Casual Conversation

You’ve done a mental work-through of the American fallacy of “rugged individualism” and reached the correct conclusion that it’s not doable, or best case makes for a very doubtful life.

Millions of people mistakenly base their identity on the romantic notion of the rugged man crafting and running his life with nothing but his own hands either in the current world or a post-apocalyptic one.

But the reality is that humans need by design a supportive community to exist in, similar to how fish need schools to swim in. Throughout most of our evolution we have existed in a tribal setting. Mothers would nurse any child in the tribe, grandparents would mentor everyone, meat caught by the hunters would be shared by all. It was understood that the survival of the tribe was predicated on a “democratic socialism” whereby everyone looked after each other. You can see this in play in the animal kingdom when elephants form a defensive wall around a young calf, or wildebeests encircle a newborn when lions approach. They are saying “our tribe will only succeed if we give the least among us a fighting chance, and we are only as successful as the least among us.”

In the modern world many have internally redefined the tribal concept to mean a “tribe of one.” But this attitude wont work. Four million years of evolution can’t be waved away. You will not manufacture your own contact lenses. If you want to survive the apocalypse listen to what your intuition is telling you: you can’t do it alone. Yes, stockpile canned food if you wish. But more importantly, make connections, plan it to be a group effort.

If it makes you feel better, if society collapses to the point that there are no more clothes, ammo, or canned food, you'll have long since been dead.

Despite what people think, we humans are fragile and pampered and a modern person is going to just end up dead if society collapses to that extent.

I knew a serious prepper dude (by which I mean he hoarded heirloom seeds and composting toilets and not silver and MREs) who, while preparing to survive, pretty much figured if it totally falls apart he and his family would end up dead, and that evening scores was probably a more useful use of his time than fighting for every last minute.

I used to think he was insane (and hell, he probably is) but the older I get the more I can understand his view on getting even, and then anything left is a bonus.

I want to remind you that you are reading fiction and that fiction writers bring all their biases with them when they write.

For a somewhat bitter antidote to the despair, I encourage you to read David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything. One passage towards the end, in particular, really made me rethink some of my depression. They talk about how wars leave indelible marks in the fossil record, and throughout most of the record there are no indications of war: peace is the rule, not the exception. We seem to be in an anomalous period of human history, and getting back from the brink will require a lot of work.

The interactions you mention from the book don’t seem to be borne out by actual human experience. In times of distress people are more likely to help each other. Listening to accounts from the ground in Asheville is largely a tale of people who may not have thought much of each other a few weeks ago helping each other because they are all humans who need help. I don’t see any reason to think this would change if the scope of disaster was bigger. The key problem seems to come from people thinking they should be in charge, and that’s easy enough to deal with.

The Rand corporation made a paper on what they call the "neomedieval era". They get paid to research and write a bunch of analytical stuff for the US Govt and other big picture people.

The idea is that the last 200 years has been an anomaly. Big central governments, industry, media etc. They make the case that a shift has started since about 2000. We are gradually sliding back to how things have worked for most of human history, decentralized societies, greater divides between rich and poor and governments trying their best to get by. Less chance of massive conventional world wars and more chance of messy regional ones (Syria, Lebanon etc). It's an interesting read. So no it's not just you!

Anyway what we should all try to do is focus on what you can locally. Make friends, build skills and do stuff with them. Be involved and help each other. Yes there are always bigger fish to take things but building up is better than being helpless in difficult situations. It can be fun AND fufill a bigger purpose. No need for constant doom and gloom to do better.

If I can get to a level my grandparents were with gardening, canning, sewing, diy repairs etc I'd be pretty well set. Back then it was a norm, but we offloaded those skills on companies and governments. Now it could be seen as homesteading or prepping but in their time it was common sense for a society that made it through world wars and the depression.

The collapse of the Empire wasn't that fast.

Something tells me that you would enjoy reading Ryan North’s “How to invent everything: A survival guide for the stranded time traveler”. It does explain how to make lye, for example

Things were better and fell apart less badly near the center of the Roman empire, the problems of that story were that Rome was no longer supporting their British colony, so the surrounding tribes were trying to take over

[off topic?]

Precipice by Robert Harris. Similar idea of sudden swift change. Prime Minister Asquith is toddling along, happily oblivious to Europe when out of the blue Austro-Hungary decides to invade Serbia.

Read Octavia Butler's parable of the sower and parable of the talents. They're written in the 90s but they're basically about now. There's even a measles outbreak.

Things can get really bad, but there are also a lot of good people.

This may sound weird, but if you can stand it (some people cannot handle either the visuals or the concepts, and that's cool) watch The Walking Dead TV series. Like many modern zombie shows but more so than most, the focus is on what happens after the shit hits the fan.

The real threat, after the first initial shock, isn't nature as in zombies but rather nurture as in humans, who will resort to slavery at the drop of a hat if given two seconds chance. (You might have worried more about canabalism, but that would be temporary bc it would be so much better to eat e.g. pork, prepared by slaves).

Actually, a bit ironically, did you know that there are more black people locked up and doing work in prisons than there ever were utilized as slaves? No, I don't mean in the show, I mean right now, irl, in America, "the home of the free", and in particular the so-called "Bible Belt". Seriously, minor infractions that white children get off scott free with will land a black person in jail for the maximum sentencing time, and if they didn't have anything (like drugs) on them, then surely something could be... ahem, "found"? You know, to fulfill the for-profit quota.

Once you start opening your eyes to such, it's sickening, to think not about what would happen if society were to collapse in the future, but what's already happening right the fuck now, maybe as little as ten miles away from where you are now.

I wouldn't worry quite so much... This whole last stand holding out through to the end of time kind of mentality isn't generally true of most circumstances in the modern age. Governments, though not nessisarily legitimized on the world stage ones, tend to be pretty quick to reform so as long as you can wait out maybe a year on victory gardens, old clothes and dried and canned food you should be fine on most difficult to create items. That and since mass production has made sure there is a considerable surplus of regular everyday items like dishware learning how to source your own clay isn't going to be much of an issue.

Governments have collapsed in the past and the militarized nature of the American citizenry is probably going to make it a unique problem. But like other places chances are any purge like times are going to be fairly short as it is generally been demonstrated that those antisocial behaviours tend to mean a lot of international compassionate humanitarian aid is witheld to those people and once order reasserts itself the bill tends to come due.

Chances are if the worst happens and you don't treat your resources as worth making a grand last stand over you have a pretty good chance of making it out and once there's a reconstruction effort then the requests made of you to do your bit will not be a lone wolf kind of senario.

The human population around the fall of the Roman Empire was about 200,000,000. If we are talking about complete collapse of civilization, I expect at least 90% of humanity will die. Of the remainder, most will go into subsistence farming and/or armies to raid nearby areas. Given the wealth of manufactured goods currently out there, I expect that most industry would be scavenger focused, causing a loss of technology.

I don't really want to live in that world.