The guy who says... "Yeah, I could be a real Tarzan...but my wife won't let me... Guess I'll have to wait for the apocalypse..." Or the house cat with dreams of being a snow leopard...until she accidentally spends one night in the snow... I'm 75...survived two wars and one bad marriage. I *like* comfortable beds, good plumbing, regular meals...and being able to sleep without having to "tie cans with rocks around the wire..." The rest of you can have my share of the "Decline and Fall..." YP
“In a modern society, everything is connected. Of course, the very connections that make it stronger, are the very ones that are it’s weakness...” Threads.
I find the idea of a slow motion apocalypse much more likely and much more terrifying. A sudden destruction of the world provides a sort of catharsis. A slow decay just leaves you with agony and nihilism. On the positive side, slow collapses are part of human history and at least someone inherits the earth afterwards.
I hate to inform you, but we're currently undergoing that. Have you not seen global society slowly capsizing under the weight of bullshit, housing and food costs going up while wages stagnate, businesses failing because nobody can afford to shop there, and everything heading for 'innovative' new technologies that are worse in every way than what they replace, all while the super-rich block out the stars and prepare to populate Mars with slaves?
Very true with the last thoughts about the fall of the Soviet Union. My family is from that part of the world and all of the people who were old enough to remember the collapse of the Soviet Union were shocked when it finally came. Everyone said that if you told them on New Year's Day 1991 that the USSR would dissolve before the year was over they would have thought you were either crazy or having a joke at their expense. Interestingly, when he thought about it my father-in-law was able to retrospectively gauge the decline of the Soviet Union by the fruits available at the market in his city. He lived in a large city, a capital of a Republic so he had better access than some areas but over time the types of fruits on sale turned more and more basic. When he was a kid in the Brezhnev era in the 60's there were lots of exotic fruits for sale that were imported from other parts of the world. By the time the Soviet Union collapsed there was just what could be grown and trucked in locally.
A good example are cities like Rome and Athens. They became ruins but not because everyone died over night. It was slow, less money to hire janitors, maintence men, and masons to repair buildings. Eventually they became ghost towns because food is not grown in cities and fled to the lords who owned land where they lived on property and paid rent with a share of crops. This was the start of feudalism.
in The Peripheral, William Gibson refers to the slow collapse of that universe as The Jackpot. my sister and i, mulling over some latest clusterfuck in the news cycle will look at each other and one will ask, “is this the start of the jackpot?” we all know it’s coming. if it hasn’t already started.
I was essentially writing The Rover but set in the American OH-PA-WV tristate area without knowing what it was and now I gotta rethink everything I was working on. Appreciate the warning.
Give the Rover a look, I think you'll find you have plenty of room to tell the story you want to tell without covering the same ground. Besides, "the Rover in Ohio" makes me want to give it a look.
Well spoken and very thought-provoking as always. I also agree that these "Slow-Collapse" scenarios don't get the appreciation they're due the same as the more 'popular' "Instant Apocalypse" stories. Thanks for sharing with us! 91st Like.
Mad Max did happen. One such event is still within living memory: see 1910s-1920s China, where the central government collapsed and was replaced with local police, governors, army officers, militias or mafias. This Warlord Era was resolved with 40 years of civil wars and various forms of foreign interventions. Leading to the rise of the PRC and 40 more years of extremely brutal and self genocidal repression, until they "mostly" eased off the repression in the 90s. It could happen again.
And now, China is looking at a likely scenario of almost halving their population by 2050. While at the same time you have a Government that has been consolidated into a cult of personality with a leader who is over 70 years old. The dance is not over for China yet.
That wasn't even unified china, kinda like Germany... and prc opinion of someone who payed 40 seconds of attention when prc was mentioned while watching some other video.
@@robertkalinic335did you have a stroke writing this? Nobody cares, if you can’t express your thoughts coherently nobody can understand the hell you’re trying to say. It’s gibberish. Like a monkey yapping in a tree.
The George Romero Living Dead series is a really good example of this genre of slow apocalypse movies in which each movie shows the zombie apocalypse at different stages, from the night shit hits the fan to months after, where the only way to survive is to be in an underground bunker.
Interesting that you didn't at least touch upon 'The Road'. While it's actual collapse may have happened fairly quickly, it depicts end stage slow collapse very well. No manufacture left to replace goods, limited resources squirreled away in obscure cupboards and all life is simply one long scrounge until there's no canned food left and the last ratburger is a distant memory. Slow collapses are always grey in the end and 'The Road' was the greyest book I've ever read.
There is a lot of media to do with the anxiety/excitement surrounding the collapse of civilization. Historically, outright *collapse* is pretty rare. What is quite frequent is the *crumbling* of civilization, and it's what perhaps the majority of people have to live with in all ages - where one takes for granted that services will only be intermittently available if at all and that police/agents/functionaries will more often than not expect a bribe. Thank you for your selection of crumble-core films, feral. Until next time!
When you read on Wikipedia, events that take centuries can sometimes seem to happen within a single lifetime. Take the collapse of the Roman Empire as an example. We didn't have a situation where the Empire was fine on Tuesday and then a crumbled mess by Friday. Instead, the decline of the Western Roman Empire took centuries. But on the other end, you have the Inca Empire that completely and absolutely collapsed in about a single generation. Crashing so hard that their entire system of literacy was completely lost to the world.
Easy way to drive the point that the Rollerboys aren't a force for good But instead of just specific ethnic groups is everyone who's not fit to join their boostergang
Also the premise: Collapse because foreigners bought up everything and tricked Americans into taking drugs? Ethnically divided gangs in competition? Having not seen the film I cannot say for sure but that sure sounds like far right propaganda.
It's one of those movies that I've kept thinking about over the years. There's something about that movie that makes an impression that makes it sit with the audience for a long time, even if they don't realize it.
@@samfilmkid It's hard to say. It's understated, and the performances are quite good. It certainly wasn't what I was expecting, moving much slower than I would have thought, and I can certainly see why some people bounce off it.
I'm not here to argue, just throwing out a ray of hope. Way I see it we have several major infrastructure shifts, internet, drones, ect, which all favor rural living. Couple that with the poor management of urban and suburban population centers, and that explains why we have rapid decay in some areas, and decent growth in others. Also this is America. We had 28 major revolutionary movements since the founding. Political and social turmoil are the norm, not outliers. In context the 1980s, 1990s, and most of the 2000s were a period of unparalleled prosperity and social tranquility. What I'm trying to say is, this may not be the end. In fact, it almost certainly isn't. We're just doing old things in new ways, and returning to historic norms of violence. Most of which could be eased by legalizing dueling(sorry if that seems off topic, kinda of pet project of mine). TL:DR This could be the end, this could be just another decade. Either way, good luck.
I don’t always agree with your takes but I have to say I think you’re spot on here. Instant collapses of civilizations is rare. It’s usually a slow decline followed by either being a shadow of past glories or being conquered by your rising neighbors.
