Anasazi Rich: Kings, Commoners, and Collapse

For me, it all started with the Anasazi. Those ruins in the desert. Enormous stacks of mute stones, placed there by hands motivated by…what?

I asked myself the same questions everyone asks when they visit an ancient Anasazi city.

“What was life like? Where did people come from? How did they find enough to eat in the sere, arid landscape and build such enduring structures? And the big question. Why did they mysteriously disappear?” —“Travel: A road trip to ruins,” by Marion and Rich Patterson, September 13, 2015, The Gazette (Iowa).

I began reading and quickly realized that the Chacoan Anasazi had an organizational structure and energy unlike anything around them. That came from somewhere. From something.

And then I realized that it was that very organizational structure and energy that not only allowed them to rise from the pit-house hovels of desert farmers, it also doomed them to collapse.

It’s classic human short-term thinking, for instance, to believe that the market can go up forever. That real estate prices will climb…forever. That population can grow…forever. That we can keep coaxing more and more calories out of Planet Earth forever.

But you don’t have to step back far to realize that’s a fallacy of micro-thinking. Of limited perspective. Of hearing and seeing no evil. Of deluding ourselves.

Because nothing can increase and grow forever. Not within the limited boundaries of our planet (which gives rise to our hopes and dreams of space and time travel, a way to escape our bounds).

I re-read Collapse, by Jared Diamond, for this Author Note. His conclusion is pretty straightforward: Human-caused degradation of our environment, coupled with natural cycles and forces of environmental change, exacerbated by population growth (a result of the success of our technology), and distorted by wealth and power inequality…leads to collapse.

Just like the Anasazi.

And the Maya, Easter Islanders, Greenland Vikings, and countless others.

So I began searching for modern signs of these indicators. They’re not hard to find.

Climate change, some of it human-caused, is a foregone conclusion.

Global population is growing exponentially. We passed our first billion in 1804. Our second billion 123 years later in 1927. Our third billion thirty-three years later in 1960. In 2015, there are 7.3 billion people on our planet. (Source: “World Population Growth Through History,” Annenberg Learner.)

In my lifetime, world population has grown by 160 percent.

By 2050, we will be just a few short years away from hitting the 10 billion global population mark. (Source: “10 projections for the global population in 2050,” Pew Research Center.)

If, that is, we don’t collapse first.

And then I began thinking about what we can do about it. We are humans. We have large brains. We can’t just grow as a species until we hit our limits and then all die, like a strain of bacteria in a laboratory petri dish. That’s absurd. Unacceptable. We can do better. Why aren’t we?

And if technology cannot save us, if it leads to more environmental problems and more population growth (read on below), which, historically, it does, then that leaves…wealth and power inequality.

Next week, I’ll go down the path of income inequality in our modern world, and the trends of that.

For better or worse, I earned an MBA in “corporate financial analysis” a decade ago, which turned my attention to macroeconomics, compared and contrasted with economic policy and the practices of business (especially super-sized big business) in our “free” economy (our economy just barely resembles a truly free market). I wallowed in that for months. But, like everything I research, it’s fascinating.

Spoiler alert: The conclusions are scary, especially in the context of Jared Diamond’s leading indicators for cultural collapse.

After researching all that, the storytelling/novelist black box in the back of brain started working.

What if an obscure economist somewhere calculated how much our economy would have grown if ultra-rich people hadn’t hoarded wealth? What if that wealth had been shared reasonably with the increasingly productive workers who actually generated that wealth? Would that economist then have a way to calculate the economic price on the heads of rich people, a price paid by the working class?

Yep.

What if that economist won the Nobel Prize for his work?

What if rich people became alarmed by his message and tried to stifle him? What if that economist’s over-protective long-lost brother turned out to be a former CIA assassin with a bunch of angry buddies?

That was the inciting idea that became Price on Their Heads: A Novel of Income Inequality and Mayhem.

