Government After the End

Governments have several legitimate functions these days: to try to regulate activities, to provide services that are not profitable but are still essential, and to fill the pockets of the higher-ups; in addition, governments try to tell every Harry, Sue, John, and Jane how he or she should live his life in all details.  After the population drops to 20% of its present level there won’t be enough people available for government service, so government will not be able intrude into the lives of people as much as it might like, but there will still be those who think that the world will end (completely) if everyone doesn’t do everything according to their dictates. Those people will be very disappointed when their case-loads drop to a tiny fraction of what they presently are, and there is a fair chance that a larger than typical percent of these people will be lost in the pandemic, because they think that they have to have a hand in everything. But in addition to there being fewer people around who will need or want government services, and there will less activity that will need government regulation. Put it all together, and there won’t be nearly as much government after the Really Great Pandemic.

There will still be a few services that government will have to produce, but I fear that the ideological struggles that we presently are afflicted with will not go away; there will still be people who will think that individuals are incapable of living their own lives without government oversight and approval. It is also likely that the imperialists will feel that having less opposition will make it an excel time to be active. We can only hope that a higher percent of the population will realize that socialism and fascism are synonyms.

On the other hand, there will be many people who will notice that there isn’t much that will need government regulation. While there will not be nearly as many people to regulate, but the people who feel the need to regulate people would be strongly inclined to tell people what to do, and the pandemic would give plenty of ammunition to both sides. The regulators would assert that it would have been worse without regulation, while the liberals would point out that government intervention had made things worse in some places and no better anywhere. We probably would be stuck with government that pokes into places where it will not be needed. But there probably would be less economic regulation, mostly because there would be so much less economy to regulate, and some kinds of activity probably would cease to exist.

The law enforcement business probably will be vastly smaller, because there won’t be nearly as much crime. Sure there will still be robberies, assaults, murders, etc. but there won’t be many criminals left. Criminals are generally less intelligent than the average, and the pandemic probably will discriminate by intelligence; i.e., intelligent people are more likely to have followed the intelligent path and avoid other humans during the virulent stage of the pandemic, while people of less intelligence are more likely to seek medical assistance, which would bring them into contact with contagion. The re-spreading of liberalism after the pandemic will result in many laws being repealed. Fewer laws to break means fewer crimes. Then there is the matter of there being less economic rationale for criminal activity. There will be jobs for everyone, so crimes will be less attractive.

The great struggle for government will be eliminating old laws that will have become irrelevant. Considering that Massachusetts is still working at getting rid of Puritan inspired laws from the 1600’s, it is likely that the excessive laws of this period will remain until we completely overthrow the old order.

One part of the old order that is likely to remain is the existence of many independent countries, and there will be less need for international cooperation, because most trade is still local.  The call for a New World Order probably will continue, but the rationale for it will have largely disappeared. It will be ironic, if the order of the new world will be classical liberalism.

Demographics After the End

Since we have already determined that there are two potential events that would cause mass destruction that have probabilities that are high enough to think about: an asteroid hit and a deadly pandemic. 

There are too many variables to make more than very general comments about changes in population that would result from an asteroid strike, because the strike could hit anywhere on Earth and the results would be determined by the location and the size of the asteroid. The loss in life could be anything from minor to the death of nearly all humans and other creatures.  This would be the random death version of the great destruction on Earth.

On the other hand, we can make some reasonable predictions about the great pandemic, because it will hit the whole world. Whether any given individual will survive is a matter of chance, but there also would be people with natural immunity. Other relevant factors would be the disease itself, how deadly it was to start with and how immune it was to antibiotics or antivirals. There are diseases that have mortality rates that approach 100%, but the human body can throw off even a deadly disease some of the time. How much contact with the disease one would need to contract it varies widely also, but generally the more lethal the disease, the fewer germs that are necessary to produce a full-blown case. The medium for contagion is another relevant factor. Generally, airborne diseases spread more quickly. And the final factor is how long the disease takes, both incubation period and the time for it to run its course. Diseases that have long incubation periods and that take a long time to run their course are generally less lethal.

With a disease like that making the rounds, the pattern of mortality would be inversely proportional to population density. There would be areas, such as islands and sparsely populated regions, that would suffer few or no fatalities, while densely populated cities might lose ninety percent of their populations. Skin color, religion, political preference, sexual preference, and most other differences among people would make little or no difference, but health, intelligence, and knowledge in disease prevention might make the difference between life and death for some. We might find that people who went looking for help would be more likely to be infected than people who stayed home and hoped that they wouldn’t run out of food before it became safe.

A catastrophe that would kill 80% of the Earth’s human population is not difficult to imagine. If that happened now, then it would bring the population down to what it was in the late 1800’s, about one hundred thirty years ago. That would be a tremendous change, but it would be quite survivable; although things would be different. The largest cities would suffer the most. We can expect that the super-cities with populations over three million could lose more than ninety percent of their populations, and those who remained might not be able to adjust to new situation. The depopulated large cities would amount to less than 10% of the total population, but it would result in the destruction of a large part of the banking and financial industry. In some parts of the world the largest cities house the administration of government and transportation hubs.