I find both slow and fast collapse scenarios to be interesting, but I also am a big fan of stories about how a society can be put back together post collapse. In a world of roving gangs, collapsed trade, and severe hardship, how does a society begin to reform? The challenge of trying to get a large enough group of people to follow you or your ideals without just starving or being killed. Where is the transition point from a gang with some loose ideals to "The Law" and does that transition point even exist practically?
"The Law" has appeared when even the folks in power believe in the need to bow to the law. It's still fuzzy, however, because there's times and places where merely mouthing platitudes to "The Law," no matter how obviously false, seem to be sufficient. Where the line between 'powerful people do bad but get punished' and 'powerful people do bad and do not get punished' can be fuzzy, because sometimes the bad was a lie, sometimes the punishments are meaningless, and sometimes people earnestly pursuing justice make mistakes.
It’s not the main event of the story but Seveneves depicts a world where we suddenly find out that in 2 years everything on the surface of earth will be destroyed. It’s current day so everyone knows that even with our planets full industrial capacity, at most a few thousand people can make it into space and hope to survive in the swarm of capsules and hasty upgrades to the ISS. (Kinda spoilers) Twords the end countries get pissy about who gets into space, there’s the last battle on earth in the final two days, America nukes a mostly civilian fleet threatening a launch site and no one cares, there wasn’t time. There’s a scene when a character decides to follow parking laws, just so he doesn’t contribute to the collapse. Meanwhile the government is dropping containers of artwork into the ocean for whoever returns 2,000 years later.
Great post, lots of thought provoking concepts. All excellent and intelligent films. A long time fan of the original Mad Max, I'm always quick to point out that 0:04 was filmed just behind my house here in Melbourne. Suburbia is well and truly consuming the area surrounding that scene. Perhaps it's another slow apocalypse?
I just discovered your channel, and have subscribed. I'm a housewife/writer from Manitoba, Canada. I've been thinking on this lately, so your video was very interesting to appear in my feed. Wishing you wellness, and safety.
Nice to see someone else recall 'Prayer of the Rollerboys'. I liked the movie at time time. It had competent bad guys, I like competence. I had completely forgotten that the Rollerboys were 'racist' (unlike the stunning and diverse Bloods and Crips?), I was more concerned with the drug running than their badthink. Good stuff, thanks man.
dont give the roller boy plan as being a bit short sighted. the war world german boys started with an economic collapse after having to pay the west high prices for losing the war. the main differences one group had a more national level of control while the roller was more of a micro level. Of course the world war 2 version die faster then it was created once the fighting started and became a warning to all power authorities' governments at what happen when you overreach. someone up thread mention china that felled into civil wars and where plump for picking by japan only for the culture revolution to take over once ww2 ended. Decades of fighting with untold death.
I always thought that Logan's run was the far future of a slow collapse, nothing outside seemed nuked, it's just all faded away. Like eventually the fish stopped arriving to be frozen.
$hopping is one I really enjoyed. I’ve always heard it described as a lesser A Clockwork Orange of the 1990s. I think there’s a bit more to it and it always struck a chord with me.
Re the Soviet comparison: if you’re really bored read War in 2020 by Ralph Peters. I could explain it, but Wikipedia has an article that can do it better. The important part is the book was published shortly before the irl collapse of the USSR, its author was an American intelligence officer known for groundbreaking insight, and the subject is the collapse of the USSR in 2020. It says a lot about how the best and brightest can get everything wrong.
The most terrifying thing about a slow collapse scenario is that you can never be completely sure about what the early signs might be, and as you watch all the various social issues and dysfunctions that seem to be building up more and more every day around us and dominating the news cycles, a small voice in the back of your head is always there, suggesting that it may already have begun. History has repeatedly taught us that civilisations inevitably fall eventually. That sooner or later all societies collapse; destroyed from without, imploding from within, or succumbing to combination of such maladies. There is no credible reason to assume that our culture is an exception, some eternal Fukuyaman 'end of history' that will stand stable for all time. The clock is ticking, and we cannot be sure how much time is left before the comforting certainties of our lives may evaporate like the morning mist. Events like the Covid pandemic remind us just how fragile the veneer of normalcy really is, and how easily the delicate clockwork of logistical chains and supply lines that we rely on to keep the lights on and food on our tables can be disrupted. We all wonder if maybe, just maybe, the next time we hear of some disaster on the news might be the time the whole unstable edifice of civilisation doesn't so much immediately come crashing down, but instead begins a slow and inexorable slide toward dissolution, or perhaps worse, is the time we first notice that such a slide is already underway.
Another excellent video with interesting points. It makes me wonder, are you familiar with the 80s/90s TTRPG Twilight 2000? Basically: WW3 happens, but no MAD (just a few "strategic" strikes). Eventually, the countries are ground down, and incapable of continuing the war. They all abandon it, and the players are left to survive in the world left over. A fascinating take IMHO.
@feralhistorian There has apparently been an "updated version", recently (haven't looked into it myself). But the old books had that serious gen X vibe.
_Twilight 2000's_ default setting is post-Fulda Gap Europe, but there were splatbooks for the Middle East and North America that I recall. Their ideas for what the T-90 and M1A2 would be were laughably silly.
Great video. The slow collapse is more likely, and I'm always at pains to get people to think about how, if they break what's here now without a plan to replace it, we have anarchy on the other side and not paradise. I'm always a little surprised that we don't all have plans for what's next, how we could make it better, as if people want change but don't want to put their reputations on the line on the off chance it comes to pass and fails. You can look at it as capitalist realism, but I think it's a copout to say we've been intellectually hacked out of our own imaginations. More likely, it's just fear and laziness. Anyone can criticize from a distance, but it takes nerve to stand FOR something instead of against it.
Efforts to make our civilization self sustainable I think is key to preventing these sorts of outcomes. The masses dependency on large institutions and industries to provide the substance to survive creates the fragile state we live in. Very difficult to do this but I believe it may be necessary as Climate Change and economic collapse due to technological innovation seem inevitable.
I wholeheartedly agree.I think that we need to take this even a few steps further .I feel we need to design and implement civic infrastructure systems , like basic power , water treatment etc not only to be self sustaining on renewable resources, but to also design those systems to be super rugged and resilient enough to last for centuries if not millennia and functionally collapse /black swan event proof. That way, if we have a civic collapse,war or a plague or even if the sun belches out a CME or an asteroid hits the other side of the planet etc we still have a way for the survivors to have a chance because the cities will still be able to process waste, have clean water and possibly have some power in some places Ideally also with hardened resilient libraries/archives so we also have the ability to reboot civilization if necessary
A big part of it is the way our industries measure "efficiency" by raw monetary cost. Labor arbitrage makes it financially more cost-effective to move manufacturing to sprawling factories in China (or wherever as a broad concept) because the workers are cheap, then ship everything around the world. Spreading industry around into smaller entities operating on a more localized basis, while not as optimized in total, would be much more resistant to shocks and probably better for both workers and consumers.
