LaMOEs

Dystopian fiction is one of my favorite forms of science fiction.  The exploration of circumstances after a major civilization collapses and how people deal with it.

Not so much for the actual catastrophe that causes the world to collapse but rather how people deal with the catastrophe afterwards.  How do we go on?  The last man on earth (LaMOE) scenario.

Some people turn feral and break every rule to survive.  Some people roll up their sleeves and get to work trying to put things back together.  Some people just curl up and die.  I think it’s somewhat telling how some people choose to cope after a catastrophe and in a similar vein I think it’s telling which scenario that people want to read about.

I picked up a short story anthology about apocalyptic fiction the other day.  Most of the stories followed the first option.  The mindset of the characters in the book was that the rules and social mores of the old world had been swept away and that anything was now justified in the name of survival.

But is it true?  Do we all revert to some more primitive state when pressured by catastrophe?  For the most part I am going to say that this is not true.  We’ve seen some examples of catastrophes around the world in the last few years and for the most part people seem to want to cooperate and to rebuild rather to pillage and loot and lookout only for themselves.

In some cases of course it did prove to be true that people would act pretty savagely to keep themselves alive but for the most part people realize that cooperation and compassion will do a lot more to insure their own survival that brutal self-interest.

I think it’s millions of years of being social and cooperative creatures that has brought us to the point where we no longer see things in stark and brutal terms and see that our own survival is more closely tied to one another than to trying to be that last people left alive.