Apparently the biggest misconception about societal collapse is how it looks.
It looked like Garland/Biden demonstrating their spinelessness by not prosecuting J6. That was the end of US democracy, the end of “peaceful transfer of power”.
These items aren’t like video game drops where you can just go around picking up generic items when you’re low and throw them together. The right items need to be in the right place at the right time, along with the required knowledge of how to integrate them. Currently these things are brought to us in the necessary combinations by logistical systems. But those logistical systems also depend on this same capability. How will you get the right parts in the right time to be serviced by the right people? “Humans are resourceful” isn’t an answer.
The modern economy is a web of circular dependencies. It takes a lot to make them fail, but when they fail, they can fail persistently, profoundly, even catastrophically.
The lingering post-COVID inflation is an example of this. Here, not much productive capacity was lost, and it was mainly a problem of improper balancing of supply and demand. In the case of a real societal collapse, it would be much worse and would risk hitting a tipping point where the whole system started to break down.
I don’t think anyone disputes that systemic breakdown is a possibility, but people definitely underestimate how fragile it is, and how it’s not as simple as just starting it up again once you have enough inputs.
That’s all true, but what was said is that people don’t know how to grow potatoes, and that’s patently false. Lots of people have the know-how from having backyard gardens. It’s not that hard really.
The bottleneck for most would be having enough defensible land to grow enough food, and having enough food for the meantime, until those crops came in. Meaning 5 acres or so for a family of four, and somewhere that you could keep other people from swiping your produce. I can’t think of anywhere that has five acres that’s also not surrounded by homes, etc. And they’re few and far between at that.
Coming in second would be securing enough seed to just plant that much acreage. If you could raid a Home Depot or nursery that wouldn’t be too bad, but short of that you’d probably only have a fraction of the number of seeds needed.
The problems are logistical, not knowledge based for more people than you’d think.
No, I didn’t say that people “don’t know how to grow potatoes”. But there’s a difference from knowing that you can put a potato eye in the soil and get a plant, vs. being able to walk out to your backyard, which has never been tilled or prepared, with tools you probably don’t have, and fertilizer and pesticides you don’t have, at the wrong season, and depending on this outcome to satisfy your caloric needs. That’s a whole different ballgame from “knowing how to grow a potato”.
People who already have backyard gardens already might barely survive, but most people reading this thread are definitely going to starve to death when the grocery stores close. Most survivalist fantasies are just that, fantasies untested in real-world life-or-death conditions.
People really don’t understand the difference between working a 10x10 hobby plot for bonus veggies vs. farming enough food to keep yourself and your family alive year-round. They’re not the same thing at all.
I’m going to be a bit of an optimist and say that people also overestimate how violent a societal collapse would be. Not that there wouldn’t be violence and crime and conflict. But I highly doubt that society would degenerate into a constant state of Mad Max / Walking Dead warfare. If for no other reason that war requires a lot of logistics. During COVID I couldn’t buy toilet paper for months. Yet towns that have regressed to 18th century agricultural communities are somehow going to manage to continue to crank out 5.56mm rounds and field company to battalion-sized mechanized forces mounted on professionally customized turbo-charged guzzoline-powered vehicles?
Perhaps more depressing is that most of society would probably be too weak from hunger to actually “make war” on each other.
First misconception is that the future is predictable.
The rest of this post may be as example of the first misconception, but:
Second misconception is that we in the U.S. are closer to civil war than any time in living memory. Do not forget this:
The U.S. is close to being a dictatorship. But it is far from societal collapse.
People crave safety, stability and a high standard of living. People would happily form alliances and work together if it led to safety, stability and a high standard of living. As a result of this, I don’t think society would break into a thousand warlords. People would want larger, more powerful, more stable governments. People would accept martial law and a police state if it meant that we got to focus or time and attention to rebuilding. A bunch of small tribes going to war with each other constantly doesn’t improve anyone’s standards of living, and the larger, more militant and better armed tribe focused on rebuilding could wipe out the smaller tribes anyway.
But I could be wrong,
For some perspective on societal collapse, consider Mexico.
Mexico has about four times the murder rate of the U.S. And the rate of political violence, compared to the U.S., is also far higher. See:
List of politicians killed during the 2024 Mexican elections
And political violence there continues this month:
State official and former mayor killed by gunfire on Guerrero highway
This is bad. This is sad. But it does not indicate societal collapse. Americans, with no relatives there, still go to Mexico for their retirement. Mexican-American still go to visit their relatives with little of no fear (I’ve been told that the violence is all drug related, so no worry). And young Mexicans, even during the Biden administration, no longer had much interest in becoming an undocumented U.S. resident. A large percentage of Mexicans like Mexico:
You could say that President Sheinbaum is far better than President Trump. I agree! But if the next president of Mexico is more of a caudillo type, I still expect the United States of Mexico to remain united, and it’s people mostly happy.
