The article herein was originally written to describe why I called for “The Death of the West”, meaning the death of Western civilization, in a year 2000 post to a closed mailing list discussing Kevin MacDonald’s work.  Pat Buchanan later came out with a book by that title.  However the spin he put on things was rather negative, and the means by which the death of the West would be realized would be highly destructive to the builders of Western civilization.

What I was talking about was the reason why I choose not to exercise my background as a technologist - one of a small number who has previously been called upon to rescue the government from its extreme stupidity in the Middle-East during situations classified by the President as “imminent nuclear war” - to attack the components of Western civilization that are most obviously and directly causing its destruction.  Timothy McVeigh was a soldier.  Imagine someone who is one of 10 men called in by the Joint Chiefs to a “pig fuck” (basically unlimited emergency funding) and work reviewed by the Jasons, could do if motivated.  My country, the “posterity” of the Founders for which its government was Constituted, is under attack by its government and indeed by its own infrastructure.  Not just that, but due to its influence over the world, all of the West was under the same attack.  What could I do?  What should I do as a man descended entirely, so far is as is known, from pre-Revolutionary War Americans?

This article is not a call to arms, but rather a call to prevent disaster from befalling the people currently held hostage by the cities—people suffering from what the head of Clan Campbell recently called “The American Clearances”.  Said disaster will befall them if they don’t flee the cities.  It is only a small, speculative and hence not adequate, part of the work before us before we can minimize the damage caused by terminating the monster that now has us hostage and is slowly destroying us:  Western Civilization.  Moreover it does not deal with the ultimate question of Man’s relationship to Nature from which he rose—so there is yet a missing keystone to complete the general structure that allows Man to create a new Superman, perhaps the heliocentric individual of which I have previously made mention, and leave Nature for future evolution.

New Orleans may be rebuilt but there are good reasons to continue the trend and empty the cities. A pandemic may make this all too obvious. Information technology has largely changed the neolithic basis of civilization and additional innovations will usher in a postcivil era of much richer human choice and sustainability. Postcivil society is coming. The transition will be rough. Empty the cities now to minimize human suffering during the transition.

The Agricultural Foundation

With neolithic agriculture came civilization.

With the Internet and advances in shipping technology we can enter a postcivil era with social organization much closer to that of the Greek demes (kin-based agrarian populations of about 5,000) that gave rise to their Golden Age.

Not only can we enter such a postcivil era, we are entering it. The rate of evolution of human pathogens is much higher now. The availability of technologies that can destroy urban centers is much wider now. The population is much more concentrated now.

Postcivil society will be the result. The only question is how much human suffering can be prevented by taking action to empty the cities before they are forced to seek new abodes.

Decentralized production and local consumption of food is far more energy and capital efficient since it needn’t be transported to urban centers. This needn’t involve a return to old agrarian technologies—although from an examination of household leisure time remaining for most employees after work and other burdens of civilization, it is apparent that civilized jobs are little more efficient for food acquisition.

Moreover, the small residual needs for distribution of food to cover local shortage is far more viable now with “just in time” inventory systems based on efficient, decentralized and very robust communications infrastructure. For example, the trading pits are not a necessity—it can all be electronically distributed and decentralized with reputation networks.

Likewise, huge central repositories of grain and livestock yards are inefficient inventory policies vulnerable to attack and sabotage.

Chicago can go.

Similar arguments apply to almost all other urban areas due to their existence as mere levels of abstraction atop the thermodynamics of food. The primary value of such abstractions remains via the distributed networks of communication keeping alive inter-cultural dialogs for those who choose it.

For instance, as a seemingly trivial example but one which profoundly affects the preferences of a surprising number of urban dwellers, people are profoundly affected by the range of choice of restaurant cuisine. This is so easily dealt with it is quite obvious people haven’t thought a great deal about it. For instance, I know a couple in a small town of about 1,000, an hour’s drive from the nearest urban center, who moved there from major urban areas, and had a taste for international cuisine. They use the Internet to find recipes and instructions on growing herbs and spices to their taste. After developing a set of dishes they particularly like they started inviting friends over on a weekly basis to sample their latest Thai, Mexican, Chinese or what have you dinners. Reportedly they have developed quite a following and could start charging money but they’ve chosen to do it just for the fun of it and have started asking musicians and other performers to show up. This style of entertainment combines the old-style “gracious country living” that seems to have been relegated to the memory hole by mass media entertainment, with the Internet’s access to cultural information.

Homeland Security

As recognized by Control Data Corporation founder, William Norris, in his project to create small, energy self-sufficient farms, and as recognized by founding fathers of the United States such as Thomas Jefferson in his effort to make Yeoman Farmer Conservatism the basis of federalism, centralized population structure creates vulnerabilities.

