Car Culture

Richard Spencer writes:

It’s Primitivism Lite, a more presentable version of the fantasy that one day the modern world will finally collapse and we’ll all be whole again.

1.) There is nothing primitive at all about advocating the end of single use zoning or recognizing the manner in which the culture of the automobile has deformed the entire landscape of North America and turned once thriving towns (and the spaces in between them) into places not worth caring about.

2.) The end of the modern world is not a fantasy. Peak Oil seems to have occurred in 2005. No amount of drilling now will put a dent into soaring crude prices. The sheer inexorable logic of material reality will now force changes in the way Americans have chosen to live for over fifty years.

I understand these sentiments (even if I reject them). I don’t think, however, that any Good Livin’ can be had by making the lives of average people more God awfully expensive and hoping for a bounteous dole from the welfare state.

Americans will adapt to Peak Oil by becoming more communitarian. In hard times, family and extended kin networks will become more important. Neighbors will do more carpooling. The huge gas guzzling SUVS and trucks will die. Local economies will revive as transportation becomes more expensive and acts effectively as a tariff on foreign goods. The suburban living arrangement will become more untenable and the American population will disperse to the dead small towns they were once determined to leave behind.

About Hunter Wallace 12390 Articles
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Occidental Dissent

4 Comments

  1. I hope you’re right. These would be a great blessing that I have been hoping for, for some years.

    I am worried that fully-electric cars may simply replace gasoline cars. Dodging the peak oil issue and allowing soul-killing car-culture / atomized suburbanism to yet survive.

  2. A period of instability is inevitable at this point. The technology simply isn’t there for an easy transition between oil and its replacement.

  3. I’m trying to fix up my place to be as self sufficient as possible. I have also been taking advantage of the cheap farm equipment from China at various retail stores. It probably won’t be that cheap forever.

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