Failed Disaster Recovery: Managerialism, Demographics, and The Limits to Growth

How the failures surrounding the recent Hurricanes can help develop a picture of larger institutional embrittlement

While wars rage in central Asia and the Middle east, large swaths of the United States are right now without power food and water. Some I know have been personally effected by the results of Hurricane Season 2024. With that in mind, it is a good time to look at the way bureaucratic managerialism (and Faustian Civilization in general) is undergoing structural collapse. While the article does not forebear the possibility of short-term recovery, a long-term institutional degradation of capacity is occurring. The disaster response to Hurricane Helene is a microcosm of both successes and failures in the event of these types of systems-collapse punctuated by catastrophe.

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One Decade to Disaster

The System (TM) responded to the impinging disaster with the normal arm-waving and news-media telling people to remain sheltered. The managerial system constructed over the last hundred years or so is effectively running on auto-pilot at this point. Bureaucrats do bureaucrat things and determine answers to questions by rechecking agency policy and examining a spreadsheet of pre-written responses. Emails are exchanged to request meetings to discuss organizing a committee.

In many of these institutions standing up and physically walking up the stairs to speak with some one in person is considered an outlandish commitment to duty. Thus it is that prior to a black-swan event, or even an abnormally severe disaster that threatens structural supply-chains and critical systems, the bureaucracy tends to adhere to a rigid “business as usual” mentality.

Even as NOAA and the National Hurricane Center realized that the impending disaster may be quite significant, on-the-ground reporting (university of Florida Update #8 below) provided relatively simple tropical-storm-warnings. In addition, only about 2% to 10% of the population is even cued into those services that issued warnings. Most of the population, like the bureaucrats ruling them, have effectively checked out. The news cycle is mostly lies and rants about how Israel needs yet another 20 billion dollars anyway.

It is in the interest of the managerial bureaucracy to pretend problems don’t exist for as long as possible; that’s because acknowledging that problem exists is the first step in your boss asking you to fix it. Refusing to acknowledge problems is a matter of self-interest not for the bureaucracy itself, but for the individual bureaucrats who work in it. Downplaying large-scale systemic problems, or potential large-scale systemic problems is naturally incentivized. The manager doesn’t want to hear about it unless you have a solution, and you don’t want to come up with a solution. Instead simple gestures are usually good enough, 9 times out of 10. On that 10th time it’ll look like the entire agency or institution is at fault, not you in particular.

Thus, few people were properly informed about the nature of the incoming disaster and preparations were minimal. In earlier generations this may have looked quite different. The modern state consists of wild oscillations between declarations of disastrous emergencies (many of which go nowhere, like the perpetual climate-crisis) and an absolute refusal to acknowledge disasters when they are imminent or when they’ve actually occurred. The managerial state, and its media compatriots, effectively refuse to either initiate warnings or maintain sufficient public trust that they’ll be believed.

As a result spreads a general detachment in both their own employees and the public; preparedness for abnormal disasters or black-swan events is effectively non-existent. Normal river flooding the bureaucracy can handle, normal forest fires too. Those are disasters with pre-written responses in their spreadsheets and pre-set public and institutional policy. Critical disasters or hundreds of square miles flooded are not problems that the employees at modern institutions are equipped to handle. Managers don’t want employees stepping beyond policy statements and employees don’t want to be fired for pissing off a manager. A coercive and highly rigid managerial hierarchy has developed.

Plague, famine, real war and natural disaster are change-of-state phenomena that prevent old systems from working effectively. To cope with these types of occurrences one requires dynamic and responsive institutions… not calcified and brittle ones. As institutions feel less secure, they become even more attached to their spreadsheets, policy statements, and public image… far more so than actually doing what it is the institution or agency was designed to do. Eventually culminating in a system that is so hierarchical and where employees are so scared to step out of line, that there is no way for the institution to navigate new problems without major top-down alterations: policy statements need to change, spreadsheets need to be updated, and managers need to be reprogrammed with new directives.

The embrittlement of western institutions has left them extremely vulnerable.

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Systems Collapse

No single disaster will swamp Faustian or Western civilization and cause a catastrophic SHTF scenario. That said, the rigidity of various national management systems creates an inability to respond to unprecedented disasters. This embrittlement of the bureaucracy through over-regulation, embrittlement of government due to apathy, and embrittlement of supply chains due to a reliance on global trade and just-in-time shipping lends itself to systems collapse.

