This 7-yo girl is living large in England. Family has a nice villa, couple of slaves and servants, throws lavish parties, all that. OK, they’re getting a little broke. The bathhouse burned and they can’t afford to fix it, can’t even find artisans to do the work, stuff like that. Her father is a tax collector and suddenly farmers are refusing to pay up. “Why are we paying for Rome’s protection? When was the last time we even saw a soldier? Meanwhile, the Saxons are fucking shit up not far from here.” And it goes downhill from there, fast.
The girl ends up at Hadrian’s Wall after a few years, and it’s a mess. Slovenly soldiers getting drunk on duty, no one cares about anything, Saxons and Picts raiding everywhere. And it goes downhill again, fast. Next thing you know, no amount of money will buy a clay pot. Metal, of any kind? Forget it, no one will give up any. Roman coin means nothing, because you can’t eat it or wear it.
When she’s 17, her and a few others get a pathetic little farm going. They’re surviving, barely. Hell, they can’t even figure out how to repair a thatch roof. A local strongman snatches them up to add to his tiny little hilltop, which is pathetic in itself compared to what the Romans had going on 30-years previously. At least they start making iron, but that’s only because the warlord lucked out and grabbed the one guy who knows the process. But hey! It’s got an OK-ish wall!
At one point the young woman finds a nice perfume bottle in the ruins. All I could think was, damn, there’s no way anyone, anywhere around her could produce even the crudest glass item.
Guess you get the idea. I know the world is more resilient now, but COVID showed how thin the sauce really is. Supply chains are 2-weeks away from near total collapse. Almost every one of us makes a living, and has an education, that’s totally irrelevant to survival.
I’m in far better shape than most as I’ve got 2.5 acres of swamp, not far from a river. I’m no stranger to the local ecosystems, but I’ve thought about trying to live out there, and it’s not doable without modern tech, not for me anyway. Example, I have plenty of guns for defense and hunting, but ammo isn’t infinite. I can make my own black powder, and have black powder guns. I make my own charcoal and I guess I could get potassium nitrate from urine, but where do I get pure sulpher? I can reload shotgun shells, but I can’t imagine how to make a primer. I can pour my own lead bullets and maybe shot, but how am I to power the smelter? Not with my two solar cells I’m not. (Get me the Fresnel lens from an old-school projection TV and I can melt rock!)
Even the simplest items are out of reach. Clay pots seem easy enough, but I have no idea where to find clay locally. I certainly can’t tell good from bad clay, don’t know the temps and times required to fire it, none of the basics. The pressing need for food and hauling fresh water wouldn’t allow time to experiment.
I make my own soap, but I don’t know how to get lye from wood ash. Even given that, it would take tons of trial and error with animal fats.
Aside from food, shelter and water, cloth is easily the most essential item. “Always carry a towel.”, is excellent advice. The one thing I often wish I had more of camping in the cold or wet is more cloth, of any kind. Even in the heat, we need cloth. Guess if I had a few sheep that would be nice, but I don’t have a clue as to building a loom or how exactly one works. Warp and weft or something? Hell, I don’t even know what it means to “card” wool. For that matter, I’d have no clue how to cure the animals hides I would hunt. Something involving urine again, that’s all I know.
Speaking of hunting, as rednecks think we could do well enough on that count. Don’t know who else has noticed, but our fauna is falling apart, starting with insects. I get into some wild places and it’s shocking how little wildlife there is. Just saw my first two copperheads, less than a week apart! That’s after 5-years of tromping the woods, rivers and swamps. If I wiped out every squirrel on the block, that would feed my wife and I for 2-3 weeks, tops. And everyone else would be doing the same thing. We would literally be down to eating stray dogs and cats, fast.
And back to defense, if you have anything and anyone knows it, you’re going to have to fight. I can’t stay awake 24/7 and neither can my wife. Scary to think, as in our fictional character’s case, no matter what you obtain, someone stronger will eventually come take it. Ally with neighbors? Of course! But there’s always a bigger fish, and being a big fish in a small pond is going to attract attention. “Their morals, their code; it’s a bad joke. Dropped at the first sign of trouble. They’re only as good as the world allows them to be. You’ll see-I’ll show you. When the chips are down these, uh, civilized people? They’ll eat each other.”
If I break my glasses and the contacts run out, I’m straight handicapped. I’ve never found used eye wear that was remotely “close enough”, better off without.
The Roman Empire had it good for a thousand years, never imagined it could end. And they were cavemen relative to our modern tech. Almost everything we know would become obsolete, overnight. But, not joking, we could live off our own trash pretty well. At least we’d have plastic containers and pull-tab fish hooks. (Seriously, I repurpose loads of crap I find in the woods and on the roadsides. You should see my tackle box! And I don’t even fish.)
What if the US dollar collapses? Global warming? (<- probably the most realistic threat) Nuclear war? A “better” version of COVID or the Spanish Flu? Diseases wiping out our factory farms? Guess what I’m getting at is that despite living in the richest era of human history, we’re all the more fragile. I’m not seriously worried about my few remaining years, but I’m seeing that the preppers might have the right idea.
