LJ_Reloaded
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- Joined
- Apr 3, 2010
- Posts
- 21,217
It's nice to know other folks out there besides me and my neighbors understand this basic stuff.
http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=18636
We’re assuming I’m the leader, so the first thing we do is we stamp out any notion of this hardcore survivalist “cull the weak” from the Crawford-thinkers out there. Yeah, maybe if we kill off a couple of the weaker members we might improve the odds of survival of the rest of us. Too bad. I’m not interested in running a society built around human sacrifice, and in the end that mentality would do more harm than good.
See, the only thing that makes one of us different from a pre-history hunter-gatherer is the knowledge between our ears. It took us many millennia to crawl out of that savagery, and we’re never more than a generation away from losing it. If one generation is incompetent enough to fail to pass things along, then we get to start over and hope it doesn’t take thousands of years to climb back.
Which is the really damning thing about Crawford in The Walking Dead, or indeed about any post apocalypse inhabitant who wants to kill human beings for short-term gain. If our knowledge is endangered, then we have a moral imperative to preserve as much as possible. That “cancer survivor” you think is so useless? She’s the only one who knows anything about sewing and she did some canning with her grandmother when she was little. The guy with the really bad eyesight? He’s one of the last piano players in the world, and he knows how to start a fire without modern tools. The old dude with the limp who’s deaf in one ear? He worked on septic tanks when he was 19 and still remembers some of the theory behind them. You need these people, and the knowledge they possess will save countless lives in the future. Not everything can be gleaned from libraries, and learning is time consuming even if the books are available.
http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=18636
We’re assuming I’m the leader, so the first thing we do is we stamp out any notion of this hardcore survivalist “cull the weak” from the Crawford-thinkers out there. Yeah, maybe if we kill off a couple of the weaker members we might improve the odds of survival of the rest of us. Too bad. I’m not interested in running a society built around human sacrifice, and in the end that mentality would do more harm than good.
See, the only thing that makes one of us different from a pre-history hunter-gatherer is the knowledge between our ears. It took us many millennia to crawl out of that savagery, and we’re never more than a generation away from losing it. If one generation is incompetent enough to fail to pass things along, then we get to start over and hope it doesn’t take thousands of years to climb back.
Which is the really damning thing about Crawford in The Walking Dead, or indeed about any post apocalypse inhabitant who wants to kill human beings for short-term gain. If our knowledge is endangered, then we have a moral imperative to preserve as much as possible. That “cancer survivor” you think is so useless? She’s the only one who knows anything about sewing and she did some canning with her grandmother when she was little. The guy with the really bad eyesight? He’s one of the last piano players in the world, and he knows how to start a fire without modern tools. The old dude with the limp who’s deaf in one ear? He worked on septic tanks when he was 19 and still remembers some of the theory behind them. You need these people, and the knowledge they possess will save countless lives in the future. Not everything can be gleaned from libraries, and learning is time consuming even if the books are available.