Systems collapse is a state where complex systems rely on all parts functioning correctly. As systems grow more complex, they become more reliant on resources and complex components. A horse drawn carriage will experience a delay, but no critical damage if one of the wheels breaks on the road and has to be pulled off for replacement. A modern high-performance sports car can experience catastrophic engine failure if the timing in a single piston valve is off. Small failures lead to cascading larger failures as the entire system is heavily reliant on everything going right all the time.

Sometimes, not everything goes right.

The events that took place in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene are representative of larger incompetence and structural damage. The modern world requires a number of things to continue functioning normally and without those, significant breakdown begins to occur. The flaws are not self-evidently obvious until the system is stressed by unforeseen events. In this case, a massive hurricane coming on the heels of several international conflicts and unhindered mass migration. Any one of these issues, the regime could deal with relatively easily, but combined… many people have now, literally, been left hung out to dry.

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Requirements for a Functional Global Industrial Civilization

• Low Friction international commerce

• Young competent workers

• Hyper-specialized production using massive supplies of energy, food, and other critical resources

• Financial liquidity

• A method of violent law enforcement and coercion

• A media system that can keep every one bought-in to the above system

Reviewing each of these components will help to develop an overall picture of how the structural decay has taken place. In an event as small as Hurricane Katrina, Helene, or the conflict in Ukraine critical flaws become visible. When multiple instances of institutional stress occur simultaneously, the flaws become impossible to ignore. That is why Hurricane Helene is such an excellent test-case, because in 2024 it is possible to witness the results of a serious stress-test of American (western) institutions in the face of building polycrisis.

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Low Friction International Commerce and Trade

Global industrialism requires international trade. At a fundamental level, it requires not only individual productive specialization, but national productive specialization. Some nations specializing in precision manufacturing, some in industrial manufacturing, some in banking. The United Kingdom GDP predominantly stems from its banking industry and little else. By specializing to an absurd degree and trading with other specialized nations, it is possible for all nations to grow more wealthy and share more material goods. Efficiencies are maximized and just-in-time international supply chains became the standard. A lesson one would think would have been learned during the Covid Pandemic.

Unfortunately, international global industrialism is also expensive and energy-intensive to keep running. Throughout the post-war era, the United States Navy became the de-facto global policing force. Piracy dropped to near zero as the United States took on the role of maintaining these massive international supply-chains.

Significant disruption to these supply chains reduces critical efficiencies. That is why the conflict in Gaza is of international importance: the Houthis in Yemen have effectively closed the Red Sea to trade. Insurance providers won’t insure vessels traveling through a region that has become a war-zone where commercial shipping is the primary target. That drives up the cost of goods as additional fuel must be expended to go around or additional insurance costs must be paid to go through. International shipping companies aren’t well known for leaving their vessels uninsured.

What would have been minor local disruptions a century ago are now critical international events due to the global industrial networked trade system. Critical events that cost the global economy billions of dollars per day. Further, economic profiteers in the form of hedge-funds and speculators siphon additional wealth out of the system by mass-purchasing the contracts on goods that are expected to rise in price. They pocket the difference. This type of speculative economics creates a zero-sum game transferring wealth from the people of the world to a few specific hedge funds like Blackrock.

The system of globalized industrialism is brittle without the might of the US Navy protecting it. It is likewise subject to critical systems collapse if the capacity to transport goods internationally fails, or even becomes overly expensive. If the cost of diesel doubles due to a major event, the cost of all shipping on earth will more than double (speculators again making massive profits on the difference).

Young Competent Workers

The demographic collapse taking place globally is resulting in a serious constraint to the supply of able-bodied and able-minded workers. In those nations where people have historically been the best trained and that created the most ground-breaking inventions, the demographic collapse is at its most severe. No one is having children. People are simply choosing to stop having children because of the expense, the nihilism of the modern world, imagined climate-crisis, or a simple moral failing.

The top-heavy nature of the global economy requires infinite-exponential growth to maintain the debt-based fiat currency system (see liquidity below). The fact of the matter is that the effects of Hurricane Helene and other disasters are dramatically more severe due to the demographics of the impacted region. If the median age in North Carolina was 22 years, then rebuilding would take place over a year or two and things would “go back to normal” relatively quickly.

The actual median (that is, half of people older, half of people younger) of North Carolina is 39. 17% are over the age of 65. That means half of the people effected by Hurricane Helene are over the age of 40… and as much as one doesn’t want to fall into tried topes, a 40 year-old does not have the same spry dynamism of a 22 year-old. Few folks over the age of 40 who have built their entire lives already want to start again and build a new home for themselves. Those under the age of 25 are already doing that anyway.

