JOURNAL: Why Community Resilience?

Here's the question: what's the connection between local food, local power, and other forms community resilience to fourth generation warfare?

The answer is simple. A government's legitimacy is based on its ability to deliver basic services.

The ability to deliver these services is the difference between a failed/hollow state (see this post on what a failed state is, although I would argue food/power is tied with security in first position) and a functional/strong one. States that fail to provide these services (or suffer perpetual systems disruption) are vulnerable to predation by non-state entities that can provide them -- as we have seen with Hezbollah, Hamas (Sadr is making the switch to a more robust plate of services right now), and a wide variety of militias (from Sao Paolo to Pakistan). Community resilience of the type we are exploring on this weblog, whether it is applied in the US or Iraq or Nigeria, is a way to stave off that predation.

Bill Lind expands on this:

In the Great Depression of the 1930s, states’ economic failure brought governments and even systems of government, including democracy, into question. In both Europe and the United States, Communism and Fascism gained certain popularity because in the Soviet Union, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, everyone had a job. But the state itself was not challenged, because there was no alternative to the state.

Now, there is. Intelligent Fourth Generation entities, ranging from some drug gangs through organizations such as Hezbollah, are competing directly with the state for people’s primary loyalty. If those Fourth Generation entities can provide basic services, including food, when the state can no longer do so, they will gain the legitimacy that state is losing. In Fourth Generation war, that is a bigger win than any potential military victory.

As you watch the global financial system continue to unravel this fall, think hard what it will take to prevent rampant state failure in a chaotic global market system that has already weakened (privatized, hollowed out, and bankrupted) nation-states across the entire landscape.

Comments

[RanDomino]

PREVENT rampant state failure?? You fool, the age of states is over!

[WarLord]

During the Great Depression my uncle walked to the nearby city to attend a Communist Party rally because they gave away a box of groceries afterwards....

[Grant]

John,

I think you're missing something here, Resilient Communities aren't about staving off state failure. They are a response to state failure just as Hamas, Hezbollah, et al are. Taken to RC's logical conclusion, the community becomes the state (or shall we use sovereign so we may differentiate terms?) The difference between what you are describing and these other groups is that the goal of an RC is only to provide services. In other words, they aren't providing services as a means to an end, but an end in themselves.

One other thing related to your description of what a failed state is: The best description of what a state must provide comes from John Locke (and adapted for use in the Deceleration of Independence): Life, Liberty and Property. Food, power and security can all be wrapped up in those three words, and much else besides. Whatever group can provide and protect those things will be where a populations primary loyalties lie, whether it be a state or some other sovereign.

[Syn Diesel]

John's abstract-moral oversight was noticed by this Anon as well.

The White Hat's Pro-Life Livingry is much more of a threat to Teh States than the Black Hat's Suicidial Weaponry.

That Whill Have Been Known As Google commands you to search R. Buckminster Fuller.

[Syn Diesel]

What happens when when 1 megaton of carbon dioxide get's "fixed" in a hybrid power cycle doing jobs as diverse as a refrigerant (a solid refrigerant at that) and a bio-photovoltaic substrate that gets endlessly recycled? Why do we need Obama to save the poor?

[John Robb]

Grant and Syn,

Exactly. I probably didn't phrase it well.

JR