February 3, 2022. And so it begins…
Societal Collapse. That is a subject with a pretty big scope right there. Certainly, too big for a single article. Maybe even too big to really wrap ones head around. But, I will give it a try. So, this is going to be the first in a long series of articles, parts, and chapters, and you can consider this to be the introduction. Probably be a book once it is done, unless we collapse before then.
Wasteland by Wednesday. I coined that phrase a while back in a conversation I had on Reddit. With a nod to the whole “Venus By Tuesday” thing, it sounded good as the title for this blog, and so here we are. By my wasteland phrase, I have been referring to the rapid and sudden breakdown of all social order and systems of civilized life. Or, as Wikipedia would put it, “Societal collapse is the fall of complex human society characterized by the loss of cultural identity and of socioeconomic complexity, the downfall of government, and the rise of violence.”
The downfall of government and the rise of violence. Think about that for a moment. Imagine what that could mean. Pretty bad, right? So, this will not be the traditional type of “prepper” blog here. There will be some aspects of it, especially when it comes to the basics, but these forthcoming preparation articles are not about getting ready for hurricanes, earthquakes, or wildfires. I am going to be discussing preparation for two things. Survival and Continuance.
The first is the immediate short-term survival of you and your immediate family in those first days when the SHTF. The chaos of whatever form the beginnings of collapse happens to take, and how to deal with them to GTFO of the disaster area and to relative safety. That is the “Survival” part.
The second thing is for sustaining yourself and the previously mentioned family after the chaos of the initial collapse has begun to die down or you have gotten far enough away from the various epicenters of it to start thinking about the long-term. Like how you can establish yourself someplace secure and build the necessary resources to allow you to live on to whatever comes in the future. That is the “Continuance” part.
The more you are able to get ready for these two parts of collapse, the better your chances of making it through will be. But, before we get into those, let us take a moment to go over the situation, and see what such a collapse is really about.
Is Such a Collapse Really Likely?
You bet it is.
You have probably read many times now about how our lifestyle is not sustainable and that if “business as usual” continues, then a collapse will occur. The Earth’s resources are being depleted at an incredible and accelerating rate. Biodiversity is disappearing forever. Sources of drinking water are drying up or becoming toxic from pollution. Air pollution in multiple forms is increasing to dangerously unhealthy levels. Climate change in all its forms and effects is only getting worse. The ecologies of both the wilds and our farmlands are being critically destabilized. Agriculture is destroying the forests, and the rivers, and encroaching into those tiny remaining habitats for wild animals. Commercial fishing is causing our ocean systems to collapse. The human population is still rising, needing more, wanting more, consuming more. You already know all of this. And this list goes on and on.
But, when you hear about this stuff, how do you react? Most other people around you do nothing more than shrug at the sadness of it and then dismiss these uncomfortable things as concerning problems that they can do nothing to solve. They generally just go on with their day, business as usual, and the best they can muster is the hope that someday in the future someone will come along and solve it all. They can see how they are contributing to the problem, but really there is nothing they can do about it. And so, they just hope and believe that the government or scientific advances in technology will eventually come up with some new zoom-zoom or wham-wham that will fix everything just in time.
The simple fact is that when a civilization reaches a point where there are not enough resources available to support its rate of consumption and expansion, then that civilization will collapse. When society does unravel, then your life and your family’s lives would be in major danger from many different directions at once.
Of course, the prevailing thought is that such things are not going to happen any time soon. And so most will not waste much time thinking about it. There are jobs to do, bills to pay, educations to plan for, and dreams of retirement to work towards. We are all quite sure that there is some great plan that will take care of all this nonsense for us, and we just have to trust in our leaders to know what is best for us…
Sorry, I threw up in my mouth a little bit there, had to stop that line.
I hate to say it, but the problem with such thinking is that it is wrong. Plain and simple. It is wishful thinking at best, and a purposeful self-delusion at worst. The evidence is there. We have all reached a point in the history of civilization where most of our resources are so depleted that the planetary ecology is about to collapse very soon, and human society with it, most likely in your lifetime. Resources do not need to be completely gone for their lack to severely affect society. They only have to be more scarce, harder to extract, and more expensive to process. Scarcity is the danger, because that is when we begin to fight over what is left, and some nations can pack a hell of a punch if they decide to get serious about it.
First You Must Believe
There is no room in survival for denial. One big first step to getting ready for such a catastrophic event is coming to believe that it actually can happen. Not just in a casual way, but in a way that embraces it not just as a likelihood, but as an inevitability. One of those first paralyzing stages of panic is often accompanied by the thought that “This isn’t real! This just can’t be happening!” But you will already know that it is real. You will have been expecting just such a thing.
