OK, I’m going to try this again. I just don’t get everything in the town going to “rack and ruin”. The big employer left and so they are back to feudal days? Why does it compute that only the big industrialists can make everything rosy? People lost jobs during the depression, but they were still able to live lives without turning feudal. In the old west people took care of themselves without turning slovenly and letting their children become wild. Even now, with all the similarities, people are pushing back, making plans for when things will go badly. They aren’t just sitting around waiting for the next thing to happen to them. Well, at least, not all of us. Am I just tilting at windmills here? Is there no one but big industrialists that can make things happen? I know that isn’t her story here, but in discussing what it will be like when Atlas shrugs it should be considered.
Even the first images are disturbing. The road had been partially dismantled, possibly sold.
We appear to be in an early phase of the whole Mad Max thing. The feudal lord has not yet established himself, but the town has folded up and died. In his contribution for this week, Billthedrill posted a link to a Russian town that died much the way Starnesvlle did.
There are former industrial towns in Pennsylvania that died. People moved away, and those who remained ended up delivering pizzas instead of working at the local steel mill.
Your comment about the Depression is on the mark. Society in that era was more cohesive, and people looked out for each other. The image of Starnesville is one of people who have been so deadened by calamity that they are incapable of responding.
Have you been to the welfare office of a fairly large city? Or to a Food Maxx on food stamp day? I see the MM effect happening in mid to large size cities. Heck, you can see it now in large urban areas. It's happening now in Mexico with the drug cartels.
When you lose a large employer in a small town, you lose not only those jobs, but the surrounding economy suffers as well. In times past, people moved on, found a new ventures, took risks, did what they could to get by. Now we have an entitlement mentality. So when jobs are lost, they are frozen with indecision, unable to shift gears, and call to the government to rescue them. Katrina is a prime example of when a populace expects government to provide all of the means. So if the whole shebang collapses, I can see this happening.
That part of the book didn't strike me that way. Remember the old axiom: whatever you reward, you get more of. These people are surrounded by a society where ambition is vilified, and increasingly, tangibly punished. Where apathy, mediocrity, and sloth somehow elevate those who display them in the eyes of others. A nation that is like that to an even greater degree than the United States of 2009. If we lived in that nation a lot of us might end up the same way.
They have made a movie about it.
They essentially went to the forest and made a mini city.
They had shoemakers, and builders and other skilled labor.
It worked because the people had skills.
If you took 200 random people today and stuck them in the forest only a handful would survive without electricity.
Most people are useless when it comes to survival without modern conveniences...We are so removed from food sources..
Give me a guy that hunts and a guy that knows how to saw and hammer over a stock broker or an insurance guy or a car salesman.
A good portion of folks let their kids run wild now and it's not in collapse...It's because of relativism..
God forbid you tell a kid no, or you can't have it or even worse...earn it.