Lessons From the Bronze Age

Brethren,


It’s been a while, hasn’t it?  I’m about to make up for that, so get yourselves some water and maybe some snacks.  The crazy cat lady has wandered out of the trailer park to yap at you again.  


It’s become a habit for me to put on YouTube videos while I’m doing chores, and three in particular prompted me to write you today.  


The first was commentary on how out of touch influencers have become.  I had to laugh, because it’s not just the influencers - they might be the most visibly ridiculous about it, but there’s an entire class of people out there, hundreds of thousands, if not millions, who have no idea what the real world looks like.  


The second was a video about the Bronze Age Collapse.  This was the period in antiquity in which the most advanced civilizations of the age - the Minoans, the Myceneans, the Hittites, among others - all suffered existential catastrophes, with the aforementioned ones falling completely, and others - Egypt, Assyria, Babylon- transforming themselves almost completely in order to survive.  


A third video featured an archaeologist and historian specializing in that region and time period, one Eric Cline, providing seven rules - or lessons, I would call them - that he takes away from the Bronze Age collapse.  I’ll address those first.


So, my take on Mr. Cline’s rules for civilizations facing collapse:


1. Have multiple contingency plans in place.

This is something on which Mr. Cline and I agree.  Mr. Cline mentions resilience in the video. There’s a book, Green Wizardry by John Michael Greer, that presents efficiency and redundance as mutually exclusive. Greer also points out that Americans historically favored the latter over the former, but that’s changed (for the worse, I would argue).  I’ll get into it more later, but as someone who spent a decade working in a grocery store, I saw this prioritization of efficiency and its consequences in real time.


2. Cultivate resilience to invasion.

I agree that cultivating resistance to invasion is a good thing.  I also can’t help but notice that our rulers are doing the exact opposite of that, and have been for decades.  Arguably, more decades than anyone on this earth has been alive - Emma Lazarus wrote The New Colossus in 1883, and while the Hart-Cellar act wasn’t passed until 1965, Emanuel Cellar had been pushing for it since the 1920s. Depending on how you look at it, brethren, all of us were betrayed before we were even born.


3. Be self sufficient, but avoid alienating allies.

Agreed.  I would say this dovetails nicely with “Speak softly and carry a big stick.”


4. Be innovative and inventive.

Agreed, to a certain extent. And you don’t get there by weaponizing the chilling effect.


5. Prepare for extreme weather.

While Mr. Cline uses the opportunity to pay obeisance to the current hegemon on climate change, he also specifically mentions hurricanes.  As a daughter of the Gulf Southeast, I can confirm that you can and should, regardless of how destitute you may be, prepare however you can for a hurricane.  And since there is no part of the US in general and the South in particular that is exempt from natural disasters, every household should have a plan for those disasters which can be reasonably expected.


6. Have a secure water supply.

Here he mentions California specifically, and its disputes with its neighbors over water rights. Jokes about socialism aside, this is also something to keep in mind if you’re fortunate enough to be in the market for land and/ or a home - whence will your water come? If your local utility goes down for whatever reason, or your well runs dry, will you know what to do? Do you have the knowledge and means to purify water in the aftermath of a natural disaster?  


7. Keep the working class happy.


The ruling class are doing their best to insulate themselves from this need by utilizing technology - insert reference to Flock cameras here - but that’s nothing new.  Governments have been surveilling their populations by whatever means were available to them for as long as governments have existed.  What’s new in the modern age is the extent to which people have made themselves vulnerable to this, what with the “smart” devices and allowing exactly the rapacious hominids into office who ought to have been kept furthest from any sort of power.  


The Bronze Age collapse may be thousands of years past, but human nature has not changed fundamentally in the ages since.  If anything, our more advanced technology and higher standards of living have enabled vast swathes of the population to live in delusion, in a way that would have killed them in pretty much any other era.


The influencers that first video commentator mentioned are one such group. I doubt a single one of the twits chattering at her camera while doing makeup, or repeatedly using the word “simulation” to describe her experience in a grocery store, would be able to survive on her own merits in an age when doing so would entail actual work - or, if I may be so crude, work beyond opening her legs. (Though it may be argued that opening their lives to the Internet in the way that many, if not most, of them do is even worse.)  


And now that I’ve mentioned grocery stores, I’ll expand on what I mentioned about them earlier.  


