Here is a question I have......when the peak hits and civilization collapses, do you think will happen? I'm not sure I can envision everyone going in tribes and becoming hunters/gatherers. That will take a mass death of many in civilization, and one great slaughter because undoubtedly a reversion to tribal life will result in wars over territories to hunt/gather.
A possible scenario to look at may be what happened after Hurricane Katrina and other disasters, KoB.
I’m pulling this quote from an article from over at Anthropik.
http://anthropik.com/2005/09/the-state-of-nature-in-katrinas-eye/
In the absence of information and outside assistance, groups of rich and poor banded together in the French Quarter, forming "tribes" and dividing up the labor. As some went down to the river to do the wash, others remained behind to protect property. In a bar, a bartender put near-perfect stitches into the torn ear of a robbery victim.
While mold and contagion grew in the muck that engulfed most of the city, something else sprouted in this most decadent of American neighborhoods — humanity.
“Some people became animals,” Vasilioas Tryphonas said Sunday morning as he sipped a hot beer in Johnny White’s Sports Bar on Bourbon Street. “We became more civilized.”
…
Police came through commandeering drivable vehicles and siphoning gas. Officials took over a hotel and ejected the guests.
An officer pumped his shotgun at a group trying to return to their hotel on Chartres Street.
“This is our block,” he said, pointing the gun down a side street. “Go that way.”
Jack Jones, a retired oil rig worker, bought a huge generator and stocked up on gasoline. But after hearing automatic gunfire on the next block one night, he became too afraid to use it — for fear of drawing attention.
Still, he continues to boil his clothes in vinegar and dip water out of neighbors’ pools for toilet flushing and bathing.
“They may have to shoot me to get me out of here,” he said. “I’m much better off here than anyplace they might take me.”
Many in outlying areas consider the Quarter a playground for the rich and complain that the place gets special attention.
Yes, wealthy people feasted on steak and quaffed warm champagne in the days after the storm. But many who stayed behind were the working poor — residents of the cramped spaces above the restaurants and shops.
Tired of waiting for trucks to come with food and water, residents turned to each other.
Johnny White’s is famous for never closing, even during a hurricane. The doors don’t even have locks.
Since the storm, it has become more than a bar. Along with the warm beer and shots, the bartenders passed out scrounged military Meals Ready to Eat and bottled water to the people who drive the mule carts, bus the tables and hawk the T-shirts that keep the Quarter’s economy humming.
“It’s our community center,” said Marcie Ramsey, 33, whom Katrina promoted from graveyard shift bartender to acting manager.
For some, the bar has also become a hospital.
Tryphonas, who restores buildings in the Quarter, left the neighborhood briefly Saturday. Someone hit in the head with a 2-by-4 and stole his last $5.
When Tryphonas showed up at Johnny White’s with his left ear split in two, Joseph Bellomy — a customer pressed into service as a bartender — put a wooden spoon between Tryphonas’ teeth and used a needle and thread to sew it up. Military medics who later looked at Bellomy’s handiwork decided to simply bandage the ear.
“That’s my savior,” Tryphonas said, raising his beer in salute to the former Air Force medical assistant.5
Or how about this account from Ran Prieur’s blog:
http://ranprieur.com/essays/slowcrash.html
[b]Appendix 2: reader comment[/b]
Here’s a comment from Aaron (March 2005):
I’ve just interviewed a permaculture consultant who has been working in Iraq (rebuilding a village on behalf of some obscure aid agency). He said the first thing he noticed was that for the first time ever there was no stamp in his passport and no customs or any kind of government apparatus when he went there. This got him kind of worried about what he was going into but when he got there (Kurdistan) he was amazed to see that the services in the town he was staying in were operating okay and the place hadn’t descended into chaos – far from it in fact.
After a while he started asking people questions like, “How come the water supply is still functioning when there is no agency to run it and how come the power is on too?”
The locals said that all the electricians just decided to get together and make the power system work, and the same thing with plumbers and the water system.
He said there were no banks operating but that wasn’t so bad because there were guys on street corners sitting behind a box offering 3 types of currency (in the form of three piles of money with a stone sitting on each one). The gas stations were closed too but at various points on the road there would be a gathering of guys with tractor drawn tanks selling gas. He said he had no idea where they had got the gas from but they were selling it and everyone’s cars were running fine.
There was plenty of fresh (organic) food in the markets and life was pretty normal. The only people really suffering were the grain farmers. They had had a fairly normal growing season but the price of grain had gone through the floor thanks to international aid agencies flooding the country with imported grain in an attempt to feed the poor helpless Iraqis.
From the tone of wonder in his voice I think he had just stumbled upon the possibilities of political anarchy.
…And here’s a follow-up, after Hurricane Katrina, September 2005:
I forgot to mention the last thing the guy said, which was that he had told the same story many times to people in the US and the response was always, “That wouldn’t happen here – it’d be total anarchy, people would be at each other’s throats.” This shows how effective the propaganda is but it’s interesting just how wrong those predictions were, although the propaganda system was able to maintain the illusion perfectly for people (in the mainstream) outside New Orleans.
The system tells us that without it we would be living in anarchy but in actual fact we would be living in community and that’s what the troops were doing in New Orleans – preventing outbreaks of community, not outbreaks of anarchy.
Take care,
Curt
