The future of America a 'Shattered Union', page 1

There might or might not be a revolution in the US, but it's certain that our civilization will collapse. War, epidemic, revolution-- something will happen. Why? Because it's inevitable. All civilizations eventually collapse-- that's just the way it goes. Civilizations are living things-- they're born, they live and they die.

Civilizations are founded by people with purpose and determination. They start with raw material-- land, people, ideas, plans-- and from this raw material try to create something. They fight and work and struggle to bring the civilization into being, and sometimes they succeed, as our founding fathers did.

But over time the people who make up the civilization change, and the civilization itself changes. Succeeding generations don't have to struggle as the early ones did-- they inherit the riches that the early generations built. Soon, there's no need to fight to survive-- there's plenty and it's just there for the taking. So the people simply take. And take. And take.

The problem is that the riches of a civilization are finite-- its strength is limited. It reaches a point where those who seek only to take must fight against others who also seek only to take, and all who take can no longer take from a seemingly unlimited stock, but must instead take from a steadily diminishing supply, and eventually from others in the civilization. As the resources of the civilization grow scarcer, and the competition for those resources more acute, more and more people become "have-nots" so that others may be "haves." Eventually it reaches a point wherein the have-nots are so many and the haves so few that the civilization becomes unstable. Most often, at this point, the haves, rather than sacrifice any of what they have fought to gain, seek instead to limit the freedoms of the have-nots in order to protect themselves from the growing threat they pose. This is only a short-term solution, and is actually a long-term failure, since it serves to further frustrate the have-nots. Given enough time, the have-nots WILL rise up and cast down the haves.

The only things that will potentially head this process off are invasion from outside or some sort of massive upheaval of the civilization-- famine or pandemic or something of that nature. As a civilization in its latter years is unstable and relatively weak, these are legitimate threats, but one way or another, every civilization has fallen or will fall.

Sumer, Egypt, Athens, Rome-- all these civilizations fell in just such a manner. The specific way in which each fell differs, but the basic process-- the creation of the civilization, its growth, the consolidation of power and the self-indulgence of the ruling class and disenchantment of the common people, and the inevitable collapse-- was, is and will be the same.