Historians have noted that when empires fail, it’s the marginal provinces where hard times hit first, where laws lose their ability to command, where local warlords declare themselves absolute rulers over pathetically shrunken territories, and where ethics prevail only when those with ethics have enough ammunition.
By that standard, our own empire is failing, and here on its margins—in this isolated high valley in the minor state of Idaho, in the arid starve-acre expanses of western North America—we’ll witness, in the near future, the withdrawal of civil society into defensible strongholds, none of them big enough or close enough to protect us from people who lack respect for our provincial human rights.
I’m using empire broadly here. Our empire includes the United States and Canada, Japan, Europe, Britain, Australia, and small techno-states like Singapore, South Korea, Israel, and Taiwan. It’s a vast trade-linked technocracy with democratic pretentions, held together by supply chains, lip service to human rights, a belief in science and technology, and, as Paul Simon has noted, a loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires.
That our empire has destroyed millions of lives and hundreds of discrete cultures doesn’t mean that its demise will stop the carnage. Millions more lives and hundreds of evolving subcultures will be wrecked when empire fragments into warring ministates run by tinpot fascists.
Pax Romana and Pax Americana and even Pax Atomica all brought safety and stability and a modicum of human rights for a majority of their citizens. Those benefits won’t survive whatever succeeds our laws and our concepts of human decency, especially here in Sawtooth Valley.
Already we have a population of survivalists. They bury weapons in the forests. They cache camping equipment in talus slopes high in the Sawtooths. They make plans for blocking refugees at choke points on our highways.
Refugees will find a way, but they won’t settle the high cold middle of Idaho. They know where they’re headed, and it isn’t here.
If you want to find people who believe most strongly in the benefits of empire, look among the multitudes trying to cross the Rio Grande for jobs in agriculture, construction, or domestic service. Look at the Chinese escaping Hong Kong for family businesses in San Francisco or Vancouver. Look at the Ukrainians and Russians sending out resumes to western cybertechnology firms. They’re not heading for Sawtooth Valley to live off the land.
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Occasionally the power goes off. It’s a bit scary, but we have a cabinet where we store candles and flashlights. We never know how long the outage will last, so we fill pitchers and water bottles from the pressure tank for as long as the pressure lasts. We flush the toilet with water from the irrigation ditch that runs under our deck. We have a propane range in our kitchen that we can light with matches, and the wood stove will keep the house warm in subzero weather. If it’s winter, the garage serves as a large and effective freezer.
We’ve never had a power outage last long enough to spoil food in the refrigerator, although one Christmas Eve a cold front brought minus 40 temperatures to the valley. Power lines snapped during the local power company’s office party. Nobody even got started on fixing them the next day, and by the time our power was back on 4 days had passed. Up and down the valley water lines had frozen and burst, fish were belly-up in aquarium ice, and houseplants were flattened by frost. Absentee owners called their insurance agents. Those of us still here kept the wood stoves roaring.
We dressed in layers and more layers, read by candlelight after sundown, and went to bed early. When we needed news from the outside, we backed the car out of the garage and turned on the AM station in Boise, which broadcast network news between hours of apocalyptic conspiracy commentary. It let us know that the outside world was still there and still had electricity. It was still giving us reasons for paranoia, but it wasn’t as cold or as uncivilized as we were.
We ate well, we stayed almost warm, and we enjoyed the empty highway outside our windows. But after 72 hours or so, the realization hit that a winter with no electricity would be long hours of tedious work with very little room for mistakes.
When my parents bought this place, it had no electricity. Rural Electrification Administration power poles came in 1956. Even so, none of our family wintered here for years, until other improvements, including paved and regularly plowed roads, advances in catalytic wood stoves, and satellite TV broadcasts, made comfortable winters possible.
My life, if the power goes out for good, will have spanned the short tenure of electric civilization in Sawtooth Valley.
With that in mind, whenever the power goes out, we can’t help but wonder if this is the end of it. These days, we avoid listening to AM radio, and stay away from history books.
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Here’s how humans survived when systems of government resembled chimpanzee bands, each with a dominant male and everyone else submissive: your band was run by a physically powerful leader, who had achieved his position by killing or incapacitating his competition. In battle with other bands, he was a skilled fighter, and was the one who decided who was an enemy and who wasn’t. If you were lucky you didn’t look like a rival. When the dominant male got old and/or weak, he was killed and ritually eaten by his rivals within the band. When he wasn’t old and weak, he killed them. Timing was important for everybody.
If this all sounds familiar, it comes out of the primal horde theory that Freud and his followers developed. Much doubt was cast on the theory when Freud’s followers didn’t kill him and eat him.
However, if you look at the current tendency of humans toward fascist dictatorship, imagining human governments as patriarchal chimpanzee bands isn’t all that far-fetched.
Small groups of adolescent humans will organize naturally into gangs, who run neighborhoods and provide legal and illegal social services. We have an instinctive fear of groups of adolescent males, because they tend toward mayhem and murder when not restrained by compulsory organization. One of the reasons for a peacetime draft, back when we had one, was to keep young men out of trouble until their frontal lobes had connected with the rest of their brain.
Fascism is a street gang writ large. It’s a social organization that comes from some place other than our frontal lobes, where reason, abstract thought, and empathy live. Probably because we lived as street gangs for hundreds of thousands of years before there were streets, it’s built into our instinctual behavior in a way that higher mental functions aren’t.
What we’re really afraid of here is mobs of young men coming out of the cities to rape and pillage and fill their starving bellies with our freeze-dried food. We see their precursors in the camo-clad hunters that show up for breakfast at the Stanley Bakery every bow-hunting season. They may be perfectly nice people, but they’re in a group, they get impatient when they’re hungry, they’re not dedicated to non-violence toward the weak and helpless, and they inspire responses that do not come from our frontal lobes.
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It’s a bright and sunshiny January day outside the windows. It’s also minus 10 Fahrenheit, so we’re staying inside, at least until it gets above zero. We’re thinking of going skiing at Banner Summit, which has finally gotten 40 inches of snow, enough to ski on without catching your skis under a fallen log.
It’s an incredibly civilized thing to do, this backcountry skiing, and it instantly identifies you as a privileged citizen of empire. You’ve had the leisure time to develop the skills and the muscle memory to climb and ski high mountains, packing the kind of high-tech gear that would allow you to spend a night out in January if it came to that. You ski on equipment that requires steels and plastics and adhesives that represent centuries of technological advances.
The ancient Egyptians might have been able to magically levitate the giant stone blocks of the pyramids into place, but they couldn’t have created the sort of clothing—and the skis, boots, skins, and bindings—that allow you to go skiing in Sawtooth Valley in January.
If the empire falls, people won’t be skiing for fun here. They’ll be dressed in white, and armed. They won’t be privileged citizens of anywhere. They’ll be trying to stay alive and to keep their tribe alive, and shooting at people who were once their fellows.
At some point in these battles—there will be many of them—civil war will start to look like a really bad idea. If everybody could go back to before the violence started, they would jump at the chance.
But by then it will be too late, even if all those on the front lines would go along with a cease-fire in a heartbeat.