To fully wrap your head around the idea that civilization is going to fall apart sometime within the next few decades, and also to grasp and accept the changes associated with that collapse is beyond the scope of what most people are capable of normally. It is a horrifying prospect, no doubt. The predictions circulating all over the place impart the idea that something very apocalyptic is likely to happen soon and most people really want to avoid the dark place in their mind where such imaginings dwell. For any of my readers who consider themselves sensitive to such things, Consider this your official Trigger Warning.
For major changes to occur that turn our civilized world into a wasteland, the process of collapse actually begins many years before the real chaos ensues. I call this period our descent. I am not quite knowledgeable myself to really pinpoint when that descent began, but I do know that we are in it right now. There are several scientific predictions, models, and studies that have been done about the coming collapse. Most of them end with some version of the conclusion that before mid-century our civilization will have collapsed back to something like the living standards of the 1800s.
Now, much of that really does not take into account some of the unpredictable possibilities that are seen as “one-offs”, such as a nuclear war, a Carrington Event, a meteor strike, and so on. In other words, as bad as these predictions are, they are really only accounting for the events that we can see coming, and that have data backing up their march forward. Climate change, biodiversity loss, resource scarcity, and all of those. Imagine, after going and reading some of these reports, dire as they already appear, and throwing in a nuclear conflict or a massive and deadly viral pandemic. The confluence of those two, the predicted (which we know is happening) and the unpredictable (which quite possibly could happen at any time), THAT is where we live in our embrace of collapse.
With that fresh horror in mind, it would be wise to plan for several years of disruption and hardship during the descent prior to the chaos of outright collapse. Many survival and homesteading skills can take years to learn and for you to grow comfortable depending on them. It also takes time to develop instincts, and to begin to see the present world through the eyes of a survivor.
You will not only have to survive during this descent and the eventual fall, but you will also have to create a new self-sustaining life after the dust has settled, provided that said dust has not settled on your grave. You need to be decisive, practical, informed, and ready for anything. Hopefully, this collection of articles and news updates I have created here will help give you a better understanding of what to expect, precise warning signs to be on the lookout for before the SHTF, and what you should try and do to prepare for a societal collapse.
And to get ready for a future life in the Wasteland that will emerge from what is left of civilization.
When is it Going to Happen?
If you have read some of my previous articles, and hopefully some of the stuff I linked to written by others much smarter than I, Then there should be no doubt in your mind anymore that our global society is extremely fragile. It is now a fact that one single event is capable of triggering a cascade of failures that will destroy our civilization completely. Not only have the problems that led to all the previous close calls not been fixed but the global situation has become even worse than ever before.
With Peak Oil occurring in 2014 or so, and the price of oil rising, the world is unavoidably heading for another potential global economic crisis, only this time all the governments around the world are highly in debt. The next economic hit won’t be like 2008. The next financial disaster will be the beginning of a global economic collapse.
With tensions around the world already rising in a variety of militarily conflicting ways, war at some point seems likely, and the resource and food shortages in nations have barely begun to be felt. Once the effects of climate change really start to kick in and start putting pressures on the nation-states of the world, that is when we will really start to get some fireworks. Assuming, of course, that we have not already found some more mundane reason to exchange nuclear weapons by then.
Our cultural, political, and social interactions have become extremely divisive and unstable of late. To the point that they have begun bleeding into our everyday lives and interactions with friends, family, and even strangers on the street. Perhaps that seems minor to you, but emotional instability in the populace is a good indicator of general unrest. It also gives a bit of a preview of how people are going to react to serious incidents in the future as things get worse. The guys freaking out and throwing chairs at the restaurant because they ran out of ketchup, well, today’s temper tantrum is tomorrow’s mass shooting. Those instabilities are also not only present in regular people but are probably spread with the same percentages amongst our political leaders as well.
The causes are many and varied. Trying to predict how they will interact with each other and expand is hardly an exact science, but there are some ways to try and figure out how and when it will all come together.
Scientific models are useful in that they can help confirm what we suspect, and they can put all the variables together in a way that researchers can more easily see and comprehend the bigger picture. Studies using them can even give us a glimpse of our possible future timeline. There are many of them out there, and I will probably post quite a few references to different ones during the course of this writing and others.
One of the most renowned was actually conducted in the early 70s at MIT using advanced computer modeling called World3. It predicted a world collapse if nothing changed, beginning in 2015. The predictions were put into a best-selling book called, “Limits to Growth”. The report came to the conclusion that, without substantial changes in resource consumption, “the most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity.” Basically saying that we could indeed witness the collapse of civilization as soon as the year 2040. Now, I know that 1972 was quite a while ago, but recent reviews of the data have shown that its predictions have been eerily accurate so far, and we are right on the predicted track for collapse.
