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Breaking Strain

There’s a lot of ruin in a nation. Adam Smith, the father of modern free-market theory, is said to have responded with this remark when told that General Burgoyne surrendering at Saratoga (one of the early acts of the American Revolutionary War) would be the ruin of the UK.

As it turned out, the UK not only survived the loss of her North American colonies, but went on to build a second colonial empire that would last into the twentieth century. She would fight two world wars, stand against incredible odds when it seemed all hope was lost, and even in her diminished state after decolonization would remain a desirable destination for both tourists and immigrants well into the twenty-first century.

The diablovirus pandemic of the mid twenty-first century became a demonstration of just how much ruin nations could absorb before coming apart. To be sure, many began cracking almost as soon as the first outbreaks reached their major population centers. Politicians fled the capitals in favor of the major cities of wealthier nations, where they hoped to be protected against infection. Other wealthy people fled to estates in the countryside, and without leadership, the populace began to fracture along the lines of tribe and clan.

In many cases, these countries were never really “nations” in any practical sense of the world. Their territories had often been drawn as so many lines on a map by colonial powers who had decided an enemy’s territory should be broken up, or it behooved them to shed their own colonial empires which had become both economic and political liabilities. As a result, there was no real polity corresponding to the territory, and often as not these paper countries combined warring factions while dividing previously existing communities. Most often they were held together by force, often by one or another strongman who typically favored his own people at the expense of rival groups. Without the threat of the force of arms to keep the various factions cooperative, these countries soon fractured. They were the ones with the empty villages, the ones where power generation failed quickly, even in the cities.

Where civil society had deeper roots, people pulled together instead of apart. Although many pundits worried about how several decades of immigration from the former colonies might have diluted Britannia’s spirit of keep calm and carry on, by and large people in the UK behaved in ways that their forebears of the Blitz would have been proud of. There were some defectors, some opportunists, particularly in certain neighborhoods of the larger cities in which integration with the larger society was weak. But for the most part, neighbors found ways to help one another while minimizing interpersonal contact. Critical workers continued to go to work, even when it involved exposing themselves to contagion.

We see similar stories across northern Europe, and in Japan and South Korea. All of these are relatively small countries with a cohesive national culture and deep traditions, to the point of being insular. They’re the sort of countries where the grandchildren of someone who brought home a foreign bride are often regarded as at least partly alien to the culture.

However, this cannot be taken to imply that only nations of a blood-and-soil tradition are able to maintain social cohesion under this level of stress, because we also see the pull-together response in the US and many of the other English-speaking nations that are the product of extensive immigration. In fact, we can often see down to the neighborhood level where we have cohesive communities and where civil society has broken down, just by looking at which areas pulled together and which devolved into warlordism.

But as the situation progressed, even cohesive communities could do only so much in the face of increasing shortages of the resources that make modern technological life possible. When trucks could not bring in essential supplies of food and fuel because there simply were not enough truckers to drive them, situations became truly desperate. This was particularly true in regions that were heavily dependent upon fuel oil for electrical generation, and thus for the maintenance of water and sewage treatment facilities, all of which are critical for keeping a modern city running.

Even so, in some areas we see people with knowledge and skills stepping forward, jury-rigging solutions to problems as they emerge and hobbling things forward, while in others people simply give up and resign themselves to enduring the privations…

—- JN Sorensen, A Study in Social Cohesion Under Emergency Conditions, (Doctoral dissertation), Kennedy University Tycho, Carpenter Point, 2044.