Would you like to intimidate a boxing coach?
Boxing coaches are by definition not the best boxers, but the ones with the strongest minds—the psychotherapists for fighters with stronger bodies. You don’t intimidate a boxing coach by being big, bad and imposing. That would simply be his entry into your psyche—you now the demon that dances on the thread dangled by the sorcerer in his nighted den…
You intimidate a boxing coach by being an academic who comes to the boxing coach asking for insight into your own field of study. You have now placed his damaged brain onto your chess board!
Yesterday afternoon, Mister Weirton, a younger, smarter, better looking man than I, showed up 45 minutes after my latest concussion—yes, I’m a stick-fighting coach too and I ate a bad stiff arm from one of my rusty fighters—and this mud between my ears sloshes more sloppily than it used to. He had things to speak with me of that were of great importance to his greatest responsibility—his family.
Mister Weirton was a university student when I met him two decades gone. He and his family now live in Western Maryland. Although we are part of the same provincial polity he likes to touch base with me periodically to gain not only my odd ball worldview but a sense for what is happening in depressed urban centers as harbingers of what is to come for he and his in their outlying settlements.
For a while after earning his degrees he worked for a government organization preparing Americans to do their mindless duty. Among his degrees is one in European history, so he has perspective that most Americans lack. He now works for a government contractor preparing young Americans to do their masters’ bidding. He is guilty of a number of sins against his profession, the most egregious being his investigation of the economy, and what he calls ‘the shadow economy’.
As he put it yesterday, “I’ve spent three years going farther down this rabbit hole to the point that I am absolutely certain that we are living an unsustainable lie. I see a collapse sooner rather than later and precipitous rather than gradual. I understand that you ascribe to the gradual school of thought—your vision seems to be of a feudal nature. I don’t have a specific question in mind—other than of the close combat variety. Rather I want your vantage on my preparations so that I might identify oversights on my part.”
Mister Weirton is well placed financially and as he puts it, “I’m living the good life in full realization that these are the waning days of Rome and the Visigoths and Huns are already here.”
The Weirton’s are conservative survivalists with a garden, wood burning stove and other manner of home sustainability measures. What he is worried about is the social climate, and seems to harbor a hope that I have gleaned some insight through my urban violence research that could help him. Most of our conversation was a discussion of our opposed visions of the near future—which is something I have been uneasy writing about. Below I paraphrase my advice, and am combining it with some revelations that I had this morning when I made my way home on the bus from the safe house we met at.
Ding, ding, ding!
Yes, that was the Crackpot Meter going off.
Yes, I have a handful of safe houses, places I stay with people I am not related to or in business with. I am writing this piece partially because, when Mister Weirton left the safe house I had a nagging suspicion that I had failed to dredge up the most important points from the recesses of my bruised brain. Sorry Doug.
Things to Consider in case of Economic Collapse
The Social System
Mister Weirton and other visionary economists see such highly complex systems as ours as prone to collapse. From the point of view of a fight coach I must agree, that redundant simple systems are more sustainable under stress. However, even though our exponential growth economy is not likely to be sustainable as a system, I see some of its sub systems, particularly predatory ones, as sustainable, adaptable, and lethally mutable.
Civil Order
Based on the events in Fergusson MO—which I suspect of being a dry run for the feds to test the local law enforcement capacity—and the massive U.S. military commitment worldwide, I do not see wide spread effective martial law in the U.S. except in certain exclusionary zones like Washington D.C., Manhattan, etc.
When I come out to visit you I run across panhandlers, and vagrants on the fringes of your high-end enclave. These people will evolve to property criminals and there will be no police protection. Police do not protect people in the city—ever. Police forces are not set up for deterrence or patrolling but as strike forces. This goes back to Nixon’s declaration of war on drugs. In my neighborhood there is an ATM where hoodlums congregate to mug people. The cops always—not sometimes, always—ride by these blatant predators to arrest lone drug users on possession charges. This is a reflection of subsidized local policing under federal pressure.
Police forces, local, state and federal, are subsystems of the overly complex governments, which I believe, due to their predatory nature, proactively aggressive role, and level of stress adaptability, will survive the governments they are currently beholding to.
