The Life of Lou Ruppert

Between the Judith Miller book I just finished, Nassim Taleb’s Black Swan, and the Neil Strauss book I just started, I’m really impressed by how fragile and unpredictable the collapse of societies can be. Taleb talks about the city of Rome going from a city of over a million people to a city of only about twelve thousand. Miller talks about how Beirut was the very picture of tolerance and peace, right up until the civil war. Strauss, in Emergency, talks about Bosnia being the same way, and about Nazi Germany gradually descending into chaos while the Jews tragically waited for things to get better. Nobody knows what tomorrow will hold.

When I was in Bosnia, I remember seeing burnt out buses and trucks along the sides of the highways. Buildings in town had huge holes in them from shelling, ten years after the war. Rumor had it that some of the older buildings were still mined to keep their occupants from returning. How does a peaceful multicultural society devolve into that state within months or years? People there acted as though nothing had ever happened, but only ten years earlier people were being lined up in death camps and slaughtered! When Rome was at its peak, did the people know that within a hundred years its population would dwindle by 99%?

It’s fun, and scary, to think sometimes that these might be the last days of our civilization. Will our cities’ populations drop by 99% in the next century? Will our diversity turn on itself in brutal acts of genocide? Will our currency bottom out like Communist Russia’s or Zimbabwe’s did? It’s freaky.

Enjoy today, because you don’t know what tomorrow will bring, or even if it will arrive at all.