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Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

>The survivors/protagonists of the zombie plague are the viewpoint the audience is intended to empathize with, but their response to the shambling horde is as brutal and violent as any plantation owner's reaction to their slaves rising, and it speaks to a peculiarly American cognitive disorder, elite panic.

Elite panic is the phenomenon by which rich and/or privileged people imagine that in times of chaos all social constraints break down and everyone around them will try to rob, rape, and murder them. To some extent this reflects their own implicit belief that humanity is by nature grasping, avaricious, amoral, and cruel, and that their status depends on power and violence. It's a world-view you'd expect of unreconstructed pre-Enlightenment aristocrats, or maybe a society dominated by a violent slave-owning elite.

This is such a salient point. It's something I've noticed when someone recommended me The Walking dead years ago. It's horrendous how reactionary and borderline fascist that show is in its nihilistic display of humanity where tribal survival is all that matters and every individual encountered is almost certainly some sort of rapist or cannibal and just needs to be stomped out. At one point I was thinking if the show is actually pushing this narrative so hard as to parody it but it certainly doesn't seem to be viewed that way.

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His observation is wrong. In all societies in which there is a power vacuum gangs take over. Witness Africa, South America, Burma, and the middle Eastern countries in which we have removed the “dictators.”

Asia after WW2 was different because the West essentially sponsored state corporate Facism in Japan and Korea until they had 30-50 years to evolve into something resembling a true democracy.

Even the term “elite panic” is lie. The elite are fine in a disaster and they know it. Look at Venezuela, the rich and elite simply moved behind walls and continue on. They have ways of isolating themselves and maintaining separation from the rabble.

The panic strikes the middle class more than any other group, because their status is the most easily lost. Unlike the rich, their power goes away with their jobs. Their lifestyle, however much you’d like to mock trips to Starbucks, weekend shopping at Pottery Barn, and all that - it all goes away. The tenuous advantage they’ve built up vanishes.

The truly elite use that fear. They aren’t afraid themselves.

> In all societies in which there is a power vacuum gangs take over.

Such gangs are the basic form of government. They have command structure, and a population base they exploit. Over time, as gang grows, it comes into conflict with other gangs and one eventually emerges as the dominant. Once in command over a big chunk of population, it either splits into many smaller bands, repeating the cycle, or it evolves to be more structured, and rules appear, which regulate how gang members operate and what they are allowed to do. You may know these rules as 'laws'.

This happens because every gang eventually understands that in the long term, taxing a prosperous population is far more profitable and stable than unlimited plundering.

The classic example of this on a massive scale is, of course, medieval Europe. All Roman-imposed centralized order broke down in a slow apocalypse and control reverted to local armed gangs... which then formed alliances and feudal pecking orders and gradually recentralized into kingdoms and empires.

I read a book in which the author related the nature of new societies after a breakdown to invasive plants - both being nasty and difficult to deal with, while extracting a lot of resources from a fairly tough environment, but in so doing making those resources bioavailable for more diverse future ecosystems.

How does your hypothesis apply to, for example, Mexico? Seems that "eventually" may mean decades, if not longer.

It seems to apply pretty well to Mexico. Every time the cartels reach an equilibrium of violence where there’s a clear chain of command and territories violence drops. Then the Mexican state decides that having para-states on its territory is unacceptable, smashes them and violence increases. You see the same dynamic though not on the same scale in US organized crime history; the Mafia were brutal thugs just like the brutal thugs who are criminals in US inner cities now. The Mafia used violence less often because they were organized. People knew where they stood. Pay your protection money, don’t talk to the police unless they’re our police and you’re done.

No crime is better than organized crime is better than widespread disorganized crime.

I agree with you 100%, just wanted to add as an extra data point that after reading some of Max Weber's works I realised that he was the one that best described how society works in modern times (not saying that his observations were perfect, just closer to the perceived truth). He is of course the one that re-popularised the "monopoly on violence" [1] term that describes (among other, countless things) Italian Mafia's tactics (which I think Weber even mentions) and today's Mexican cartels' way of doing things.

