We Are Not the First Civilization to Collapse, But We Will Probably Be the Last

The archeological remains of past civilizations, including those of the prehistoric Cahokia temple mound complex in Missouri, are sobering reminders of our fate.

[chrishedges.substack.com]

{CAHOKIA MOUNDS, Missouri: I am standing atop a 100-foot-high temple mound, the largest known earthwork in the Americas built by prehistoric peoples. The temperatures, in the high 80s, along with the oppressive humidity, have emptied the park of all but a handful of visitors. My shirt is matted with sweat.

I look out from the structure—-known as Monks Mound — at the flatlands below, with smaller mounds dotting the distance. These earthen mounds, built at a confluence of the Illinois, Mississippi and Missouri rivers, are all that remain of one of the largest pre-Columbian settlements north of Mexico, occupied from around 800 to 1,400 AD by perhaps as many as 20,000 people.

This great city, perhaps the greatest in North America, rose, flourished, fell into decline and was ultimately abandoned. Civilizations die in familiar patterns. They exhaust natural resources. They spawn parasitic elites who plunder and loot the institutions and systems that make a complex society possible. They engage in futile and self-defeating wars. And then the rot sets in. The great urban centers die first, falling into irreversible decay. Central authority unravels. Artistic expression and intellectual inquiry are replaced by a new dark age, the triumph of tawdry spectacle and the celebration of crowd-pleasing imbecility.}

As an ancient astronaut theorist follower you get a wide range of this historical existence of civilization collapses worldwide over millennium. There is a theory that at one time, with the earth being estimated approximately 4.5 billion years old, that there could have been a more technological advanced civilization before our time. More than one? People have been looking for it for a long time. That the planet has gone through a number of catastrophic wipe outs. The going theocratic question is whether extraterrestrial beings helped humans with technology unknown to us, or do we just keep killing ourselves off. Constructs on our planet our engineers can't construct today and a jump in evolution that can't be explained. Planet terraforming and gene manipulation?

Are we that close to being victims of another kill off? Our western leaders sure seem to be on that course. I see a lot of rot setting in. And quite frankly, the enemies they manufacture are seemingly the very one's, outside of independent news sources attempting to bring attention to the conditions rising around us to make that happen.

{“Collapse occurs, and can only occur, in a power vacuum,” anthropologist Joseph Tainter writes in The Collapse of Complex Societies. “Collapse is possible only where there is no competitor strong enough to fill the political vacuum of disintegration.”}

When the enemies they manufacture are virtually forced to participate in their failing capitalist system, within the penalties forced upon them for developing competition, the entire world society pays the price. While the world around us currently burns and communities are swallowed by water and mud, as this war in Ukraine rages on, their going concern moves from green energy back to more fossil fuel use and control of who benefits from it.

I recently have been following George Eliason, a journalist in the Donbass region. I find him to be somewhat controversial. While he provides great insight to that conflict he puts out some rather mind bending material that forces one to apply critical thinking. I struggle to find where he is on the political spectrum. A recent post of his on facehack was on a book he's putting together advocating for more nuclear power energy. My reply was one of opposing views due to what it leaves behind, what it does to communities when that waste is transported to communities that end up poisoned. A plant in Vermont that was shut down now has land that will be poisoned for decades that illnesses are higher around, and communities in New Mexico pay the price from the waste from which it was transported from. Reoccurring stories for decades and we really want to continue this scenario? I also mentioned that with perpetual warring on the rise that more of these plants will only provide targets within those wars. Well, sure as shit, days later I guess Ukraine was listening to me as they begin bombing the largest nuclear plant in Europe. In case anyone isn't aware of this yet, the western governments don't give a rats ass who, how many, or how they kill to get what they want. They just blame it on someone else while doing it. Taking responsibility of any means will not be tolerated.

{The city’s hereditary rulers were venerated in life and death. A half mile from Monks Mound is the seven-foot-high Mound 72, in which archeologists found the remains of a man on a platform covered with 20,000 conch-shell disc beads from the Gulf of Mexico. The beads were arranged in the shape of a falcon, with the falcon’s head beneath and beside the man's head. Its wings and tail were placed underneath the man’s arms and legs. Below this layer of shells was the body of another man, buried face downward. Around these two men were six more human remains, possibly retainers, who may have been put to death to accompany the entombed man in the afterlife. Nearby were buried the remains of 53 girls and women ranging in age from 15 to 30, laid out in rows in two layers separated by matting. They appeared to have been strangled to death.