I am, far more than an MBA geek and rabbit-trail researcher, a storyteller. A life spent writing short stories and novels, a decade in the magazine business, and even longer in book publishing will do that to you.

And it all started with the Anasazi.

So, how much wealth and class disparity was there in the Anasazi days? That’s a good place to continue from here.

The Anasazi were egalitarian…until the Chaco Canyon period

Throughout the course of their existence, most archaeologists conclude, the Anasazi were a supremely egalitarian people.… The great exception to this general rule…erupts at Chaco between A.D. 900 and 1125. —In Search of the Old Ones, by David Roberts, p. 76

Modern Puebloans, meaning since the Chacoan Anasazi collapse, are also supremely egalitarian people. It’s as if during the Chacoan period, the Anasazi became a very different culture.

That’s a strong reason to postulate theories about invaders from the outside, perhaps hyper-violent Toltecs from Mexico (or local people highly influenced by the Toltecs), being the impetus for the rise (and ultimate fall) of the Chacoan Anasazi empire.

As we’ll see, during the height of the Chaco Canyon Anasazi, they were anything but egalitarian. They were strictly segregated into extreme class divisions, and, in all likelihood, that tipped the culture so out of balance with its unforgiving agricultural environment that it ultimately led to collapse.

The Anasazi before Chaco were so egalitarian it probably made them an easy target of a small group of power-hungry invaders. But the Puebloans since are likely strongly reacting against the horrible experience of their Anasazi ancestors, and clinging to egalitarianism as a way to avoid that ever happening again.

So far, it’s worked for them.

Toltec kings influenced the Anasazi rich of Chaco Canyon

At the peak of its glory, near the end of the eleventh century, Chaco commanded an even farther-flung trade [than the regional Chacoan road system implies] in exotic goods: macaw feathers from Mexico, seashells from the Sea of Cortez, turquoise from eastern New Mexico. The Mexican links may prove that Chaco was in contact with the Toltecs, who ranged from central Mexico to Yucatán and Guatemala, and who at the time were the most advanced civilization in North America. —In Search of the Old Ones, by David Roberts, p. 160

The great Maya city states of Central America flourished between A.D. 200 and 900, after which the Toltecs rose north of present-day Mexico City, only to themselves collapse in A.D. 1168, probably at the hands of invading tribes that became the Aztecs.

Yeah, it’s confusing. Partly because the Maya people are still around today speaking their Mayan language. Like the Anasazi, their people didn’t collapse, just their extremely class-divided culture that built the famous cities that are now ruins in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico: Chichen Itza, Copán, Tikal, and many others.

There are significant parallels between the collapse of the Classic Maya culture and the Anasazi collapse.

Maya “kings” ruled over a society that expanded until they lived beyond their means, and when their local environment went through a few more drought cycles than their too-large population could take, everything collapsed.

Kings tend to fall hard and take down a lot of people with them.

Chaco Canyon society had strict class division

Chaco society turned into a mini-empire, divided between a well-fed elite living in luxury and a less well-fed peasantry doing the work and raising the food. —Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, by Jared Diamond, (p. 149)

Perhaps trying to mirror or reproduce the rich lifestyles of former Maya kings and the current Toltec kings to the south, the Chacoan Anasazi kings created their own mini-empire among the new middle class of farmers in the Four Corners region of the American Southwest.

The pre-Chacoan Anasazi were “middle class” because they’d learned to farm well enough to produce surplus calories that could be stored and transported (dried corn, beans, and to a much lesser extent, squash), thus creating an economy of sorts.

That gave the new Anasazi rich, the new kings, someone to tax.

Don’t you know that made those farmers mad?

“Those snooty Southerners, coming in here and demanding our food! Who do they think they are, anyway?”

So why did they give in?

Because the new Southern Kings were brutal beyond belief. Anasazi commoners were essentially enslaved by cult ceremonies and the threat of cannibalism.

“Give ’em whatever they want, okay? Anything to make them leave us alone. We’ll starve before we let them eat us.”

