Exactly.
One frightening thing, at a personal level, about a Carrington event is, what do you do if you happen to be traveling a somewhere if it happens? This cheery thought occurred to me when I was in the mini-subway at Atlanta’s airport during a business trip (I live in Montreal). Suddenly there you are in a different country, possibly separated by an ocean in some cases, with some local cash perhaps, a debit card and credit cards that don’t do anything and so on.
There is a real example - “1177 BC the year civilization collapsed” Non-fiction archaeology.
The bronze age developed an economy based on international trade. When the trade routes collapsed, civilization went with it.
We are in a similar situation today. For most of us our day to day existence relies on three corporations; Walmart, Amazon and Microsoft. A bit of hyperboley there but the essence is my point. Our foodstuffs are imported and rely on a common international infrastructure. Our products are ordered from an international brokerage. All of this relies on a common software system controlled by a single company.
If one of these systems fails they all collapse, just as they did in 1177 BC. In that case it is not the elite who will survive, it is the homeless and the indigenous reservation dwellers. The people who already practice survival as a life style. The rest of us wouldn’t last 6 months.
Are you defining “normally religious people” as the ones you don’t see in the news?
How about the ones you see in the news for running the local food pantry, all comers welcome?
And I’d class the Old Order Mennonites and Amish as “highly religious”; but I very rarely see them in the news, except occasionally for things like opening a store (also everybody welcome) or as part of a farming topic or because somebody thought they made good scenery for a picture.
Well here is an atheist acknowledging this; for, I believe, the second time in this thread.
thank you.
And an extremist Muslim fringe also. Which to be fair is pretty prevalent in a few nations.
There is an extremist Jewish fringe too.
I wouldnt be surprised if Hinduism and other religions also had an extremist fringe.
I would be surprised if they don’t. Any sufficiently large group of humans will have an extremist fringe.
Sometimes, of course, such fringes cause a whole lot of trouble.
You bet they do. All of them.
Find your local chapter of the Society for Creative Anachronism, and they might also have some answers.
Extremist Hindus? Somebody hasn’t been paying attention to India. There’s more than a slight streak of nationalism going on, they haven’t been very shy about announcing it to the world, and there’s definitely some extremists among that set.
Extremist Buddhists? Yeah, even there, you can find some in Myanmar
And Sri Lanka, and arguably Thailand, though it’s hard to separate religious from ethnic identity in both those cases.
This reminds me of the theme of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, with the implication that the survival of humanity depends on the values and actions of a few exceptional individuals (or corporations) who uphold the principles of reason, individualism, and capitalism, and the collapse of an interconnected civilization leads to a dystopic dark age of chaos and suffering. I don’t disagree.
Keeping working on that bunker, bro.
Meh. Many SCA people are quite good at crafts, although the non-crafting stick jocks probably outnumber them, but IME precious few of them grow their own food or have skills in that area.
The biggest problem I could see the Amish and Mennonites having if society breaks down is short-sighted outsiders raiding their farms and stealing all the food in sight for themselves. And possibly destroying their ability to grow and raise more food
I could also see people in the know doing that at Mormon churches, as well as doing this to other Mormons, who follow 6- to 12-month food storage (and yes, they do rotate and eat it) as part of their religious beliefs.
“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."
We know how to live without electricity, etc, and we have wool blankets, candles, lanterns, tents, and swords.
Correction: you think you know how.
Moderating:
This is a personal attack that adds nothing to the discussion at hand. Stop with the superfluous comments now.
Just because I didn’t use ‘we’ doesn’t mean I’m not also in the SCA, and ‘we’ know nothing about living without electricity. ‘We’ know how to camp for a bit without it, but most SCA folk wouldn’t last a week without ice for their drinks (or insulin, come to that).
The SCA are not subsistence farmers in some resource-limited country, they are well (over)fed Western hobbyists used to being no more than a few hour’s drive away from the modern world. Very, very few SCAdians are actually medieval lifestylers. Hell, despite appearances I’d argue more are not even crafters than are( unless armour repair counts)
I think the SCA is not the reenactment group to look to for this. The mountain men/trapper reenactors are a way better bet - lots of lifestylers there.