As such, I highly recommend Weber's "Economy and Society" [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_and_Society

> the Mafia were brutal thugs just like the brutal thugs who are criminals in US inner cities now.

Hello? It's not 1990. Look at the crime stats. There's plenty wrong with today, but there isn't much organized or disorganized crime.

I was actually thinking about centuries, not just decades, referring, mostly, to the early formation of ancient societies. It is not a fast process by any means.

In modern times the process is, of course, can go much faster than in 2000BC, because everyone can see a template of a working system before their eyes in the form of existing countries, so they can just copy-paste the basic law / organizational structure instead of slowly inventing them.

Reminds me very much of this video, which I like to rewatch every couple of months or so for the sheer brilliance of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbNFJK1ZpVg

> Even the term “elite panic” is lie.

FYI, there is at least one book written on the subject based on research of real-world disasters

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/21/books/21book.html https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6444492-a-paradise-built...

Cory Doctorow writes about it as well:

https://boingboing.net/2013/04/14/elite-panic-why-rich-peopl...

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/news-and-features/articles/cor...

It is hardly Mr Stross's own idea, and I would not dismiss it so glibly after a minute's thought and a very shallow understanding.

A widely spread and aged idea doesn’t make it any less wrong.

Sure, though a comment on HN by someone who first heard the term 20 minutes ago and misses the main point of it, _really_ doesn't make it wrong.

> Even the term “elite panic” is lie. The elite are fine in a disaster and they know it. Look at Venezuela, the rich and elite simply moved behind walls and continue on.

Sounds to me that the need to move behind walls is a pretty strong indicator of the elite panic concept you are criticizing.

After all, if they didn't panicked then why did they felt the need to coward behind those walls and man them with armed minions?

And by the way, "fear the walking dead" is packed with seasons where the protagonists find themselves in a gated community where armed guards and passive protection measures are extensively used to keep the menacing zombies at Bay while living a pretty comfy life. Sounds a bit like Venezuela, doesn't it?

Because lots of people actually do want to kill them, and the walls keep those people out. It's the same phenomenon you see in South Africa - everyone who can afford it builds high walls and private security, because everyone who can afford it is a target.

Those people inside closed gates are just another symptom of the disease itself.

Possibly not the best example - the people who can afford high walls and private security are usually white. South Africa was run for decades by a minority elite (racist) government that brutally subjugated the majority black population. The exact situation that the article talks about.

That's pretty much a definition of "elite panick".

The article defines elite panic as a false panic; a "cognitive disorder", caused by elites who look down on the rest of us and think we're all violent hooligans. If people really are trying to kill them, I don't think "panic" is an accurate term and I can't blame them for taking steps to avoid being murdered.

> The article defines elite panic as a false panic; a "cognitive disorder", caused by elites who look down on the rest of us and think we're all violent hooligans.

Yes. It's a belief based on pseudo-morality, where those who are not privileged are portrayed as being rude uncultured barbarians who, without resorting to extreme violence and oppression, would represent a threat to their pure and pristine existence and social order.

It's the same argument that slave owners used to justify beating slaves to death.

>If people really are trying to kill them, I don't think "panic" is an accurate term and I can't blame them for taking steps to avoid being murdered.

You somehow left out the part where these elites resort to extreme violence and oppression to deprive their neighbors from fulfilling basic needs and instead of helping the community they outright represent a very real and very violent threat to them.

And then, as a feat of cognitive dissonance, these elites cowarding behind their castle walls try to fabricate a moral basis for the violence and oppression they inflict on the very society that permitted their life of privilege.

History strongly suggests that, in periods of disorder, even elites who did not resort to extreme violence and oppression will get murdered. ISIS didn't grant any leniency to nice elites who were well-loved by their local community.

That’s simply false. The aftermath of the American civil war for example worked out fine for large swaths of southern elites compared to the general population. Social disorder generally is bad for everyone, but the elites often recover faster with fewer problems.

Looking at say the fall of the USSR it was well connected elites that ended up making vast fortunes.

>If people really are trying to kill them, I don't think "panic" is an accurate term and I can't blame them

This is akin to saying "well if some wifes cheat, being a paranoid, jealous husband is perfectly reasonable". It's not that bad things never happen to elites, it's a cognitive disorder because the paranoia is structural, regardless of what actually happens.