Chacoan Anasazi: A three-class system

Styles of buildings indicate a three-step pecking order: the largest buildings, so-called Great Houses, in Chaco Canyon itself (residences of the governing chiefs?); outlier Great Houses beyond the canyon (“provincial capitals” of junior chiefs?); and small homesteads of just a few rooms (peasants’ houses?). —Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, by Jared Diamond, (p. 149)

Chacoan society settled into a three-tier class system. There would be a High Priest at the top, living in Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon. He (or she?) would be surrounded by a huge supporting cast of bureaucrats and sub-priests and muscle-men (the actual cannibals?) and engineers and architects.

There are so many storage rooms in Pueblo Bonito and other enormous buildings of Chaco Canyon, it seems obvious the kings were smart enough to store food against hard times.

That probably helped lead to population growth—the rains around the farming region of the Four Corners is and was notoriously spotty. Some farmers would have had big surplus crops in a good year, while others just a few miles away would have no crop.

The High Priest, being in charge, could give those starving farmers enough food to get by, thereby earning their loyalty without having to kill, cook, and eat them as punishment for not paying their taxes—all of which accrues to a higher population.

Even a cruel king, if he’s shrewd, appreciates the political power of mercy.

You don’t have to keep as big an army of terrifying flesh-eaters when you show mete out just enough mercy.

Don’t you know that made the Chief Warrior angry?

“I need at least twenty more warriors next year,” says Pók, the Chief Warrior.

 

“Do you know how much dried corn that will cost me?” asks the High Priest. “No. I can buy more loyalty feeding starving farmers than your warriors can get me, especially as much as they cost to feed and train. And when the rains come, those farmers will make more corn. Your warriors never do that.”

 

“But they can feed themselves on those incompetent farmers! That’s what they do! It costs you nothing!”

 

The High Priest snorts and stares across the bright courtyard for a few moments. “Your subhuman warriors can eat the subhuman farmers if they don’t send a tribute three years in a row. You understand? That’s my final word on the matter, now leave me!”

You know, just like in the halls of the U.S. Congress and White House today, conversations like this go on—just not the “eat them” part of the conversation. Warrior chiefs always want more warriors. The richest man at the top always wants more riches.

Pueblo Bonito: House of the richest of the Anasazi rich

The highest concentration of luxury items located to date comes from Pueblo Bonito’s room number 33, which held burials of 14 individuals accompanied by 56,000 pieces of turquoise and thousands of shell decorations, including one necklace of 2,000 turquoise beads. —Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, by Jared Diamond, p. 150

Wow. That’s a lot of worked turquoise.

Considering that the Chaco Canyon elites consumed an enormous amount, but produced very little, this was a great burden on the carrying capacity of the local environment.

Workers who drilled and cut and polished the turquoise had to be fed. And if you make a pile of 56,000 pieces of worked turquoise to bury with the king(s), then you can’t use it to trade for food.

Those outlier peasant farmers, again, are being taxed at a very high rate. No wonder the Anasazi farmers finally went on strike at the bitter end.

Can you imagine the secret meetings? Do you think they had hand signals or signs they marked on the ground to denote a gathering after the next full moon to talk about organizing against the High Priest?

Sure they did. That’s what humans do.

And the Chief Warrior had spies everywhere. The leaders of the farmers’ rebellion were likely blacklisted and, ultimately, killed, cooked, and eaten by the ragtag band of ultra-violent refugee warriors who fled to Chaco Canyon from the Toltec culture to the south.

We modern Americans have avoided cannibalizing our labor force, thank goodness. Though our rich people in charge haven’t treated organized labor very well.

The Ludlow Massacre was an attack by the Colorado National Guard and Colorado Fuel & Iron Company camp guards on a tent colony of 1,200 striking coal miners and their families at Ludlow, Colorado, on April 20, 1914. Some two dozen people, including miners’ wives and children, were killed. The chief owner of the mine, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., was widely criticized for the incident. —Ludlow Massacre on Wikipedia

The chief owner of the mine is kind of like the Chief Warrior of Chaco Canyon. Those subhuman miners aren’t going to take money out of his pocket, by golly!

