
How the Apocalypse Will Bring Out the Best in People - pmcpinto
https://psmag.com/how-the-apocalypse-will-bring-out-the-best-in-people-56f51136e770#.oegshdfkk
======
splitrocket
There's a user on Metafilter.com, Dee Xtrovert,(
[https://www.metafilter.com/user/45778](https://www.metafilter.com/user/45778)
) who lived through the siege in Sarajevo.

Their stories of what it's like are so vastly different than what you would
expect. Do yourself a favor: dig in and read.

"Well, unlike the majority of you (I assume), I actually lived several years
in a period of savagery and killing, during which nothing - food, water,
electricity, phone, clothing, sense of safety, school, the ability to go out
in public, etc - was available, except during totally unpredictable, brief and
sporadic occasions. "

A collection: [https://www.metafilter.com/137458/In-war-not-everyone-is-
a-s...](https://www.metafilter.com/137458/In-war-not-everyone-is-a-
soldier#5461243)

My Favorite: [https://www.metafilter.com/78669/What-if-things-just-keep-
ge...](https://www.metafilter.com/78669/What-if-things-just-keep-getting-
worse#2430771)

~~~
slv77
"Ferfal" lived in Argentina during its economic collapse at the turn of the
century and has a similar unique perspective. He's now has a blog but some of
his early posts are here:

[http://www.rapidtrends.com/surving-argentinas-economic-
colla...](http://www.rapidtrends.com/surving-argentinas-economic-collapse-
part-1-3/)

~~~
hga
Those are excellent, and presumably are included in his book:
[http://www.amazon.com/Modern-Survival-Manual-Surviving-
Econo...](http://www.amazon.com/Modern-Survival-Manual-Surviving-
Economic/dp/9870563457/) (which I've bought but not yet read).

------
aethertap
I live in a rural area in tornado alley. We also live on a major fault line,
so there are a few potential "big ones" that could affect my area.

I spent quite a bit of time thinking about that, trying to figure out what to
do in order to be prepared for a realistic disaster. What I ended up deciding
was that I can afford to help my neighbors (and whoever else may show up). I
have an extensive first-aid setup, stuff to purify water, tons of trash bags,
and some easy-to-prepare food. If we have a major disaster in my area, I plan
to distribute as much of that as I can. For a fairly small investment I have
enough stuff to keep everyone on my street healthy and fed for about a month
even if their pantries are empty. No Mad Max necessary.

As an interesting side note, as part of that process I did some calculating on
relative costs and discovered that you can buy enough storable basic calories
(white flour, stabilized cooking oil, and sugar - no health food here) to feed
about 100 people for a month for less than it costs to get a single mid-grade
rifle with no ammunition (about $1000). To me, that's the best answer to the
idea that being prepared means getting armed to the teeth and fighting off the
ravening hordes.

I may be wrong, but I agree with the thesis of this article that people tend
to band together and try to help each other in a disaster, so I built a plan
around that assumption.

~~~
hga
That's a thesis that noted survivialist Bruce Clayton developed in the early
'80s or so, although he went with whole wheat, and add some salt and powdered
milk for the Mormon Four plus the oil, which is needed by children for them to
thrive (see more details in _Nuclear War Survival Skills_ if interested, which
Clayton recommended before any of his books).

In my world view, you're better off with "A kind word _and_ a gun", food etc.
plus the ability to restrain bad actors, should any turn up. Some just might,
as seen when an EF-5 tornado roared through my home town of Joplin, MO, but
tornadoes, at least, have very limited effects, you don't have to walk far to
get out of the areas of destruction. If the New Madrid fault goes you've very
much want such preparations already in place.