In 2015 there were further studies using more advanced computer models, based on the 1972 computer model, and using a more modern computer modeling system that was developed at the UK Anglia Ruskin University. This project developed a model to quantify the interactions of human economic systems with the carrying capacity and resource density of our world.
The purpose here was to overcome the limitations of the World3 model by correcting a few inaccuracies and adding a few new parameters, along with inputting newer data from recent developments in the world. This has had the effect of making the model’s prediction far more accurate.
This new model was then used to explore short-term scenarios of various human political and economic decisions by simulating our socioeconomic, geopolitical, and ecological systems. It was hoped that such simulations would assist governments and organizations to make better decisions going forward. I say, good luck with that. Since these studies have been done and presented, there does not appear to be any significant changes being made by any of the primary governments to avoid the collapse of our society. There have been some positive decisions made but no major action taken. More likely, those decisions were made just for appeasement, so everyone could get back to the “business as usual” of making money from growth.
The year 2040 collapse scenario was verbally described by Dr Aled Jones, director of the project. Here is a good quote of that:
“The model was run forward to the year 2040, without any feedback loops that would change the underlying current trends. The results show that based on plausible climate trends, and a total failure to change course, the global food supply system would face catastrophic losses. An unprecedented epidemic of food riots would occur. In this scenario, global society essentially collapses within a few decades as food production falls permanently short of consumption.”
Basically, the model predicted total societal collapse to a level of “horse and buggy” technology by 2040. It’s a pretty sobering wake-up call. No matter which study or report out there you would like to check out, they all come to the rough conclusion that continuing along the “business-as-usual” path all but guarantees the TEOTWAWKI, because our current way of life is just not sustainable.
To answer the question of “when,” 2040 seems as likely as any. I’m just going to say soon. Also, keep in mind that these studies and papers, reports and models, all of the scientific efforts, none of them really factor in the unpredictable. Nuclear conflict, meteor strikes, pandemics, solar flares… The fact of the matter is that there are a lot of things that could happen to hasten our demise and precious few things that might extend it.
What’s Going to Happen During the Collapse?
A whole lot of horrible stuff, that’s what. I will have other articles devoted to that subject and all of its possibilities, but for now, go ahead and pick the opening act of one of your favorite post-apocalyptic films and put that in the forefront of your mind. That will suffice for now.
It is this part that most people will have trouble accepting, or even comprehending. It means that the safe, comfortable, and stable world they have always known and taken for granted will no longer exist. They will suddenly find themselves responsible for their own lives and having to survive by using common sense and pragmatic actions, with no time to be spared for the old “civilized” thoughts or feelings. They will be constantly exposed to, and participate in real violence. Experiencing, and contributing to, the chaos and tragedy around them, in ways far different from the movies they could once just turn off.
To survive, people will have to change, or at least suspend their personal beliefs. There will be no morality or ethics among the desperately starving and panic-stricken masses. People will have to give up their habits and let go of those old precious dreams and expectations of life as it could have been before. They will need the self-discipline to not give in to the terror of it all. Wants and whims, feelings, and ego will all have to be put aside or they will not survive. Not only is a future in a collapsed world physically challenging but it will be emotionally daunting as well if you are not mentally and psychologically prepared for it.
The rule to remember is this: There is the way things should be and then there is the way things are. The “should be” ideals are all well and good if you are debating in your freshman ethics class, but in the real world, you ignore the way things are to your peril.
When the collapse occurs it will typically be much better for your immediate survival to be out in the countryside rather than stuck in some urban sprawl of a city, or even the suburban areas. This is simply because you are much less likely to be targeted for attack or the raiding of your supplies as there are fewer people around and most of them are already both distanced from the initial chaos and also more self-sufficient in their own rights. In the rural areas, there are more opportunities to find food for survival and especially to run for the relative safety of the wilderness when needed. It would be a good idea to start getting ready to escape that direction, or better yet move to the country now. If you decide to remain in the overpopulated urban centers or even the outskirts, there are some bad things that you can likely expect to happen when the SHTF.
When the SHTF
Initially, there will be a lot of mass confusion, with people wandering around aimlessly and looking for answers that don’t exist. This will soon evolve into food riots as household supplies are depleted. Sprawling neighborhoods will become barren deserts, spotted by pockets of communities that have banded together to try and “ride it out.” They will probably enforce such defense violently.
There will be a lot of rage and anger toward the government and this anger will begin venting in violent uncontrolled riots, stealing, and looting, especially once the banks have confiscated their life savings or simply shut down. There will be no ATMs operating for people to get money to buy food. Supermarkets would be emptied as they operate on a “just-in-time” supply chain formula that will fail rapidly.