Even though putting more money into the pockets of the laborers would stimulate the economy and grow the Gross Domestic Product by increased consumption of a growing middle class.

Instead the Chief Warrior, John D. Rockerfeller, Jr. amassed a fortune based on monopoly powers in oil and mining businesses that kept American GDP growth small—imposing a hidden tax on Americans that went directly into the Chief Warrior’s pockets.

After Rockerfeller’s Standard Oil was broken up by historic antitrust decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1911, the economy boomed:

In a last, ironic twist, Rockefeller emerged unscathed once again—and wealthier than ever, thanks to the multiplying value of his shares in the 33 subsidiaries created by the decision. —”Rockefeller on Trial,” from the show American Experience on PBS.org.

Think how much richer, overall, Americans would have been if Rockefeller had to play by the rules of free enterprise rather than lying and cheating his way to a monopolistic stranglehold of the oil and mining market? It would be a lot. There’s a high price paid by society to support the likes of John D. Rockefeller, Jr.

Just like there was a high price to pay by Anasazi farmers to support the Chaco Canyon elite.

Children of the Anasazi rich prospered

[D]ifferences in infant mortality and longevity…between a baby born at Pueblo Bonito and another born at Site 627 across Chaco Canyon in A.D. 1100 [show that] the Pueblo Bonito baby was three times more likely to live to adulthood than the farmhand’s child a few hundred yards away. —Anasazi America: Seventeen Centuries on the Road from Center Place, by David E. Stuart, p. 145

That’s not surprising. Who wouldn’t take care of their children better if they were rich? All of us would. It’s human nature.

Their legacy could live a long time beyond the first Anasazi king’s life, just as it has for John D. Rockefeller, Jr.

Rockefeller’s greatest legacy—his family—lives on, spanning more than 200 surviving individuals and possessing a collective net worth of about $10 billion, according to Forbes’ list of America’s wealthiest families.— “The Rockefellers: The Legacy Of History’s Richest Man,” by Carl O’Donnell, July 11, 2014, at Forbes.com

Would that collective net worth of $10 billion have contributed to a higher standard of living among a significant number of Americans had it been shared with the productive workers who earned it rather than as a legacy of a man who lied and cheated his way to create a monopoly that amassed a great fortune at the expense of countless impoverished but productive workers who generated profits for his companies?

I’m not enough of an economist to calculate that. But my MBA in corporate financial analysis (yeah, five years of night school to get that) makes me shout, Yes!

If I were an Anasazi farmer who managed to avoid the teeth and stomachs of the marauding cannibal warriors, I might have had the same instinct about the High Priest’s monopoly on corn.

Anasazi rich: taller and healthier than poor farmers

As for evidence that the chiefs ate better than did the peasants, garbage excavated near Great Houses contained a higher proportion of deer and antelope bones than did garbage from homesteads, with the result that human burials indicate taller, better-nourished, less anemic people and lower infant mortality at Great Houses. —Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, by Jared Diamond, p 150

I wonder if John D. Rockefeller, Jr’s descendants were taller than him?

Jay Rockefeller, great-grandson of oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller, Jr., was 6-feet, 6½-inches tall. —Jay Rockefeller chart on AstroTheme.com.

I can’t find a legitimate reference for the oil tycoon himself. But I found this for his father:

John D. Rockefeller, Sr., the oil tycoon’s father, was 5-feet, 11-inches tall. —John D. Rockefeller Biography on IMDb.com.

So I think we can safely say, with one data point reporting, that modern times mimic ancient times: The descendants of the rich are taller.