@@feralhistorian Completely true, but corporations and even governments are too short sighted to engage in that sort of global scale contingency planning. Corporations care about short to medium term profits for their shareholders, and governments care about their local economic advantage and (where applicable) their re-election chances in the next election cycle (more accurately thought of as the next time the ordinary citizenry are afforded the illusion that they have more of a say over the actions of those that govern them than they actually do, but still). Neither type of organisation is properly incentivised to take a longer headed view and expend money and resources on immensely important contingency planning for an event that will almost certainly happen in one form or another one day, but from which there is no demonstrable imminent threat to justify expenditure in the minds of the money men. The already rich getting even richer, and making sure those that grease the wheels along the way are themselves remunerated for their services in one way or another, always takes precedence, and so you get the odd focus group or committee who ruminate on such things for a few years and then deliver a report that is barely even read and whose recommendations are almost never implemented. Maybe sometimes you even get a few, usually woefully inadequate, token polices put in to place, but it is all ultimately political theatre - a fig leaf to allow the governments of the day to pretend that they are taking prudent steps and care about the long term well being of their citizens more than the demands of the corporate lobbyists the ministers/secretaries of state share golf courses/gentleman's clubs/smoked filled rooms with. And so we continue to stumble along as a civilisation and hope that we don't collectively step off a cliff before we see the threat, though quite honestly even if we do see the threat we will most likely refuse to do anything about it until the last minute if at all. It is not as though we have seen many of the promises made at the 1996 supposedly 'watershed' Kyoto climate change conference enacted just yet. Then again, I suppose it has only been 28 years...
@@craigsurette3438 Nobody is going to build civic infrastructure designed to last for centuries. Setting aside the enormous extra expense for governments that already want to spend more than they take in with officials rarely looking beyond the next election, science and technology is still progressing enough that your century-proof twenty year old waste treatment plant costs more to operate for the next decade than a modern version would for the next twenty-five... and it would treat more pollutants that we just hadn't pegged as problems twenty years ago.
Imagine being Caracas and someone tells you that union leader that just won the election is the start of a slow decline that will end with people bathing in sewer water and eating aardvarks while the government refuses to let foreign aid into the country because "there is no problem"
It's not like there weren't people who said just that, more or less. They weren't believed (assuming you believe that the election results reflected the votes cast.)
Another great video!... I thought Children of Men was pretty good, though not my favorite in the genre. I definitely need to check out Rover... looks good, thanks for mentioning it! 🤘😁🤙
I saw Payer of the Roller Boys as a kid and forgot about it, then I saw this video and watched it and remembered it. I really enjoyed it, great world building and production work despite being low budget flick! The movie just screamed 1990's, for good or Ill and it was prophetic in some ways despite being a campy, tongue in cheek cyberpunk story. Mist being Opioids from China, the Great Crash being the national debt coming to a head and the subprime mortgage crisis on steroids, and America being deindustrialized by foreign competition and resulting in mass unemployment. The whole slow collapse is not just something that could happen, in many parts of the world its already a reality. Mexican cartels, Brazilian Street gangs, and Narcos Guerrillas in Colombia operate with great impunity. We have Islamic militias/terrorist in the middle east who have carved spheres on influence over large areas of land, and in Russia we had an oligarch with his private army who tried to march on Moscow and only stopped because he lost his nerve do the enormity of the effort, not do to force of arms of the Russian state. I think America is not far behind, we have effective given up control of the border, many city governments have allowed there streets to become infested with crime, drugs and homeless people do to a lack will. The Federal government is often ineffectual and its leaders don't seem interested in real governance and are motivated by self-interests and not the public good, and they are at the beck and call of the super wealthy and the bureaucracy is increasingly in regulatory capture. Slow collapse is not fiction, it becoming more of a reality by the day, we just have not reached advance stages yet.
Jerimiah would have been an awesome series to compare this too with the opposite being true everyone over 14 ( well every died who experienced puberty). Also it sucks after finding this channel 2 months ago I'm caught up and now have to wait week to week.
I love seeing Mad Max 1 get some praise. It seems even the creator has abandoned the place the movies started, aside from doing what he can to bring its actors back for deserved big Hollywood paydays (RIP Hugh Keays-Byrne).
Roller boys in concept seems more realistic, in that while their government is collapsing smaller groups or even tribes have started to in their own way try to take care of their own people. The biggest advantage America has is that we do have individual states that a good size of the population of each state would have some faith in the more local government in order to keep continuing on.
In m headcannnon this whole genre is in the same universe. Even when they have different reasons for the "collapse" that still makes entire sense to me. As society collapses everyone is now drumming up their own reasons to believe in. Also I see Demolition Man, Brave New World, and Logan's Run, all in the same universe, showing us how some vestiges of civilization did hold on.
The apartment scene in PULP FICTION and the scene of Goose and Johnny feel very similar; I'd like to ask Tarantino if if had been an influence, perhaps even subconscious. PF is the American portion of the Slow Collapse, before John D. Plisskin becomes a war hero flying the Gullfire Missions over Leningrad.
I feel the Slow Collapse may be a realistic possibility within mine or my child's lifetime. Unchecked economic growth and consumption has already brought it to many countries in the global south, and it is creeping north slowly but surely.
youtube keeps throwing your videos my way, and the way this is happening suggests you can look at at least 200k subscribers in the near future. not sure if it's a quirk of the algorithm or what, but one of the main things i avoid (as much as possible) is having the presenters face on screen. duno, just werids me out and adds a dash of paranoia branded "parasocial relationship attempt" that being said, i haven't engaged with your arguments any, but most of them are presented in an interesting and entertaining way. keep it up, keep the message visualy central rather than your face, and you will have my sorry ass sticking around for a long time cheers!
The ending of Children of Men always makes me think of the ending to Threads. It's not going to be good for the next generation, and it's only going to get worse.
I thought Children of Men had a bitter sweet ending. Spoilers: Theo dies but after the screen cuts to black you can hear children laughing I think, it’s been a while since I’ve seen it.
All three films end with hope, of a sort. Hope of a return maybe to the old world. Soylent Green, planet of apes, and Omega Man( the great Charlton Heston fascist sci-fi trilogy) give up no revival of the lost but look ahead, with trepatation, to a future unknown. Which is the only proper way to look ahead.
In recent memory the pandemic, especially the Lock Down phase, felt like a slow collapse to me... I'm sure somewhere in the multiverse there is a version of America, or even the world where things continued to decline with no light at the end of the tunnel... I'll leave it there before the mere thought of such a bleak outcome outstrips the limits of my antidepressants!
The pandemic was nothing compared to full blown economic collapse as we've seen historically. If we really had to, people would still go to work despite the risk of infection and the higher death toll. It would be horrific, but society would easily cope.
Children of Men is relative to the current state of the world. Where both East Asia, Eastern Europe, and The West are suffering from population collapse. However the whole world is going to suffer it. Both Middle East and Latin America are showing signs of brith rate decline. Even Africa will suffer this fate yet much later. This event is going to leave a scar on the mind of humanity forever. But we are going to see a golden age never seen before. Just hope we can survive.
Africa is going to completely collapse if the rest of the world would start showing cracks no doubt. Sudan turned into a mad max esque resource extraction meatgrinder...