This time there will be no police around, or willing, to stop the riots and looting. This scenario will be playing out all over the country and the world, and cops are just people like me or you, they have their own families and interests to try and protect. This is pretty much what is predicted by all those computer models we discussed.
The breakdown of law and order will be rapid and total early on as the number of rioters becomes too large for the local police to handle. Those police will grasp the futility of the effort and the scope of the problem much faster than the ordinary citizen, and they will take their own actions for survival. The rule of “might makes right” will become the law of the land, and jungle rules mean no rules at all. After all the violent movies folks have seen and the “battle royale” video games they have played, many people will believe that they will have no choice except to be violent to survive. And they will be right by way of the self-fulfilling prophecy such thoughts create. There will still be many who will not come swiftly to such a conclusion, and their social and moral conditioning will make them vulnerable to others who have embraced being insensitive to the value of life.
So many theories out there fail to take into account the widespread presence of criminal elements in society. There are way more out there than most people realize, and if you think that they have not been dreaming of an occurrence just like this, you better think again. The very first to break with social norms will be the ones who have already been broken long ago.
House after house, building after building, will be broken into and raided as desperate people search for food and others ransack for valuables, gear, or simply for the fun of it. You better be prepared to defend your life viciously as desperate people go from house to house searching for supplies. Food and other things will be fought over and quite a few people will meet violent deaths. Many others will die of starvation later. Cannibalism may begin happening as people shed their humanity in the need to survive by any means. Electricity and water supplies could disappear at any moment making survival even more difficult.
Some groups of people may come together for better protection and to form some sort of a temporary community for survival and the pooling of resources. Other people will band together to form gangs that will take what they want by force, and they will see the other groups as targets for such raiding.
With no strong authority to restore order, cities will most likely become ruins in constant violent conflict as different gangs and groups seek to dominate each other. Territories will probably be formed and controlled by quasi-warlords as the stronger gangs take over the weaker. As these groups grow larger they will be forced to send raiding parties further and further out looking for food and supplies. Country survival retreats close to cities and large towns will be the first targets.
So, What About Those Rural Lands?
If you do manage to relocate out into the countryside before the collapse begins you will have your best chances of survival. Simply not being in the vicinity of hundreds of thousands of desperate, angry, and violent people is a big boost right from the start. You will not be part of the chaotic famines and riots that are happening. You will not be exposed to the continuing turf wars and resource raids. That is not to say it will be easy, but it will be a lot easier. You will not be completely safe. In fact, the very belief in the concept of safety is something you need to suspend right away. There will still be the occasional “lone Wolf” type survivor or raiding party wandering out into the countryside firmly on the path of knowing that their best chance of survival is to take what they need by force. At the very least they may raid your supplies when you are not around or asleep at night.
This is why you don’t just need supplies. Your supplies need to be secure and well hidden. The country life may be great, and a fine way to avoid much of the initial chaos of the fall of society, but it will not be the end solution for some time down the road. The very best option is to be able to isolate yourself and your family or small group very far from population centers, and preferably in a location that would not be high on the list for wandering raids to take place. It will not be permanent, but for a little while the world will just be rough. Best to survive it by avoiding it.
After a while the number of roaming people or gangs, indeed simply people in general, will have greatly decreased. You and your family will never be completely safe for a long time so you will always have to act accordingly. But eventually, the opportunity will come to rebuild. Continuance. Until then, the only rules that matter will be yours. You will have to accept and fully embrace the fact that you are the final law in all situations. This is something that involves a tremendous psychological change from the civilized world and life that you once led.
Remember, there will be no true national or world government in existence anymore. At the very best some form of martial law will prevail for a while. But eventually, the government will be ineffective and the military personnel will have disbanded to protect their own families or perhaps they might have organized into some sort of military-based communities with only certain people being accepted. The presence of the military in your surroundings after a collapse probably will not mean help and in fact, they too may just be taking what they need by force, possibly even taking fit people away to work in their compounds. Do not assume anything. Wait until you have facts to make any decisions about people.
What Comes After
Where does the world go from there? Who knows? Who cares? Certainly not I. You have to be able to get that far to find out, and that is all that matters right now. I know that a lot of people give up before they even start. Either depression because of what will happen or denial of the mere possibility of it. Others may fail to prepare because they look at all the traditional prepper doctrine and figure that they do not have the resources or money that such prepping will take, and don’t even know where to start.
Those are the people this is being written for, indeed the entire purpose of this crappy, fledgling website of mine. The rest who already have bunkers and plans and truckloads of stockpiled ammo, I think they already have a plan, and I wish them the best with it. They won’t get much here to change their minds.
For the rest of you sorry souls like me, this is the start of what will be a long line of articles that I hope will help you get ready to stay alive and find the reasons to do so.