The obvious vulnerabilities, such as pandemics, bioweapons attacks, nuclear attacks, due to centralization of population, central stores and transportation hubs, need not be elaborated. A decent article on just the threat posed by corporate agriculture is given by the New Scientist bioterrorism special report: “Run, radish, run”.

Residual, Inter-deme Transport Requirements

A primary function of cities is transport of food.

Once food production and consumption is localized, the need for energy is radically reduced to that required to fill temporary localized shortages due to food production short-falls.

The residual function of cities is to provide routing and consolidation of food transport for famine relief.

Cities provide 2 primary functions in transport:

   1. Minimization of road construction by providing central hubs.
   2. Load consolidation for optimal use of fixed-capacity vehicles.

Transport systems minimizing these two functions minimize the residual transportation need for cities.

Aerospace transport renders road construction moot, hence is quite desirable. Shipping via ocean has this benefit to a lesser extent. Land transport should be limited to intra-deme if at all possible.

Variable sized transport vehicles minimizes load consolidation. Vehicle technologies that are relatively insensitive to scale are therefore immensely valuable.

Since human labor is costly and one of the primary failures of civilizations is due to transport of pathogens along trade-routes and humans are the primary vectors of human pathogens, autonomous and/or remote control transport technologies are immensely valuable.

The ideal primary mode of inter-deme agricultural transport is therefore probably:

   1. Aeronautic.
   2. Scalable.
   3. Autonomous.

A Possible Residual Transporter

There is at least one type of transporter than can fulfill the requirements for residual, inter-deme transportation based on autonomous balloon technology.

The large variations in wind direction and speed with altitude, coupled with high speed electronic communication, computation, global positioning and weather analysis creates an opportunity for autonomous hydrogen balloons that fulfill the requirements to empty the cities of transportation hub infrastructure.

The long duration balloon experiment is very similar in some ways to a system designed to fulfill the requirements of emptying the cities.

With vertical sections of the “pumpkin” alternating between aluminized and clear, the sections could act as a series of horizontally polarized high-gain antennae for mesh communication as well as a reflector for a strobe. The vertical axis would have a Dyneema draw string that could tighten down the “pumpkin” shape into a toroidal shape to decrease volume and thereby decrease buoyancy, reversibly. Another potential created by this is to have the rib strings extend together into a composite draw-string in the center with the component strings, going down the sides of the sections, differentially tightened to create an asymmetry in the toroid so that during descent or ascent the balloon could experience some horizontal thrust, somewhat like a parachute. This might be useful during the terminal phase of the flight to tether it precisely (these would be unlikely to land—merely be under control of a ground mooring).

The top of the envelope would most likely have solar cells coated inside of the Mylar. Polymer solar cells are ideal.

Reversible hydrogen fuel cells would provide electrical power as well as converting water and excess power into hydrogen when needed. This aspect of the design is the most problematic at first since the number of catalysts useful for reversible fuel cells are relatively rare and will require some fraction of the transporters to be used on an ongoing basis to keep catalyst supplies flowing to their points of manufacture. The mass levels are, however, are trivial—measuring in the milligrams per cell so it could be a small fraction piggy-backed payload.

Dew could be collected to replenish water supplies for this. In some situations it may be that during upward acceleration the required depressurization of the hydrogen would lower the envelope temperature below the dew point. This might provide some small degree of control over when to collect water although that control is acquired at the expense of a temporary sacrifice of navigation authority—as long as it takes to get the dew rolling down the sides of the balloon. There may be no need to collect dew while in flight but it may be necessary to keep a system aloft a long time and carrying that much insurance water from the ground would be too costly to the payload capacity.

5 mil Mylar is about $2/square yard. Hydrogen is about 35cents per cubic meter. Mylar’s density is about 1.4g/cc. You need about 1m3 of hydrogen to lift 1kg.

The envelope of a 1 ton transporter could be made for about $2000 and would weigh in at about 10% of the raw hydrogen lift capacity.

If replacement amortization and insurance is factored into an initial capitalization, a scaling constant of 1 metric ton of transport per $6000 is reasonable in quantity. The envelope and reversible fuel cell is scalable linearly with the payload and the control circuitry need be no more costly than the $1 chip discussed by Charles Moore which consumes orders of magnitude less power per processing cycle than the CMOS DSP chips from Texas Instruments.

It looks like the entire freight transportation of the United States in ton miles could be carried by balloons costing $300 billion, including replacement amortization and insurance—and that without any use of fossil fuels except possibly as feedstocks for production of polyethylene, and without any on-going energy input of any kind except solar. Since we’re speaking here of residual transportation needs for relief of drought and other food production short-fall conditions, the entire world’s needs could be easily handled by such a system.

