Executive Summary

• In a future defined by diminished economy, due to depleting resources, what can we expect?
• A return to "old-style" cultural norms looks inevitable for:
  • Spirituality
  • Trust & Reputation
  • Values & Virtues
  • Leadership & Order
  • Education
  • Commerce
  • Jobs & Work

If you have not yet read Are You Crazy To Continue Believing In Collapse? available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.

The journey to where we’re going, the transition to the next economy and the society that comes with it, is liable to be harsh and disruptive. Network breakdown will be the order of the day. Money and goods will stop moving. People will lose a lot. They’ll lose property, imagined wealth, comfortable routines, faith in institutions and authorities. In some places they may lose personal security or freedom. Depending on how disorderly politics gets, we may lose family, loved ones, and friends. People will be very unsure of who or what they can depend on. We might expect pervasive desperation, anger, and despair.

Superstition

One thing I fully expect is a rise of superstition as a counterpoint to the widespread disappointment in science, technology, and indeed all the intellectual baggage of the Enlightenment that underpinned our notion of progress. The public that survives the first significant food and fuel shortages will be furious that the genius wizard innovators promised by the late Julian Simon and others somehow failed to make the scene with their magical rescue remedies — cold fusion, thorium reactors, hydrogen-powered cars, vertical farming, et cetera. All those fantasies will seem like a cruel joke and the public will feel hugely let down. In place of empiricism, logical positivism, and other modes of evidence-based thinking, superstition could step forward to “explain” the amazing failure of modernity to save itself.

In the USA we are historically inclined toward a kind of simplistic, apocalyptic religious fundamentalism, so don’t be surprised if parts of the country fall under the sway of evangelical despots.