I worked in a grocery store bakery for years.  In that time, I saw less and less actually made in the store - and the ways in which customers inquiring about the change asked about it mattered. Management could get around giving a forthright answer by saying that the product was “baked” in the store, or by answering in the affirmative when a customer asked if something was “made” in the store.  As far as management was concerned, a product was “made” in the store if it wasn’t delivered packaged and ready to be put straight on the shelf.  No, the way to get management to admit that something was shipped in pretty much already made was to ask if it had been “mixed” in-store.  In the time I was there, at least a couple of different kinds of bread went from being made entirely on-site to getting shipped in partially baked, since someone figured out that they could put in twice the amount of yeast and still get rise when the bread was baked in-store.  It was more cost effective for them to do it that way, since it freed up more time for the bakers, but they still got the benefits of customers smelling fresh baked bread and seeing personnel removing it from the oven.  Some stores even have fans that waft the scent of freshly-baked product further out of the bakery.  


Another thing I saw in my years there was more and more automation of the ordering system, and less supplies kept on hand.  This was one of many metastizations of JITT out of manufacturing.  


JITT stands for Just In Time Transportation. It refers to a system in which just enough supplies are kept on hand to last you until your next shipment of supplies. It’s a very efficient system, but not at all redundant.  If that next shipment doesn’t arrive on time, if the order isn’t right, if just one thing goes wrong, you have a problem.  And in transitioning to this system, we often did.  This was made worse by the ordering system being designed to track which supplies were being used and ordering based on what the data suggested would be needed. In theory it should have saved time, but in practice it necessitated a lot of overtime from the manager, assistant manager, and one brown-nosed baker with managerial ambitions.  


The line from management there was the same as the line from management from a hospital where I worked, whenever I asked for a shift partner because the workload wasn’t safe for just one person to be handling it:


Please bear with it for just a little longer.  I just need data to take to upper management.  I just need numbers to back up my request.


Lower and middle management weren’t seen as competent professionals running departments.  They were seen as functionaries.  


And my own manager wasn’t the only person from whom I saw this in the hospital. Doctors were treated much the same.  The hospital switched over to a new charting system while I was there; and while I never had to chart, and never saw the system myself, from what I heard doctors had to check symptoms on a checklist, and the program would suggest tests to run.  If a doctor chose not to run that test, they had to input their reason why.  


When I heard that, I was powerfully reminded of something I once read in the introduction of a book called The Coming Plague. Author Laurie Garrett wrote about her uncle, a WW2 medic and doctor, and the apprehensions of himself and his colleagues in turning over the field to successors who had never had to practice in a time before antibiotics, who had diagnostic tools at their disposal which meant that they had never had to develop the finely-tuned diagnostic sense of the elder doctors, and who had never seen polio.  


Those apprehensions were well-founded. In some ways, the Third Worlders who have seen things like smallpox or measles are better prepared for medical training than their more sheltered classmates. It’s the same problem we’ve seen in the arts: creatives who had seen war, or at least had to earn a living through hard work before their art was good enough to make them self-sufficient, made better art than "nepo-babies" who have lived in a money bubble their entire lives.  


Which brings me back to the first point I wanted to make: there’s an entire class of society that has no idea what the real world looks like. It boggled my mind to realize that there are hundreds of thousands, or more probably millions, of people just in this country who honestly believe that every single human being who exists wants to, and deserves the opportunity to, live a dignified life.  


Not all of them are able to articulate it. Not all of them realize that this is the reason they vote the way they do, why they’re so susceptible to propaganda, why their overabundance of empathy is so readily weaponized against them.  But they’re out there. They’re out there, and they vote.  


These are the people who give money to beggars, who vote for welfare, who virtue signal at any and every opportunity, and think themselves good people for it. These are the people who take SSRIs to help them quash the knowledge, deep down, that they aren’t good people and that they aren't helping. Introspection would help them more, but they find “affirming” therapists so they aren’t pushed to do any, because beneficial introspection hurts.  It hurts to look at yourself and identify the areas in which you’re wanting, in which you’re not good enough.  It’s hard to actually better yourself.  


It’s so much easier to use “self care” as an excuse to do what you want, to buy what you want, and to act in accordance with your nature.  It’s so much harder to choose to be better.  


And that’s just with the weak-willed who go along with the prevailing ideology. It’s so much worse with those who are actually mentally ill. Instead of being helped, they’re being enabled.  


I hate it when people call addiction a disease.  I refuse to. Not because this is incorrect - it does function like one.  But part of the reason medical personnel and the public are pushed by the ruling class to use the word “disease” for addiction is to lessen the stigma associated with it, and to lessen the role of personal responsibility in its management.  


Addiction is a failed coping mechanism; nothing more, nothing less. Society isn’t willing to admit that the reasons people become addicts require a lot of introspection, and a tremendous amount of willpower, to correct. It’s not as simple as giving them a lifelong prescription and calling them cured. And hardly anyone is willing to admit that no one else can do it for them. If an addict is to be anything more than an addict, they must understand why they turned to addiction, face whatever drove them to it, and commit to not using that addiction as an escape and a coping mechanism for their problems for the rest of their lives.  Because that’s yet another thing society isn’t willing to admit - an addict will forevermore be an addict. The want will always be there, and the addict has to choose every day to turn away from it.  When stressed, they might have to choose every single moment of every day to turn away from it.


