Comment by Manuel_D | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Manuel_D | Hacker News Reader

I once encountered a reddit user vocally insisting in a regional subreddit that industrialized society would collapse in the next 10-20 years. I poked around his comment history and it was non-stop commenting in /r/collapse pondering the kind of collapse that would happen, theories as to what would trigger it, and plans for how they would somehow survive and turn it into a utopian society for themselves. Like 9 months of this kind of commenting. The kicker was a wall of text, a dozen paragraphs long, about how he'd emerge from his bunker and become the patriarch of the local group of survivors - ultimately leading to him having several wives, of course.

While there are pressing challenges like climate change, aging populations, inequality, and more, I find that the substantial majority of people who devote large amounts of energy towards pondering and preparing for the collapse of civilization are using it as an escapist fantasy. I see lots of parallels with people preparing for Judgement Day: some unprecedented event is going to kill off the majority of the population leaving a chosen few to inherit the new world. These collapse predictions are often rooted in serious issues, but I find that this kind of escapism makes the average person more skeptical of serious activism.

Not sure if you read the article, but both you and the redditor you are describing fit archetypes explicitly called out by the author.

Which one? "Partial Deniers" I guess? I think that's the overwhelming majority of people, those that recognize that emerging problems exist but do not predict they will cause a global collapse of society. Although it's often difficult to judge, exactly, since collapse evangelists tend to be rather evasive and ambiguous about what exactly will trigger the collapse.

You fit partial denier, yes. The redditor you're describing would certainly fit into "post-collapsists" given that they are preparing for the collapse in order to minimize post-collapse consequences.

I would say that most upper-middle-class+ educated westerners fit into the "partial denier" archetype, yes. It's in human nature to deny something bad is happening until its too late, and sometimes even then (see, eg. global warming, COVID-19, etc).

Completely agree. It is actually very hard to collapse a modern Western society. It is too large, too complex, and have millions of people working to stabilise/fix problems.

Probably, it'll be more like the fall of the Roman empire; a slow gradual process of increasing instability, culminating not in utter chaos, anarchy and apocalypse, but in finding a new (temporary) period of some stability.

It's probably going to be a decrease in quality of life for many people, but certainly not a cavemen fighting with sticks situation, and the bunker survivors gloriously emerging to rule the wasteland as kings, as some preppers seem to believe.

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.

Yep agree. The bunkers also forget that there are more firearms in the US than people. So plenty of people will be targeting the bunkers.

For the collapse community, that complexity is viewed as a major vulnerability. A classic text in their lexicon is anthropologist Joseph Tainter’s “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” which discusses complexity’s role in collapse (the TL;DR is that diminishing marginal returns to social complexity are to be avoided if you’d like your society to prevail).

Yep they are pretty much wrong. Complexity is not the same as Fragility.

> While there are pressing challenges like climate change, aging populations, inequality, and more, I find that the substantial majority of people who devote large amounts of energy towards pondering and preparing for the collapse of civilization are using it as an escapist fantasy.

To be fair, something fairly similar could be said of most any internet conversation on such topics.

I'm inclined to agree with you, but I'm curious how serious these plans were. Did anyone really try hiding in bunkers and organizing an independent community, or was that just armchair Redditing?

I met a guy who sold his lawncare? business and bought one of the RV's that is basically a bus, and his family of five lived in it, to be prepared for the collapse. (I'm not sure how he was planning on getting gasoline if the collapse was that serious...) After a while of interacting with some more normal people he decided he had been deceived, but I heard some time later that he had bought a house in the woods to prepare. I have no idea if he was on Reddit, though.

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