When a civilization, or an empire more particularly, is in the throes of decline and on the doorstep of collapse, as is the US currently, there are three realistic responses the native people can bring to the crisis.
- Do nothing
The appeal of this choice is obvious — "don't rock the boat", "let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die" — but rife with uncertain fates. Doing nothing is abdicating any role over surviving the collapse to begin anew. Your people may survive or they may not. Are you willing to chance a favorable outcome?
- Redouble empire expansionism
This is the preferred response of the ruling elites, and of the buckbroken patriotards who self-medicate the rumblings of their discontent by quaffing the showy pabulum of Pyrrhic spectacles that provide a lifeline to rapidly disappearing traditions and cultural touchstones. "We can bombastically grow our way out of this mess", is the operative slogan. Military adventurism abroad and debt-juicing consumerism at home are the hopeful solutions to mollify the core ethnostock of the empire. This is what nearly all fading empires have done in the past, to no avail. None avoided their preordained fate. If anything, expansionism hastened the end, and made recovery in the aftermath more difficult.
- Reduce, Retrench, Reconstruct
This is the best solution, and therefore, the least likely to happen, because it requires sacrifice at a time when that virtue has had the life snuffed out of it by the domination of the vices unleashed from generations of prosperity. The idea is simple enough: the way forward is through the rubble of the empire. Celebrate every battlefield defeat of the empire. Pray for the enemies of the empire to weaken and humiliate it. Separate from the System. Segregate from invasive hordes. Discriminate in favor of your own. Shrink your circle of loyalty. Be exclusive, rather than inclusive.
Divest from the empire as much as possible, reduce your dependence on it, and throw monkey wrenches into the gears of the leviathan whenever opportunity arises. Consolidating your loyalties and your trust to a smaller in-group, while adding to the costs of the empire's efforts to keep its control over all its territory, will set up your people to thrive post-collapse. Giving your people time to acclimate to the new responsibilities of forging their own way, and time to retrench so as to make do with less as things fall apart, will lay the groundwork for the reconstruction of a nation that authentically represents them and privileges their posterity.
This is not the time to tune out or to turn outward. It is the time to turn inward and find strength in tighter bonds and redemption in clarifying hardship.