Mister Weirton interjects: “Your are postulating that local police will devolve into a type of feudal lordship, which is a supportable model in less complex societies. But we have never had anything this complex and unsustainable.”
I’m not suggesting feudal order but ‘collapse predation’. The following are the points that I suggest that will emerge as factors in a collapse situation—whether gradual or precipitous—due to the stress adapted law enforcement subsystems of government finding refuge in their various brotherhoods as well as relevant experience and equipment.
Collapse Predation
1. Local law enforcement will not protect and serve but pillage and steal. The proactive elements of local law enforcement are good at one thing, crashing down doors and clearing out hostile residences and securing and disposing of all goods seized. Rather than local law enforcement—as many preppers fear—forcing survivalists to give over food stores and confiscating weapons for the common feeding and defense, I see them pillaging food stores to feed their own families and confiscating guns to barter with criminal gangs, who will possess the only real non monetary currency. [Sorry, I left that out last night.]
2. State law enforcement and available national guard, will not establish food banks and disaster relief, but rather establish and secure upper class enclaves [leaving the middle class to be devoured by the poor], and, particularly in a slow decline scenario, will serve as collateral debt collectors for banks. If you can’t make your house or car payment I expect paramilitary contractors under the supervision of the state police to come and repo the vehicle or seize the house, possibly as a barracks.
3. If the currency collapses expect government agents to be paid in fuel, automobiles, houses and portable goods, confiscated from debtors, which is just about everyone.
4. Currency collapse is seen as the big driver in such a scenario and only precious metals have been imagined as currency. I however, suggest the following items as currency in a collapse scenario, in the order in which I envision them being monetized: fuel, drugs, batteries, equipment, people. I believe firmly that heroin will become the actual U.S. currency at some point in this century. [Mister Weirton dismissed my invocation of drug gang wealth as fleeting since their cash would become worthless.] I see their drug holdings as representing true wealth. Imagine if the many people who despaired of their crumbling material world just wanted out, as did the wife in the post apocalyptic movie The Road. I see drug gags offering ‘China white euthanasia’ in return for material assets and food.
5. Federal law enforcement agencies are purely predatory in function and—unlike the local police—do not even make the barest pretense at protecting and serving. Federal cops are home invasion specialists extraordinaire. I interviewed one federal cop who had personally ‘knocked in eleven-hundred doors’ in 3 years! While the massive herds of federal employees will surely fall into panic, urging federal action to restore their host organism, the actual teeth of the federal government are already sharpened and capable of sustaining themselves. The DEA for instance may be the largest narcotics holder in the world. In a collapse situation that dope will become the only real money out there.
6. I do not see the military doing more on a domestic level then quashing separatist movements and insuring the security of key government facilities and persons. I have not done enough research on the current military to comment much here. I just don’t think that the volunteer force will use much force against citizens, and that that task will fall to paramilitary contractors and federal and large municipal law enforcement agencies. I have known too many military men who have served in combat units to believe that entire units would participate in pillaging the suburbs and turning the U.S. into a fascist state.
7. Thanks to the ‘War on Drugs’ the U.S. is home to two supreme classes of predatory gangs—criminal and federal. In a long slow collapse or a precipitous collapse, if the fiat currency we worship is utterly devalued, I see these two forces: the federal apex predator and the criminal niche predator, as carving up the world between them. The 1970s and 80s saw numerous assassinations of military personnel and officers based in the U.S. by federal agencies and drug cartels. In a true collapse situation I see the home based U.S. military being infiltrated by these forces. I also suspect that reactionary forces within the military might fight back and form the basis for stable sectors. I would ultimately pin the hopes of the U.S. on rogue military commanders who defy the federal agencies, corrupt police forces, and criminal gangs.
8. I think that the one investment in technology that the federal government will go to the wall to keep afloat is the evolving communication networks. If the economy and infrastructure fracture federal control will depend on wireless communications. Enabling increasingly poor Americans to communicate as they currently do provides a potent means for social behavioral control and counter-separatist intelligence. I Expect some form of electronic communication to remain viable for the general population far into any slow collapse dark age, if for no other reason then development of hit lists for local ‘collection’ teams and federal death squads.
