Why Modern Conveniences cannot be destroyed

I don't know why it is, but people who were once hippies, or identified with hippies, have a strange and very precise eschatological vision. Young people as a whole do not share this vision. It appears to have been attached to the 60s. I personally have no explanation for it.

The vision runs as follows. Due to an economic or environmental crisis, society collapses suddenly. Technology as basic as flushing toilets, electricity, communication devices, and cars are abandoned, and men return to a world akin to the stone age.

post apocalyptic stone age, a hippie dream

This vision is based on numerous misconceptions.

First, essentially all of modern life is built upon a single technological achievement, use of electricity. The first use of electric lights was for street lighting in Cleveland, Ohio in 1879, only 140 years ago.

Now all other processes we perform in modern life have electricity as their basis. Even running water  requires electric pumps to force it to homes and businesses.

While electricity still seems like magic to some, the actual procedures for producing it are known to many.

And in spite of how people imagine the source of the electricity they use, it is usually produced within a hundred miles or so of its end use. So electricity is a local affair, and not actually centralized nationally.

The second thing is that America was originally a set of states that formed a federation for mutual defense, currency, and mail. Those states' rights and authority were never revoked. It is simply that the federal government grew and created federal income tax and added federal regulations. But essentially, schools, roads, and utilities continue to remain a state-operated affair. The US is really like 50 independent but cooperative nations, though most have forgotten that. 

So if the American economy were to go into a crisis, and the government even close, responsibility and authority to govern would revert to the states, at least de facto. People would continue to get up and go to work, including to utility companies, trucking companies, police departments, and so on.

The only way that electricity could stop, is if people at all levels of state infrastructure and governance abandoned their jobs. All bureaucrats went home. All city employees chose to sit around the house.

If the Federal government ceased to be able to back its money, states would create their own currencies. This happened in the period of the Confederacy.

Hence nothing would actually stop. 

For an example of this, consider the collapse of Soviet Union in 1991. People continued to go to work, and though there were disruptions, transportation and utilities continued to operate. Bankers still went to their banks. Newspapers continued to print newspapers. Lumberjacks continued to cut trees. Fishermen continued to fish. Store had little, but they were open.

Civilization expands because people want things that require its expansion. The only way to make civilization go away, is for people to want it to go away.

Let's now take a common (perhaps most common) counter-example. The Fall of Rome. It is said that Roman urban centers had many amenities like running water. And after the sacking by the Germanic, they did not. Life began agrarian. In the words of one historian, there was a radical simplification of material life.

But what people don't know is this was a local event. In the actual capital of Rome at the time, Constantinople, none of those amenities Rome was famous for went anywhere. Life went on as usual. It was only the Western portion of the Empire (what is today Europe) that life became simplified. I myself never knew this until I read Lost to the West: The Forgotten Byzantine Empire That Rescued Western Civilization, by Lars Bransworth.

Things don't actually collapse. It is a hippy myth, an eschatology. It cannot and does not occur. No great technological achievement of man ever disappeared unless it was replaced by something that did the same thing more efficiently.

Hippies did not like toilets, running water, or electricity. They liked to live by steams and use outhouses. But they were alone in this.

Hippy utopia envisions outhouses

"What happened when they burned London during the [Great] Plague? They rebuilt it later, and it is always better than before. So when the world is destroyed, a new and better world must spring up from the ashes. There will be chaos and destruction all over the universe; but after that, there will be no war for 800 years!"

— Meher Baba (LM 1986 print ed. 2621)