But scientists and historians who study catastrophes for a living have long known that there is, in fact, very little antisocial behavior that takes place after disasters. Rebecca Solnit’s extraordinary book A Paradise Built in Hell describes in great detail the collective sense of “immersion in the moment and solidarity with others” that follows large-scale calamities. The common person rises to the situation to help other people, and there can be a profound experience of well-being, inventiveness, and flexibility. In fact, the worst effects in the aftermath of disasters come when institutions try to impose top-down organization, as the military might. The presumption of mass chaos, looting, murders, rapes — this comes from something disaster scientists call “elite panic,” when people in positions of power fear the loss of their power and so overreact in violent ways.
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Elite panic on behalf of white conservatives led to a vast increase in prepping during Barack Obama’s presidency; there was a downtick in interest after Donald Trump entered the White House — ironic, given the comparative risks of a catastrophic event then and now. Trump has made the Environmental Protection Agency into an auctioneer of public lands, which has in turn rapidly undone commonsense regulation. Not to mention that with his deregulation and outright looting of the environment in the interest of privatizing public wealth, he has pushed the Doomsday Clock much closer to midnight. But survivalism, as it exists now in America, is not rational. It is emotional. It is the twisting of hypermasculine fear into a semblance of preparedness and rationality.
I lay in my hotel bed in Greenville, finally clean, and began to feel a strange and terrible sadness for the people I had left on the mountain. The majority of them had military backgrounds. I thought of how they had learned in the service to be powerful, effective, competent with weapons; I thought of their leaving the military and returning to a world where those virtues were far less valuable, even sometimes scorned. How strange it must be to go from the battlefield, always on high alert, capable of killing a fellow human, back to society, where people walked around nakedly vulnerable. Our support for veterans has never been strong, and it’s worsening rapidly. It must be alienating to feel devalued, to have to struggle to retain the kind of self-worth the military had built up in you, after you have given a great deal to your country. You start to believe that institutions have failed you. And so you begin to obsess over the end of society. You stock up on guns because you’ve been trained to believe that guns can protect you, and while you’re at it, you stock up on food and water and other things. You’ve become a prepper. You begin to imagine the end of society — which you see replicated so often in zombie films, television shows, disaster flicks, and dystopian literature that you can imagine it vividly — and perhaps you start to long for the apocalypse. It would solve so much of what makes you uncomfortable about the contemporary world.
Very little anti-social behavior doesn’t mean none, and it isn’t none when it happens to you.
Once disaster hits you are more vulnerable, as first responders are busy, and some folks will take advantage.
Lots of folks will help, but there is always that one bastard that will rummage through what you have left to take what appeals.
The trouble with solidarity is it doesn’t hold. The stress has a cumulative effect, unless you eliminate the stress actually solving your problems.
This means you band together only with the right sort of people. The sort of people who can work together with you to solve mutual problems.
And stay away from the sort of toxic moral smugness that the linked article is dripping of. People who talk like that know nothing of dealing with the collapse of society. People who’ve been to war might know a thing or two.
Lauren Groff is a head case. It’s all psychological projection with her. When the zombie apocalypse hits, and she wants to have solidarity with you, drive off and leave her.
These silly rural peasants, who buy guns in the backward belief that guns will protect them, also sometimes use those guns to murder Bambi. They are a lower form of life, unlike saintly and enlightened journalists. Journalists buy their meat from the supermarket so that no animals are harmed.
The problem is that rural people are unclean, whereas journalists are God’s gift to the world. When journalists finally bring the dictatorship of the proletariat, there will be no more farming. Instead, pure kosher beef will be created from the infallible typewriters of the Party. Until then, any traitor who contradicts the message of the party must be denounced to the nearest commissar as a reactionary, and probably a Kulak.
Rural survivalists used to be called farmers. Lauren Groff is an idiot.
I buy meat from the supermarket because I can, and because I’ve got no use for unfermented soy products.
If civilization collapses I’ll outlive the soyboys, but the preppers will outlive me.
“there is, in fact, very little antisocial behavior that takes place after disasters.”
Tell it to this guy:
https://personalliberty.com/one-year-in-hell/
Cities are full of the sorts of people who do not respond well to disasters. A few hours without electricity and it’s total anarchy.
I unironically agree with this. I think that the author gets more right than she gets wrong. But I’m guessing she’s the sort of person you don’t invite into your post-zombie-apocalypse nomad-pastoralist warrior-tribe unless she’s young and seriously hot.
And if I had to guess I’d say she probably isn’t especially young or hot.
Just saying.
I wouldn’t want her even if she were hot. She’s stupid, and that makes her a liability. Let the walkers have her.
Unity is the false god of totalitarians and of the insecure. First do things right, then the unity will happen. Put unity first, and you’ll never do things right.
(((Lauren Groff))) is 42 and definitely on the down slope of “hotness.” Birth Date: Jul 23, 1978.
Dave, your example sucks ass in this context.
Bosnia was not a “disaster” other than in terms of politics, and since the nature of that disaster was essentially a breakdown in society itself…? Yeah; lousy example.
Additionally, Sarajevo during the period described was nothing like, say, Nashville, TN after the tornadoes rolled through. Incoherent culture, total breakdown of order, and, lastly, dealing with Serbs and Muslims. It’d be about like bemoaning the Hatfields and McCoys being an example of “no cooperation after disaster”, only exponentially worse.
The nature of the disaster itself was human-caused–And, what is bizarre is that I would wager that if an asteroid had struck the Adriatic, the Bosnian Muslims and Serbs might well have made common cause in the face of it. Left to their own devices, however? Internecine and incestuous warfare was the order of the day, working out the issues those groups had going back to the Turks.
Just as progressives have a tendency to assume statistically low crime = no crime = no reason to harshly punish criminals we do have, so there seems to be an assumption that:
Wow, social solidarity among people with some reasonable ties to place and each other holds up well under relatively brief conditions of disaster with help a notional 3 days away
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social solidarity holds up well in all conditions
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Stupid reactionaries who anticipate danger/collapse need to be slapped as rubes
Weaken the ties of community among the groups in your model, or lengthen the period of disaster longer than 3 days, let alone to “indefinite”.
There will still be social solidarity, people are like that, but it won’t be total. People are like that too. How the lines will break down may not be obvious in advance.
Also, “fear of the inchoate other” is a magic phrase that encapsulates and reveals so much about the author’s mindset.
I don’t know about some other folks, but most of my Others have already taken shape. Any new ones the apocalypse provides will just be variants.