~~~
aethertap
Thanks for the pointer to Bruce Clayton, I'll have to look him up. I don't
mean to come across as being against having the gun - I actually agree with
your "kind word and gun" idea. I just wanted to get the point out about how
much relief can be accomplished with that money because I think it gets missed
in a lot of discussions, and of the two it seems a lot more likely to be
relevant in a real disaster to me.

~~~
hga
Here's my recommendations from the classic era of survivalism (mid-late-70s
through the '80s):

 _Nuclear War Survival Skills_ , get a PDF to see if it's interesting to you
(e.g. [http://www.oism.org/nwss/](http://www.oism.org/nwss/)), get the green
softcover for when the lights go out and for accurate patterns for the Kearny
Fallout Meter: [http://www.amazon.com/Nuclear-War-Survival-Skills-
Expanded/d...](http://www.amazon.com/Nuclear-War-Survival-Skills-
Expanded/dp/094248701X) (it says something about the times that Amazon is
keeping it in stock, they didn't a few years ago) or from the publisher
(previous link).

This is the bible of expedient nuclear war survival, everything from quick to
build shelters to sprouting wheat to avoid vitamin deficiency diseases, based
on many years of serious research at Oak Ridge, _and tested_ , they'd go so
far as to hand a copy of shelter plans to average American families, and then
videotape them following the plan, and improve the design based on that. Vs.
too many of those classic Civil Defense shelter plans drawn up by bureaucrats
in the Beltway that would kill their inhabitants due to too little ventilation
to remove heat and humidity.

Maybe then check out his recently published _Jungle Snafus ... and Remedies_ ,
his hardcore work on survival started in WWII, and he started thinking about
nuclear war survival in the mid-late '30s (sic) after learning about the idea
of nuclear weapons while at Princeton (quite a few people thought and wrote
about it before the details were worked out after E=mc^2 and all that, see
e.g. the SF of the pre-end of WWII era).

Then Bruce Clayton's magnum opus, _Life After Doomsday_ , get the Dial Press
paperback which has annotations and comments made after the first edition:
[http://www.amazon.com/Life-after-doomsday-survivalist-
disast...](http://www.amazon.com/Life-after-doomsday-survivalist-
disasters/dp/0803747527/) And perhaps check out some of his other works, the
food for others concept was not, as I recall, originally published in
_Thinking About Survival_ [http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-About-Survival-
Bruce-Clayton/...](http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-About-Survival-Bruce-
Clayton/dp/0873642937/) but you'll find it there (probably originally
published in an issue of the hard to find Mel Tappan _Personal Survival
Letter_ ).

The other two major intellectuals of the era were Jerry Pournelle, see his two
relevant novels coauthored with Larry Niven, _Lucifer 's Hammer_ and
_Footfall_ , and Mel Tappan, start with his _Tappan on Survival_ :
[http://www.amazon.com/Tappan-Survival-
Mel/dp/1581605099/](http://www.amazon.com/Tappan-Survival-Mel/dp/1581605099/)

The obscure and now very expensive used _Bad Times Primer_ by C. G. Cobb had
insighs, especially on survival on a budget, I didn't find anywhere else at
the time (there is of course the new wave of "prepper" thought and literature
that's no doubt worth checking out that might cover things like that):
[http://www.amazon.com/Bad-Times-Primer-Complete-
Survival/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/Bad-Times-Primer-Complete-
Survival/dp/0960660801/)

Finally, _Total Resistance_ [http://www.amazon.com/Total-Resistance-H-Von-
Dach/dp/0873640...](http://www.amazon.com/Total-Resistance-H-Von-
Dach/dp/0873640217/) is _the_ manual on _sane_ armed resistance and such,
commissioned by the Swiss Non-commissioned Officer's Association, very Swiss
vs. USSR invasion and '50s-ish, it's not written by wild eye idiots. Much
updating and thought is required, of course, but I would start with that
foundation, and for best reading quality, track down the original hardback, I
think the publisher reproduced the paperback edition from it.

For modern works, I'll only note _The Modern Survival Manual: Surviving the
Economic Collapse_ [http://www.amazon.com/Modern-Survival-Manual-Surviving-
Econo...](http://www.amazon.com/Modern-Survival-Manual-Surviving-
Economic/dp/9870563457/) since it's written from the author's experience of a
less than total collapse in Argentina. See also people's writeups of the much
worse collapse and warfare in post-Cold War Yugoslavia.

