The Inevitable Societal Collapse of the USA and How to Prepare and Cope

Originally Posted by packrat

Thankfully we have a rather free press that enables us to be aware of the world around us, and empowers us to adapt to the constant changes in the world, economically speaking. American society has been very capable in gauging these sorts of trends and riding with them, if not on top of them.

Hahahahahaha, that's a good one. America's press is some of the most politically motivated and controlled in the world. American society takes an age to adapt to anything, primarily because yours is such a vast and diverse country that getting everyone to agree on anything is damn near impossible and people naturally fear change, especially people who live in insular communities and believe everything they see on tv.

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By contrast, the generation of value and the distribution of goods and services are intrinsically intertwined in the American system. That system is also not as dependent on the purse-strings of the American government as the USSR was.

Whilst this might be true internally, America is not big on free trade globally. If the prtectionist trade policies your central government has had in place for so long were removed, following the collapse of central government for example, your producers might well struggle to survive once they were exposed to the commercial realities of global markets.

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Finally, if I am interpreting him correctly, Olrov's predictions assume that American society will live in denial and strive to maintain the current status quo until that indeterminate point in the future when it will become completely untenable, and society as we know it will disintegrate. This is just silly in a nation where we have a press that is more than eager to dish out day-to-day dire predictions. Already there are many companies picking up on the predicted changes in the world and are developing more "sustainable" means of living, ranging from power-sipping consumer electronics, to modular energy efficient homes, to even hydroponic skyscrapers. Not to mention the drastic uptick in solar panel sales and waste-energy harvesting methods such as electricity-generating automotive shock absorbers or vibrational generators.
The similarities that Olrov loves to draw between the American system as it is now, and the pre-collapse USSR I feel are shallow at best, and misleading at worst.

Again, this is pretty much nonsense. In America the personal use of resources far outstrips pretty much every other country on the planet and you're hugely resistant to any efforts to curtail this. Consumerism is the driving force behind the economy and the thought of people giving up their cheap goods or accepting a cut back in lifestyle is laughable.

I think America would deal very badly with a catastrophic collapse. That you're willing to spend billions on securing middle eastern oil reserves but won't sign up to global initiatives to reduce emissions because it would cost your businesses too much is a pretty strong indicator of the general mentality. I don't think the comparrison with the last days of the USSR is too far off the mark really although your slightly more cordial international relations might soften any potential blows slightly and you don't have quite the same risk of chunks of the Union splitting off at the first sign of central government weakness.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by packrat

And your last point is just absurd. I can't imagine any nation or society would deal with a "catastrophic collapse" well, seeing as how it would be cata-fucking-strophic.

Not really. Germany dealt pretty well with their economy collapsing under hyper-inflation in the '30s and that was catastrophic. Japan bounced back ok after having two major cities wiped off the planet in WW2 which some would probably describe as a catastrophy. Possibly I was using slightly over the top language but that doesn't make my point any less valid. Look at New Orleans for example. A city built below sea level in a region prone to storms gets hit by a storm then floods and people start raping and murdering each other. What's going to happen when one of the big cities built on a fault line gets hit by a big earthquake? Everyone's going to calmly leave, roll with the changes and carry on elsewhere? Of course not, it'll look like a warzone and given the proliferation of firearms, will possibly become an actual warzone. The kind of localised chaos caused by what cannot be callled anything other than a catastrophic event in a single city, magnified up to a national level in the event of a proper economic collapse and failure of government represents, I would say, the end of your country as you know it.

Now I'm not suggesting that a similar event in any other major city wouldn't result in a similar situation. Should the Thames barrier fail and London get flooded, I'm sure it would be chaotic for a while and given our country's terrible infrastructure for these kinds of things, it'd take years to get over it but I honestly believe you'd see more of people helping each other out than you would of people shooting each other to defend the sodden patch of earth they used to call a house and at the end of it all, there would still be an infrastructure and everything woudl eventually get back to normal.

Obviously I don't know all the ins and outs of every facet of American life and business or whatever, I can only comment on what I know from news reports and opinion (Which I get from a rather less devisive source than you I'd wager) and when you see how much people were bitching when the price of petrol went up a bit last year, I can only imagine what would happen if the petrol just stopped.

And we've actually had that situation here a few years ago when the fuel depots were all blockaded. Sure it was annoying but life pretty much carried on. People just didn't drive, they got on trains or worked from home and there were certainly no fights at petrol stations or any of that nonsense.

I just really think you're over-estimating the ability of the majority of Americans to adapt to even the slightest change, let alone something as fundamental as a life without oil.

There's nowhere I can't reach.