It's a disorder because the panic is a function of their social status and their position in society that they know is to a degree unearned (in particular in countries like South Africa or wheverever else the elite is a hereditary class), so in a sense they anticipate the resentment that is rightfully coming their way.

It's like, if you're a habitual liar and thief you also tend to think everyone else is as opportunistic as you are, and sometimes you're right, but that's not why you believe it in the first place.

You are making the same mistake as the elites who are panicking: someone is trying to kill them (Or, more likely, use the capabilities they have in order to improve their situation, at the expense of the elites. Killing people is usually less an end goal than kidnapping or theft.), therefore everyone who is not a similar elite is a "violent hooligan".

This is more an outgrowth of the British fixation on immutable class distinctions locked at birth.

Are reasonable defensive measures a panic?

A lot of things are being described as a panic at the moment, and a lot of it is really just rational risk mitigation behaviour. The factors the influence risk management decisions are all pretty straightforward. You’ve got an assessment on the likelihood of the risk causing an impact, as assessment of the potential magnitude of that impact, a judgement about how much risk you’re willing to accept, and decision about how much resource you’re willing to commit to managing the risk. The way these panic discussions tend to go is first, ignore the fact that different people/organisations have different resources available to commit to risk management, then if you disagree with any of the judgements they make, describe it as a ‘panic’, rather than what it actually is, a rational decision that you might disagree with for some reason.

No. Sociopaths and opportunists exist. Everyone should be prepared for that remote possibility, because the consequences are potentially large.

Almost no one buckles their seatbelt fully expecting to crash in the next 5 minutes. That doesn't invalidate taking the precautions.

Therefore, the sane person lives inside a secured enclosure with military-grade defenses, with the potential threats making of their important decisions for them.

That's the default. For most of history that was how it worked; anyone who could afford to do so built a secured enclosure and hired military-grade defenses. We've managed to establish more peaceful norms, where most people's threat models don't need to include roving bands of soldiers or brigands on the highways. But these norms aren't infinitely resilient, and can be broken by sustained periods of disorder, as we've seen in many places around the world.

Define 'afford to do so'.

If you mean 'anyone who has exploited the community around them to the point that they themselves come off as a predator and danger to the community', this would very likely explain why they could 'afford' to build a castle, but might also shed some light on WHY they might practically require a castle, or soldiers.

If you mean 'anyone who has exploited the community around them to the point that they themselves come off as a predator and danger to the community'

This is the basic trope. Many of the Kulaks were simply peasants who knew how to farm better than their neighbors.

Funny, but the same justification is used against (often non-white) store owners in disadvantaged neighborhoods, where their only "crime" was simply running a store in that neighborhood. Some genuinely good people who create value are genuinely creating value. That also doesn't mean they're exempt from receiving delusional accusations of exploitation. By the same token, there are some exploiters as well. However such judgments can only be just on the basis of individual actions.

As always, we should be on the look out for those who use overly simplistic and reductionist prejudicial assumptions to make accusations. Over time, they often turn out to be history's villains.

Why do you even assume that cowarding behind a castle with armed guards to keep neighbors at Bay are "reasonable defensive measures"?

Sounds to me you're exhibiting "elite panick" while being completely oblivious to it.

> The elite are fine in a disaster and they know it.

Not all the time, though. For example, Bloomberg reported a few days ago that Nigeria's elite, which normally flies out of the country for healthcare, can't do it now due to the travel restrictions across countries [0].

> The panic strikes the middle class more than any other group, because their status is the most easily lost. Unlike the rich, their power goes away with their jobs. Their lifestyle, however much you’d like to mock trips to Starbucks, weekend shopping at Pottery Barn, and all that - it all goes away. The tenuous advantage they’ve built up vanishes.

Makes sense.

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-02/trapped-b...

> Not all the time, though.

And to drive the point home even more: many high-status politicians in Western countries have contracted COVID-19 and it's uncertain how many more will, and how many will die. Also: uncertainty creates a panic of its own.

