And as I read that, it occurred to me, perhaps the sacrifice that must be made in order to preserve some semblence of civilization is the sacrifice of the cities. Let them burn; let them riot; let them riot and loot and burn until there’s nothing left to steal and nothing left to do except to beat one another senseless as they turn to stealing from one another. Then as the electricity begins to fail and the water supplies are cut off, they’ll begin to consume one another in a frenzy of killing while the saner members die attempting to flee the cities only to find themselves dying of hunger and thirst and feral animals having insufficiently provisioned themselves for the attempted escape. And the few that do manage to make it to the next town or village will be greeted by the well placed bullets of the righteous and their torn bodies will be burned in the town square.
That’s a heavy price to pay for the preservation of civilization, but it’s a price we should gladly pay.
I remember a discussion we had in school which posed the question of civilization’s demise and homo sapiens’ retrogression; i.e. going back to a primitive existence of killing animals for food, sleeping under the stars, bathing in rivers.
We concluded that any form of survival and renewal was not regression. However, we did note that becoming dependent on others for necessities (other peoples labor) was equal to descending to a feral state.
There is NO civilization without cities and there NEVER HAS BEEN. That is where the word comes from. Urbanization is one of the requirements for a real civilization.
When civilizations collapse the first thing that goes is urban life and the commerce they produce. When the cities collapse and the economies they sustain, populations flee to the countryside and eke out a miserable subsistence life of greatly diminished productivity. This is what is called a “Dark Age” and they have recurred whenever civilizations collapse.
Your idea is similar to what Pol Pot tried to do to Cambodia. It is just as sick.
Your idea is called tribalism not civilization.