Rat race of the rich, Anasazi or not

Like Easter Island chiefs erecting ever larger statues…and like Anasazi elite treating themselves to necklaces of 2,000 turquoise beads, Maya kings sought to outdo each other with more and more impressive temples, covered with thicker and thicker plaster—reminiscent in turn of the extravagant conspicuous consumption by modern American CEOs. —Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, by Jared Diamond, p. 177

Yeah, but Jared, does the “extravagant conspicuous consumption by modern American CEOs” contribute to the downfall of our culture? Are we going to crash and burn because of the too rich? Are they driving our economy into the ground, wrecking the middle class, and undermining democracy and our cherished American way of life even more than pipsqueak overseas terrorists the media screams about all the time?

You know, like the Maya kings.

Like the Anasazi rich.

Like the irresponsible masters of nearly every culture that has dramatically collapsed in the history of our known world.

I’m afraid of what that answer might be. But we’ll only know after our own collapse happens.

Maybe we’ll get lucky and it’ll hold off while we’re alive and only our children and grandchildren will suffer. (It makes me cringe just to write that, even though I know I’m being ironic and wry and all that.)

Or maybe technology will save us.

Or maybe the 99 percent will revolt at the voting booths and elect leaders who will save us.

Or maybe aliens will arrive and save us.

There’s always hope.

How Anasazi rich stay in power: foment war

As summed up in the book Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda, published by the organization Human Rights Watch, “this genocide was not an uncontrollable outburst of rage by a people consumed by ‘ancient tribal hatreds.’… This genocide resulted from the deliberate choice of a modern elite to foster hatred and fear to keep itself in power. —Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, by Jared Diamond, p. 317

Now this is interesting, if horrible and sad.

What might an Anasazi rich elite do to stay in power? We already know about their use of social-control cannibalism to “encourage” Anasazi farmers to keep paying their taxes in the form of dried surplus corn, among other things too unpleasant to imagine.

What else might they do?

Would they pay lobbyists to influence the decisions of the Council of Southern Chiefs? Would they contribute corn to their campaigns? Would the Supreme Court of Owl Men deem those payments a harmless expression of free speech?

Worse, perhaps, would they whisper lies and innuendos into the ears of the Council of Northern Chiefs that would make them turn against the Council of Southern Chiefs, and foment outright violence and warfare?

Did Richard Nixon’s campaign for the U.S. presidency conspire to scuttle Vietnam War peace talks on the eve of the 1968 election?

Absolutely, says Tom Charles Huston, the author of a comprehensive, still-secret report he prepared as a White House aide to Nixon. In one of 10 oral histories conducted by the National Archives and opened last week, Huston says “there is no question” that Nixon campaign aides sent a message to the South Vietnamese government, promising better terms if it obstructed the talks, and helped Nixon get elected. —“Yes, Nixon Scuttled the Vietnam Peace Talks,” by John Aloysius Farrell, June 9, 2014, on Politico.com.

Those damn Anasazi rich High Priest politicians weren’t any better than our modern batch of despicable politicians!

At least Nixon didn’t kill, cook, and eat anyone. Insofar as we know.

Insulated Anasazi rich: Blind to the common good

A further conflict of interest involving rational behavior arises when the interests of the decision-making elite in power clash with the interests of the rest of society. Especially if the elite can insulate themselves from the consequences of their actions, they are likely to do things that profit themselves, regardless of whether those actions hurt everybody else. —Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, by Jared Diamond, p. 430

Jared Diamond makes the further point that cultures in which the “rich” live and work as equals with “commoners” are far less likely to collapse than rich people who live in gated communities.

As we know, the growth of gated communities is exponential.

Across the United States, more than 10 million housing units are in gated communities, where access is “secured with walls or fences,” according to 2009 Census Bureau data. Roughly 10 percent of the occupied homes in this country are in gated communities, though that figure is misleadingly low because it doesn’t include temporarily vacant homes or second homes. Between 2001 and 2009, the United States saw a 53 percent growth in occupied housing units nestled in gated communities. —”The Gated Community Mentality,” by Rich Benjamin, Op-Ed Contributor, March 29, 2012, The New York Times on NYTimes.com.

Ironic name for the author of that piece, isn’t it? Rich Benjamin.