The result of these collapsing demographic trends drives down GDP, industry, and the overall supply of workers. Rebuilding takes additional energy and resources because those doing the rebuilding are less able to do it themselves. The GDP begins to shrink if the population shrinks. Simple-minded politicians [and bankers] are thus pushed toward the importation of millions of foreigners. Many foreigners are more poorly trained and tend to be best suited for rote-skilled jobs rather than the type of dynamic industry-building jobs that Americans once performed.

Slow decay becomes inherent to the system punctuated by crises that cannot be well-managed. An imported population accustomed to government handouts doesn’t build new industries, and a population that’s aging out of the work force simply waits for a pension or 401k to retire. Depending on the rate of demographic decline, the slow institutional decay may accelerate quickly and unpredictably surrounding larger national crises.

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Specialized Production Requiring Massive Resource Supplies

Circuit boards, internal combustion engines, and digital relays do not simply spring into existence. The production of advanced electronics tools and equipment requires highly specific production facilities and numerous critical minerals and materials. Cities and nations alike are economically incentivized to hyperspecialize in specific types of production. One country produces the ore, one city concentrates the metal, one city shapes the metal, and one city performs the final assembly. The transportation of each of these goods also requires energy and resources at every step.

The supply of resources that fuels human civilization is not unlimited. Even if it were, the rate at which those resources can be yanked out of the ground is also not unlimited. The limitations in supply create fiscal upheaval when supply shocks take place. When the Ukrainian war began, food supplies dramatically changed in price as speculators inflated value by front-running the market to buy grain contracts.

With the recent hurricanes, supportive equipment and supply was limited. Resources had to be produced (or drawn from storehouses), resources had to be shipped to where they were needed along washed out roads. At each stage, energy needed to be expended to rebuild or maintain the transportation networks, build the equipment, repair the equipment, and pay the faceless bureaucrats to push pencils and policies.

Those resources are not unlimited, and they’re slowly starting to run out through mismanagement and a simple lack of availability.

For one or two single pre-planned crises, it is possible for the regime to maintain a supply of spare resources and equipment and bureaucrats. For a serious novel crisis or in the event of multiple crises, it becomes an impossibility. Something as simple as a bad bureaucratic policy or a water shortage or a broken gas-line can completely derail relief efforts.

Likewise, something as simple as a lack of sand can make the mass-production of concrete far more expensive… which makes the rebuilding of roads or the reconstruction of city-centers near impossible. Few people understand how absolutely massive the resource-requirements of modern civilization are. As those resources begin to dwindle, it becomes progressively more difficult to recover from disasters. Buildings half-buried in mud slides will stop being rebuilt because the expense in doing so is simply too much.

The Lying Media Cannot Keep People Invested

It is estimated at this time that roughly 10 million men of prime working age have checked out of work or seeking work. These men are likely engaged in the underground economy, but that number is massive. Working age men form the background of every economy on earth, and without them collapse becomes imminent. In the case of the United States, at an estimated population of 400 million people, that’s 200 million men, and around 120 million men of working age. Just under 10 percent of the potential work force has checked out.

For decades the legacy media has managed to maintain a façade of normalcy: go to school, get a job, buy a house, have kids, retire. With school getting incredibly expensive, pay for employment becoming degraded to pennies, and homes well out of reach for most individuals, that façade has cracked. The economy is a Potemkin village and by using the internet to compare notes, every one now knows it. There are some very well paid people out there, linemen, contractors, business owners. Very few of those in the younger age brackets (especially those who were born American citizens) have managed to see success in life by adhering to the dictates of our leaders. Those who see success threw out the handbook and sought out alternative opportunities.

As a result, marriage rates are down, loneliness and mental illness are rife, and a gigantic swath of the population has simply checked out. A service/consumer economy cannot survive if people stop producing things and stop buying things. This slowdown has resulted in a massive increase in relative costs. Simple labor and transportation is harder to come by. It is cheaper to buy a home than build one. Contractors are flooded with work while huge segments of the population have simply given up on working entirely.

The addictive properties of social media and the “opiate epidemic” aren’t helping, but those appear to be symptoms of a larger cause: Social and Economic Starvation.

It’s a powder keg, but one that the federal administratum is very good at keeping damp. The one thing that the leadership cannot stop people from doing is nothing. With that in mind, unable to find an ‘out’ for themselves, a lot of folks have laid down to do nothing as hard as they can. This will not in itself force change, but it will make rebuilding from catastrophic disaster a lot harder. It will also make maintenance more and more tenuous as the number of people willing to do the maintenance declines.