I won't go into all of the details, but imagine eight out of every ten people you know not making it through the pandemic. Then adjust that, so that the ones afflicted with chronic diseases will be among those who don't make it. Add to that group those people who involved with public health and welfare agencies. And remember that people in the medical industry are more likely to have been exposed than other people. On the other hand, if you are a commercial fisherman or a miner, then you would have a better chance to survive. Prisons, hospitals, and universities would lose almost everyone. Farmers would do better. The two left probably were reasonably healthy and more likely tha not did not work with the public. They almost certainly are between twenty and seventy years, and they are not obese, nor are they especially slender. If you are in the group, then I may run into you afterward. 

The population would somewhat like the population of the late 1800’s in characteristics in addition to the number. The rural proportion of the population would be larger than it presently is, and it might be younger. There certainly would be few chronically ill people left; the weakest are the most likely to go in a pandemic. Some diseases attack the young, while leaving the mature alone, and others do the opposite, but there is a tendency for older people to be more likely to have a chronic disease, and people with chronic diseases would almost certainly be lost. As noted above, there probably would be a slight advantage for people who were more intelligent and better educated. Regardless of which group you are in, you probably won’t survive, but you already knew that. 

After the End

Maybe I have completely lost my mind, or maybe I have heard too much of millennialist thinking, or it might be from reading too much by “the-end-is-near” types, but I am fairly confident that the human race will undergo substantial change in the reasonably near future. I have already written a novel about the Really Great Plague in which about 80% of humans died from Pneumonic Plague; alas, it was not taken up by a publisher (with good reason), and I haven’t yet rewritten it. The conspiracy theory people are sure that the Illuminati will be behind it, and the Christians think that their god is the moving force. I don’t think that anything except biological processes will cause the catastrophe, unless it will be an asteroid. The exact method isn’t very important, but we can be confident that the population on Earth will be much lower in the future than it is now, but total human population may be higher, if interstellar travel becomes practical. We can’t count that out, unless we want to look like Professor Wilberforce who scientifically proved that heavier than air flight is impossible. But I don’t think that we should rely on that, because it may not become available for some considerable time. We should plan for the world after the end. What should the human world be like when there will again be fewer than two billion humans?

Leaving all possibilities open, what should we plan to have for institutions of control, both governmental and otherwise? What will cities and other places where people will live look like, and how will we get from one to the other? How will rules of behavior change? What will people look like?

The answers depend on when and how the population will be reduced. An asteroid strike will cause population reduction in some areas but not in others. The same is true of a virulent pandemic also, but that would tend to reduce in inverse proportion to population density. Some islands might be unaffected, while metropolitan areas might lose nearly all of their populations.

Remember, this won’t be the end as predicted in Revelations and in the popular press, so some people might be shocked at who will survive. So don’t think about who you would like to have survive. Think instead about what you want things to be like after the population will decrease, and it won’t be like a horror movie; there won’t be zombies, and there won’t be a complete collapse of civilization. And there won’t be shortages of many things; although there may be shortages of a few products.

We classical liberals want the government to be as small as possible. Government seldom does any good for many people, and it frequently gets in the way of people living their lives. There won’t be a lot of people available for government work anyway, because there will be too many serious things for people to do. We will need to continue supplying food and fuel and other goods to the remaining people. There will be surpluses of some things for years, but eventually it will be necessary to replace everything. The stock of Best Buy will only last so long, even with one tenth the demand.

What else will we need to think about?

    There are plenty of people who think that society should be perfectly social; that people should abandoned their individual desires and urges, but animals in which the individuals act for the generality lose the ability to be creative outside of a limited set of situations. Humans who could not be freely creative would not be humans. I admit that most people have few creative thoughts and do very little that is outside the norm, but the outliers are necessary for any social, intellectual, political, scientific, or other change. We need outliers, and that implies that we need a wide variety of people from those who require constant care to those who can imagine what couldn’t be. But having that breadth of intellectual capacity does not require seven billion people. It doesn’t even require one billion.

    Perhaps there should be stringent requirements for becoming an adult such as walking across the Sahara Desert from Timbuktu to Oran, or maybe camping out near the South Pole for a few months (either Winter or Summer), or something else along those lines.

So reader, what do you think? Must it begin here and now, or can we put things off forever? Do we need a new world order, or should we crawl along as we have for these past millions of years?

To the Dogs

I’m not a real dog enthusiast, but there used to be dogs all around. If you walked down the street, then you would meet dogs every few hundred feet. They’d come over and sniff you, unless they were interested in something in particular, and they’d just keep trotting along. Or there’d be dogs chained in backyards that would bark or howl at you as you passed. There weren’t many vicious dogs, but every now and then a dog would bite someone, but the bites were usually minor; intended as warnings rather than attacks. Earlier today I noticed once again that there weren’t any dogs in sight. I suppose that there may be some dogs hidden inside where they can dig into the trash, scratch up floors and woodwork, or maybe they are tranquilized so they can stay inside all day without going crazy. Regardless of the reason, I kind of miss the dogs.

