This Is How a Collapse Feels Like
Station Eleven: on our journey back to the Middle Ages
We watch dystopian movies for entertainment. We read books on collapse and throw these words around like playing scrabble. Yet we rarely feel what they mean. For all it’s worth it is just entertainment or an intellectual game at best. It never hits us in the gut because in the back of our minds we don’t consider them as something that could happen to us!¹
Reading Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel is the first time it actually hit me on a deeper level. Despite the current pandemic and a ton of material I’ve read on the collapse of civilisation, it was just a game of words for me too. I never felt the implications of it.
Our civilisation is a house of cards. You might think of corporations and institutions, but that is superficial. We are the cards. Each and every one of us. With increased specialisation, we depend on each other more and more. There are very few people who could make a pencil on their own, perhaps some know how to make a wheel, but absolutely no one can run a power plant or fix an aeroplane. It takes a well-coordinated ensemble of specialists to run a civilisation. Our highly specialised individual skills are wonderful when we work together, but worthless on their own.