Is it a sign of impending collapse that the richest Americans gate themselves away from the rest of us “commoners”?

In the later stages of the Chacoan Anasazi, villagers built and lived behind defensive structures.

Between 1116 and 1120…at Pueblo Bonito, new walls and room blocks were built to close off old courtyards and limit access. —Anasazi America: Seventeen Centuries on the Road from Center Place, by David E. Stuart, p. 121

Pueblo Bonito was the home of the richest of the Anasazi rich, the High Priest, the top advisers, the most powerful people in Anasaziland. They were walling themselves off. Insulating themselves from…who or what? Angry bands of over-taxed peasant farmers?

By A.D. 1130, about a decade after transforming Pueblo Bonito into a gated community, all building stopped forever. The last of the Anasazi rich had either moved on, died of starvation, were murdered by angry Anasazi farmers…or perhaps were killed, cooked, and eaten as a just last dessert.

The gates of their gated community ultimately did them no good at all.

Uninsulated Anasazi rich: Sympathetic to the common good?

Failures to solve perceived problems because of conflicts of interest between the elite and the masses are much less likely in societies where the elite cannot insulate themselves from the consequences of their actions. —Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, by Jared Diamond, p. 431

So if we forced the richest 1 percent of Americans to live, say, in an apartment with people in the 50^th percentile of income on all sides, would our society be better at solving our problems?

It’s a ludicrous idea. But yeah, it probably would.

When those rich people living among the great unwashed masses spend millions of dollars to influence our elected officials, maybe they would lobby for more rat extermination rather than tax loopholes to ship billions of dollars out of the country without paying taxes.

But forcibly removing rich people from their gated communities to save our country is so un-American, it’s unimaginable.

Except maybe by a novelist. Like me.

But there are better ways. More dramatic ways. See Price on Their Heads, for example.

Destructive Anasazi rich extract wealth from common farmers

Haiti’s elite identified strongly with France rather than with their own landscape, did not acquire land or develop commercial agriculture, and sought mainly to extract wealth from the peasants. —Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, by Jared Diamond, p. 340

The lessons of Greenland are a good example given by Jared Diamond.

Two cultures moved into the empty space of Greenland after about A.D. 1,000—Norwegian Vikings, and Inuit natives.

The Norwegians identified so strongly with, you got it, Norway, they refused to exchange their European ways of dressing, and they continued their almost impossible efforts of trying to farm like Norwegians (raise cows and such), that they starved. Even though there was food all around them—they refused, for inexplicable reasons, to eat fish, for example.

The Inuit, on the other hand, thrived. They figured out how to hunt whales and seals, and they weren’t squeamish about eating fish.

The former Vikings must have watched the Inuit thriving, even as they were falling apart. But they were so stubborn, they refused to change.

They kept raising cows and trying to farm until the soil played out. And they died of hunger. Every last one of them.

The Inuit must have watched them. Did they shake their heads? Mutter under their breaths? “Stupid white people.”

Most kings and nobles fail to heed long-term problems

We have to wonder why the kings and nobles failed to recognize and solve these seemingly obvious problems undermining their society. Their attention was evidently focused on their short-term concerns of enriching themselves, waging wars, erecting monuments, competing with each other, and extracting enough food from the peasants to support all those activities. Like most leaders throughout human history, the Maya kings and nobles did not heed long-term problems. —Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, by Jared Diamond, p. 177

Sometimes it’s not just the kings and rich people who fail to see and react sensibly to what is happening before their faces. Sometimes entire populations view the world through the lens of their royalty and deny facts and science and plain evidence.

Sometimes it’s not just the emperor who is wearing no clothes. Sometimes it’s nearly everybody.

“The Emperor’s New Clothes” is a short tale by Hans Christian Andersen about two weavers who promise an emperor a new suit of clothes that is invisible to those who are unfit for their positions, stupid, or incompetent. When the Emperor parades before his subjects in his new clothes, no one dares to say that he doesn’t see any suit of clothes until a child cries out, “But he isn’t wearing anything at all!” The tale has been translated into over a hundred languages.—“The Emperor’s New Clothes,” by Hans Christian Andersen, on Wikipedia.

