Another excellent essay/summation of our predicament. I have been thinking very much along the same lines as I put together the next couple of posts in my 'Energy Future Series'.

Here's a snippet of the next one I have ready and will post in a couple of days:

"A corollary of this rising political tension tends to be increasing domestic authoritarianism as the ruling caste struggles to maintain control of its own population in the face of anti-war narratives and movements, and the resulting—at least for the masses, not necessarily for society’s elite—tightening of economic conditions as resources are directed towards the military/security/industrial complex and related ‘control’ mechanisms. This results in diminishing returns for citizens: they get less and less benefit from their ‘investments’ in supporting the ruling caste of society. To counter these diminishing returns, the ‘rulers’ of a society seek greater control via a variety of means, but particularly economic and behavioural. A larger proportion of a society’s ‘wealth’ must be allocated away from the masses and towards the ruling caste’s favoured ‘projects’ and citizens must be ‘convinced’ of the need for the resulting ‘austerity’...

When diminishing returns are encountered for the geographical region controlled by the sociopolitical elite, it was generally countered through expansion into unconquered, peripheral regions where wealth could be extracted to support the core (i.e., ruling caste). Political tension between competing polities often was the result with the elite of competing societies coercing and/or convincing their subservient populations of the necessity to engage in war with the ‘other’...

In a world of quickly diminishing resources that are necessary to support the complexities of society and in which people have lost the skills/knowledge to live self-sufficiently—and here there are no unexploited lands to migrate to—the path towards ‘collapse’ is likely going to be much, much faster than the pre/historical ‘norm’: it will be probably be a Seneca-type decline given most of humanity’s reliance upon complex and fragile long-distance supply chains and the various subsystems that support these. "