~~~
aethertap
Thanks again, this looks like a lot of good stuff. I've actually read
Lucifer's Hammer (several times if I'm totally honest), I had no idea he was
involved in that.

------
grecy
Living in the Yukon we sometimes talk about what would happen to most "city
folk" if their world fell apart with no supermarket and electricity.

Most of us hunt our own meat, grow our own vegetables, build our own cabins
and get our own firewood. Tons of people up here are already living entirely
off-grid.

We all agree, our biggest problem would be lack of gasoline to run chainsaws,
and none of us really has a solution to that. Cutting firewood by hand would
be doable, though it would be a full time job to get enough for the winter. A
decent size house will burn through roughly 10 cords in a single winter.

~~~
pyre
On the flip side, things like this[1] play out in severely rural areas. It
always annoys me when people in rural areas paint a picture of how much
"better" it is to be living there.

[1]: [https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/when-a-woman-is-
raped...](https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/when-a-woman-is-raped-in-
rural-alaska-does-anyone-care)

~~~
deelowe
lol. Really? People really think this is common? I just don't know what to
say. It's not like that at all.

Look, generally speaking, people are decent and have morals. The vast majority
do. Shocker I know, but it's true. Most people aren't racist, homophobe,
rapist assholes. Doesn't matter where they live.

~~~
DanBC
> People really think this is common?

Rape and sexual violence are pretty common.

You might want to find a trustworthy source of numbers. Here's one for England
and Wales:
[http://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandj...](http://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/bulletins/crimeinenglandandwales/yearendingdecember2015)

~~~
deelowe
I was talking about it being significantly more common in rural areas.

------
PhasmaFelis
The one thing this article misses, I think, is that all of these scenarios are
temporary and local. If an area is devastated by an earthquake, there's still
a food supply chain in the outside world, aid supplies and workers will
eventually start trickling in, and generally you will have _some_ support (if
limited and fragmentary) to help you pull yourself back up to a "modern"
living standard over weeks and months.

If a complete societal breakdown should occur--the traditional global-nuclear-
war apocalypse, a major governmental/infrastructural collapse in a large,
developed nation, etc.--things get rougher. People may start off being civil
and helpful, but modern urban society is utterly dependent on food grown on
farms spread across thousands of miles and distributed via high-tech
infrastructure. If that stops for long enough, in a large enough area, then
people start to get hungry, and things start to get really bad.

I still find the article heartening in general. Disasters on that scale are
not terribly likely in the modern world. Still, it's worth considering.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Alarmingly, one of the biggest breakdowns in ancient times, at the end of the
Bronze age, now seems to have given rise to the 'sea people', a band of
refugees that roamed and pillaged. There was a chain reaction of famine,
revolution, refugees spilling over to neighbors who also had a poor crop, more
famine, more revolution. In an expanding circle of fire, most known
civilizations fell in just a few years and produced an enormous army of armed
refugees. They only stopped when Egypt armed everybody and killed them all.
Even then Egyptian society was so disrupted (by arming civilians, seeing their
god-kings bleed, fragmentation and slow rebuilding) that it took a century to
have a unified government again.

I see some parallels in our modern world. We have a slash-and-burn air-assault
style of war that leaves millions homeless and infrastructure in ruins.
Refugees are mounting alarmingly. At some point, they'll become 'sea people'
and we'll all have a hard decision to make.

