If we’re talking about a full societal collapse, I think the biggest misconception is how long it will take to rebuild civilization. People think that when the violence settles down in a few years, people will go to the libraries or other sources of information, read books on how to start up things like agriculture and oil refining, and then it’ll just be a few years of effort until we have the lights back on.
It’s not going to work like that. For the first few years people will be too pressed to preserve knowledge or systems. Then the systems will fail, and we’ll find that they can’t be easily restarted because they depend on each other. We’ll also find that most of the knowledge was digital and only accessible via an internet that will never exist again, and most of the libraries (and built-up areas) will get covered by vegetation a lot faster than anyone expects.
Without exaggeration, I think it’ll be quite fortunate if the clock of civilization gets pushed back by only 1000 years. We may well get pushed the entire 6000 years back to the beginning of written history. I don’t think it will be worse than that, because there’s a good chance we’ll preserve the ability to read and write. But most other stuff… gone.
And, similarly for the ultra rich catastrophists who think that they will be able to come out on top after the collapse. Yeah Elon, about those ultra skilled military types you hired who have all the skills needed to do well after the collapse of society, and are sitting on the mountain of supplies you brought. I’m sure they are going to carry on following your orders when the banks are no longer around to cash your checks.
Some of them have come up with the idea of fitting their private armies with bomb collars. How they intend to get their army to put the collars on is left a bit vague.
Not just that, but also the built-in default assumption that they will win.
Many of these guys are going to be in for the rudest awakening of their lives when they try to shoot up their foes and find out, to their horror, that their foes, too, can also send bullets into their bodies as well, and might, even, have…….better weapons.
I see the impending USA collapse as much more like what the USSR & Warsaw Pact countries experienced.
Commerce dribbles on with random disruptions, the bozo on top changes, as do a bunch of the laws, and society mostly shuffles along heads-down enduring the endurable. While the government du jour tries to out-asshole the prior lot.
Lotta marginalized folks especially dependent on the status quo die more or less unnoticed in their millions. Lotta hotheads in their thousands die spectacularly at the hands of various militias and government thugs.
And life goes on for everyone else. With significant disruption and ethical compromise. But schools still operate, stores still generally have some of most stuff, and everyone looks the other way as hard as they can. Which, it turns out, is pretty darn hard.
Ah, and now we’re back to our board bugaboo, semantics!
The USSR & Warsaw Pact description you mention I would have described as severe decline, or characterized by severe stability issues, but not a collapse. For that matter, the prior USA Civil war as definitely an unstable situation (duh) but neither societies involved fully collapsed during or even after depending on your POV.
But again, semantics.
Though using the OP as a guidelines:
It seems they’re envisioning a more total collapse of order and identity. Though if you look at Quantrill’s Raiders and the like, that would be an example of the above quote, even in a society I didn’t quite define as a total collapse.
Are we talking about a global collapse, or just the United States? Because if just the U.S. collapses, foreign countries and corporations will move in pretty quickly and keep some semblance of society functioning - for a price. America has plenty of natural resources, after all, and lots of hardware to steal.
I’d say the opposite. “Collapsing” to the point of cooking sparrows on curtain rods is entirely possible, we are far closer to that than we think IMO. Our food supply is based on an incredibly long fragile set of worldwide supply chains, it wouldn’t take much to break them
What I doubt is whether that alone would be enough to actually collapse society. Society has dealt with mass death and food insecurity in the past, I don’t see why it would collapse if faced with it again.
Though it would have a massive effect, even the slightest bit of genuine food insecurity to a society generations away from the last time it happened would be a massive shock. But society would survive IMO
I don’t think there such a thing as a local collapse any more. Our economies (including food supply and other basic essentials) rely on a massive network of global supply chains. If the US collapses so does China (and vice versa)
I’m not sure anyone can say with any certainty what condition the rest of the world will be in if US society collapses abruptly.
I don’t mean this in the sense that America is most important country in the world, the Atlas holding up everything else. But the world economy is a large complex integrated system. If you removed a large part, the whole thing would collapse in unpredictable way. One could make similar statements about China or a number of other large pivotal economies.
It’s sort of like taking 10% of the human brain, even if you’re not taking the most important part, 10% is more of a loss than the patient can probably survive.
I strongly disagree. The thing about large complex integrated systems is that they’re infinitely adaptable. You can’t import from one country, you’ll import from another. The roads are down, you bring things in by ship. There isn’t enough beef, you start eating chicken or beans. Things will be lean for a few years, our appliances will grow older and repairmen will get more work, and some people may lose some weight, but there is so much waste and redundancy in the current system that it will be able to survive just about anything. You’ll have eight billion people working hard to get the system working again - because they’ll have to - and they’ll succeed.
The COVID mess demonstrates otherwise. There’s not much redundancy at all, that would be unprofitable. Everything is deliberately kept on the razor edge of failure at all times, since anything more costs money.
On top of that, anything that causes an actual societal collapse will destroy a great deal of the existing infrastructure and assets. That’s nuclear war or asteroid strike territory; you probably won’t have eight billion people - or even one - left, and they’ll be scrounging in rubble with few resources.
How many people starved during Covid? How many societies collapsed? All whining aside, Covid was a pretty successful stress test for economic resilience.
Pointing out reality isn’t “whining”. And a moderately dangerous disease not destroying civilization is hardly some ringing endorsement. If COVID was as dangerous as, say, Black Death era plague I expect we wouldn’t be here.
I expect enough of us would. Things would be nasty, and lots of people would die, but enough human societies and governments would muddle by for civilization to survive.
This is not a feature of complex integrated systems. They are not known to be infinitely adaptable.
Complex integrated systems are known to be fragile because they contain circular dependencies that aren’t obvious. i.e. I want to ship some things, the ship is broken, the ship needs parts from a supply line that’s only served by ship. That’s a simple contrived case, but it illustrates the problem.
This really only assumes the loss of one country and not a gigantic part of the the global economy. Some things could be substituted but when the web of interdependency fails, nobody knows what happens.
COVID was a mild test. That wasn’t due even to the loss of any factories or ports, just a few workers couldn’t show up to factories or ports for a year or so. Even after COVID was fully managed it took years to work out the supply chain kinks. 3 years later, inflation still isn’t full under control, and this has tipped the government of major countries toward autocracy.
It was a mild test and the results shocked everyone. If (for example) US society were to collapse, it would be much, much worse, and nobody really knows where the domino effect ends.
“Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic. But destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the Streets”
-William Jennings Bryan
Seems like sound logic, but it didn’t always play out that way.
In the Russian Civil War, the Reds held the major cities, and because they kept the factories and railroads going, they could spread out from there and overcome the disunited White, Black and Green factions who held the countryside.
The Chinese Warlord and Civil Wars started to follow that pattern, with the Nationalists holding the ports and large cities. It took over a decade, but their Western-trained and supplied army eventually beat the provincial warlords. But later the Communists, who had learned to survive in the rural areas, came back to take the cities and all of China. The Japanese had negated the advantage of holding the ports, and China never had a substantial industrial base.
I think the most common misconception is expressed succinctly in the phrase, “end of the word”. According to all the astronomical evidence we have gleaned from the super telescopes we now have constantly scanning space, there is no threat out there great enough to “end the world”. Also, given the fact that there are human beings located on virtually every part of the globe, no man-made disaster would be great enough to render the human species extinct.
The alternative, however, isn’t much better. I agree with the OP’s vision of the nightmare that will be left. The “Dystopian Shit Hole” would be planet wide, inescapable, and ongoing.