See table 1-44 of National Transportation Statistics 2002.

That table gives about 4 trillion ton-miles per year of freight transport in the United States.

With my prior design of a scaleable autonomous balloon, the capital cost of freight transport is about $6000/ton and the travel rate averages 10 miles per hour or so.

Calculating with Unicalc (the units-based calculator):

4000000ton*mile/year;10mph;6000dollar/ton?dollar = 273973 dollar

The 4000000ton needs to be multiplied by 1 million and therefore the dollar amount needs to be multiplied by the same factor.

The result is just under $300 billion capital cost.

The US’s total current transportation in ton-miles is driven mostly by urbanization. If food consumption is co-located with production, the residual needs would be a small fraction of that. The entire world’s residual transportation needs could be reduced to a system with capital costs on the order of $300B and virtually no operational costs.

This ignores a lot of other economic and social changes that must occur—changes that are likely to localize transportation and changes that are probably no greater than those contemplated in “the war on terrorism” where we, in exchange for the privilege of keeping the doors of immigration open and maintaining our dependence on foreign energy, must give up our freedom to the government.

Money

Localizing of vital necessities to within a deme of 5,000 is more achievable if economics are reduced in scale. This reduction in economic scale requires a reduction in monetary scope. The obvious first step in such a reduced scale and scope is the introduction of local money—that is money that is most valuable if spent within a locale.

The foundation of money starts with something backing it. Obviously, there are only two forms monetary backing: 1) the promise of a reward upon the presentation of monetary tokens and/or 2) the promise to protect from punishment those who present monetary tokens (usually as tax payment). We’ll call #1 reward money and #2 punishment protection money. Typically #2 is the least reliable form of money since it easily degenerates into a so-called “protection racket” where those providing the protection also provide the punishment and thereby suffer the incentive to find ever more economically efficient ways of punishing those who do not present monetary tokens to the “protector”.

Unfortunately, natural systems abound with requirements for protection, and it is frequently impossible to assign responsibility for said protection to those incapable of punishing those under their protection. This is the origin of the need for demic money: punishment protection money that is backed by the authorities of the deme. Demic money is not as vulnerable to exploitation by elites due to the fact that demes are consanguineous by definition. Kin altruism is natural within demes and the degree to which elites can exploit their demography is limited not only by its size but by the degree of consanguinity which is high by definition. Plato’s definition of “deme” had a scope of 5,000 individuals—large enough to maintain genetic diversity in support of a primary evolutionary dimension explored by said deme, and small enough that kin altruism is easy to ingrain.

Interdemic money is naturally limited if vital necessities are intrademic. The primary need for interdemic money arises from reinsurance indemnification. Such reinsurance needs arise from drought or invasion by mass entities such as empires. The latter form of interdemic payment is particularly dangerous as it is the way such unsustainable entities communicate their disease—by requiring mirror-like unsustainable structures to resist assimilation—and then co-opting the centers thereby formed so they continue to sap the life from those they are supposed to protect. The primary technique for such interdemic transmission of non-sustainability is urbanization of elites. The primary means of urbanizing elites is to suppress indoctrination against urbanization by gaining control of indoctrination structures. The primary way of gaining control of indoctrination structures is centralization of information sources—a situation that is far more difficult to attain with the advent of computer-based information networks and distributed indexes. There are still dangers, of course, including centralized indexes such as Google, which has already indicated a willingness to suppress certain viewpoints for political purposes. However, the degree to which Google has been able to achieve this censorship has thus far been limited. Nevertheless, it is crucial to understand that Google is founded and run by men predisposed to urbanization and at some point it may become strategically necessary to find alternatives for information indexing.

How Will This Unfold?

This outflow of population to the areas of solar collection of their energy—photosynthesis of their food—to reduce total system complexity will necessarily be driven by the ecological structure of the food chain.

It will likely begin when a few catastrophes hit and cause millions of deaths rendering the apparent “safety” of urban areas a cruel deception. Since there have been no massive wars in the Western World since WW II, there has arisen a profound complacency which has just recently be shaken by the AIDS pandemic, The attacks of 9/11/2001, the de-population of New Orleans and the on-going sacrifice of civil liberties for “homeland security” primarily due to the vulnerability of specialized, highly centralized, structures. Recent fears of a 1918-style pandemic may well be realized in the coming months. The world’s population is far more vulnerable to such a pandemic today than it was in 1918 and there could easily be a billion deaths, disproportionately concentrated in highly civilized societies if cascade effects arise as they are likely to.

As this awareness rises, and people begin to look for genuine security and alternatives to urban lifestyles, it will become apparent that current social constructs aren’t working for people. People will no longer see contributing half of their labor to a government that is resulting in their deaths as a good deal.

