Unsupported Speculation

I have a rather strange idea, which is related to my fascination about what caused early bronze age cities to collapse, and what might have changed about more modern cities that made them less vulnerable to the same phenomena.

To begin with, you have to remember that bronze age cities were the largest and most complicated ever constructed by mankind. The main idea about this I want you to think about is that no one had any experience in the reasons for city stability or instability because of this.

Human communities had been constrained previously by an inability to obtain enough food. This was because no large fields for growing crops were possible due to a lack of a strong enough metal to make animal-drawn plows. The best metal we had was copper, and that was only good for jewelry, because it was too soft to make tools from.

The alloy bronze was probably accidentally discovered, because arsenic is a byproduct of the melting of copper. Then, when copper was remelted in the same melting vessel with the residual arsenic still in it, when the ratio between the copper and the arsenic happened to be correct, people created bronze. But, they would have to notice that they had a stronger metal before they could make deliberate use of it. At some point they DID notice, and then the bronze age began.

Long story short, they created ploys strong enough to be pulled through fields by animals, and large farm fields were created, food was in abundance, and a community had enough food to sustain larger populations within a small geographic area.

Communities grew into bronze age cities. These cities’ larger sizes and complexity created the need for abstract labor in order to organize these urban areas. This means that people had jobs now that weren’t the normal toiling in the fields and general human physical labor, but that their roles in these new cities were to ‘collect numbers’, calculate, and make decisions.

Markets and business also flourished, and in particular the brewing of alcohol. What you have to remember about the human consumption of alcohol is that it is very difficult to create so that it is safe for human beings to drink. There are kits available to make your own beer, mead, or wine, and if you read the instructions, you will likely be too scared to attempt to actually make it. This is because the instructions will be replete with warnings that if you screw up somehow while making your batch, you will either make yourself brain dead or deceased after drinking it. It’s one of the jokes about the racket of “Make Your Own Alcohol” kits: No one ever does.

And so this is today, when we have professional brewing who know both how to create large batches of alcohol safe for people to drink, as well as test batches for safety. Obviously, no one knew how to do either in the bronze age.

Like today, in the bronze age, alcohol was a great way for those early people to wind down after work. In order to attract more customers, alcohol brewers began to add hallucinogenics to their brews. This meant that at the end of the day, after a long day at work, you could go to the local bronze age pub, relax, get sauced, and hallucinate.

And so what probably happened TO those bronze age cities that caused their collapse, is that to many citizens succumbed to partial brain failure, which was caused by a combination of dangerous batches of alcohol and the use of drugs. Once the numbers of people who were both mentally disabled and also held various jobs in the city reached some threshold, the city as a whole failed to maintain organization of itself.

Getting back to those new abstract laborers busy collecting data and making decisions, when too many people in a city suffer from partial brain failure, it is virtually impossible to make any informed decisions at all towards management of the city, because all data is inaccurate.

And so that is my current theory about how bronze age cities collapsed, over and over again. But what is it that allows modern cities to stay alive despite reaching vastly larger populations and complexity than those early bronze age ones, EVEN when in the throws of drug epidemics? The answer, I believe, is industry.

But when you read ‘Industry’, you should read ‘The operation of very powerful and dangerous machines near other people”. And so what we are talking about are factories, steel production, logistics, ports, rail, construction, ext. These types of activities, because of modern technology, require the use of machines that can easily maim or kill someone. This is why they often require regular drug testing, as well as lots of performance tracking; Managers want to be able to anticipate that an operator of one of their machines, or someone who works in close proximity to them, may maim or kill themselves or someone else, before it happens. In addition, the types of runaway disasters that are possible in some of these industries is breathtaking, and a small f*ckup can sometimes destroy an entire complex.

And so my conclusion is that these modern industries are the lifelines that happen to keep a city alive when the revenue generated by them is high enough, even if a large portion of the city is wracked by systemic drug abuse.

On a tangent, just because I am interested in these things, is that an irony here is that these industries also happen to be the loudest to work or live nearby, and not only do people have to cope with noise pollution, but also physical vibrations inside their homes or apartments at all hours of the day and night. This causes housing near these industries to become the cheapest, and the people that can afford to live somewhere quieter move away instead, and housing around industry become slums with drug abusers.

And so, modern cities have found a celestial hack in order to spare themselves from the judgement of YHWH, and mankind marches defiantly forward through the calculated perpetuation of human misery.

HAIL SATAN!