As I listen to the news of London 3 days into the riots I find it hard to believe that this is happening. When I see pictures of a building burning I expect to see firetrucks. I expect to see the safety net of modern society.
I also feel like I am watching every apocalyptic movie I have ever seen unfold before my eyes. A week ago I heard reports that London was ahead of schedule with its Olympic buildings and under budget.
Now this.
Fire fighters and riot police survey the area as fire rages through a building in Tottenham, north London on Aug. 7, 2011. A demonstration against the death of a local man turned violent and cars and shops were set ablaze. (Lewis Whyld/PA/AP)
Here’s the link to the Guardian UK. It updates every few minutes.
I don’t know how many people have read Jared Diamond’s Collapse. In it he examines how different societies came to collapse. Why didn’t the Easter Islanders notice that they’d chopped down every tree, which left them with no way to build boats to go fishing? What happened to the Vikings who settled Green Land? The list goes on. It wasn’t one thing that drove these societies over the brink into collapse, it was a number of things all contributing to their breakdown. But the thing which is a common thread in all is that the ruling people, whether it was government or a loose affiliation of leaders, failed to foresee the problem and act to prevent it.
Why don’t people see what is coming? It is easy for us to look back with hindsight.
Back in 2009 I came across this post on Cluborlov – Social Collapse Best Practices. He talks about what he observed happening in the USSR and what a society could aim for when faced with collapse.
‘ Forget “growth,” forget “jobs,” forget “financial stability.” What should their realistic new objectives be? Well, here they are: food, shelter, transportation, and security. Their task is to find a way to provide all of these necessities on an emergency basis, in absence of a functioning economy, with commerce at a standstill, with little or no access to imports, and to make them available to a population that is largely penniless. If successful, society will remain largely intact, and will be able to begin a slow and painful process of cultural transition, and eventually develop a new economy, a gradually de-industrializing economy, at a much lower level of resource expenditure, characterized by a quite a lot of austerity and even poverty, but in conditions that are safe, decent, and dignified. If unsuccessful, society will be gradually destroyed in a series of convulsions that will leave a defunct nation composed of many wretched little fiefdoms.’
The full post can be read here.
As someone who has read a lot of history, read about societies under pressure, about how people behave when society breaks down I find the UK riots both impossible to believe and also, sadly, not very surprising.
As readers of SF we are all familiar with apocalypses in their different forms. But would we recognise it if we were living during the early stages of one?
Canned baked beans anyone?
I’m being frivolous. I guess this blog post is my attempt to come to terms with rioting in a nation that I thought of as one of the most civilised.
Is anyone else reeling with shock?
Mad Genius Club 
14 responses to “London’s Burning …”
I’m not at all surprised. The signs that something like this would erupt have been there for a long time. The only thing that was ever in doubt was when it would erupt.
There’ll be more. We’re partway through a societal earthquake world-wide. People who can’t handle the changes or who have never had any need to learn personal responsibility and self-control will lash out at the nearest target.
It’s plotting gold, but probably won’t show up for a good long time – not until it’s all a bit less raw.
Yes, Kate. The more I think about it the more I can see where it came from. I just thought it would be gotten under control a lot quicker than it has.
I’ve started typing and deleted it all at least a half-dozen times now. I find that I simply can’t comment on this topic without grabbing the line between posting and politics and using it for a jump-rope … Short answer is, I’m with Kate. There’s a lot more where this came from. This is a totally-foreseeable outcome from conscious decisions society has been making my whole life, and this train has barely left the station. There’s likely to be a *whole* lot more to this journey before we get near anything that any of us will recognize as “sanity” again.
Stephen, I konw what you mean. I almost didn’t do this post, but I thought as writers of SF it felt like something we’d been reading about all our lives.
It could — and does regularly — occur in any large city. We can only hope it doesn’t go nationwide or worldwide. I’m not sure we can really do much more than hope. How do you get from where we are to a soft landing?
Legalize drugs and take the money away from gangs, not to mention foreign militias?
Try to send all the illegals home? Maybe a bunch of the legal immigrants as well? “Sorry, your type isn’t welcome here” is a complete failure of what America is. Of what most European countries are trying to be. And it would probably spark all the riots and revolution we’re trying to prevent.
I often wonder what a transition to something like John Ringo’s _There Will Be Dragons_ starting economy would look like. What do you do when automation takes almost all the jobs? How does it work when there literally is no chance that a huge segment of society will never have a “real” job? Tax the automated factories and put increasingly large numbers of people on the dole? Yikes!
Pam, I have a series of short stories set in the near future when the Social Engineers run Australia. In these stories most people never have a job because there are no jobs for them. They get just enough to live on and basic medical care from the Gov.
Only those people who can contribute to society have real work and it is something to be respected, scientists, doctors, teachers, and creatives like artists, writers and musicians.
I’ve an idea, which will no doubt end up in a story some time, that the government would give everyone a minimal stipend. But the government would control (or give tax breaks to co-operating companies) video gaming for real money prizes, earning a small prize for answering questionnaires, and the lottery. Making sure everyone who put out any effort at all could win a small suppliment. There might be paid pickup work doing remote monitoring of robotic equipment. Pay or “social credits” or whatever for litter pickup, volunteering at schools or hospitals . . . Lots of not-quite-make-work that enabled people to earn or feel that they had expended effort for the extra money, for the beneficial psychological effect, however weighted in their favor.
I got a chill when a politician recently suggested a retail sales tax, with everyone getting a government “rebate” to cover basic housing and food costs. I’d prefer to write about the basic stipend payments, not receive one!
Exactly. In my stories I have the people who don’t have paid work, doing things like creating their own crafts and bartiering them for favours from others so there is a whole sub-ecomony.
I do think we are on the cups of the change in the world. It seems we may have grown up in a golden age, despite the fear of nuclear war.
Hmm. The more we move forward the more we resemble the past…
Bread and circuses? I think the parallels are there to see, and sadly so are consequences. They are not palatable, so we’re trying to pretend they don’t exist
Bread and circuses while Rome is burning. If you’ll forgive the mixing of metaphors.
The riots were a bit of a shock. London is not the first place that comes to mind when one thinks of violent riots. It’s not something totally unexpected though. These are after all less than pleasant times, fertile ground for all sorts of nasty things.
On the bright side, a period like this doesn’t necessarily lead to the end of times, or the collapse of civilization. Some good can come out of messy and violent troubled times. It has more than a few times in the past. Modern democracy is the result, and has been shaped, by quite a few of those ugly periods.
So, fingers crossed and lets hope for the best. :0)
Regards,
Rui Jorge
A positive note, Rui. I certainly hope that we as a society can learn from this and evolve.
Bread and circuses is a phrase from the end of the 1st century or the beginning of the second. In other words, decades away from the 3rd century crisis and centuries away from the actual fall of the empire. I think our civilization is still fairly resilient.
I was shocked by the riots too, but then I read John Lambshead. He doesn’t take it too seriously (Rioting is as English as tea and scones. It generally stops when the weather turns bad., writing in Baen’s Bar). He has decades of living in English society and was raised there – he probably knows more than I do.
LOL, Ori. I had been thinking this would never have happened in winter!