I bring up addiction with mental illness because both require enablers, and society in general has been far too willing to enable those suffering with both or either for far too long.  This is what outsourcing social functions to the government has done.  


The truth is, welfare shouldn’t have any place in government.  Boomers will pitch a fit when told this - don’t speak ill of Medicare in front of a Boomer unless you want spittle flying at your face - but that doesn’t make it untrue. And even otherwise reasonable people will bend over backwards to find excuses for their pet programs when presented with the mere suggestion.


“Social Security would’ve worked if Congress hadn’t gotten their hands on it.”

“Social Security is just me getting out what I paid in.”

“If I didn’t have Medicare, I wouldn’t be able to afford any healthcare at all.”  


Social Security is a Ponzi scheme that gives those who have aged out of the workforce a pittance of what they paid in - inflation doesn’t benefit the working class. Beneficiaries aren’t getting their own money back. They’re getting what’s being paid into it now, money extorted from their heirs. Congress was always going to get their hands on it. Congressmen don’t become Congressmen because they’re principled, at least not anymore. There is no way to protect any program from being pilfered by politicians and bureaucrats. The only way to keep politicians and bureaucrats from stealing government money is to keep the government on such a shoestring budget and under such close watch that they literally can’t steal from it.  

Another thing society is unwilling to admit is that not everyone deserves charity. One reason why the homeless often spurn shelters is because shelters have rules.  A homeless addict, a lot of the time, would rather call 911 and go to a hospital than go to a shelter when the weather is too bad for them to remain on the street.  And when they get in the hospital, laws requiring staff to provide care means that those same "people" can abuse medical workers to a ridiculous degree, sometimes involving permanent injury, before anything is done about it.  


Polite society is not ready to admit that not everything human-shaped is worthy of being called human.  


The ways in which society traditionally dispensed charity - through churches and social groups - meant that there was a standard to which those seeking help had to rise (or at least to appear like they did, or were trying). Laws justifiably prohibiting government from discriminating amongst its citizens in distribution of resources to which they are entitled means that the unworthy are enabled to become resource sponges - contributing nothing, absorbing everything they can.  


Do you have any idea, brethren, how many of your tax dollars subsidize addiction? And not just narcotics or alcohol. Do you have any idea just how many medical personnel and firefighters are injured every year in treating bariatrics?  


It’s not even the eating themselves to death with which I take umbrage. It’s that someone can eat themselves to death, and maim others in the doing. Not because they’re trying to, but because moving a bariatric patient is more dangerous than anyone who hasn’t had to do it could realize.


With this, as with alcoholism, as with opiate addiction, they are enabled.  And not just in the obvious ways.  


The FDA is a joke. There’s a revolving door between Big Pharma and the FDA. Both government and the moneyed interests that own it have incentive to keep the population fat, lazy, stupid, and most of all, complacent. There’s no telling anymore what’s in your food, even if you make it yourself. Hell, even if you grow it yourself, because how are you to know exactly what is in the air and in the rain?  


Though at the very least, it’s not as damaging as what’s in the grocery store. The Amish certainly don’t have the same rate of obesity as the rest of the population. (And honestly, I’m starting to think they were right about technology in general, if not electricity in particular.) 


There are other things, too. Hormonal birth control was implemented without any long term studies (at least to my knowledge) of what using it for the duration of a woman’s reproductive years will do to her.  The horrors of unrestrained transgender ideology has shown what irresponsible use of hormones can do to the human body. So why are we so cavalier in the use of hormonal birth control? It’s become ubiquitous in general society, and that should be terrifying.  


I said all of that to say this: our rulers hate us, and they act like it.  


The most recent edition of Islander magazine asked: What is to be done? I perhaps lack the intellect to find their answer particularly coherent, but my own remains what it has been for as long as I’ve seen fit to heed the question:


Take care of your own, become as independent as you can, and do your best to make your home a beautiful refuge for you and your loved ones. Develop and refine practical skills. Read things that grow your mind, avoid brain-rot, savor simple pleasures, take joy in what you build. And when you can’t help but worry, when it feels like too much and you can’t quite banish the anxiety: pray.  


A civilization’s fall can’t be stopped by just one person, but we can each look after our own little corner of the world, and make it a better place.  When you do that, it has a ripple effect. Is it grand? No. But it doesn’t have to be.  


Being grand is overrated. It’s better to be worthy. Worthy of your name, worthy of your heritage, worthy of the blessings left to you by your forebears and given to you by God. 


Go forth, brethren, and proveyourselves worthy.