Doug Anderson: Post-Apocalyptic Studies — The Aftermath, Precis

Anthropologists concluded that in the period after they lost their electronics, they were forced to talk to one another and to spend long periods with nothing to amuse them except the natural world, and nothing to engage them but their own survival which had been sorely threatened by the collapse. They had been addicts of electronic culture for so long that the absence of the great stimuli proved fatal for many.

Many became violent or mentally ill and either killed one another or perished by their own hand so painful was this confrontation with self and other. The elite classes, who had been able to keep their electronics going via gasoline powered generators were so besotted with their own manufactured reality that they failed to see that the people would come for them, and their private security companies were easily overwhelmed by the vastly superior numbers of the desperate and starving.

It took the better part of a century for the pockets of survivors to reestablish tribal consistencies, and to finally reach out to one another for help. During this time, without electronics, they were forced to fall back on music, painting, story-telling and poetry to sustain them spiritually — arts that did not require technology. They were forced to find their medicines in plants and healing herbs. Native peoples who had long been marginalized or suppressed appeared from the outlying areas to help them because their own knowledge of such things was vastly superior. They strove to find land that had not been poisoned to grow their food, and they learned to shepherd the animals that had been lost and scattered in the great confusion.

—

copyright 2015 Doug Anderson