Many high-status politicians are clueless fools with no idea how to avoid infection, or how to minimise the risk of contagion within their immediate circle.

Most won't die unless they're in a vulnerable age group. But they will spread the infection to friends, family, and colleagues, some of whom will die.

The median age in the House of Lords is 70.

As for elite panic - armed gangs are already a thing in the UK and US. The suggestion they wouldn't move into a power vacuum left by the police/military when they're already battling for turf with violence, extortion, and intimidation is hard to take seriously.

Yes, there are plenty of people who will help others, especially in nice middle class enclaves. But you only need a small minority of dark triad types willing to use violence to create an immediate problem for everyone.

That small minority sounds to me like the NRA types.

>Asia after WW2 was different because the West essentially sponsored state corporate Facism in Japan and Korea until they had 30-50 years to evolve into something resembling a true democracy.

My father was a high-ranking US diplomat stationed in Taiwan during the early White Terror years. You have no idea how hard the people on the ground were working to stop Taiwan from tipping over in to a full dictatorship. It may seem hard to believe nowadays, but this was the era of the Marshall Plan and the rebuilding of Japan- US foreign policy was strongly focused on building allies' infrastructure, both civil and legal.

The term "elite panic" is a very real thing based in actual historical events.

It traces its roots to the French Revolution, Russian Revolution, and Maoist Revolution, where the rich/elite were slaughtered and imprisoned by mobs of peasants.

By comparison, the middle class didn't exist when these revolutions took place. The "middle class" is a very new construct that is only a few decades old, dating back to the post WWII economic boom.

That's not entirely true. The middle class used to be known as the bourgeoisie, and before that they were traders, merchants, and sometimes small-scale artisans, who were below the local aristocracy, but above the peasants, serfs, and cannon fodder.

The US has a peculiar definition which includes workers who would normally be considered working class. The true middle classes are usually professionals with advanced specialisms that require above-average intellect and education, and typically include some element of management and administration. They have some political leverage, but typically less than they think.

This version of the middle classes emerged as the administrative, technical, scientific, medical, and legal support for company owners and speculators during the Industrial Revolution. This is still recognisable today. (It was a huge problem during the Maoist revolution, and Mao went out of his way to destroy and "reeducate" this class - because they were capable of resisting him.)

The upper classes rely on inherited wealth and power, make their money from property, land, share ownership and other forms of rent seeking, have direct personal connections to networks that shape policy and power, and don't need to work unless they choose to.

> His observation is wrong. In all societies in which there is a power vacuum gangs take over. Witness Africa, South America, Burma, and the middle Eastern countries in which we have removed the “dictators.”

And it's particularly amusing because he just mentioned Haiti. What happened in Haiti is precisely why the American plantation class was so terrified: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1804_Haiti_massacre

The plantation owners in Haiti knew fully well that the revolt was deserved.

'deserved' has nothing to do with it. The American South elites deserved it almost as much as the Haitian planters did; and they were likely correct to fear it, contrary to Stross's glib dismissal of their fears as irrational.

Did you miss the rest of that comment: "Even the term “elite panic” is lie. The elite are fine in a disaster and they know it."

The Haitian elites were not fine in their disaster. And other elites (viz the American south's elites) knew it. That's the point.

I think I realised what strikes me as untrue about the 'elite panic' idea - that 'pulling together in emergencies' Stross referred to is typical to temporary emergencies. I don't think the Elite's fear is anywhere near as irrational as he paints it.

There's one unsettling fact I keep thinking about in regards to this topic - before everything went to hell, Rwanda and Afghanistan both had higher literacy rates than was typical for their respective regions. I think Stross's very middle class values are out of touch with the reality of the human condition in a way that both the very rich and the poor aren't.

I say this as a fan of the Laundry files, I think he might be having trouble imagining realistic near-future settings because realistic depictions of the near future don't have a middle class, and that is not something Stross can quite envision.

Agreed, and the author (whose work I generally love) seems to also set up a straw man, considering cases where a small, single-digit percentage of humanity is affected. Sure, in that case, there won't be much social upheaval, as most institutions of "civilization" will remain intact.

