In January last year, I published a book called “The Collapse of 2020.” It was inspired by a $ 1,000 bet I made in 1995 that Western civilization, a victim of powerful modern technologies out of control, creating environmental, political and economic disasters, would collapse in 25 years.
I thought about writing a book to see how accurate my prediction had been.
I wrote then that the collapse had not occurred completely, but it seemed imminent in any direction you were looking, and I would wait until the end of the year for a final decision.
I thought of “collapsing” not as something like the implosion of a building, a sudden and complete act, but as an avalanche, moving downwards destroying everything in its path until finally the village was buried.
At the end of the year, the judge whose opinion my betting partner and I had agreed to accept gave his decision: I had won mainly in the environmental phase, since global warming was an undeniable phenomenon that threatened the Earth; I had not won in politics because most governments were still working, even if badly; and I had lost in the economic area because the stock market was up. Therefore, I lost.
I replied that if I had won over the environment, that in itself was causing a breakdown that covered everything else. That the coronavirus had shown how corrupt and inefficient almost all governments had been, and millions of lives were lost, good evidence of debilitation, if not collapse. And that the world was in a depression as deep as that of the 1930s, although the wealthiest nation decided to create non-existent dollars from the air to deceive people that the times were good and not to look behind the curtain.
I said I hadn’t lost and I wouldn’t pay. I may not have won completely, since much of the world still functioned in familiar ways, but given its precarious state and the downward direction in which it was going, I certainly didn’t lose.
And let me add a personal note: when I published the book, I was living in Mount Pleasant, a city that was no longer a city that since 2008 I found decidedly pleasant, despite having no mountain.
Then, in March, I got a chest disease that was probably a form of COVID-19 and spent a week in the hospital, just with my wife to comfort me. It was then that the pandemic was declared and I knew that its consequences would be disastrous, in fact, it would expose all the weaknesses of the political and economic systems that I had written about in my book.
It was then that I decided to leave South Carolina and return to the city where I was born and raised, Ithaca, New York. I decided that I wanted to be close to my family and found a place where my son-in-law is just a few minutes away and my daughters are just a few hours away. I decided that there would be a shortage of food and interrupted supply lines, so I am in a rural area with dozens of farms running around me. I decided that there would be political unrest in most cities in the country, resulting from economic stress and political ineptitude, so I moved to a small village on the outskirts of Ithaca (from where I can see across Lake Cayuga to the small village where I was born), where there is very little dispute and people know how to be neighbors.
I really enjoyed my time in Mount Pleasant and made lifelong friends there.
But I know I made the right choice. When our civilization continues to collapse, I will be able to survive as long as the Lord allows.
Kirkpatrick for sale he is the author of 14 books, including a story by SDS, the 1960s student group, which will be reprinted in the fall.