
5. Oswald Spengler, The Hour of Decision, (Alfred A. Knopf, New York 1963). Originally published in 1934, cited p.118.
6. William Gayley Simpson, Which Way Western Man? (National Alliance, Washington DC, 1978,) cited p.180.
7. The comparison is ours, not that of the authors of the following books in this AI school. Consult further: H.P. Moravec, Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 1988); R. Kurzweil, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (Allen and Unwin, London 1999); Bill Joy "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us," Wired April 2000.
8. K.G. Drexler Engines of Creation (Doubleday, New York 1986) pp.174-176.
9. Robert D. Kaplan The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War (Vintage Books, New York 2001) at pp.114-115.
10. As above at pp.169-185.
11. As above at p.169.
12. José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (1929).
13. In addition Kaplan says that Hitler's Germany had "relative honesty in bureaucracy" at p.171. That in our opinion is more than can be said about bureaucracies in the West.
14. E.O. Wilson The Future of Life (Alfred Knopf, New York 2002) pp.xxii-xxiii.
15. W.M. Hern, "How Many Times has the Human Population Doubled? Comparisons with Cancer," Population and Environment, vol.21, no.1, 1999, pp.59-80.
16. W.B. Dickenson, "Watch for the Water Wars," The Social Contract, Summer 2002, pp.287-288.
17. P. Longman, The Empty Cradle: How Falling Birthrates Threaten World Prosperity and What To Do About It, (New America Books, New York 2004).
18. As above p.8.
19. R. Chapman "No Room at the Inn, or Why Population Problems are Not All Economic," Population and Environment vol.21, no.1, 1999, pp.80-97, cited p.95.
20. S. Leeb and G.C. Strathy The Coming Economic Collapse: How You Can Thrive When Oil Costs $200 a Barrel (Warner Business Books, New York 2006).
21. As above pp.7-9.
22. See especially W.R. Cotton Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change (University of Illinois Press, Urbana 1982).
23. See G. Hardin Living Within Limits: Ecology, Economics and Population Taboos (Oxford University Press, Oxford 1993).