Yah what we’re seeing is nowhere near Children of Man. Population decline, not collapse, is happening in the developed world due to rising cost of living on top of the fact that people already tend to have less children when those children are more likely to make it to adulthood. That’s not the same thing as infertility led extinction. I tire of this bullshit dramatics, don’t you?
@@baneofbanes He said it was 'relative to the current state of the world.' And it _is._ This is the first time in history human populations are going down without some great crisis causing it, and our societies aren't engineered to deal with it. There's no doubt it will be traumatic; arguably, it already is, considering the results (and reactions) to policies that have been put in place as a result of lower fertility. I'm less sure of an ensuing golden age; it all depends on what message humanity takes from the chaos, and how much of today's wealth the survivors stand to inherit. The Black Death made the European survivors wealthy, but wealth was measured in land; less people meant more land for everybody else. But not all wealth is physical, and of that which is not all of _that_ is easily accessible.
@@baneofbanes Its why he said 'its a relative'. We're currently living a much less extreme version of The Children of Men. Obviously the birth rate isn't going to actually become zero. He never said it was the same. Media often talks about real issues by taking them, and making them ten times worse or otherwise extreme.
You may be too old to have caught this (no offense), but do you know if this film is where the term “day of the rope” was first coined? The first time I heard the term was when I was an undergrad and was exposed to 4chan. “Day of the rope” seemed to be the most commonly used young online racist term for the day of the “coming race war.” It was used in the same manner that older, more “traditional” skinheads and neo-Nazis (oldfags) used “RAHOWA.” In fact, a lot of the themes of “Rollerboys” as you’ve described them here (youth rebellion tied up in twisted patriotism, but with direct opposition to established authority) I’ve definitely seen reflected in edgy and racist online cultural spheres like /pol/ before the 2016 election. To be clear, I’m not a racist, just interested in online cultural history. I’ll definitely need to check this one out.
I think it's a deliberate reference to the Turner Diaries, written in 1978 (which I have not read) It's has been a staple of the white power movement ever since.
A lot of older Fallout fans decry the newer series entries as failures of the original narrative of the series. I've seen this framed as owing to the fact that the Bethesda run failed to really show a new world that had risen from the glowing ashes of the old. I can agree that the newer entries failed to show me what felt like a living world that had moved on, if simply for the time scale presented - maybe the Washington Monument is a lost cause, but surely someone can sweep up their own hovel's little driveway, right? Fallout 3 appealed to a younger me by wallowing in the grime-caked history of the old America, but that didn't translate as well in Fallout 4. New Vegas felt like maybe it best captured the struggle to build a new world on a political macro-level, with its factional struggle. Fallout 76 at least makes some reasonable concession to the conceit of rebuilding simply by being set much sooner after the bombs dropped. If people are still just crawling out or migrating back to the area then sure, I can believe the area is mostly still devastated, populated by cultists and raider types in addition to the attempted societal reboots. Why has nothing changed 200 years later? Why in the TV series do we see a town square filled with junk? Like many, I had little interaction with the first couple of entries in the series, and much like the Rollerboys, it feels to me like a foreign land, some place I can't get to from here; even though those first games are available, I can't see them with the eyes of someone who never knew what would come next. And maybe that's the whole explanation for Fallout - nobody thinks of the trash piles as strange, it's just the new normal. But that sounds a little... hollow to me, at least over the eventual course of centuries that we'll see. Maybe I just haven't considered how hard the collective psyche would take getting knocked on our ass like that.
Cool examination. Also, the writers really were not subtle in the rollerboys one, wow. White leader named Lee calling for the "day of the rope", talking about alien races. Could have replaced the 80's suit frat boy with literal AH cosplay at that point. Or call the guy Jim McWeigh.
Bounty Killers was about corporation and real estate agents gone mad so they have bounty killers to hunt them down. The main character is Mary Death and the villain Catherine says "Pure capitalism no taxes, no government we wont corner the market we'll own it."
The Rover!!!!!!!!! Great movie directed by David Michod who also did Animal Kingdom one of best movies ever. Animal Kingdom was made into a serial which I watched for about 2 min because it was so terrible.
![BLACK BAG - Official Trailer [HD] - Only in Theaters March 14](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Du0Xp8WX_7I/mqdefault.jpg)
The guy who says... "Yeah, I could be a real Tarzan...but my wife won't let me... Guess I'll have to wait for the apocalypse..." Or the house cat with dreams of being a snow leopard...until she accidentally spends one night in the snow... I'm 75...survived two wars and one bad marriage. I *like* comfortable beds, good plumbing, regular meals...and being able to sleep without having to "tie cans with rocks around the wire..." The rest of you can have my share of the "Decline and Fall..." YP
Comfortable, climate controlled beds and a shower whenever I want. Amen.
cool story didnt ask
“In a modern society, everything is connected.
Of course, the very connections that make it stronger, are the very ones that are it’s weakness...”
Threads.
I find the idea of a slow motion apocalypse much more likely and much more terrifying. A sudden destruction of the world provides a sort of catharsis. A slow decay just leaves you with agony and nihilism. On the positive side, slow collapses are part of human history and at least someone inherits the earth afterwards.
Slowly and then all at once.
I hate to inform you, but we're currently undergoing that. Have you not seen global society slowly capsizing under the weight of bullshit, housing and food costs going up while wages stagnate, businesses failing because nobody can afford to shop there, and everything heading for 'innovative' new technologies that are worse in every way than what they replace, all while the super-rich block out the stars and prepare to populate Mars with slaves?
The center cannot hold.
“There’s no hope for the future, just inertia carrying familiar forms forward for another day”. Nice line.
This guy’s a good writer. HRT with trees instead of gonzo.
Very true with the last thoughts about the fall of the Soviet Union. My family is from that part of the world and all of the people who were old enough to remember the collapse of the Soviet Union were shocked when it finally came. Everyone said that if you told them on New Year's Day 1991 that the USSR would dissolve before the year was over they would have thought you were either crazy or having a joke at their expense.
Interestingly, when he thought about it my father-in-law was able to retrospectively gauge the decline of the Soviet Union by the fruits available at the market in his city. He lived in a large city, a capital of a Republic so he had better access than some areas but over time the types of fruits on sale turned more and more basic. When he was a kid in the Brezhnev era in the 60's there were lots of exotic fruits for sale that were imported from other parts of the world. By the time the Soviet Union collapsed there was just what could be grown and trucked in locally.
A good example are cities like Rome and Athens. They became ruins but not because everyone died over night. It was slow, less money to hire janitors, maintence men, and masons to repair buildings. Eventually they became ghost towns because food is not grown in cities and fled to the lords who owned land where they lived on property and paid rent with a share of crops. This was the start of feudalism.
Children of Men is the bar. Good luck making anything that good again.
in The Peripheral, William Gibson refers to the slow collapse of that universe as The Jackpot. my sister and i, mulling over some latest clusterfuck in the news cycle will look at each other and one will ask, “is this the start of the jackpot?”
we all know it’s coming. if it hasn’t already started.
