Predicting collapse

I am a prophet of doom.  There tends to be an oversupply of prophets of doom, and the proportion who turn out correct is quite small.

Equally, there are also a large number of prophets of non doom, for example the numerous prophets of complacency during the fall of the Roman Empire in the west, who assume that everything will continue as today, often even when spectacular collapse is under way, they assume that everything has now stabilized, or will very shortly stabilize.

So, I reach for the mantle of an accurate prophet:  Ayn Rand in her science fiction novel Atlas Shrugged accurately predicted the condition of today’s Detroit, though her book was published when Detroit had the highest standard of living in America.

In Atlas Shrugged “Twentieth Century Motors” adopts far left principles – which turn the factory and the surrounding city into a desolate ruin. Government do gooding prevents the market from correcting the problem, as more money keeps being funneled into losing programs.

Her account differs from the way things actually went in that she omits all mention of race, racial politics, and race baiting. Indeed, her America has no Jews, no blacks, and no Asians, White Anglo Saxon Protestants do it to themselves.  Or perhaps it has all the usual ethnicities and races, but this is irrelevant to her story and left out of her prophecy.

Her America does, however, have anti discrimination laws, which are applied to destroy the banking system, just as in real life they actually were applied to destroy the banking system.

This, however, is simply a matter of focus. She is telling us about self destructive belief systems. The original cause of the death of Detroit was not blacks, it was the ideas that she so accurately skewered, for Detroit was white when she wrote. Electing a new people was merely a detail, a result not a cause, a detail irrelevant to the story, hence left out. That the left buggered the economy was the story.

So her prophecy leaves out a very big area, the inculcation of race hate, the creation of black privilege, state encouragement and tolerance of attacks by blacks on whites.  The prophecy is economics only, but in what it covers, it is remarkably accurate.

Her America has no real distinction between the parties, which was probably true in her time, but has now become more obvious.

“Atlas Shrugged” is set in a carefully undefined time. Technology is in part time of publication technology, in part steam punk retro (steel and railroads), and in part city of tomorrow futurist (unreasonably fast trains).

The Soviet Union has collapsed, and/or survives only on American aid. Thus a book written in the 1950s casually predicts the situation that in fact prevailed after 1994 or so.

The story occurs a generation after the final collapse of General Motors “”Twentieth Century Motors”, after a long period during which it was kept half alive by government interventions.

The fictional equivalent of General Motors in the ruins of Detroit is “Twentieth Century Motors” in the ruins of Starnsville, which name for a company that passed away a generation before the time of the story suggests a time early twenty first century. So, in so far as she hints at a date, she got the date reasonably correct.

In this undefined time, laws and regulation have multiplied so as to become irrelevant, and the government increasingly rules by moment to moment decree, drifting into capitalism without markets and socialism without a central plan, sliding into socialism through regulation rather than nationalization, and from regulation to rule by decree.

At the time she wrote, the west was backing away from the socialism of nationalization and price control, but she correctly foresaw it was merely heading into socialism by another path.