The poet Paul Valéry noted, “a civilization has the same fragility as a life.”}

Vision this as our ruling class and the millions who have died needlessly now at their feet. Let's just go back a century even. As we are mirroring the last century this century today. My argument has and will continue to be that they have no concern to any of our lives, we are exploitable while alive and expendable for death. We're carrying them into their after life while their politicians and medias have broken us and made us to weak to speak for ourselves.

{Across the Mississippi River from Monks Mound, the city skyline of St. Louis is visible. It is hard not to see our own collapse in that of Cahokia. In 1950, St. Louis was the eighth-largest city in the United States, with a population of 856,796. Today, that number has fallen to below 300,000, a drop of some 65 percent. Major employers — Anheuser-Busch, McDonnell-Douglas, TWA, Southwestern Bell and Ralston Purina —have dramatically reduced their presence or left altogether. St. Louis is consistently ranked one of the most dangerous cities in the country. One in five people live in poverty. The St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department has the highest rate of police killings per capita, of the 100 largest police departments in the nation, according to a 2021 report. Prisoners in the city’s squalid jails, where 47 people died in custody between 2009 and 2019, complain of water being shut off from their cells for hours and guards routinely pepper spraying inmates, including those on suicide watch. The city’s crumbling infrastructure, hundreds of gutted and abandoned buildings, empty factories, vacant warehouses and impoverished neighborhoods replicate the ruins of other post-industrial American cities, the classic signposts of a civilization in terminal decline.}

So weak that so many have either grown into acceptance or fail to recognize this reality that has effected every state across our nation. We're no longer the country that provided for the world and viewed as a beckon as a profitable and reliable place to come to, we're a place people flee to when our policies tear their countries apart with no where else to run. Today many of them flee from a hell we created to face hell getting in. Unless you're a member of the opposing construct of the government you're fleeing from, you're surely going to face hell. You have to hold a sense of loyalty to their capitalist system to get the privilege of it today. They feed off our tax dollars, NGO groups, and intelligence agencies for education and training to advocate chaos back home, while we are perceptively managed to falsely believe their average citizens are here only to drain our resources. Resources we really don't have anymore due to decades of printing money out of thin air that went to the ruling class which is an aspect of what this article is about!

I'm not quite on board with Hedges view on over population though. While there are some relevant points made I disagree with some aspects. I strongly believe if we had continued in the field of green technology in the 70s that by now that technology would be greatly improved. I'm quite convinced we're purposely being held back on technology improvements for the continued use of fossil fuels for profits.

The argument that green technologies would exacerbate the same resources use in the fossil fuel industry don't fly. If we had began in the 70s we wouldn't be using those resources as much today within a completed structure over the decades. We wasted 5 decades in reverting to technology that might have already produced better answers, or might already be available but aren't due to purposeful suppression. I'd like to see someone have a discussion with Bob Lazar on that.

Our over population concerns are however evident in regards to the emigration of citizens from towns and cities that collapse to other cities. Large cities are a magnet for the homeless also. The conditions our national policies create simply herd people into large metropolitan areas for the most part. Most emigrants that make it into the country, legally or illegally, almost always get lost in the vast numbers of large metropolitan cities. Gentrification exacerbates these conditions and provides exploitation of large numbers of people seeking employment, highly taking advantage of emigrants and poor working conditions.

A study by the DOD projects that the future of large metropolitan areas are going to become a beckon of uncivil criminal activity and poverty as unrest begins to settle in. With that in mind, or other words. We have yet another aspect of a failing societies on the world scale along with perpetual warring and climate change that obviously indicate our world leaders are on the wrong path, yet continue to fuck everything up within their servitude to the ruling class for their own benefits also. Seemingly they must believe they can rule from the top of a mountain on the north or south poles looking down on all of us and not fry or drown with the rest of us.

You can do a search for that DOD study at Youtube. It was part of a release done by The Intercept. It's about a 5 minute log video. I'd put it on here but people tend to look past my video post. Seemingly spending time on videos for good information isn't worthy of their time. If anyone needs help I'll dig it up for you. I might still have it saved.