I think that is about all the guess work I can manage on this subject. My central point is that home invasion by police forces of an increasingly federal nature is going to increase in the U.S. over the next 50 years no matter what. And that the more of a collapse there is the better positioned armed and cohesive predatory police forces and gang sets will be to adapt to a collapse situation. In a big die off resulting from ecological collapse, the predators last the longest because they can at least eat the dead vegetarians. There is no need to imagine the rise of fantasy mohawked biker gang predators when every community of over 100,000 in the U.S. has a readymade, functioning, and already pillaging gang. Furthermore, federal police will be able to target any locality for their operations and should be even more sustainable. These police forces and private law enforcement contractors now in operation recall the barbarian tribes that Rome invited to patrol its length and breadth, only to have them turn on the mother city and bring down the whole rotten structure and stay on as feudal lords.
I understand that such a feudal structure is probably not going to result from such a complex collapse. But these people are here, armed, and operating. To think that someone is going to cobble something more effective together from scratch in the short run is foolish. From the viewpoint of a psychopath with a badge I see a potential collapse as a ‘glory season’; a time when the bureaucratic yoke may be thrown off and a man with a weapon and a band of brothers can be a man again, taking what he wants, bringing home what his family needs.
I wish I could have been more help.
You were more helpful than you think. See, I recognize how my upbringing, social station, and education color my perspectives and mental paradigms; to believe one has all the answers and all the angles is pure folly, and treasonous to the soul. You got me thinking of the possible role - and a bad one at that - of local and regional law enforcement, and that will cause us to develop even more backup plans, as well as "fly under the radar" from here on out.
Oh, and thanks for the hard cider!
Although I've known some really decent law officers, the ones in my locale seem to be bad as often as they are good with the bulk in an amoral gray zone. In a worst case scenario I see some hero cops out there, and some really good local rural policing. But, with the pressures urban and suburban departments have been under I see disaster bringing a negative tilt, particularly since urban cops are recruited based partially on psychopathic characteristics.
I wanted to make sure this was pointed out, because , since the disaster movies of the early 1970s like Earthquake down to The Walking Dead, the military is usually seen as a negative force in apocalyptic fiction and the police are generally cast as heroic lone hopes on the classic model of the John Wayne western yarn. I do think that decades of movie watching with the same themes hammered home does form a prejudicial view in the mind.
Hero cop mythology may just be a left over Old West trope but it is still providing a subtext. Most people do buy into the ethics they see portrayed on film and TV. To look at the actual Old West you see gunfighters and lawmen sliding into each other's roles seamlessly contrary to our mythology. Two weeks ago I watched a Baltimore police detective buying stolen groceries at a bar across the street from where it was stolen. He looked at me nervously, as two weeks prior I told him that as a grocery manager I used to beat the shit out of people that did that. He avoids me like the plague, demonstrating classic criminal behavior. In urban centers we are already there on the long decline. When the world tilts at 90 degrees I don't see this guy all of a sudden acting like John Wayne.
Watch Europe and Japan, the periphery of an empire falls before core. When those regions fall global currency flows will rush into the US (safe haven) causing the dollar to rise, possibly to all time highs. That process has actually begun, but on a slow burn level, it will pick-up significantly when Europe and Japan crack. Once the financial crisis hits the US, then you'll see troubles with the US dollar. Economies can survive a stock market crash, but not a bond market crash. IMO the next bubble to pop will be the bond market
Number one on your list has already begun, expect it to accelerate. Read about the decline of Rome and you'll see the same thing as soldiers sacked their own cities to compensate the decline in pay and pensions.
Number four, add booze. Probably pint bottles would be best.
Precious metals are a hedge, but can now be easily tracked and confiscated. Remember, nothing in a safe deposit box belongs to you. Keep money in one and it will be seen as money laundering. Precious metals will best serve to a transition into a new currency regime and as a black market currency. Food could end up being the premium currency under a 'Mad Max' scenario.
Can't argue with, or add to, much else.
The fun begins October 1st, 2015. Book it, Dano.