I was essentially writing The Rover but set in the American OH-PA-WV tristate area without knowing what it was and now I gotta rethink everything I was working on.
Appreciate the warning.
Give the Rover a look, I think you'll find you have plenty of room to tell the story you want to tell without covering the same ground.
Besides, "the Rover in Ohio" makes me want to give it a look.
Nice p f p
@@feralhistorianNo kidding. That has potential.
Well spoken and very thought-provoking as always. I also agree that these "Slow-Collapse" scenarios don't get the appreciation they're due the same as the more 'popular' "Instant Apocalypse" stories.
Thanks for sharing with us!
91st Like.
Mad Max did happen. One such event is still within living memory: see 1910s-1920s China, where the central government collapsed and was replaced with local police, governors, army officers, militias or mafias. This Warlord Era was resolved with 40 years of civil wars and various forms of foreign interventions. Leading to the rise of the PRC and 40 more years of extremely brutal and self genocidal repression, until they "mostly" eased off the repression in the 90s. It could happen again.
And now, China is looking at a likely scenario of almost halving their population by 2050. While at the same time you have a Government that has been consolidated into a cult of personality with a leader who is over 70 years old.
The dance is not over for China yet.
That wasn't even unified china, kinda like Germany... and prc opinion of someone who payed 40 seconds of attention when prc was mentioned while watching some other video.
@@robertkalinic335 can you say that again in English?
@@penzorphallos3199 I don't give two shits about your language purity standards..
@@robertkalinic335did you have a stroke writing this? Nobody cares, if you can’t express your thoughts coherently nobody can understand the hell you’re trying to say. It’s gibberish. Like a monkey yapping in a tree.
The George Romero Living Dead series is a really good example of this genre of slow apocalypse movies in which each movie shows the zombie apocalypse at different stages, from the night shit hits the fan to months after, where the only way to survive is to be in an underground bunker.
This is now my favourite channel. Good stuff.
Children of Men has been one of my favorite movies since I first saw it in the theater.
pirate of the Caribbean guy voice BEST START BELIVE IN SLOW COLLAPSE BECAUSE YOURE IN ONE
Yep
I have nothing of substance to say. Algorithmic engagement. Good shit dude.
Wow, thank you for introducing me to Prayer of the Rollerboys!
Interesting that you didn't at least touch upon 'The Road'. While it's actual collapse may have happened fairly quickly, it depicts end stage slow collapse very well. No manufacture left to replace goods, limited resources squirreled away in obscure cupboards and all life is simply one long scrounge until there's no canned food left and the last ratburger is a distant memory. Slow collapses are always grey in the end and 'The Road' was the greyest book I've ever read.
There is a lot of media to do with the anxiety/excitement surrounding the collapse of civilization. Historically, outright *collapse* is pretty rare. What is quite frequent is the *crumbling* of civilization, and it's what perhaps the majority of people have to live with in all ages - where one takes for granted that services will only be intermittently available if at all and that police/agents/functionaries will more often than not expect a bribe.
Thank you for your selection of crumble-core films, feral. Until next time!
When you read on Wikipedia, events that take centuries can sometimes seem to happen within a single lifetime. Take the collapse of the Roman Empire as an example. We didn't have a situation where the Empire was fine on Tuesday and then a crumbled mess by Friday.
Instead, the decline of the Western Roman Empire took centuries.
But on the other end, you have the Inca Empire that completely and absolutely collapsed in about a single generation. Crashing so hard that their entire system of literacy was completely lost to the world.
Isn't the "Day of the Rope" from the Turner Diaries? How did they get away with that one?
Easy way to drive the point that the Rollerboys aren't a force for good
But instead of just specific ethnic groups is everyone who's not fit to join their boostergang
It is, but the movie came out in 1990, pre-internet. Not many people outside of the rightwing nazi/militia groups knew about the book.
Also the premise: Collapse because foreigners bought up everything and tricked Americans into taking drugs? Ethnically divided gangs in competition? Having not seen the film I cannot say for sure but that sure sounds like far right propaganda.
Because most people in the 90's we're giant sensitive pussies.
“Turner” was ‘78, so, almost assuredly.
The Rover is such an unappreciated film. Wasn't too popular when it was released possibly cause it's was too accurate.
It's one of those movies that I've kept thinking about over the years. There's something about that movie that makes an impression that makes it sit with the audience for a long time, even if they don't realize it.
I’ve started that movie three times but have never been able to finish it. What am I missing?
@@samfilmkid It's hard to say. It's understated, and the performances are quite good. It certainly wasn't what I was expecting, moving much slower than I would have thought, and I can certainly see why some people bounce off it.
Yes it is excellent. Beautiful. Animal Kingdom is that directors previous film and it's even better.
More like because Pattinson is annoying as hell and nobody likes him
This is one of the most frightening videos so far. It seems like we are so close to one of the futures depicted in these films.
I'm not here to argue, just throwing out a ray of hope.
Way I see it we have several major infrastructure shifts, internet, drones, ect, which all favor rural living.
Couple that with the poor management of urban and suburban population centers, and that explains why we have rapid decay in some areas, and decent growth in others.
Also this is America. We had 28 major revolutionary movements since the founding. Political and social turmoil are the norm, not outliers. In context the 1980s, 1990s, and most of the 2000s were a period of unparalleled prosperity and social tranquility.
What I'm trying to say is, this may not be the end. In fact, it almost certainly isn't. We're just doing old things in new ways, and returning to historic norms of violence. Most of which could be eased by legalizing dueling(sorry if that seems off topic, kinda of pet project of mine).
TL:DR This could be the end, this could be just another decade. Either way, good luck.
I don’t always agree with your takes but I have to say I think you’re spot on here.
Instant collapses of civilizations is rare. It’s usually a slow decline followed by either being a shadow of past glories or being conquered by your rising neighbors.
I find both slow and fast collapse scenarios to be interesting, but I also am a big fan of stories about how a society can be put back together post collapse. In a world of roving gangs, collapsed trade, and severe hardship, how does a society begin to reform? The challenge of trying to get a large enough group of people to follow you or your ideals without just starving or being killed. Where is the transition point from a gang with some loose ideals to "The Law" and does that transition point even exist practically?
David Drake has a lot of those stories. Except they're often just to try and start rebuilding. EG the Raj Whitehall series, and The Reaches.
"The Law" has appeared when even the folks in power believe in the need to bow to the law.
It's still fuzzy, however, because there's times and places where merely mouthing platitudes to "The Law," no matter how obviously false, seem to be sufficient. Where the line between 'powerful people do bad but get punished' and 'powerful people do bad and do not get punished' can be fuzzy, because sometimes the bad was a lie, sometimes the punishments are meaningless, and sometimes people earnestly pursuing justice make mistakes.
Never heard of "Prayer of the Rollerboys" certainly going to look that up! Fantastic closing imagery of Grozny!
Benedict Anderson was correct, yet again. Thanks for this--you're making the kind of content the internet actually needs.