“The sky is falling! Global warming! Climate change! We’re all gonna die!”

“No we’re not. It’s just those stupid scientists talking nonsense again! Ignore them.”

So who do we blame? The victims who vote against their own best interests? Or the rich people who convince the victims to vote against their own best interests?

We blame the scientists, of course.

The richer the rich, the harder everyone falls

What collapsed quickly during the Classic collapse [of the Maya empire] was the institution of kingship. —Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, by Jared Diamond, p. 171

When a king falls, especially a cruel king, or a kingdom kept in place by violence and abuse of commoners, with such things as human sacrifice and cannibalism and slavery, then few mourn the loss of the king.

Survivors fade into the wilderness and tell taboo stories about the temples of the cruel and evil king, a place where their descendants should never set foot again.

Many Navajo and Hopi and other Native Americans refuse to enter, acknowledge, or face Chaco Canyon. Maybe because it’s a place of those taboos. A place where something horrible happened.

Might we one day tell tales of taboo about a place called Wall Street? Or Capitol Hill? Or the ruins of a white house?

If we’re not careful, we might. If we don’t have the courage of children to say our leaders are wearing no clothes, that they have no moral dignity or right to mislead us as they do, then that becomes increasingly likely.

Ultimately, it’s our fault. We must blame ourselves.

Cultural collapse happens very fast

One of the main lessons to be learned from the collapses of the Maya, Anasazi, Easter Islanders, and those other past societies (as well as from the recent collapse of the Soviet Union) is that a society’s steep decline may begin only a decade or two after the society reaches its peak numbers, wealth, and power. —Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, by Jared Diamond, p. 509

Imagine if the lights went off. Right now.

And stayed off.

How quickly would our American culture crash?

Decades?

Years?

Hours?

It’s the stuff of apocalyptic fiction. We don’t even need zombies to make it scary.

Just close your eyes and imagine what happens when your neighbors run out of food. You know, the ones with all the guns.

Collapse is not inevitable: The people in power choose it

Even in difficult environments, collapses of human societies are not inevitable: it depends on how people respond. —Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, by Jared Diamond, p. 179

See, this is what I like. We are humans. We have big brains. We can use them to prevent our own cultures and ways of life from collapsing.

But we can also maddeningly behave like lower lifeforms, with no clue about what’s going on.

We span the spectrum.

Plato’s Socrates argued that democracy was doomed to failure because the electorate couldn’t be counted on to make choices in its long-term best interests. The Athenian Senate disliked what he had to say so much, they sentenced him to death and executed him (though, yeah, he could have gotten out of it if he’d wanted to, so it was a little like suicide, but still, on paper, they sentenced him to death).

Now Jared Diamond is arguing that our insulated rich leaders can’t be counted on to do what’s best in our own long-term best interests either.

So what does that leave? Is the only form of long-term, sustainable human cultural style hunter-gatherers?

There is, in fact, evidence for that. But I’m getting ahead of myself, which I usually do.

The Anasazi rich caused the Anasazi collapse

Motesharrei’s report says that all societal collapses over the past 5,000 years have involved both “the stretching of resources due to the strain placed on the ecological carrying capacity” and “the economic stratification of society into Elites [rich] and Masses (or “Commoners”) [poor].” This “Elite” population restricts the flow of resources accessible to the “Masses”, accumulating a surplus for themselves that is high enough to strain natural resources. Eventually this situation will inevitably result in the destruction of society. —“NASA Study Concludes When Civilization Will End, And It’s Not Looking Good for Us,” by Tom McKay, March 18, 2014, News.Mic, derived from a report written by applied mathematician Safa Motesharrei of the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center along with a team of natural and social scientists

That’s it. NASA scientists say it, even though the politicians and the politically correct police got to them and forced a denial (read the article with its pasted-on disclaimer at the beginning).

