“The End of the World is Just the Beginning”
A new Dark Age.
The End of the World is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization by geopolitical strategist Peter Zeihan is one of the most fascinating books I’ve read in quite a while.
It starts out by noting a couple of things most readers of Culturcidal would just acknowledge out of hand. The United States and much of the rest of the civilized world are piling on an unsustainable level of debt. Furthermore, demographically, the most prosperous parts of the world have aging, shrinking populations.
These two problems also present a third problem that most of us have probably recognized but have assumed isn’t all that big of a problem. That being that the time is going to come very soon when the United States simply can’t afford to put so much money into our military, which means American military forces will be much less involved in the world. Most people reading this are probably thinking, “Good! Let some other nations police the world and be hated for it! It would be great for it to no longer be our problem.” This is a reasonable perspective to have, but it’s also the start of what Zeihan believes will be a disaster far beyond what most people have ever imagined.
To understand Zeihan’s perspective, we have to go back to WW2.
In the years prior to WW2, the world was a very different place. There was no superpower, and colonialism was still in full swing. If your country needed something, you could try to trade for it, or you could take over some much more primitive country and, one way or the other, force them at gunpoint to give it to you cheap. For a variety of reasons, WW2 changed that equation. After the war, the United States was unquestionably left with the strongest military and economy in the world. On the other hand, Europe was devastated. They lost enormous numbers of soldiers, and their industrial base had been heavily damaged. Furthermore Europe, with good reason, feared being swallowed by the Soviet Union.
This led to the United States essentially becoming the beating heart of the free world. The dollar became the reserve currency. We moved toward free trade and opened up our market to our allies to help build back their economies. We guaranteed not just the security of Europe, but we also, at least in a fashion, became the world’s policeman. Granted, we didn’t step in and settle every dispute, but if it impacted the flow of energy, particularly oil – or trade – we took a violently keen interest in making sure things stayed smooth. This didn’t immediately lead to the end of colonialism, but it did eventually make colonialism irrelevant.
Why go through all the hassle of occupying some backwater when you can just buy their goods on the open market and theoretically, 100 of those backwaters could buy your goods as well? All of the benefits of this new system continued to compound when computers and shipping containers came on the scene because it made moving products around so cheap that all sorts of new possibilities opened up. For example:
The average computer has ten thousand pieces, some of which are themselves made out of hundreds of components. Modern manufacturing is borderline insane. The more I learn about the sector, the less sure I am as to which side of the border it resides.
In other words, cities were built in deserts. Primitive nations became relatively advanced. Everyone reading this now has products in their homes that were mined, crafted, assembled, and shipped from dozens of nations all around the world. To us, the whole process seems simple. We go to Wal-Mart and buy what we want or fly to a city in the middle of the desert like Las Vegas and have a good time without really wondering how it can exist at all, but this is an illusion. The world we live in today is actually almost unimaginably complex and it only looks simple because we don’t understand the incredible system that makes it all possible.
What Zeihan would add is that it’s also considerably more FRAGILE than most people realize.
Why fragile? For three reasons mainly.
1) Because the United States (and pretty much everyone else went off the gold standard), capital has been easier to acquire than at any point in history. As a debt-driven economic apocalypse sweeps the world and economies dramatically slow because of shrinking and aging populations, there will be massive levels of DEFLATION, and suddenly capital will become much harder to acquire. This will decimate entire industries, make many businesses non-viable and dramatically slow the speed on innovation.
2) If let’s say Houthi pirates threaten shipping or Panama starts doing things that could potentially make their canal inaccessible to trade down the line, they’re currently either going to get bombed or receive a mafia-style, “It would be a terrible shame if you kept this up and forced us to do something horrible to you,” phone call from the Secretary of State’s office. That’s what makes things like this possible:
The route from Shanghai to Hamburg is a breezy 12,000 nautical miles. At the zippy seventeen miles per hour that modern container ships typically sail at, that’s a cool thirty-five-day trip. The fastest any commercial cargo vessel can sail is twenty-five knots. That’s still three full weeks—a lot of time to spend sailing through waters infested with pirates, privateers, hostile navies, or some combination of the three.
In other words, everything will change radically. There will be pirates. Hostile nations will raid each other’s shipping or refuse to let it pass entirely. Nations in key shipping routes will charge exorbitant fees to allow it to pass through. Pipelines, which are essentially indefensible will be sabotaged at scale. Every middle-man on the planet will find a way to insert themselves into supply lines. If America stops essentially guaranteeing the safety of the world’s shipping, a lot of the trade that’s happening today will either become orders of magnitude more expensive or just WON’T HAPPEN AT ALL
3) Those first two things are an ENORMOUS problem because a lot of nations today are only thriving or EVEN FUNCTIONAL at all because of them. What happens when the capital needed to build new roads, plants, or even farms on a large scale dries up almost completely for a long time? What happens when that leads to big portions of the workforce in many countries moving back to small-scale farming? What happens when a nation’s main exports can no longer reach its biggest customers? What happens when critical imports like cars, tractors, computers, parts of the power grid or fertilizer essentially become non-available? What happens when nations that are reliant on exported food from far away can no longer get it?
