Thread: New America
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Old 12-02-2022, 11:51 AM
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Raellus Raellus is offline
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Default Glass Half Full

For a counterpoint to Mark Granovetter, I recommend checking out Rutger Bregman’s Humankind: A Hopeful History. Here's the blurb from Amazon.com:

The “lively” (The New Yorker), “convincing” (Forbes), and “riveting pick-me-up we all need right now” (People) that proves humanity thrives in a crisis and that our innate kindness and cooperation have been the greatest factors in our long-term success as a species.

Here's a piece on the story that inspired his book.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/20...-for-15-months

I don't totally buy in to Bregman's relentlessly optimistic outlook re the human response to crisis, but I think he does a pretty good job of refuting univeralist Hobbesian arguments re human nature.

Quote:
Originally Posted by castlebravo92 View Post
On a slightly different note, but related to Hobbes, Peter Zeihan has waxed poetically about the potential impacts of a collapse in globalism and a disruption to the energy market. I'll summarize briefly (but, you should really go look him up on Youtube or buy his book "The End of the World is Just the Beginning").
You're the second or third person who's recommended Zeihan's book. I'll have to check it out.

To be fair, I have no doubts about how a collapse of the global energy market (read: fossil fuels) will lead to a breakdown of western civilization/society. In fact, I don't see how it wouldn't lead to a mass starvation event in the USA. Circumstances would indeed be pretty dire in much of the country, in the aftermath of the TDM. That said, I don't see the majority of the survivors sporting Mohawk hairdos, donning ass-less chaps, and terrorizing the highways and byways of the USA.

As a thought experiment, say that anarchy and predation did become the norms post-TDM. That begs the question, what's worth saving? In that world, settlements where decent people manage to survive and remain, uh, decent, would be like snowflakes in the Sahara. If they eschew the might-makes-right ethos, how did they manage to survive in the first place? I mean, what T2k party hasn't encountered at least one Polish village or small Texas town not worth Seven Samurai'ing?

The simplest solution to the chaos v order conundrum, and the one I adhere to, is that one would encounter both neo/pseudo-civilization and savagery in the T2kU. The proportions are, of course, debatable, and ultimately up to each individual REF. IMHO, a proper T2k milieu includes more of the latter, raising the stakes to create or find/preserve the former.

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Last edited by Raellus; 12-02-2022 at 12:17 PM.
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