If you consider a zombie story in the vein of The Walking Dead, we're confronted with a world where something like 90-99% of humanity is dead or zombified. Governments are gone, militaries are gone, industry is gone. I expect we'd see a pretty violent world where people try to protect their immediate family and are naturally distrustful of all but small groups of people. I don't think this has anything to do with so-called "elite panic"; if you reduce people to constantly struggling to fulfill basic survival needs, and remove any kind of laws or consequences, people will do whatever they need to do, and resorting to violence will end up quite common.

Many societies with turmoil have managed to resolve the situation and went back to normal. Surely that depends on the attitudes of people, and especially leadership, on how to deal with the situation.

Zombie television presents violence as the only option and the enemy as an incurable and unsavable evil. If the only option shown is to kill and build walls, then that's what they are programmed to do.

In the real world people can always come together and compromise, share ressources and help each other. The foundation for this has to be built in peacetime.

> "In the real world people can always come together and compromise, share ressources and help each other."

That's starkly contradicted by the absence of toilet paper and other staples on store shelves at the individual level and the ongoing profiteering on and commandeering of medical protective gear and other medical supplies at the international level.

Germany is taking patients from surrounding countries. It’s not everywhere that things are like that.

The panic strikes the middle class more than any other group, because their status is the most easily lost. Unlike the rich, their power goes away with their jobs.

Also note, that many (though not all) of the "aristos" executed in the French Revolution were people lower down on the hierarchy. These were the people more easily visible and accessible to the mob.

The panic strikes the middle group the most, because the danger is the most real for them!

Here's a contemporary example of elite panic cynically deployed to sway an election.

Georgia Rep. Paul Broun released an ad warning that "in uncertain times like these," it’s important to protect yourself against "looting hordes from Atlanta" along with video of him carrying a rifle.

https://twitter.com/mbaram/status/1247597527987339269

Yeah, I lost a bit of respect for Stross' intelligence when I read that part about elite panic. Stross also doesn't seem to understand that just because a person prepares for the possibility that the masses might become violent doesn't mean that the person necessarily thinks that outcome to be the most likely one - it's just better to be safe than sorry.

>The elite are fine in a disaster and they know it.

Only if the disaster is relatively manageable. History has many examples of elites being killed during political upheaval.

Interesting, can you share the name a book, preferably rife with examples, where I can learn about the "In all societies in which there is a power vacuum gangs take over." thesis?

Thank you for this response, I was about to answer the same but you've done a much better job of expressing my sentiment.

> In all societies in which there is a power vacuum gangs take over.

Not all. Read some anthropology and you'll find interesting examples of large non-hierarchical societies.

The original paper is pretty interesting, and much more nuanced than Stross’s summary.

“Our claim is most controversial,and tenuous, regarding the idea of elite panic.We believe that elites panic just as non-elites do. Because the positions they occupy command the power to move resources, elite panic is more consequential than public panic.”

The paper overall references the fact that that historically, people in authority assume the public will panic, and most data suggests that they don’t. And ‘elites’ in this context means those in authority, not “rich and/or privileged people”.

They actually discus three possibilities: that 1) elites fear panic 2) elites cause panic 3) elites themselves panic

However, the paper certainly doesn’t suggest that ‘elites’ are somehow more prone to panic than the rest of society.

“Elites and Panic : more to fear than fear itself” Clarke and Chess

Pdf at https://moscow.sci-hub.tw/2964/7c0b4f9dec1b897ad09a6565ffbfc...

Most of the media zombie scenarios create very hostile environments and rapid breakdown of society. They're essentially engineered to create this situation. The zombies spread the disease actively. Near 100% conversion rate (immunities or asymptomatic cases are extremely rare). Incubating individuals will turn on those around them. And of course there often is a lack of genre awareness, the very concept of a zombie apocalypse is unknown.

This converts almost the entire population into hostiles. If you don't get all combative you become part of the zombie horde. So there's a huge selection bias.

This is hardly comparable to covid where essential functions of society are still working and the infected are not going out of their way to infect more people. And even now we're already seeing countries finger-pointing and adopting an everyone-for-themselves attitude around medical equipment.