I laughed at the dad advise line while doing inventory of our MRE stockpile
It’s not the main event of the story but Seveneves depicts a world where we suddenly find out that in 2 years everything on the surface of earth will be destroyed. It’s current day so everyone knows that even with our planets full industrial capacity, at most a few thousand people can make it into space and hope to survive in the swarm of capsules and hasty upgrades to the ISS.
(Kinda spoilers)
Twords the end countries get pissy about who gets into space, there’s the last battle on earth in the final two days, America nukes a mostly civilian fleet threatening a launch site and no one cares, there wasn’t time.
There’s a scene when a character decides to follow parking laws, just so he doesn’t contribute to the collapse. Meanwhile the government is dropping containers of artwork into the ocean for whoever returns 2,000 years later.
Wait is that from the movie he's talking about or something else?
Great post, lots of thought provoking concepts. All excellent and intelligent films.
A long time fan of the original Mad Max, I'm always quick to point out that 0:04 was filmed just behind my house here in Melbourne. Suburbia is well and truly consuming the area surrounding that scene. Perhaps it's another slow apocalypse?
I just discovered your channel, and have subscribed.
I'm a housewife/writer from Manitoba, Canada.
I've been thinking on this lately, so your video was very interesting to appear in my feed.
Wishing you wellness, and safety.
Welcome, and I hope you continue to find it interesting. Always good to hear from other writers.
Nice to see someone else recall 'Prayer of the Rollerboys'. I liked the movie at time time. It had competent bad guys, I like competence.
I had completely forgotten that the Rollerboys were 'racist' (unlike the stunning and diverse Bloods and Crips?), I was more concerned with the drug running than their badthink.
Good stuff, thanks man.
dont give the roller boy plan as being a bit short sighted. the war world german boys started with an economic collapse after having to pay the west high prices for losing the war. the main differences one group had a more national level of control while the roller was more of a micro level. Of course the world war 2 version die faster then it was created once the fighting started and became a warning to all power authorities' governments at what happen when you overreach.
someone up thread mention china that felled into civil wars and where plump for picking by japan only for the culture revolution to take over once ww2 ended. Decades of fighting with untold death.
I always thought that Logan's run was the far future of a slow collapse, nothing outside seemed nuked, it's just all faded away.
Like eventually the fish stopped arriving to be frozen.
I look forward to all of your videos.
Good video with some really nice points. Prayer of the Rollerboys reminds me of the 1990s British movie, Shopping.
$hopping is one I really enjoyed. I’ve always heard it described as a lesser A Clockwork Orange of the 1990s. I think there’s a bit more to it and it always struck a chord with me.
Re the Soviet comparison: if you’re really bored read War in 2020 by Ralph Peters. I could explain it, but Wikipedia has an article that can do it better. The important part is the book was published shortly before the irl collapse of the USSR, its author was an American intelligence officer known for groundbreaking insight, and the subject is the collapse of the USSR in 2020. It says a lot about how the best and brightest can get everything wrong.
That sounds like something I need to read as soon as possible.
@@feralhistorian you’ll find it interesting as a case study.
Prayer of the Rollerboys was so terribly awesome.
@08:04 Day of the Rope? Is that a Turner Diaries reference?
I'm 90% sure it's a deliberate reference, but so far haven't found confirmation.
The most terrifying thing about a slow collapse scenario is that you can never be completely sure about what the early signs might be, and as you watch all the various social issues and dysfunctions that seem to be building up more and more every day around us and dominating the news cycles, a small voice in the back of your head is always there, suggesting that it may already have begun.
History has repeatedly taught us that civilisations inevitably fall eventually. That sooner or later all societies collapse; destroyed from without, imploding from within, or succumbing to combination of such maladies. There is no credible reason to assume that our culture is an exception, some eternal Fukuyaman 'end of history' that will stand stable for all time. The clock is ticking, and we cannot be sure how much time is left before the comforting certainties of our lives may evaporate like the morning mist. Events like the Covid pandemic remind us just how fragile the veneer of normalcy really is, and how easily the delicate clockwork of logistical chains and supply lines that we rely on to keep the lights on and food on our tables can be disrupted. We all wonder if maybe, just maybe, the next time we hear of some disaster on the news might be the time the whole unstable edifice of civilisation doesn't so much immediately come crashing down, but instead begins a slow and inexorable slide toward dissolution, or perhaps worse, is the time we first notice that such a slide is already underway.
Thank you for taking the time to talk about the UK.
Fantastic video, esp. the conclusions at the end.
Another excellent video with interesting points. It makes me wonder, are you familiar with the 80s/90s TTRPG Twilight 2000? Basically: WW3 happens, but no MAD (just a few "strategic" strikes). Eventually, the countries are ground down, and incapable of continuing the war. They all abandon it, and the players are left to survive in the world left over. A fascinating take IMHO.
I'm not familiar with it, but it sounds like something I should look into.
@feralhistorian There has apparently been an "updated version", recently (haven't looked into it myself). But the old books had that serious gen X vibe.
_Twilight 2000's_ default setting is post-Fulda Gap Europe, but there were splatbooks for the Middle East and North America that I recall.
Their ideas for what the T-90 and M1A2 would be were laughably silly.
Great video. The slow collapse is more likely, and I'm always at pains to get people to think about how, if they break what's here now without a plan to replace it, we have anarchy on the other side and not paradise. I'm always a little surprised that we don't all have plans for what's next, how we could make it better, as if people want change but don't want to put their reputations on the line on the off chance it comes to pass and fails.
You can look at it as capitalist realism, but I think it's a copout to say we've been intellectually hacked out of our own imaginations. More likely, it's just fear and laziness. Anyone can criticize from a distance, but it takes nerve to stand FOR something instead of against it.
"But [their racism] is subdued"
"DAY OF THE ROPE! DAY OF THE ROPE! DAY OF THE ROPE!"
Subdued in the sense of being one facet of their identity and worldview, rather than the singular defining element.
Roller boys was a great movie...the contaminated drugs was an awesome plot device
Excellent video as always. I wonder why the slow-decline/semi-apocalypse scenario is as untapped as it is. A lot of potential there
Efforts to make our civilization self sustainable I think is key to preventing these sorts of outcomes. The masses dependency on large institutions and industries to provide the substance to survive creates the fragile state we live in. Very difficult to do this but I believe it may be necessary as Climate Change and economic collapse due to technological innovation seem inevitable.
I wholeheartedly agree.I think that we need to take this even a few steps further .I feel we need to design and implement civic infrastructure systems , like basic power , water treatment etc not only to be self sustaining on renewable resources, but to also design those systems to be super rugged and resilient enough to last for centuries if not millennia and functionally collapse /black swan event proof.
That way, if we have a civic collapse,war or a plague or even if the sun belches out a CME or an asteroid hits the other side of the planet etc we still have a way for the survivors to have a chance because the cities will still be able to process waste, have clean water and possibly have some power in some places
Ideally also with hardened resilient libraries/archives so we also have the ability to reboot civilization if necessary
A big part of it is the way our industries measure "efficiency" by raw monetary cost. Labor arbitrage makes it financially more cost-effective to move manufacturing to sprawling factories in China (or wherever as a broad concept) because the workers are cheap, then ship everything around the world. Spreading industry around into smaller entities operating on a more localized basis, while not as optimized in total, would be much more resistant to shocks and probably better for both workers and consumers.