Structures stabilized by bottom-up kin-altruism than top-down enforcement will become the obvious solution and people will naturally migrate to those most akin to themselves. Some people will continue to believe the multicultural ideology that maximum diversity within the smallest area is the best way to live and they—too—will find their “kin” as multicultural demes will certainly form near the former urban centers.

Initially, land will be a problem, not because there isn’t enough of it but because of the centralization of ownership.

Localized agricultural consumption, in present circumstances, under which land ownership is highly centralized, requires particularly high-density and low-capitalization forms of agriculture so that tenants can rent inexpensive land and make minimal capital investments (investments that will inure to the landlord as tenancy is terminated) in it while reaping subsistence over a very short period of time. Trophic losses dictate that any investment in such an agricultural system focus on highly efficient autotrophic sources with, at most, one highly optimal trophic layer prior to human consumption. (“Trophic losses” are the losses of food energy that occur in a layer of the food chain. “Autotrophic” means acquiring energy and materials for sustaining life from the inorganic environment—typically photosynthetic organisms that fix carbon dioxide and nitrogen, etc. with solar energy.)

There are few options for such agriculture to deal with this temporary and politically based land shortage.

The only likely option is cyanobacteria or phytoplankton as the autotrophic species, with consumption by a highly efficient human-consumable life form such as a phytoplankton-eating fish. Spirulina (arthrospira platensis), for example, is a cyanobacteria with 20 times the protein productivity per acre of soybeans, and the amino acids are of a far broader spectrum and therefore more nutritious than soy protein. Cyanobacteria are, however, too high in nucleic acids to be directly consumable by humans as a staple. An additional trophic layer is necessary, or an industrial process which, itself, will produce some losses.

To give an idea of how much land area is necessary for this to work, humans burn approximately 100 watts of energy. Optimal spirulina production in the Imperial Valley, California, produces about 100 watts of food calories per 10 square meters of pond. Few areas get nearly the solar flux of Imperial Valley. That plus trophic (or processing) losses to make it human consumable as a staple (say via Tilapia which is an algae grazer) would increase the required land area per person to around 100 square meters.

This is a temporary measure of course, and the 100 square meters per person is an estimate, but such things are necessary to discuss given the dire circumstances that may be facing people during the transition—particularly if they don’t act more proactively.

The land-reform pressures from this restructuring of population will most likely result in a conversion to a clearer distinction between natural rights and taxable rights, with taxable rights forming the basis of the monetary systems previously described.

Since the primary function of government is the protection of non-subsistence property rights, it is sensible to charge a use fee for those rights. Note, I said “non-subsistence” property rights. The point here is that house and tools of the trade are protected from confiscation under bankruptcy law precisely because they are subsistence assets. Where government does not exist, subsistence properties are typically defended by the occupant, whose life is sustained by those assets. Government brings precisely the property rights we associate with civilization—assets beyond home and tools of the trade.

Given the relatively liquid nature of civilization, it makes sense to define “non-subsistence” in some dollar value of assets. Various ways of defining the dollar value are all approximately equal:

    * The median price of housing a person plus the median price of capitalizing a job.
    * The threshold used by the SEC for “qualified investor”.
    * The level of savings insured by the FDIC.
    * Or, for the historically inclined: The market price of 20 arable acres in the Confederate south, a mule, a plow and a small house on such land.

Until a citizen accumulates the subsistence net asset level, they should pay no tax and then pay tax only on the net assets they own above subsistence.

Assessment should be by the owner with government option to force sale and/or by the government with owner option to force sale, thereby establishing a “fair market value” for the exercise of eminent domain. Net assets only would be taxed and would be calculated by subtracting the fair market value of debts against the estate from the self-assessment of the occupant.

Other forms of taxation could be eliminated in a revenue neutral way if net assets, in excess of subsistence levels, were taxed at the risk free interest rate (approximately the interest rate on the national debt).

Indeed, given the centralization of asset ownership that has resulted from the subsidy of non-subsistence property, a subsidy inherent in civilization, it may be the failure to use this tax base is the ultimate cause of the repeated decay of civilizations from ancient times.

However, this time the adaptations of technology make the rise of civilization unnecessary and the threats of technology make it undesirable. The “end of history” may not be the result of a clash of civilizations with one civilization supreme, but the obsolescence of civilization itself.

—-

External links:

pandemic
Golden Age
reputation networks
“Run, radish, run”
The long duration balloon experiment
Polymer solar cells
Reversible hydrogen fuel cells
$1 chip discussed by Charles Moore
National Transportation Statistics 2002
Unicalc
the risk free interest rate