I am assuming a mess as supply chains break, communications systems are compromised, and we all are of us are scrambling. (as I write this morning I hear the voices of grade-school kids loudly and delightedly yelling at each other as they organize into carpools) Like musical chairs, where is the safest place to land? The safest will be a place without life and that cannot sustain life. So we will not seek such places but we will seek places where it looks like food without violence is possible.
As such places fill, the issue of how to organize into plausible viability will preoccupy everyone. Who gets what, who leads, who builds, and how to handle newcomers? I imagine we are talking about a patchwork of survivable spaces, surrounded by burnt-out, drought-stricken, or flood-stricken spaces that are paths connecting the more successful struggles for survival.
It would be very useful to put time into thinking about the social relationships that are emerging, whereas most effort will be going into meeting the material needs of food, sanitation, rest, and security. Out of the search, in tidepools of suffering and struggle might come waves of compassion. more like the emergence of Christianity from the decaying Roman empire or Confucianism in the Waring States period than like picking a team captain at summer camp.
I find it amazing how therapeutic to write such stuff. No sentence here would have ever come to be if I hadn’t written the previous. I highly recommend Huizingha's book Homo Ludens (Man the Player) and Piaget's Play Dreams and Imitation in Childhood. Piaget says that knowledge requires play, treating a this as a that.
So please add comments here as we turn this into a conversation.