@@feralhistorian Completely true, but corporations and even governments are too short sighted to engage in that sort of global scale contingency planning. Corporations care about short to medium term profits for their shareholders, and governments care about their local economic advantage and (where applicable) their re-election chances in the next election cycle (more accurately thought of as the next time the ordinary citizenry are afforded the illusion that they have more of a say over the actions of those that govern them than they actually do, but still). Neither type of organisation is properly incentivised to take a longer headed view and expend money and resources on immensely important contingency planning for an event that will almost certainly happen in one form or another one day, but from which there is no demonstrable imminent threat to justify expenditure in the minds of the money men.
The already rich getting even richer, and making sure those that grease the wheels along the way are themselves remunerated for their services in one way or another, always takes precedence, and so you get the odd focus group or committee who ruminate on such things for a few years and then deliver a report that is barely even read and whose recommendations are almost never implemented. Maybe sometimes you even get a few, usually woefully inadequate, token polices put in to place, but it is all ultimately political theatre - a fig leaf to allow the governments of the day to pretend that they are taking prudent steps and care about the long term well being of their citizens more than the demands of the corporate lobbyists the ministers/secretaries of state share golf courses/gentleman's clubs/smoked filled rooms with. And so we continue to stumble along as a civilisation and hope that we don't collectively step off a cliff before we see the threat, though quite honestly even if we do see the threat we will most likely refuse to do anything about it until the last minute if at all. It is not as though we have seen many of the promises made at the 1996 supposedly 'watershed' Kyoto climate change conference enacted just yet. Then again, I suppose it has only been 28 years...
@@craigsurette3438 Nobody is going to build civic infrastructure designed to last for centuries. Setting aside the enormous extra expense for governments that already want to spend more than they take in with officials rarely looking beyond the next election, science and technology is still progressing enough that your century-proof twenty year old waste treatment plant costs more to operate for the next decade than a modern version would for the next twenty-five... and it would treat more pollutants that we just hadn't pegged as problems twenty years ago.
Imagine being Caracas and someone tells you that union leader that just won the election is the start of a slow decline that will end with people bathing in sewer water and eating aardvarks while the government refuses to let foreign aid into the country because "there is no problem"
It's not like there weren't people who said just that, more or less. They weren't believed (assuming you believe that the election results reflected the votes cast.)
Another great video!... I thought Children of Men was pretty good, though not my favorite in the genre. I definitely need to check out Rover... looks good, thanks for mentioning it! 🤘😁🤙
I saw Payer of the Roller Boys as a kid and forgot about it, then I saw this video and watched it and remembered it. I really enjoyed it, great world building and production work despite being low budget flick! The movie just screamed 1990's, for good or Ill and it was prophetic in some ways despite being a campy, tongue in cheek cyberpunk story. Mist being Opioids from China, the Great Crash being the national debt coming to a head and the subprime mortgage crisis on steroids, and America being deindustrialized by foreign competition and resulting in mass unemployment. The whole slow collapse is not just something that could happen, in many parts of the world its already a reality. Mexican cartels, Brazilian Street gangs, and Narcos Guerrillas in Colombia operate with great impunity. We have Islamic militias/terrorist in the middle east who have carved spheres on influence over large areas of land, and in Russia we had an oligarch with his private army who tried to march on Moscow and only stopped because he lost his nerve do the enormity of the effort, not do to force of arms of the Russian state. I think America is not far behind, we have effective given up control of the border, many city governments have allowed there streets to become infested with crime, drugs and homeless people do to a lack will. The Federal government is often ineffectual and its leaders don't seem interested in real governance and are motivated by self-interests and not the public good, and they are at the beck and call of the super wealthy and the bureaucracy is increasingly in regulatory capture. Slow collapse is not fiction, it becoming more of a reality by the day, we just have not reached advance stages yet.
There’s also a movie from around this time called Solarbabies, I think about some kids using rollerblades in a team sport.
Excellent essay, dudemeister.
Thanks... ☝️😎
Jerimiah would have been an awesome series to compare this too with the opposite being true everyone over 14 ( well every died who experienced puberty). Also it sucks after finding this channel 2 months ago I'm caught up and now have to wait week to week.
I'd forgotten about Jeremiah.
"Prayer of the Rollerboys" is available in full on RUclips.
This makes me think of modern day America and its piles of rotting trash and homeless camps in L.A.
epic closing sentence!
Solarbabies is another movie that comes to mind that is similar but with a fantasy twist.
I love seeing Mad Max 1 get some praise. It seems even the creator has abandoned the place the movies started, aside from doing what he can to bring its actors back for deserved big Hollywood paydays (RIP Hugh Keays-Byrne).
I saw Rollerboys. I never knew it was that deep.
12:00 Freud wrote on this in Future of an Illusion, particularly in the early chapters. Well worth a read.
Roller boys in concept seems more realistic, in that while their government is collapsing smaller groups or even tribes have started to in their own way try to take care of their own people. The biggest advantage America has is that we do have individual states that a good size of the population of each state would have some faith in the more local government in order to keep continuing on.
9 missed meals from chaos
In m headcannnon this whole genre is in the same universe. Even when they have different reasons for the "collapse" that still makes entire sense to me. As society collapses everyone is now drumming up their own reasons to believe in. Also I see Demolition Man, Brave New World, and Logan's Run, all in the same universe, showing us how some vestiges of civilization did hold on.
The apartment scene in PULP FICTION and the scene of Goose and Johnny feel very similar; I'd like to ask Tarantino if if had been an influence, perhaps even subconscious. PF is the American portion of the Slow Collapse, before John D. Plisskin becomes a war hero flying the Gullfire Missions over Leningrad.
Isn't 'day of the rope' from the Turner Diaries?
Could the original Deus Ex be considered a "slow collapse" scenario in your opinion?
Good pick.
Another Slow Collapse that's interesting is William Gibson's The Peripheral. I'd like to see your opinion about it.
I feel the Slow Collapse may be a realistic possibility within mine or my child's lifetime. Unchecked economic growth and consumption has already brought it to many countries in the global south, and it is creeping north slowly but surely.
It would be really cool if you could talk about the William Friedkin film, Sorcerer.
I'd completely forgotten about that movie. But now I have the start of an idea involving it . . .
@@feralhistorian Hell yeah brother
Sometimes the RUclips algorithm surprises you. Great video.
wow i watch a lot of movies but never heard of the rover or rollerboys, nice
Love your channel! Have you ever thought about doing the Handmaiden's Tale?
It's on my reading list, so I'll probably get to it eventually.
Best start believin in collapses… YOU’RE IN ONE
youtube keeps throwing your videos my way, and the way this is happening suggests you can look at at least 200k subscribers in the near future.
not sure if it's a quirk of the algorithm or what, but one of the main things i avoid (as much as possible) is having the presenters face on screen.
duno, just werids me out and adds a dash of paranoia branded "parasocial relationship attempt"
that being said, i haven't engaged with your arguments any, but most of them are presented in an interesting and entertaining way. keep it up, keep the message visualy central rather than your face, and you will have my sorry ass sticking around for a long time
cheers!