Middle income and higher countries do not easily experience societal collapse. That’s true in middle income Mexico,and also true in the high income U.S.A.
I do not like the idea of living in a dictatorship. But so long as it doesn’t insist on controlling every last institution, lots of people will barely notice it in their everyday life. It still can be a good place to raise your children. That’s is no reason for complacency – it means that peaceful efforts to push back against dictatorship can work without plunging society into collapse.
On the other hand, the Rwandan genocide was mostly carried out with machetes. Guns and funky cars are not actually needed for mass violence.
Well, the OP says we can pick the style of collapse that happens, but that it is a pretty major collapse going by the examples.
A nuclear war, or a disease with a mortality in excess of 99% - yeah, this is not going to be a merely somewhat worse future. This is the level of a catestrophic social collapse. Anything else is just fighting the hypothetical.
Now granted in your (@msmith537)'s quote above, you could have a semi-utopian, non-violent society after after a collapse above. The survivors could absolutely cling to a perfect, non-violent society as a reaction to whatever causation of collapse. Especially in the immediate short-term communities right after Captain Trips wiped most of the world, there were some very positive communities (though with certain outside influence, but I’d bet more on some degree of violence when the worst that could happen already has.
As for the degree of war-material to consider the conflict, in a zombie/plague sort of thing, there would be huge temporary abundance for a while, but yes, given the scale of the conflicts in Mad Max, it would likely exhaust itself quite quickly. I find the ammo situation in Mad Max 2-3 (extreme scarcity, to the point guns/ammunition are extremely rare and precious) to be more realistic than the plethora we saw in the Furiosa era.
At the very least, modern type guns and ammunition would be very rare and post-collapse guns & ammo would be very basic. People in a Mad Max type society could probably manage simple black powder weapons, but quantity and quality of both the weapons and their ammunition would be low. And the few remaining modern weapons would be highly prized and rarely used. Lord Humongous being the only member of his gang with a real gun which he only pulled out near the end of the movie is the way I’d expect it to work.
I would imagine that as society breaks down, people would tend to organize into local groups who know and trust each other and figure out what sort of structure works for them. Defaulting to whoever decides to adopt fascist affectations is probably more of a product of fiction.
It depends on the country. The US has more guns than people and untold billions of cartridges and they aren’t vanishing in the event of a societal collapse. There are still over 500 million firearms in the world without including the US. Firearms are very durable for the most part. It’s exactly why you see people using weapons as old as their grandparents in conflicts around the world without issue.
Most of them would be lost or used up rather quickly. And odds are good that the majority would be outright destroyed or rendered inaccessible in many forms of collapse, like a nuclear war or asteroid strike.
But in the case of a straight up civil war / slide into Somalia-style chaos? What then of the USA’s massive arsenals? Both privately held and governmentally held by the now collapsing government at all levels.
They would be used against other people, for suicide, for hunting and as a means of barter.
As said, they would be used up by their wielders on each other. And with not much anymore in the way of ammunition manufacture (industrial collapse does seem needed for the situation to be called a “societal collapse” in the first place) even large supplies of ammunition will be burned thoguh pretty quickly. There’s a reason logistics is such a big deal in warfare.
Just to add some practical firearms/reloading knowledge (my father in law reloads for his personal use), it’s true that well treated guns last a long time, even with reasonably heavy use. But some of the options for “well treated” are going to go out the door fast, and without careful treatment, they become much more unreliable and a lot less accurate over time. People talk about stacking ammunition deep, but gun cleaning tools wear out too, not to mention the consumables such as patches and more importantly solvents.
Second, before someone brings up reloading, yes, many of us know from history or fiction, that black powder is relatively easy to produce. But producing it in quantity, treating it without setting something off, grinding it into a perfect grain, and estimating how much to use when reloading some pre-existing brass cartridge is going to be challenging, even to reloaders who mostly buy their blackpowder (and it’s a modern formulation to emulate BP, not the real thing) or worse…
Primers.
These are NOT going to be produced by a society collapsed to the degree suggested by the OP. They could be, but probably in small numbers. So even if you save your brass, and make the powder, without primers, you’re going to not be able to repurpose those high numbers of modern guns. Though if you, like my father in law, have a half dozen black powder rifles he occasionally shoots for fun (though half of those are themselves caplocks!), your reloading options are largely pointless.
So I’ll stand by my earlier comment, depending of the nature of the apocalypse, the USA at least would have a short term abundance, but if there were any large conflicts it would get used up pretty quickly after which pre-collapse cartridges would be rare and valued, while other options would require a lot of dangerous work for far less efficacy.
Especially since in such a collapse, a great many of them will just be left out in the weather, or at least semi-exposed in ruins.
Also, a great many of the well-stored weapons and ammunition will be extremely hard to find. It’s not like you’d be able to just psychically tell that some dead guy who used to live in a half-ruined building kept a gun safe in a closet or something like that.