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Comment by oneoff786 | Hacker News Reader

Apocalypse stories don’t often make sense. The energy and fuel situations are usually bonkers. The hordes of people who turn into lunatics is silly. Cooperation is natural and good.

My favorite post apocalyptic cult is the one featured in A Quiet Place 2. This world features aliens that will kill anyone who makes a sound. The protagonists are captured by this cult of like 30 people with little intro to who the hell they are. They do this strongman creepy virtue signaling for a while and then tie up Jim’s replacement with some noisy chains on a dock. Surprise surprise, Not Jim makes a noise (not with the chains for some reason), and sure enough the entire cult is immediately wiped out.

…

How did these people canonically survive for so long doing these dumbass shenanigans?

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> Cooperation is natural and good.

Recently, after seeing people from Dallas haul their trailers to my small Texas town's grocery store so as to pillage our remaining toilet paper stock, my faith in the rational ability of my fellow Man has been somewhat reduced.

The first time people got into literal fist fights in supermarkets over toilet paper, my faith in the rational ability of most humans was shaken. The third time around, it was gone. By now my expectations of humans are, sadly, extremely limited.

Hmm I'm bothered by people hauling trailers to horde toilet paper, sure.

But I'd absolutely fight you for the last roll on the shelf.

I would wipe my ass with my own hand before I'd engage in any kind of violence over fucking toilet paper. It's absurdly stupid and ethically bankrupt.

Violence against another human being should be a last resort for self defense only.

you say that from the comfort of your own fully stocked home. When your child is starving your perspective will likely change. Even if it doesnt, other people will be coming for you.

If a group attacks other people, someone has to band together to step up to stop them before they come for each individual.

The thread is about toilet paper, not food.

It's a perfectly understandable reaction for lack of food and water. It's absurd for toilet paper. But if you look hard enough, you will find people doing the same for Playstations, so it shouldn't be that surprising.

(What does the US people have with toilet paper anyway? It seems to always enter the discourse of survivalists and other kinds of apocalipse dreamers, and anything that happens, it seems to disappear there. It's different on most of the world.)

> I would wipe my ass with my own hand

That's probably not the best of ideas, however the toilet paper frenzy is indeed extremely strange. If it was that crucial, humanity would collectively explode from all the stuff they could not push out of their asses before toilet paper was invented. Many times over. And it would stink to hell and back, too.

> Violence against another human being should be a last resort for self defense only.

Idk, or boredom. I hope you don't assume the average fuck on the street has 1/100th the sense of honor you do.

Y'all need some bidets...

Finally someone lays down the facts.

All the while the grocery store essential items are being procured, packed and supplied to your town in the middle of a global pandemic. Getting freshly grown produce, dairy and meat in the middle of apocalypse level panic?

I envy world view of people like yours. I wish I had that level of self-entitlement. I truly do!

Do you really think that the “most humans” I’m referring to are the same ones responsible for that still-functional-despite-The-Circumstances supply chain? Those humans are too busy to fight over toilet paper in the aisles, and too competent to run completely out of it in the first place.

My take is that local cooperation is natural and good. But, the roving bands of marauders will absolutely be a thing in an apocalypse scenario.

We had TP when no one in our state had it locally, because people didn't lose their minds. Then people found out and drove here. The day I saw a literal armed guard for a pallet of toilet paper was the day I realized that in a true SHTF scenario, there is nothing you can do. If you live within 4 or 5 hours of a road, you will be inundated with refugees/robbers/marauders. It will happen, I am convinced.

As dark as this is, I believe the best thing you can do is plan a safe and painless exit for you and yours when things get really bad.

How many people? What fraction of Dallas residents engaged in that behavior?

That said, would it have been "Texan" to have turned them back at the city limits?

> The hordes of people who turn into lunatics is silly.

The hordes of lunatics already exist, and are just waiting for something to happen.

Sure sure. But they either die or fall in line very quickly. Fiction always makes these out to seem like very powerful entities.

AtR isn't so much a post-apocalypse in the usual total-collapse-of-civilization sense. It's post collapse of the US government really so technology, trade, and some infrastructure still exist. There's still a relatively strong remnant of the US around but they only hold sway in the north east and [0] some across Ohio extending as far as Missouri.

As for cooperation there's a lot of that going on throughout Texas but there's also groups with very different ideas about what a good nation would look like and some are willing to use force to bring their ideas into being. That ultimately feels quite realistic to me. Pockets of cooperation that have to defend themselves from uncooperative elements.

[0] partially fan made map with some comments by the author clearing up things that were only mentioned briefly in the book: https://www.reddit.com/r/behindthebastards/comments/oevzgd/a...

you can look at modern apocalypses to see what might happen;

in rwanda hundreds of thousands of people were murdered in ethnic violence https://www.un.org/africarenewal/web-features/i-was-tested-l...

in aleppo, blocks banded together, but there was starvation, robbery, murder, rape etc

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/dec/21/three-years-af...

hurricane katrina superdome - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/sep/06/hurricanekatri...

venezuela https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/17/world/america...

> Cooperation is natural and good.

I agree, but perhaps hard fought. "The Survivors", the 1975 TV series from the U.K. tried to do apocalypse more cleverly.

How so?

Scanned the Wikipedia page for it and nothing popped out as notably clever:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivors_(1975_TV_series)

I don't know if I'd describe it's take as 'notably clever' but the focus wasn't on hordes of zombies / insane cults / etc but groups of people coming together and trying hard to rebuild some sort of life after a massive epidemic that kills most people. There were clashes between different groups, some resolved amicably, some with violence.

Actually depicted people trying to organize and cooperate, rebuild rather than running nitrous-fueled cars to trade petrol with the Bullet Lord or whatever. (I like those films too though.)

Pretty good actually, a Terry Nation show as I recall (the guy who invented the Daleks). Attempts to take the subject seriously and realistically (no zombies or daleks), with reasonable success.

Like in Waterworld, where did they get all those cigarettes? Who's growing all that tobacco?

Nick Naylor: Cigarettes in space?

Jeff Megall: It's the final frontier, Nick.

Nick Naylor: But wouldn't they blow up in an all oxygen environment?

Jeff Megall: Probably. But it's an easy fix. One line of dialogue. 'Thank God we invented the... you know, whatever device.'

"SHTF Survival Stories", despite it's sketch title and cover art, follows some of the Balkans war.

People do cooperate.. just not in the ways you might want.

A horde of lunatics stormed the capitol, some wearing outrageous outfits with names like "Q Shaman"

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