The burden of rich people along with the environmental degradation they lead us to commit will kill us all.

Except for a few of us who will continue as hunter-gatherers in some dystopian future.

Fortunately, the electricity is still on…so we can watch NFL and political debates and flit around on the Internet, editing out facts we don’t like on Wikipedia. Hey, it’s good while it lasts!

But maybe there’s something we can do about it. Maybe a few individuals (not science) will save us. Maybe a Nobel Prize-winning economist and a band of former CIA assassins will….

Hey, you never know. Take a look at Price on Their Heads and decide for yourself. If social-control cannibalism can work, maybe putting a few of the richest of the rich in the crosshairs might work, too.

Conclusion

Can we avoid cultural collapse?

I want to be a 51 percent optimist.

I have faith in our big human brains.

Contrary to the evidence of how it’s worked in the past, I believe science and technology and engineering can (might) save us.

But then I look at the people we Americans tend to elect to public office, and the immoral (at least amoral) rich people who fund the campaigns of those officials to get elected, and I suspect we’re probably doomed.

Unless…unless our big brains kick in pretty quick. I’m 51 percent sure that will happen. I just hope it doesn’t show itself as a Nobel Prize-winning economist backed by a team of former CIA assassins.

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This is background research for…

Price on Their Heads: A Novel of Income Inequality and Mayhem.

Warning! This story contains impolite language, graphic violence, a little sex, and is very politically incorrect.

Jackie Key inherits a full scholarship from a rich man murdered by his brother. To justify his complicity, he studies the economic ripple effect of the dead man’s assets.

What he discovers and tries to publish makes him become public enemy number one among the country’s rich and powerful because Dr. Jackie Key can calculate a true price on their heads.

From Jeff Posey, author of The G.O.D. Journal, Anasazi Runner, and The Next Skywatcher, comes a twisting and turning contemporary political thriller that exposes the cruelly tilted playing field of American economics and politics.

Join Nobel Prize-winning economist Dr. Jackie Key as the heavy-handed government and ultra-rich drive him into the grasp of his brother, head of a team of assassins targeting Jackie’s list of the “too rich to exist.”

—Image of We Are Equal on Hand Palm from Marty Nemko’s blog.

—Image of “Toltec-style Vessel 1” from the American Museum of Natural History collection licensed under CC BY 2.5 via Commons via Wikipedia.

—Image of Star Wars Empire Needs You from TDCDecals.com.

—Image of Pecking Order Colorful Humanoids from “Pecking Order” article on NewinEveryWay.Wordpress.com.

—Image of Chaco Culture National Historical Park A.D. 1050-1100 turquoise beads recovered from site number, 29SJ 423 from National Park Service at NPS.gov.

—Image of Swag Don’t Come Cheap from “Why Do Poor People ‘Waste’ Money On Luxury Goods?” by Nicole Hala, November 6, 2013, on SOC 331: Foundations of Sociological Theory, Queens College, CUNY.

—Image of Rwandan genocide graves from Genocide Facts on ModernHistoryProject2012.wordpress.com.

—Image of roll of insulation from HomePro Pest Control Services at Pestva.com.

—Image of Problem Solved from Case Solved Stamp on ClipArtBest.com.

—Image of snooty French elite from “Le pacte d’Obama avec les Saoudiens et Al-Nosra” on Euro-Synergies.hautetfort.com.

—Image of Long-Term Planning from Mellis CEVC Primary School at Mellis.Suffolk.Sch.UK.

—Image of Downward Plunging Red Arrow from “Stock Markets Collapse,” July 8, 2014, on AndhraWishesh.com.

—Image of Anasazi population chart from Jared Diamond, “Life with the artificial Anasazi,” Nature 419 (2002), 567–569.

—Image of Denial Acceptance Resistance Exploration from “3 Mistakes Change Leaders Make; Plus Essential Strategies to Avoid Them,” on Xonitek.com.

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