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.
look at the hurricanes and other natural disasters that take our entire counties
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.
China’s entire history is coming together and breaking apart over and over.
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.
Australia’s about as sparsely populated …
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.
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.
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’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.
You’re seriously trying to school me on evolution?! Yeah. I get it. Take your American hate elsewhere, I’m just kicking around ideas. And BTW, bet you can’t start a fire to save your very own life.
i feel like you took the wrong things from that person’s post
Wow what a rugged response 😂
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.
But some always survive! We humans are the AR-15s of the animal world. Not the best at anything, not even good for some tasks, but we’re well adapted, multipurpose machines.
To even imagine surviving a year, I’d have to go far more serious than I’m willing to go. 500 pounds of rice, beans and corn would go a long way for both of us. Until the bears and deer find it. Or 2-legged critters find it. Despite being in a swamp, gathering and purifying water would be hell and take a huge chunk of my day. Can’t even count on rain. What to do when my tarps are shredded? How about when we get a 2-month dry spell?
LOL, as of now, I don’t even have a path to the river, and that’s only 800M away. When it gets cooler, I’m breaking out the chest waders and mucking through the swampy bits, see how it goes. But imagine hauling water for a 1.6KM round trip. Every day. Lord.
Still, I’ve always wanted to go to camp and stay a whole week on my own, not leave no matter what. Be interesting to see how that would work out. Probably end up working all day just to gather firewood for heat, boiling water, cooking, light, etc.
Even with all the dead wood around, it’s a challenge. The dead stuff evaporates in the fire and the green hardly burns. Take 6-months or so to end up with cured firewood, and the trees I have are not the best for that.
And then foraging for plants and shrooms, which I’m nearly clueless about, be lucky to nail a squirrel or catch a decent fish. Back to camp to cook. Sleep, rinse, repeat. No time to learn new skills.
Also, I’d end up wiping my ass with dried moss. Paper products don’t last, even in a dry tent. LOL, see the 2020 Toilet Paper Riots.
Again, I’d be far better off than most. Don’t think we could make it 3-months, even if we had stockpiles of dry foodstuffs and no one came along to fuck with us. And that’s not going to happen.
Been learning to make charcoal at scale, only done it in paint cans. That will be a fun experiment.
That’s the point. We, most of us, would just die. For me it’s a question of the degree of suffering involved. Forget beans and rice for a year. Just give me a vial of fentanyl or something else that can kill me with minimal suffering. That’s as far as I need to go for prepping.
You need to ask yourself if that’s the world you want to live in if it’s a rapid collapse.
Sure, you’ll have a better chance of survival if you prep, but unless you have a trustworthy community of skilled individuals that can band together for defense and food production you’re basically in a situation where you’re waiting to die. Whether it be illness, injury, infection, malnutrition, aggression from other humans…whatever, odds are you will not survive very long.
In a catastrophic collapse all the things that used to keep society running are gone. We have a global network that moves everything from energy to food to medication to machinery where it needs to go. We have people, specialists, whose life’s work it is to make all of these things. That specialization also means they don’t work the fields, plant crops, pull a plough, or raise draft animals.
If TSHTF we lose the specialists first.
The global supply chain stops. The flow of materials and energy stops, any exceptions are rare, if any, and that will be likely be temporary as there will be limited ability to find and use raw materials (coal, iron, smelting, machining, electricity)for low tech (like a piston for an engine) and impossible for high tech ( computer chip manufacture for the engine controller or other electrical/plastic parts).
If it’s bad enough, fast enough, we basically wind up in a scrapper/stone age/subsistence farming because we have no way to mine for the materials that make modern society what it is. We probably ate all the draft animals, so fieldwork is done by hand. You will need specialists who understand crop planting, harvesting, storage, animal husbandry, homebuilding with natural materials, etc. Probably need to go hang out with the Amish. But even then, things like medicine and vaccines are gone. There will constantly be people who will try to take what they want by violence.
The only real hope is for a slow slide into collapse where civilization has time to adjust and pull back its borders and maintain whatever remains. That doesn’t mean that billions won’t die on the way there, and it’s pure luck if civilization can withstand the assault of the dying masses.
So again…the odds of surviving a real collapse are very low, it just depends on how quick the collapse is to determine how long your odds of survival are. Couple that with the loss of every modern convenience, scarcity or loss of medicine, electricity, etc and you’re looking at a tough existence. The only hope is a “village” full of the very people that can do hard physical work and the knowledge to survive in the new low-tech world. The likelihood of that chance for anyone in the overwhelming majority of the modern world is near zero.
not the best at anything, not even good for some tasks, but we’re well adapted, multipurpose machines.
actually humans are the absolute best at persistence hunting, and it’s not even close. no other animals can keep up with humans’ natural ability to just keep jogging
I’m actually really curious which rifles are better at some categories that the AR-15 is not best at
Longer range, more or less “power” (velocity and bullet weight), ammo weight and availability, weapon weight, stuff like that.
For any given task, there’s a better weapon. .22LR rifles are what most people talk about in survival situations. The AR-15 is the Toyota Corolla of guns, reliable, easy, good enough for most chores.
Feel free to continue with more examples!
If I can my M&P 15-22 working this week, that might be my choice for a survival gun. It’s like a 3/4-sized AR-15, same controls and form factor. Cheap ammo, light as a feather, all that.
Stopping power? Cartridge size? Capacity?
.22LR, 25 in the magazine. So no, not much stopping power, but I’m one of those “shot placement counts” guys. In any case, 25 rounds adds up to a lot of angry hornets.
At the time, the largest Grizzly ever taken was by an Inuit woman with a single shot .22 bolt-action. The Virginia Tech shooter, worst school massacre in US history, killed most of his victims with a .22 semi-automatic pistol.
Ammo is readily available, even if scrounging, nothing to throw 500 rounds in a backpack. Accurate enough to hit a squirrel at 50-yards without tweaking your scope, if you even need one at that range (I do!). On top of all that, the report is nothing like anything else, hard to pinpoint a “quiet” shot like that. Oh, and zero recoil, followup shots are already on target.
You can be an AR-15. I’ll be an AK-47.
LOL, I sense a gun nut fight coming up. (Only shot an AK once.)
I’m not a gun nut. I barely know the difference between the two. I do know, however, that a lot more AK-47s were used by revolutionary forces the world over than AR-15s.
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.
Now we’re talking the same language! I’ll have a read on that.
I’m shocked at the comments deriding individualism and building skills, like those are vices. And then there’s the, “I’d rather die.” comments. OK. Die then.
The collapse of the Empire wasn’t that fast.
No! But the book details a single person’s life and experiences. For her, it was fast. Interesting to see how civilization frayed at the edges and contracted back towards Rome.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
In the Postman society rebounded super fast from that scenario as soon as a postal service started to function so as long as you can live in a Costner world all is not lost
when the roman empire collapsed, 2/3rds of the world population lived in asia and while they noticed, they did not suffer that much. it is hard to find anything that will make every civilisation collapse at the same time and the same rate
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.