------
bbarn
When I think of "Apocalypse" I'm thinking something a little more permanent
than an earthquake. As long as there's an end in sight (i.e., it will
eventually be going back to normal) people are going to act a lot differently.
It's when it truly looks hopeless that I'd expect to see the movie style
looting and violence.

~~~
jrcii
One summer in the early 2000s there was a blackout along the whole west coast,
I was in Palm Springs where the temperatures that time of year regularly
exceed 110F. The water filtration shut off so all the city's water was
declared possibly contaminated and the gas pumps were off so if you needed gas
to get to water there was none. People realized the last clean source of water
was bagged ice and started forming mobs banging on the locked doors of
convenience stores. I saw people siphoning other people's gas. Basically all
hell broke loose. The kicker? The power was only out for 6 hours. When people
are scared it doesn't take long.

------
protomyth
I think an apocalypse[1] will bring out what's in people not their best or
worst just what they really are. I think of the apocalypse as being the big
dark[2] that allows you to see people's true character.

As to survival kits, I tend to think that combining the standard survival kit
for winter in the northland with the basics a person would take deer hunting
and fishing would probably go a long way.

1) short term disasters are a bit different but a lot of madness tends to hit
- see all the rioting in mini-disaster scenarios

2) Character is what you are in the dark. - Dwight L. Moody

------
jonathankoren
Having to redo my 72 hour bag recently I ended up on a bunch of survivalist
websites. (Mostly [http://offgridsurvival.com/](http://offgridsurvival.com/) )
They all have this tendency to start reasonable, and then go off the rails
into crazy town. You'll have some good reviews of legitimate things you'd want
like flashlights solar power radios, cooking stoves, knives, multitools,
stableized food and the like, and then it goes into gasmasks, trauma kits for
your "everyday carry" and of course guns. Lots and lots of guns, oh and
bullets in common calibers for "ballistic wampum".

The subculture paints a world of black helicopters, and roving gangs of George
Soros funded Black Lives Matter cannibals, ISIS EMP attacks, Supervolcanos,
and so we're going to have to secretly leave cities by shooting our way out to
our hidden mountain cabin ("Never tell anyone where your redoubt is. That's
basic opsec.") Oh and along the way you'll may want to hand over boxes of
ammunition to strangers for needed supplies.

The thing is though, I totally get it. It's a problem. How long can you hold
out with resupplies? How can you pack this better? How can you reduce weight?
It's an engineering problem. The right wing conspiracy theories and and that
up it neighbor is just waiting for the right moment to kill, eat you, and your
skin into a jaunty hat is just absurd wish fulfillment fantasy.

~~~
bcook
Yeah, it's unfortunate that the (clinically) paranoid survivalists, that
honestly have good information to share from a survival perspective, often
have paranoid political beliefs.

Just like anything in life, you need to separate the good information from the
bad... thank god for people that are "different". :)

------
JoeAltmaier
Of course most people will be civil. Its not 'most people' that would be at
issue in an apocalypse. In the examples given, the 20,000 soldiers had 'little
to do'. In part because the presence of 20,000 soldiers is a calming
influence?

Initial looting isn't the only public order issue. Its desperate people when
supplies run low, taking what they need to survive from other desperate
people.

------
facepalm
What about situations like the last plane out of a war zone with a limited
number of seats? I think people tend to become less charitable then? Or if
scarcity really hits?

~~~
prodmerc
I think there's a fundamental difference between man made catastrophes and
natural disasters in people's minds.

If it's man made, they will want to blame someone, so people will be more
aggressive towards anyone else.

If it's a natural disaster, everyone accepts that everyone else around is in
the same situation and will help as much as they can right away...

~~~
facepalm
I remember specifically an issue in Europe a couple of years back where a
series of snow avalanches was destroying hotels and killing people (in the
alpes, I think - hotels had been built in illegal places). Roads were blocked
and the only way out were helicopters. Supposedly there were some ugly
displays of selfishness around getting on the helicopter first.

------
rrggrr
There is a book, Einstein's Dreams, by Alan Lightman that describes this
phenomena beautifully. It's a short and wonderful book.

------
rk06
in "attack on titan" (fiction), apocalypse happens and humanity is hit the
hardest.

but no, it does not bring any good. instead people do atrocious and horrible
deeds in the name of greater good.

So, I would say, "No, apocalypse can destroy humans but not change them."