Whew! Had to get some thoughts out! What are yours?
The novel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalescent Damned good so far! And it’s a trilogy!
What’s missing from your analysis is natural given that you’re likely, reading between the lines, an American. Your culture venerates the “lone wolf” “man with a gun” stereotype so naturally that’s what you gravitate toward when picturing a post-collapse time.
The reality is that when times get hard people (at least in any country I’ve lived in) pull together, not apart. I’m not sure if that’s possible in the USA. (Current data suggests it isn’t, but I bring my own biases into that analysis.) I’m pretty sure personally that if the shit hits the fan, the USA will, in fact, shatter and spall and generally become what you describe.
But most of the rest of the world, if history is to be believed, won’t. So don’t worry. Civilization will continue. Just yours might not.
Any city is going to get wild if things really break down, but US rural areas are already self sufficient and used to banding together
There’s also a lot of churches and churchgoers who are used to community driven chores.
Honestly, outside of the cities, the US would probably be fine. There’s plenty of well maintained roads between locations.
For example, look at the hurricanes and other natural disasters that take our entire counties. People spring back from those.
that is not a self-reliant effort and nobody expects or pretends it to be
Then you haven’t experienced the self-reliance and community come out after a hurricane. It’s rather stunning to see.
I expected nothing after Hurricane Ivan, but I prepped best I knew how to help myself and my roommates. Cried a bit when I saw the Florida Guard roll in. Seriously. “My god. We have help?”
But the vast majority of aid came on a neighbor by neighbor basis. Sure, for businesses and large concerns, money came from insurance, the government, etc., but they weren’t walking down the street with chainsaws looking for people in need.
I think the difference is size. The US has states the size of European countries. Getting a country/state to pull together is a lot easier than the whole EU/US because the culture and goals are similar. Right now the Carolinas are pulling together to deal with flooding and Florida is dealing with a rocking hurricane season.
But I agree with another comment that the real divides would be city vs rural.
Cities tend to think that government is the main answer to problems since their lives are surrounded by roads and buildings and public transport and people have a lot less of their own to work with. You can’t easily have a garden in an apartment for example.
Rural doesn’t have as much government influence since so much focus is spent on the cities. Power outages last longer, stores are few and far between, side roads are often an afterthought and police and fire are 10 min away if you’re lucky. So people use the land and neighbors and have the ability to be mostly self reliant.
So you can see where the divides come from on a lot of subjects
Said it better than I could. Stunning how rural people come together vs. city people screaming for help. See: Hurricane Katrina. Southern Mississippi, our poorest state, was wiped off the map. But all the rest of the country knows about is the clusterfuck New Orleans turned into.
I was there, saw it. NO got kissed, MS was beat like I’ve never seen. NO, and the rest of the US, screamed, “Government save us!”. While rural MS said, “Aight. Let’s do this thing.”
I cried when the FL Guard rolled down my street after Ivan. I was prepared to be on my own and couldn’t believe they were there to relieve us. (And for those of you who may say I should have expected help, you’ve never fought your way through such devastation. I didn’t know the military could get through that.)
China’s bigger than the USA and doesn’t have this divide.
Australia’s about as sparsely populated and doesn’t have the civil war the USA is brewing up right now threatening them.
There’s nothing exceptional about the USA’s circumstances and geography. You can’t use exceptionalism as an excuse.
China’s entire history is coming together and breaking apart over and over. Australia has a lot of land but the vast majority is unpopulated.
Over cycles of 500-800 years, yes.
The USA has only barely exceeded 200 and has already had one existential threat in the form of the ACW and is facing ACW II Electric Bugaloo in my lifetime.
the USA has the second oldest active constitution of any government, it is an old oooold beast.
Sorry what? Australia’s population density is is 3.6/km², the US’s is 33.6/km², almost 10 times higher. Even if you fudge it by treating the swathes of uninhabited desert as an outlier and ignoring them, you’re still dealing with a raw number of people lower than the population of Texas.
you think China doesn’t have an urban-rural divide?
This being up flavors of how schizophrenia manifests in pseudo-helpful, positive ancestor/friend/family type hallucinations in almost all other cultures but Americans exclusively hear voices telling them to ruin their own lives, to hurt themselves and others, and destroy things
Is this actually the case? Do you have a source? I’m genuinely curious, not having a go at you.
I’ve heard that stereotype but it isn’t accurate. The experience is more or less undesirably the same in all cultures, even deaf individuals who are unlucky enough to have it happen tend to be bombarded with apparitions employing sign language. There are exceptions but they go against how things typically work, all cultures have tales of people gone mad.
You don’t even have to reach for schizophrenia. Look at the sociological differences in drunkenness. Drunk Brits and Americans go off on destructive sprees. Drunk Japanese and Chinese get maudlin and maybe start singing loudly.
Drunken violence is such a rare thing here it’s shocking when it happens.