Most of the infected aren't going out of their way and infecting people. A small number of the infected are acting with, at least, reckless disregard for the possibility of infecting others.

There has been one study on the influenza virus that says that people who are asymptomatic are more social than normal.

The simple hypotheses is that the virus wants the host to spread as much as possible.

That was a small evo-psych study (38 people) and it wasn’t a study of the flu but rather the vaccine so there are other possibilities. It’s certainly possible but I’d avoid giving it much weight without more data.

Yesterday I read an article that claims an opposite of elite panic -- working class denial? -- of the virus is happening in my city [0].

The thesis is that a community (euphemistically termed a "subculture") of older African Americans in Philadelphia refuse to participate in the quarantine due to their skepticism of the federal government's public health directives due to previous medical conspiracies, namely the Tuskegee Experiments.

0: https://6abc.com/health/expert-says-subculture-still-thinks-...

You're missing an adjective in there. It takes a special kind of mind to cite a case of government disregarding the health of African-Americans, as rationale for the thesis there is no health risk.

As someone who grew up outside of the USA, I feel like the problem in America is the diametrically opposite one.

People have too much faith in "normality", rule of law and relative stability and don't realize that stuff like that breaks down and stops working very easily, with even minor disruptions. Power plants are suddenly not supplied with oil, being stopped by a cop can be scarier than being stopped by a robber, and if you confront someone trying to break down a building door in the middle of the day their response is "so what are you going to do? go away before you get in trouble". etc. Or as some guy from Argentina described, if someone steps in front of your car you hit the gas, not the break. Heck, the order broke down in NO after Katrina - and it was a small, short-lived, localized inconvenience by developing world standards.

The "elite panic" is spot on and should not be confined to the elites, especially given the non-existent safety net, and the widespread accessibility of firearms.

> It's a world-view you'd expect of unreconstructed pre-Enlightenment aristocrats, or maybe a society dominated by a violent slave-owning elite.

This really hit home for me. It has always struck me as supremely odd, the civilization-breakdown fantasies that people have when I suggest that everyone in a society, not just the police, have easy and unrestrained access to arms, as advocated by many throughout history. This seems to be their worldview: without the threat of cop (with superior firepower than any random person), that society will devolve into this immediately, every fender bender or bit of road rage turning into life or death conflict.

It’s plainly wrong on its face, even without invoking the reality that there are many peaceful and prosperous places in the US wherein the private arms significantly outnumber those of the state.

I have tried for a long time to understand this view, and Charlie just dropped in the missing puzzle piece. This almost makes up for how wrong he’s been about bitcoin.

The easy access to arms doesn't destabilise, if anything it stabilises. It does, however, result in a constant tick-over of domestic murders, suicides, accidents, people shot dead by toddlers, and (in the US) seemingly purposeless mass murder-suicides.

Coronavirus has only just overtaken the US's normal firearms death toll.

> ... that society will devolve into this immediately, every fender bender or bit of road rage turning into life or death conflict.

To provide context, here is some data on that:

"cases of road rage involving a firearm — where someone brandished a gun or fired one at a driver or passenger — more than doubled to 620 in 2016, from 247 in 2014."

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/25/us/road-rage-guns.html

That doesn't amount to "civilization-breakdown", but whether it's a level that's worth worrying about is something different people will feel differently about. I suspect it is a higher number of cases (per capita) than many other countries with stricter gun laws.

How many of those were would-be fistfights that were de-escalated to nonviolence by brandishing (literally: holding a weapon) by a victim? A lot of casually violent people become a lot more polite when they realize they don’t get to punch or beat whomever they like. That’s a good outcome, to me, but that figure lumps it in with violence where people get shot, mixing good gun-related outcomes with bad ones, as if brandishing is an end in itself to be prevented.

You can’t really stop road ragers from getting out of their car with the intent to hit someone. You can indeed convince them that attacking armed strangers is a bad idea—without anyone being hurt.

Providing context means, well, providing context, not just tossing out a composite figure without background or breakdown. A good actual context for that would be the not-gun-related road rage assault figures before and after, and what percentage of that increase is brandished (no one injured) vs shot/shot at (violence that should be prevented/reduced).

