New America

[Raellus]

Originally Posted by castlebravo92

A little farming town of 1,000 people, 20 miles down the road, is going to get overwhelmed by 100,000 people passing through. People on foot will steal vehicles, hungry/starving people will break into homes and kill livestock for food.

This sort of thing will certainly be true in some cases, but it would probably be more exception than rule.

The Hobbesian view of human nature has been belied time and again by real life events. More often than not, in a crisis situation, strangers cooperate and help one another to get through it rather than devolve into self-serving, dog-eat-dog rapaciousness.

In World War II, during the Blitz and, later, the bombing of German and Japanese cities, episodes of urban refugees descending on rural farming communities like locusts were few and far between. Evacuations were largely orderly and peaceful. If anything, farmers gouged evacuees for food and shelter. For a more recent, American example, look at the aftermath of hurricane Katrina. At the time, the media made post-Katrina New Orleans out to be a hell-scape, Mad Max style free for all, but there's little evidence that widespread looting, rape, and murder took place in the days and weeks after the levees broke. Instead, strangers helped one another evacuate to higher ground, and shared the basic necessities of life until FEMA arrived in force.

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[Tegyrius]

Rae, I feel like we should dust off our copies of Savage Continent again. That's probably a good starting point for that particular extrapolation.

- C.

[castlebravo92]

Originally Posted by Raellus

This sort of thing will certainly be true in some cases, but it would probably be more exception than rule.

The Hobbesian view of human nature has been belied time and again by real life events. More often than not, in a crisis situation, strangers cooperate and help one another to get through it rather than devolve into self-serving, dog-eat-dog rapaciousness.

I'm not as optimistic, and in any event, you sort of need the Hobbesian view of things to fit the plot of the canon Twilight exchange - which was a pretty miniscule exchange (73 megatons, roughly 130 dgz's) compared to what the US government has prepped for since the 50s.

In World War II, during the Blitz and, later, the bombing of German and Japanese cities, episodes of urban refugees descending on rural farming communities like locusts were few and far between. Evacuations were largely orderly and peaceful. If anything, farmers gouged evacuees for food and shelter.

The problem, from an response analysis standpoint, is nuclear war is highly stochastic. We have a sample size of 0 when it comes to the number of flattened American cities and how Americans would react. In the face of disaster, the Japanese and the Germans tend to act pretty orderly (Fukishima is a great example on the Japanese side), Americans less so. I was going to make the thesis this is because of lower trust levels in the United States, but initial research suggests Japan is just as bad as the US is in that regard, so there goes that theory.

I'm a little more pessimistic than you, but it's hard squaring the circle of the level of the attack and the level of subsequent disorder...you kinda have to channel your inner Hobbes to make it work. I think in reality, there would still be plenty of people left alive (around 92% of the population) who would know how to: re-wire a generator and rebuild refineries, and I'm guessing EPA regs and environmental impact studies would reduce the lead time and the NIMBY lawsuits precluding the construction of new generating capacity. Electricity may not be widely available for general residential use for a couple of years (transformers being the weak link), but IMHO we'd have enough generation capacity to have an industrial base at least on par with early 1900s, which would be sufficient to keep people from starving and the economy recovering and expanding existing capital rather than everyone eating the seed grain and having nothing left for next year's harvest.

For a more recent, American example, look at the aftermath of hurricane Katrina. At the time, the media made post-Katrina New Orleans out to be a hell-scape, Mad Max style free for all, but there's little evidence that widespread looting, rape, and murder took place in the days and weeks after the levees broke. Instead, strangers helped one another evacuate to higher ground, and shared the basic necessities of life until FEMA arrived in force.

Katrina was plenty bad in pockets. There were vigilante/cop murders of unarmed blacks, there really was widespread looting, there was heavy handed government confiscation of weapons, and things were bad and lawless in the Superdome. But with Katrina, everyone had the expectation that things were going to get back to normal. If that ceases to be true, then who knows how people will act, especially when food gets low for everyone.

Using Africa as an example, we can see examples of a paroxysm of violence in the Rwandan civil war, but the more common scenario of hard times is starvation, civil war, DP camps, and warlords, but not plagues of locusts stripping the land bare. The starving get displaced or cut off from food, and then mostly die or are saved by NGOs or the restoration of food production and distribution...but either death or salvation takes months.

[shrike6]

Originally Posted by castlebravo92

I'm not as optimistic, and in any event, you sort of need the Hobbesian view of things to fit the plot of the canon Twilight exchange - which was a pretty miniscule exchange (73 megatons, roughly 130 dgz's) compared to what the US government has prepped for since the 50s.

