The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch Read Online Free Page B

the state: cheats don’t prosper. This tacit agreement between the individuals in a society to cooperate and behave for the collective good, sacrificing a certain amount of their own personal freedom in exchange for benefits such as the mutual protection offered by the state, is known as the social contract. It is the very foundation of all collective endeavor, production, and economic activity of a civilization, but the structure begins to strain and social cohesion loosens once individuals perceive greater personal gains in cheating, or suspect that others will cheat them.
    During a severe crisis the social contract can snap altogether, precipitating a complete disintegration of law and order. We need look no further than the most technologically advanced nation on the planet to see the effects of a localized fracture in the social contract. New Orleans was physically devastated by the rampage of Hurricane Katrina,but it was the desperate realization by the city’s inhabitants that local governance had evaporated and no help would be arriving anytime soon that precipitated the rapid degeneration of normal social order and the outbreak of anarchy.
    So after a cataclysmic event, we might expect organized gangs to emerge to fill the power vacuum left behind after the evaporation of governance and law enforcement, laying claim to their own personal fiefdoms. Those who seize control of the remaining resources (food, fuel, and so on) will administer the only items that have any inherent value in the new world order. Cash and credit cards will be meaningless. Those appropriating the caches of preserved food as their own “property” will become very wealthy and powerful—the new kings—controlling the allocation of food to buy loyalty and services in the same way that ancient Mesopotamian emperors did. In this environment, people with special skills, such as doctors and nurses, might do well to keep this to themselves, as they may be forced to serve the gangs as highly specialized slaves.
    Lethal force may be applied swiftly to deter looters and raids from rival gangs, and as resources become depleted the competition will get only fiercer. A common mantra of people who actively prepare for the apocalypse (called Preppers) is: “It is better to have a gun and not need it than to need a gun and not have it.”
    One pattern likely to recur over the weeks and months after the Fall is that small communities of people will gather together in a defensible location for mutual support and protection of their own stash of consumables, looking for safety in numbers. These small dominions will need to patrol and protect their own borders in the way that whole nations do today. Ironically, the safest place for a group to barricade themselves in and hunker down during the turbulence would be one of the fortresses dotted across the country, but now turned inside out in its purpose. Prisons are largely self-contained compounds with high walls, sturdy gates, barbed wire, and watchtowers, originally intendedto prevent the inhabitants from escaping, but equally effective as a defensive refuge for keeping others out.
    The outbreak of widespread crime and violence is probably an inevitable effect of any catastrophic event. However, this hellish descent into a
Lord of the Flies
world is not something I will discuss any further here. This book is about how to fast-track the recovery of technological civilization once people are able to settle down again.

THE BEST WAY FOR THE WORLD TO END
    Before we get to the “best” let’s start with the worst. From the point of view of rebuilding civilization, the worst kind of doomsday event would be all-out nuclear war. Even if you escape vaporization in the targeted cities, much of the material of the modern world will have been obliterated, and the dust-darkened skies and ground poisoned by fallout would hamper the recovery of agriculture. Just as bad, even though it is not directly lethal, would be an