Zeihan believes we’re going to get answers to these questions and they’re not going to be answers most of us are going to like.
He believes supply chains of minerals, goods, and food are going to have to become MUCH shorter. Not necessarily inside a particular country, but at least close enough that a regional power can protect the shipments.
That’s going to take time to develop and in the interim, people are going to suffer greatly – and that’s in areas where it’s feasible at all. If you NEED imports, exports, or supplies from halfway across the globe – and many nations do – chances are, you’re going to stop getting them. Many countries across the globe won’t even be able to come close to rebuilding in-house what they were getting through free and open trade across the world. Zeihan believes that will lead to mass starvation in some places and deindustrialization in many others. He particularly seems to think China is doomed:
In absolute terms, the biggest loser by far will be China. China sits at the end of the world’s longest supply routes for nearly everything it imports, including roughly 80 percent of its oil needs. China’s navy lacks the range necessary to secure, via trade or conquest, agricultural products—or even the inputs to grow and raise its own. China’s demographic collapse suggests imminent labor force and capital-supplies collapses. And China’s existing, Order-era agricultural system is already the most hyper financed sector in history’s most hyper financed economy. There is nothing about this that will work in the world to come. There will be no shortage of famines in the post-Order world. Likely in excess of 1 billion people will starve to death, and another 2 billion will suffer chronic malnutrition… Some two-thirds of China’s population faces one of those two fates. And remember, China is also history’s most quickly aging society. The people who will be called upon to manage—or suffer through—mass malnutrition and famine are going to be old.
In other words, instead of the assumption that technology is going to improve and things are going to keep getting better, things are going to get worse, much worse, almost across the board, all over the globe. If there’s a silver lining at all in Zeihan’s view of the world, it’s that the United States is better equipped to handle all of this than any other nation in the world because we can defend ourselves, we can feed ourselves, we have abundant natural resources and almost anything we don’t have, we can get from Canada, Central America or South America, all of which will NEED our cooperation and protection.
Again, that wouldn’t mean the United States wouldn’t be impacted. It would be tough going here for quite a while as we sort all of this out. However, if you had to be any nation on earth after this happened, you’d want to be in the United States.
The most frightening thing about this whole scenario is that it’s a logical, coherent, and plausible worldview. This is something that could very easily happen almost by default and if it did, it could take an extraordinarily long time for the human race to even catch back up to where we are today, much less move even further ahead.
You might think that technology might be able to save us – and maybe it could, but the obvious rejoinder to that is, “How many different parts and materials go into one robot, car, plane, supercomputer, missile, satellite, or rocket ship? Take away even one of those pieces and a million-dollar piece of equipment becomes a paperweight. What happens if it takes us a decades to manufacture those parts or we can’t get some rare earth metal we need for it in sufficient amounts for mass production? What happens if we can get them, but the staggering amount of capital it takes to build them in a factory is so much harder to come by that even in the US, no one can afford to build it?”
What’s being talked about here is the end of the “Age of More,” and the start of a new Dark Age that could take decades or even centuries to fix. It wouldn’t be the first Dark Age our species has endured, but if things went this route, it would be even more painful than the first one.
As a teacher, I see first hand the effect of technology on students today. The majority of students are unable to learn. They are relying on ChatGPT to do their assignments because their grade is more important than actual learning. Give them a paper and pencil test and constantly police the room to prevent the use of cell phones, the majority fail. I constantly get the test is too hard or parent's saying their student has test anxiety. They have test anxiety because the majority do not do homework and if they do, they send each other the answers via text. I can trace who copied from whom within and across classes due to wrong answers and the same misspelled words.
Students no longer struggle with solving problems. If they do not know the answer immediately, they stop thinking and ask another student or look it up on the Internet. There are now Internet sources where students can upload a picture of their math homework and in a few seconds they will get the answer to every question, including showing the work as to how it was arrived at. It is why over half the students fail math every year. In my district, the math teachers now base 90% of the grade on tests because the students cheat like crazy. Most are using paper and pencil tests again to eliminate the ability to get answers through the the Internet. My wife taught math this year and she made sure each class had a different set of tests and had 5 versions for each class. With test creation programs, that is very easy to do. With math, it is as simple as using different numbers for each question.