It’s estimated that nearly all job growth since 2020 has gone to foreign workers… American citizens who aren’t angry are simply at a point of giving up in the face of institutions and leaders that hate them. This is one reason why rebuilding from events like Hurricane Helene is going to take a long time if it happens at all. Not enough people are interested in rebuilding a system that hates them.

Liquidity, Everything for GDP Even if the Money is Fake

Infinite Growth. The stability of the global economy relies on a debt-based system of finance. That means that every dollar created must be paid back with interest. To generate that interest, productivity has to outpace the rate of currency creation… as more debt is accumulated, more productivity is required to pay back the debts. If productivity growth ever slips below a crucial threshold (no one knows exactly where that threshold is) then economic liquidity collapses. To remain stable, the debt-based economic system must grow exponentially… forever.

The world we live in is, as it turns out, not infinite. Resources run thin, the quality of ore dwindles, and the energy needed to extract critical elements does not come free. The attempts to transition to an electric-economy smacks more of panic among our elites than it does of actual well-thought-out planning. The amount of neodymium alone needed to mass-produce electric vehicles remains massive compared to historical availability. The same is happening for lithium and other critical minerals. The amount of energy required to extract and produce these materials also is not infinite and mines are not energy-cheap systems.

Ultimately, the economy is starting to slow at the global scale. Less is being produced as prices continue to rise. Panicked bureaucrats and lawmakers seek methods to continue pushing growth to retain stability in the economic system. At best this results in seeking alternative economies, but most of the time it results in money printing.

The laws of physics dictate that we can only pull resources out of the ground so fast. As resources dwindle, the money-printer has to be cranked up to compensate, continuing an inflationary spiral. More make-work jobs to keep the plebs consuming and fewer resources to go around. In the long-term one sees housing inflation wealth extraction, and the formation of a permanent precariat underclass. That system will remain stable unless acted on by outside forces… forces like natural disasters, famine, war or hurricanes.

As a result of this ever-enlarging economic gap between reality and imagined reality, it is far less possible to ‘build back’ after a disaster than it was ten or twenty years ago. Disasters will no longer create wounds in the body politic that will heal within a year or two, but may well cause permanent damage. A washed out road may be deemed not-worth-it to rebuild. A damaged factory might be moved rather than reconstructed. There’ll be a push toward a form of scarcity-industrialism where it’s preferred to use pre-fabricated buildings and communities rather than build new ones. The energy and resources just aren’t there any more.

Fake economy (if you’re interested in a long video on the topic)

Mechanisms for Legal Enforcement

The modern mechanisms for trade requires a vast network for legal enforcement. Managerial bureaucrats overseeing stockpiles, licensing, shipping and customs. As a result, the legal-enforcement system has become bloated and itself top-heavy and rigid. Gone are the days where men of action would have to make a call on doing the right thing far from home. Now a 50 year old woman in a pantsuit shows up to your factory and makes a call and if you don’t like it the police will show up to seize your assets.

Mass communications and rapid transportation have permitted the creation of a micro-managerial bureaucratic leviathan whose only goal is the perpetuation of itself. By becoming an overbearing mother, the state has engender a tremendous amount of ill-will in the population. The population cannot express its dissatisfaction too loudly, but that ill-will exists none the less. People are attempting to drop out of society, swap to black-market employment, or become wealthy enough to afford enough lawyers to live relatively free. In all cases, there’s a sense of desperation.

In the managerial bureaucracy there is also a sense of desperation. People are far easier to control when those people are reduced to entry numbers in a spreadsheet. Tech-bro types are hoping that AI will make it possible to govern humanity like an ant nest. As a result of this inefficient micro-managerial system, institutions have become rigid in enforcement. People have become unable to act outside the scope of managements approval despite desperately wanting to. The built-in rigidity of the system, the cowardice of individual bureaucrats and the resentment of the population creates a dangerous environment.

In the event of major disasters, where transportation and communications are limited, the leviathan cracks. The effective penalty for looting isn’t too different from the penalty for not-registering your car. Thus people treat all laws as optional, the more you have to follow, the less each one individually means. It creates a general unwillingness among the population to work with state institutions. The calcification of those institutions means that, even when they actually do have the best of intentions, the population won’t believe them. More boxes to check and more inventory to inventory.