Yeah, gun brandishing incidents is a really weird thing to get worked up about. Gun homicides, sure - but those have been going down in the US since the 90s. (Despite the assault weapons ban expiring. Funny, that)

Homicides aren't normally committed by people who would need an assault rifle, and most are probably not using an assault rifle to kill themselves, either.

Also, I wouldn't exactly feel good if someone cut me off for driving a little too slow for them and they waved a gun at me. Somehow these arguments make that OK as if it isn't an escalation or is "oh well gee at least we didn't fist fight."

I can't comprehend a 1 in a million per year event (brandishing, not even necessarily firing) being anywhere the top of anyone's list of things to worry about.

Any idea what the driver (pun not intended) is on that increase? Were more guns sold? Did people abruptly start driving more?

You don't have to guess at what happens when governments collapse. Just look at what happened to Europe in 1945.

https://www.amazon.com/Savage-Continent-Europe-Aftermath-Wor...

It's very ugly, but not what you describe.

That book describes the same civil wars that happened for the hundreds of years before 1945 too.

Walking Dead starts out Rick-against-everyone but veers towards a story about scrappy, regular folk coming together to more or less form a democracy, against a backdrop of total chaos. I read this as retelling a certain story of America, with the zombies standing in for brutal nature (and Native Americans!) and the protagonists the Europeans, creating a few different outposts of "civilization". I wrote about this reading here: https://blogtarkin.wordpress.com/tag/walking-dead/

While I've never seen The Walking Dead, I'm a little puzzled why someone would balk at a post-apocalyptic "nihilistic display of humanity where tribal survival is all that matters and every individual encountered is almost certainly some sort of rapist or cannibal and just needs to be stomped out". Without civilization and culture this is what human beings are like. It's the "state of nature" Hobbes wrote about, and much of it fits with observed behavior of hunter-gatherers as well as chimpanzees.

I'm not saying you and me and all the nice friendly people you know are like this, deep down. I mean, some of us probably are and are just good at hiding it, but many of us aren't. But in a Malthusian scenario where survival is at a premium and the material abundance of modern civilization is no longer here, who do you think is going to survive?

"I am Legend" not only portrayed surviving humans as more sympathetic toward each other, but even humanized the infected zombies (to a degree). The zombies had a leader, and he was motivated not by a desire to kill humans, but by what appeared to be desperate love of someone taken from him.

I won't give any more details, but if you haven't seen it, it's a great film.

The book and the film diverge. It's still a good film. The alternate ending is way better.

The alternate ending better lines up with the book.

In the novella, humans are treated quite differently than in the Will Smith movie.

In the US there is the well-known phenomenon that during big catastrophes the media will concentrate on looting, as if this was a big problem and not the reasonable response to closed stores, full of products that people need.

Specifically, back people loot.

https://www.aclu.org/blog/smart-justice/mass-incarceration/b...

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/hurricane-katrina-looters/

>> To some extent this reflects their own implicit belief that humanity is by nature grasping, avaricious, amoral, and cruel, and that their status depends on power and violence.

A lot of that sounds like projection.

I was surprised when a lot of people started expressing concerns about lawlessness recently, because it wasn't obvious to me why this crisis should lead to that.

But are they wrong?

“Fear the Walking Dead” deals with these questions very explicitly. One of the main characters is what you could call a zombie sympathizer.

All media should be viewed as satire

It’s so emotionally compressed into one vibe and hyper stylized visually how anyone can sit down with the intent of making real sense of it is bizarre.

It’s highly customized to satisfy a target audience. Not generalized like so much other media.

Go interact with real people, or create your own.

I’ve been curating a space opera for a decade. 3,000+ typed pages.

I have no desire to give it up to the public and find it almost meditative. Haven’t seen any of the new SW movies, or sci fi in the last decade. I borrow ideas as Lucas, etc did. It all just flows.

I don’t really owe society a financial return on my endeavors either.

Grew up this way though. I honestly don’t care if anyone ever finds value in my efforts.

Putting in work to satisfy others isn’t why I get up in the morning.

Let go of market economics and free yourself to be a multi disciplinarian.

If all media were satire, we would call it satire and not media.

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