I honestly think its a mixture of the two. Coming originally from a rural area where farmer will help neighboring farmer with harvests and other stuff. I can see them helping out at least initially. But spending my later years in an urban area. I see alot of entitled mentality in the urban areas. As urbanites begin to get relocated These two styles are going to clash in some areas and opinions start to change and change quickly because there are strains of xenophobia that run through rural areas. The question is what percentage and what areas and thats up to each individual ref and their particular world view. My own opinion is that its somewhere in between the extremes.

[castlebravo92]

In defense of Hobbes...

Mark Granovetter came up with a threshold model of social violence (i.e., riots), which are usually composed of large groups of people - most of whom would never on their own chuck a rock through a window, burn down a store, or assault or murder someone, but all of these things can and have happened in riots. What he hypothesized is that violence in riots are started by someone with a violence threshold of 0, which then opens the door to someone who won't join in until someone else has, which opens the door to someone who requires 2 people doing wanton violence before he or she joins in and so on. In a sense, the violence acts like a social contagion and spreads until there's a break in the violence threshold.

https://www.commonlit.org/en/texts/t...ds-of-violence

This is a roundabout way of saying that it may not take a lot of provocation for a crowd of refugees to spiral out of control into a spasm into an orgy of violence sort of like a stampede at a concert.

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"):

1. The global energy market is very easily disrupted; it is largely secured through the global order created and enforced by the US following WW2.

2. Agriculture is an *industrial* activity, not a pastoral activity. It requires significant inputs from the mining, chemical, energy, and industrial sectors to maintain yields (potash is mined, nitrogen fertilizer comes largely from natural gas feed stocks, which come from the energy industry, which also produces the fuel that is used to plant and harvest and distribute crops, and the planting and harvesting is largely mechanized as well).

Adding fertilizer inputs into soil has allowed humanity to take unproductive land or marginally productive land and make food grow on it. Take those inputs away, and that marginal land no longer produces crops. Ultimately, you get a 5-fold or more reduction in yields, with a resultant equal drop in population shortly to follow.

As an aside, a LOT of the world's fertilizer comes from Russia and Belarus. A lot of the developing world's surplus grain comes from Russia and Ukraine. China imports 80% of their energy supplies, and has (according to Zeihan) the 2nd worst statistics on the amount of inputs needed to produce a calorie of food (with Brazil having the worst).

In Twilight terms, GDW may have been optimistic about only half the population being dead 2 years after most of the world's oil production was destroyed.

As an aside and a sort of self-rebuttal to the argument that it all falls apart, the US is actually in a great position. We are (or could very easily be) completely energy independent, we grow an excess of food, are not dependent on long supply lines over areas we can't control to keep the lights on or the people warm and fed, we have more navigable waterways than the rest of the world combined (which is about 10x more efficient than rail in terms of energy and cost to ship goods, and rail is about 10x more efficient than semi-trucks, which are about 10x more efficient than airplanes), and our agriculture isn't heavily dependent on fertilizer inputs, and what we need we can get from Mexico and Canada

[Raellus]

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.

Originally Posted by castlebravo92

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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[Raellus]

To return this thread to the OP, one explanation for New America's success in certain regions is that it provides security and services in its AoCs*. Sure, they only provide it to some, often at the expense of others, but pandering to the majority can often be a winning strategy.

*ISIS/ISIL successfully employed this strategy in building its thankfully short-lived Caliphate.

Of course, this would also apply to other factions in other regions of the Twilight World.

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[castlebravo92]

Originally Posted by Raellus

To return this thread to the OP, one explanation for New America's success in certain regions is that it provides security and services in its AoCs*. Sure, they only provide it to some, often at the expense of others, but pandering to the majority can often be a winning strategy.

To mix metaphors, it's like boiling the frog and outrunning the bear rolled up into one. For the untermensch, the screws are applied slowly so it's not obvious from the get-go what is happening. This is helped by the general increase in overall tyranny, lawlessness, and "extreme measures" the government has already taken to restore/keep order.

As far as outrunning the bear, you don't have to outrun the bear, you just have to outrun the slowest guy. Using the Pareto principle, maybe 20% of an area under New American control are true believers, but if they are present, seem to be getting civilization working again to a degree, a lot of people are going to glom on.

Additionally, I imagine things in a lot of post-collapse areas would take on "prison-rules" aspects, so a lot of people not naturally draw to a New America ideology pre-war might find themselves having to "clique up" just to survive.

BTW, I'm not trying to make New America the good guy here, I think they are and should pretty clearly remain the bad guy. But historically, the really successful and really evil bad guys don't don a black shield and black armor and fly the Jolly Roger. They come dressed as the good guys.