The earliest evidence of the domestication of dogs is only about 30,000 years old, but there are reasons to think that humans have been dealing with dogs for a few hundred thousand years. To a significant degree we two species grew up together; we were eating some of the same things. Dogs became our friends and partners in work. They changed to fill the roles that we gave them. But they also were out friends. They were companions when we walked, whether we were hunting, collecting berries, or just thinking, and they were happy to wander along for a walk in the woods, and run off to play.

More recently dogs were burglar alarms, and they announced guests. Sure they might smell a little, and they shed, but they aren’t as irritating as cats. You don’t need a pit bull to keep intruders away, because few people will gamble on the good nature of any dog, if the owner isn’t present. They even announced strangers at the houses of other people.

I don’t know when regulations that restricted the freedoms of dogs and of people to have dogs were first introduced, but such regulations have expanded to the point where it is difficult for someone to have a dog, but the regulations probably started in densely populated areas and expanded into more rural areas. Now it is rare to see dogs even in actually farming areas. I don’t hang around in the backwoods, so I don’t know how they are doing there. Apparently because of complaints by people who don’t like dogs most of the dogs are inside, where their barking can’t be heard by the dog hating neighbors. Except for some lap dogs, dogs aren’t indoor animals. I’d have to look up the statistics, but I believe that dogs have typically been getting smaller, because people have chosen smaller dogs for indoors.

I’m not a real enthusiast of dogs, but they are pleasant and friendly. Even if you don’t like dogs, they’ll meet you half-way; they’ll give you the benefit of a doubt. If they happen to be sociopaths, then, like people, they will let you know before they attack, but sociopaths are less common among dogs than they are among humans, and I’ve never met a dog that was a religious fanatic. They almost always have the attitude of live and let live. 

I don’t travel much, but I suspect that dogs have become less popular in most of the world as economic development has expanded. It might be a good idea to reverse that trend so that humans can have dogs as exemplars to show them good behavior, and to remind them what to do with individuals who refuse to allow others to live their own lives, within the limits of live and let live. There might be a little barking and droppings, but that would be a small price to pay.

“Is it true that I’m no longer young?”

I don’t worry about it, but as with my questions about the perception of time, I wonder how other people perceive their own aging. There are many signs, both real and illusory, of aging, and they appear at different times in different people’s lives. I have been listening to the Jefferson Airplane recently, and I enjoy their lyrics and sounds more now than I did when they were fresh and new. To a significant degree they reflected an illusory view toward age and aging, that I suspect they are still happy with, and there would be little need to change the lyrics to reflect changing attitudes, even though their opinions were fluid; the fluidity is what I like most about the Airplane.  

Consider the lyrics of “Lather” by Grace Slick. The lyric poem is about Lather having reached the fine, early middle-age mark of thirty years, but, for the poetess, it marked the end of being young (sort of), “Is it true that I’m no longer young?”  The song goes through Lather giving up youthful things, etc., but it ends with the unforgettable lines: “And I should have told him, 'No, you're not old.' / And I should have let him go on... smiling... babywide.” (from Lather” by Grace Slick). 

Some may consider that was a little out of character for an era and philosophical movement that was said to worship youth, and in “We Can Be Together” (written by Paul Kantner) there is the beautiful line “We are obscene, lawless, hideous, dangerous, dirty, violent, and young. Here the reference to “young” was a mark of distinction, something to set us apart from the rest of humanity; it makes a great song, but I see it as a matter of attitude, rather than chronology. I love hearing that line now, and it still refers to me. That song is chock full of ironic contradictions, and it comes down on my side in each case; it’s no wonder that I like that song still. The youth culture of that time was not about chronology; it was about an attitude that included tolerance and intellectual openness, real old-fashioned 18^th century liberalism. It was diametrically opposed to the totalitarian ideas that were (and still are) pushed by Socialists and other movements that think that people can be “politically incorrect”. The incorrectness is in thinking that any individual has all of the answers for anyone else.

My own attitude is reflected more clearly in Bob Dylan’s lines: “Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now” (from My Back Pages), because in most ways I feel younger now than I did when those lines were written.

Which brings me to the point: is one’s attitude toward age and aging determined by one’s age as a percent of one’s total lifespan? When the Airplane was created I was serous-minded and diligent. Alas, I had no significant opportunities for much else, but I didn’t let that bother me. I enjoyed the attitudes and sounds of the Airplane more than any other bands, and when people with whom I associated switched to other noises, it made little difference to me, and I noticed that I didn’t especially like music at all; although I love great lyric poetry. Through the weeks since then, I have become younger and more appreciative of the attitudes of the Woodstock Nation. That doesn’t mean that I think that socialism is a good idea. No, that nation favored no government, rather than government that controlled everything. And yes, I am still an anarchist.

There are a few subsidiary questions that are more personal in nature, and you, oh reader, may want to consider those for yourself.  For one example, I was born on the twenty-seventh day of the sixth month of the 1370^th year; how old does that make me now?