The new math teachers though are too lazy to do this. They are now using ChatGPS to create tests and grade them. All they have to do is take pictures of the student's test and upload them. It grades the tests and automatically enter the scores into the online grade book. I still grade by hand so I can get a sense of how students are doing and learn what I need to reteach and what I can stop reviewing because most of the students understand the concept. Yep, it takes time. One should not go into education without expecting some long days of grading and lesson planning. I look at it this way. I get a two week break after each quarter and an 8 week summer break. That time off compensates more than enough for the extra hours I put in.
In addition, when I go to meetings with parents, I can tell them exactly how their student is doing without having to look at their grades. I can explain exactly why the student is failing and what the student needs to do to improve. Few teachers can do this today. Back in the day, all of my teachers could do this because grades were recorded in a grade book manually and calculated by hand without the use of a calculator. They did the math in their head.
When teaching science, my students and the younger teachers are amazed that I do the math without a calculator. I can do it faster in my head than with a calculator most of the time. When I was in school, even in college as an undergraduate, calculators were not available and when they became available, were not allowed on tests. I actually learned how to use a slide rule in high school.
A few years ago, the state changed the credential requirements for teaching so many of us older teachers had to take tests to qualify for the newer credentials before we could renew them. I had to take a general science test because I am now expected to teach chemistry and Earth science while teaching biology. This was an online test and we could not bring our calculators. We could only use the calculator available online. I did not think much of it, I have an app that is a scientific calculator. Well, the online app provided was overly complicated and did it was not obvious how to input numbers in scientific notation. I said forget this and used the scratch paper provided and did it like I did way back when I had to know how to do the mathematical functions using exponents with only paper and pencil. I finished the test faster than most and got every math answer correct. I answered questions on chemistry, physics, and Earth science based on what I learned in college and last used in college. Back then, we put in the hours and effort to actually make doing calculations second nature and with only paper and pencil. We had to memorize formulas. Today, students can use notes that contain the formulas so they think they do not have to learn how to use the formula because it is provided for them on the test.
This is the main reason the US can no longer find enough workers to work in high tech or any job that requires math skills. These companies have to hire foreign workers and bring them over here on work visas. The foreign workers then use their job to get any and all family members who want to come to the US visas to do so.
Finally, we have become so dependent upon technology that when it goes down, nothing can get done. Yesterday, when we got to school, the Internet was down and was down for the entire day. This is finals week. The majority of the teachers were giving their finals online. They were not prepared to give a final in the case technology was not working. They canceled finals and told students they would not count on their grade. They could not even entertain their students by playing a video because they needed the Internet to do so.
I gave my final the old fashioned way and graded it by hand. An hour after school, I had my grades done and at that time Internet service was restored and I entered my grades and submitted final grades for the two classes I had that day. Today, the last day of finals, teachers were staying after school and some will return tomorrow to do grades because they did not know how to calculate grades any other way. The finals given on Wednesday and yesterday were taking a long time for the computer system to grade because it was so backlogged with all the tasks that needed to be done during the outage yesterday.
You want to bring the first world countries to their knees, attack and shut down the Internet or electrical grid for days or weeks. Riots will start quickly as people fight over food and other basic necessities. EMPs are easy to make and detonate. That will take down all technology that is not hardened. It will even fry the electronics in your vehicles making them forever useless. I have kept my 1965 Mustang that I learned to drive in and learned to repair on my own just because it is simple to repair and maintain and it has no computerized parts. I have never been stranded because an electronic device failed like I have been with my newer vehicles. There is not a mechanic within a 100 miles of me that can work on a carburetor. I grew up learning how to rebuild them and still have the original carburetor that came with the car because I keep rebuilding it. I also have a few spares on hand so a faulty carburetor will only keep the car down the short time it takes me to replace in and get it functioning.
Very interesting, John. While I have a more optimistic view, what Zeihan discusses (and I have not read is book but now certainly will) reads like a warning to America, mostly. Despite our bloat, and our debt, and our political corruption, I remain steadfast that America must, for its OWN interest, remain the world’s policeman. I know that such an opinion in the Trump GOP is not popular but the simple fact is this: if we do not remain the policeman, no one will. That possibility could very well likely result in what Zeihan predicts. Yes, it’s expensive to protect our allies, and yes some of them take advantage of us, and yes, they are often ungrateful (because they are jealous), but it’s in our own economic interest for them to remain stable and willing and able to supply us with resources we need and buy the goods we produce.
Thomas Hobbes was right: life is nasty, brutish, and short. And, in my opinion, the only thing keeping America and Western Civilization from collapsing into another Dark Age is Pax Americana.