You definitely need to discover the work of Richard K. Morgan, and do a video on the Takeshi Kovaks novels. They'd be right up your street.
That Rollerboy movie sounds wild😅
Prayer of the Rollerboys is a bit more of a cyberpunk movie than an apocalypse story.
"...base model H-sap operating system." Perfect.
I liked Dead End Drive In myself. That movie never got enough love or attention.
The ending of Children of Men always makes me think of the ending to Threads.
It's not going to be good for the next generation, and it's only going to get worse.
I thought Children of Men had a bitter sweet ending.
Spoilers:
Theo dies but after the screen cuts to black you can hear children laughing I think, it’s been a while since I’ve seen it.
Your backdrop almost looks like Oregon.
All three films end with hope, of a sort. Hope of a return maybe to the old world. Soylent Green, planet of apes, and Omega Man( the great Charlton Heston fascist sci-fi trilogy) give up no revival of the lost but look ahead, with trepatation, to a future unknown. Which is the only proper way to look ahead.
children of men is an excellent movie
To be fair thats the kind of advice my dad gave me lol
In recent memory the pandemic, especially the Lock Down phase, felt like a slow collapse to me... I'm sure somewhere in the multiverse there is a version of America, or even the world where things continued to decline with no light at the end of the tunnel... I'll leave it there before the mere thought of such a bleak outcome outstrips the limits of my antidepressants!
The pandemic was nothing compared to full blown economic collapse as we've seen historically.
If we really had to, people would still go to work despite the risk of infection and the higher death toll. It would be horrific, but society would easily cope.
I remember reading that book in the 90s. The idea of Britain being the last country standing seemed a lot less far-fetched then.
Children of Men is relative to the current state of the world. Where both East Asia, Eastern Europe, and The West are suffering from population collapse. However the whole world is going to suffer it. Both Middle East and Latin America are showing signs of brith rate decline. Even Africa will suffer this fate yet much later. This event is going to leave a scar on the mind of humanity forever. But we are going to see a golden age never seen before. Just hope we can survive.
Africa is going to completely collapse if the rest of the world would start showing cracks no doubt. Sudan turned into a mad max esque resource extraction meatgrinder...
Yah what we’re seeing is nowhere near Children of Man. Population decline, not collapse, is happening in the developed world due to rising cost of living on top of the fact that people already tend to have less children when those children are more likely to make it to adulthood.
That’s not the same thing as infertility led extinction. I tire of this bullshit dramatics, don’t you?
Well forget this like we forgot everything else.
@@baneofbanes He said it was 'relative to the current state of the world.' And it _is._ This is the first time in history human populations are going down without some great crisis causing it, and our societies aren't engineered to deal with it. There's no doubt it will be traumatic; arguably, it already is, considering the results (and reactions) to policies that have been put in place as a result of lower fertility.
I'm less sure of an ensuing golden age; it all depends on what message humanity takes from the chaos, and how much of today's wealth the survivors stand to inherit. The Black Death made the European survivors wealthy, but wealth was measured in land; less people meant more land for everybody else. But not all wealth is physical, and of that which is not all of _that_ is easily accessible.
@@baneofbanes Its why he said 'its a relative'. We're currently living a much less extreme version of The Children of Men. Obviously the birth rate isn't going to actually become zero. He never said it was the same. Media often talks about real issues by taking them, and making them ten times worse or otherwise extreme.
You may be too old to have caught this (no offense), but do you know if this film is where the term “day of the rope” was first coined?
The first time I heard the term was when I was an undergrad and was exposed to 4chan. “Day of the rope” seemed to be the most commonly used young online racist term for the day of the “coming race war.” It was used in the same manner that older, more “traditional” skinheads and neo-Nazis (oldfags) used “RAHOWA.”
In fact, a lot of the themes of “Rollerboys” as you’ve described them here (youth rebellion tied up in twisted patriotism, but with direct opposition to established authority) I’ve definitely seen reflected in edgy and racist online cultural spheres like /pol/ before the 2016 election.
To be clear, I’m not a racist, just interested in online cultural history. I’ll definitely need to check this one out.
I think it's a deliberate reference to the Turner Diaries, written in 1978 (which I have not read) It's has been a staple of the white power movement ever since.
@@feralhistorianYou know, as soon as I read your reply, I remembered this. Thanks!
A lot of older Fallout fans decry the newer series entries as failures of the original narrative of the series. I've seen this framed as owing to the fact that the Bethesda run failed to really show a new world that had risen from the glowing ashes of the old. I can agree that the newer entries failed to show me what felt like a living world that had moved on, if simply for the time scale presented - maybe the Washington Monument is a lost cause, but surely someone can sweep up their own hovel's little driveway, right?
Fallout 3 appealed to a younger me by wallowing in the grime-caked history of the old America, but that didn't translate as well in Fallout 4. New Vegas felt like maybe it best captured the struggle to build a new world on a political macro-level, with its factional struggle. Fallout 76 at least makes some reasonable concession to the conceit of rebuilding simply by being set much sooner after the bombs dropped. If people are still just crawling out or migrating back to the area then sure, I can believe the area is mostly still devastated, populated by cultists and raider types in addition to the attempted societal reboots. Why has nothing changed 200 years later? Why in the TV series do we see a town square filled with junk?
Like many, I had little interaction with the first couple of entries in the series, and much like the Rollerboys, it feels to me like a foreign land, some place I can't get to from here; even though those first games are available, I can't see them with the eyes of someone who never knew what would come next. And maybe that's the whole explanation for Fallout - nobody thinks of the trash piles as strange, it's just the new normal. But that sounds a little... hollow to me, at least over the eventual course of centuries that we'll see. Maybe I just haven't considered how hard the collective psyche would take getting knocked on our ass like that.
Cool examination. Also, the writers really were not subtle in the rollerboys one, wow. White leader named Lee calling for the "day of the rope", talking about alien races. Could have replaced the 80's suit frat boy with literal AH cosplay at that point. Or call the guy Jim McWeigh.
No nuclear war in Mad Max? Did they retcon that out?
They retconned it in with Thunderdome. I've got a video on that coming in a few weeks in fact.
lord of the flies is in a way world falling apart.
Bounty Killers was about corporation and real estate agents gone mad so they have bounty killers to hunt them down. The main character is Mary Death and the villain Catherine says "Pure capitalism no taxes, no government we wont corner the market we'll own it."
Not so far away now.
Children Of Men an excellent film!!
Children of Men is so good!
Shalom brother.
The Rover!!!!!!!!! Great movie directed by David Michod who also did Animal Kingdom one of best movies ever. Animal Kingdom was made into a serial which I watched for about 2 min because it was so terrible.
I think im the only person who didn't think children of men was so great.
It certainly has its flaws.
You seem like a man who truly savors the subtle nuances of his own farts.
yo is that lucifer from super natural?