The managerial bureaucracy finds it nearly impossible to operate effectively in disaster-zones where communication and transit are limited because most of the people hate the bureaucracy. They’d rather go hungry than accept help from the managerial class… and that’s a best-case scenario. In truth, the managerial class is only there because they were ordered to be there and most despise regular people. This type of tit-for-tat culture war is what got us to where we are, and the division will only get worse as the bureaucracy becomes more rigid and overbearing.

Assassination War & the Death of Bureaucracy

Inability to Perform Mass Reorganization

The thing that is most critical when it comes to the effects of disaster is the momentum of the system and the managerial bureaucracy being sufficient to prevent mass reorganization. It’s clear that any attempt to make the world a better place will be met with blatant lies from the legacy media, stone-walling by unelected bureaucrats, and violent opposition from brainless ground-troop organizations like AntiFa.

Historically, the United States has been relatively good at swapping out one class of elites for another. With the post-war bureaucracy, however, it has become incredibly difficult to actually proffer new ideas to the public. Young people want to do better, but are crushed when attempting to make meaningful change. Several attempts have been made (Occupy Wallstreet, Trump, Lockdown Resistance) each more aggressive than the last.

Unfortunately, it’s very difficult to rally an aging population. Most nations on earth are aging, and this leads to the type of cultural stagnation now being witnessed. It’s very difficult to get men in their 30s to risk it all for a better world compared to men in their early 20s. The indicator is that the decline will continue slowly until major disasters create opportunities for those willing to buck the rules.

What makes the difference there is how long it takes The System to retake control of a given area after a disaster. The longer that the western managerial bureaucracy takes to reestablish direct control, the stronger the resistance to that control will end up being.

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There are alternative methods of organization that can help prime a community to throw off the the establishment managerial bureaucrats:

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Private Local Reorganization in the Face of Disaster

In response to the incompetence of large-scale organizations, the people in a disaster-stricken areas are prone to sudden change-of-state reorganization independent of larger institutions. These sudden individual reorganizations pose an impediment to the reassertion of control by the bureaucratic managerial class. As a result, regions stricken by natural or artificial disasters are likely to be further stricken by overbearing and ineffective legal declarations. This helps the established managerial system maintain a sense of public legitimacy.

For example, following Hurricane Helene it was declared that possession of a firearm in public would be considered a criminal offense. Similarly rumors have been wide-spread that FEMA was seizing buildings and supplies to ‘inventory’ them for days rather than provide those resources to the public. These types of declarations are made primarily for the sake of the enforcement agencies that enter to reassert national control and to prevent local organizations from developing. Even a small local organization of individuals that achieves a level of assumed-authority in a power vacuum can become a significant extra-legal body that the powers that be don’t want.

A Slow Decline: Unable To Rebuild What Was Lost

There will be no great collapse or catastrophic end in the West. Rather the disasters that strike various regions will start getting worse and reconstruction will begin happening slower if it happens at all. Once a critical threshold is met there will be a change-of-state that takes place as local authority supersedes national authority when it comes to territorial control. This is most likely to occur in regions of the West where there are large youth populations. (Utah Maybe?).

Over time economic friction will increase and global trade will decline. International shipping will become more expensive and dangerous. Should piracy become a serious threat to the Atlantic or Pacific trade lanes there will be immediate knock-on international effects.

In the recovery from disaster there will be a form of forced-economic-localization. It doesn’t matter how cheaply Amazon sells a product if it can’t be shipped to you. Instead local men with 3D printers, machine shops and 6-axis mills will become invaluable. Fixing a car without the right part isn’t possible in the modern era, so the ability to make the right part could mean life or death for people in a town connected to the rest of the country by a single washed out road.

Resource shortages will encourage more piracy (or even banditry) which will further discourage the cowardly enforcement apparatus that’s grown up with the presumption of public cooperation. A disaster represents the opportunity for a social change-of-state in a restricted region and presents challenges to long-term stability. The bureaucratic managerial system as it stands is becoming less well prepared for disaster over time, and the population is becoming less willing to operate within a system that hates them. Regions becoming more isolated for long periods of time is going to be a side-effect of national cultural failures.

Eventually the demographics and decline will stabilize, but where that point is and how it comes about is yet to be seen. A major resurgence could happen in response, but that depends heavily on national unity, economics and strong competent leaders. In its current state it seems likely that one or two major disasters in the wrong places and at the wrong time could completely cripple the United States national trade system and generate critical power vacuums. Rebuilding from such disasters could prove too expensive and slow… resulting in economic and political localization much to the chagrin of the ruling elite and their repugnant foot soldiers. When or where that might happen is a question left to fate.