Not good, but livable

From a site that I visit often.

We will live through the hardship. Our great and great-great grandfathers did.

How fragile our society really is?
Julia said...What's frightening about all of this is that the veneer of civilization is so thin. And, most of us have no experience with this. Perhaps our grandparents could handle it better without breaking down....
Leftists have no idea how fragile civilization is...December 9, 2009 8:04 PMHi Julia,

You know, I’m not so sure how fragile our society really is.Granted, in some of the most advanced part of the world the society has reached incredibly complex networks but in other places its still technologically modern but much more rugged.What I mean is, if Bolivia has power and a somewhat functional society, anyone can.

Most of the third worlds works in such a semi-organized chaoes.I think that in a worst case situation, that’s as far as you can fall in global terms. You dont go back to cavemen or pre industrial revolution times. What has been learned and such cannot be undone.We’ve been social creatures for so long, a functional society is part of who we are. Even though events can disrupt that for some periods of time, I don’t think its disappearing.A lot of people don’t know it but the social organization as we have it today ( except for the technological advances of course) has been around for thousands of years.Since the times of the Babylonian empire, there’s been complex social threads.

Today middle east is largely ruled by some laws and religious traditions that are brutal, yet almost 2000 years BC, on that same region the Hammurabi code had surprisingly modern laws about real estate, divorce, etc.

My point is, there are some fragile technologies and networks, mostly regarding complex logistics, but we can have a modern society without many of them because many countries do. Buenos Aires may be nicer than the cities in Bolivia, but its logistics and infrastructure is patched as it gets broken in a similar manner. Apparently always about to crumble, but gets patched or fixed and we keep going. The logistics mostly consist on independent truckers and drivers, chugging along the roads in poor conditions, in vehicles just as poorly maintained… and yet here we are.

Lets also keep in mind that there always will be fatalists and doomers. For them the world is always about to end. This year, or the next, always predicting the feared end of the world because one well founded reason or another, just to come up with a new one when that prophecy wasn’t fulfilled.

I think the greatest fragility our society has isn’t physical, but psychological; the idea that there’s always a punishment for a crime, that the police are the ones that are responsible for your personal protection, the government will watch after you and is responsible for your well being. All these ideas some people have and have a rude wakeup call when they learn otherwise.FerFAL