aoi_to_midori

How often do I think about Ancient Rome? Not very.

I do think about Dark Ages Britain, though. I think about it a lot. Especially recently.

The story goes that in 410, the Emperor Honorius wrote to the British Romans, telling them to, "look to their own defense." An actual letter may never have existed, and a formal declaration may not have been said, but the fact remains that Rome could no longer provide defensive resources to a far flung island at the edge of the empire that necessitated an ocean crossing to reach. Troops were needed closer to home, and the Empire could no longer afford to defend all of its citizens or maintain their infrastructure for them. The Church remained, true. But even the Catholic Church couldn't field armies or build roads. (Not yet, anyway.) The people were, for all practical purposes, on their own.

This wasn't an abrupt change. Thousands of Romano-British citizens didn't wake up one day to someone knocking on their door, saying, "Look, we've got to go. The money's run out, you see. Shame we can't help with the upkeep, but you know how it is. Take care of things while we're gone, eh?" This was a slow process, an inexorable ebbing of a tide that was probably imperceptible until it wasn't. People being people, I imagine that there were a lot of conversation and debate about what was going on or even how it couldn't possibly be happening.

"Rome would never abandon us! Their power stretches from Hispania to Palmyra! Their wealth and power are unlimited!"

But there had to be others who saw the writing on the wall and knew that denial, appeals to precedent or paralyzing indecision would not stop the inevitable. We know this because The Dark Ages exist. We have archeological evidence that people continued to survive and maintained a certain degree of order, culture, and stability despite being abandoned by their former overlords. True, we don't know a ton about The Dark Ages, but we know that the island that is Britain didn't suddenly depopulate once Rome left. There was plenty of conflict as warlords fought over petty kingdoms, but at least some of the common people thought ahead, imagining the worst possible scenarios and working backwards from there to prepare themselves for as many scenarios as possible. They managed to function despite the fact that they were very much On Their Own™.

I've been thinking about that a lot. Being On Our Own™.

Whatever is coming, we know it's going to be bad. (This essay sums up my feelings on the matter, so I won't waste time rehashing things.) Granted, we have the benefit of knowing it's going to be bad — there will be no naive appeals to optimism and better angels this time around — but the scale of badness has yet to be determined. I'm neither a political theorist nor a particularly good prognosticator, but I do feel more secure when I look at a situation, carry it to it's most pessimistic extreme, and then assume that's the situation I'll be facing in the future. I started doing this when I was caught completely flat-footed by the Great Recession and watched a career I loved and the independence I craved disappear in a matter of 72 hours. (There are few things more humiliating than being forced to move back home to a family that says, "We told you so," at every available opportunity, but I digress.) The approach has served me well. After all, you can always pull back if things aren't as dire as you thought they'd be. But if you're not at least psychologically prepared for the worst to come to pass, well...

So, the Worst Case. The Worst Case will vary depending on where you live and what your circumstances are, but generally speaking, I'm guessing it would probably be a wholesale disinvestment in institutions that many of us take for granted. One of the rallying cries I've seen bandied about by the Very Online Left is that, "We keep us safe." In the interest of gaming out the Worst Case, I will take their slogan at face value. The Worst Case is existing in a sociopolitical structure that is actively hostile to life for all except an upper echelon of Keys To Power. This will be exacerbated by a segment of the populace that would gleefully hunt "inferiors" for sport if they could get away with it. We're already seeing whole scale hostility toward virtues like empathy, kindness and humility, driven by the dopamine rush of rapid fire social media and the pervasiveness of influencer grifters that push their followers to be crueler, pettier, more vapid, more obsessed with material possessions and subscriptions to services to Anxiety Engines and animated emojis.

We must keep us safe. Also healthy, educated, clothed, housed, sane, and happy.

I became something of a Sparkling Disaster sommelier back during the Great Recession, mostly because I had to be. My Worst Case Scenario then was the very real possibility that I would have to support aseanchai , if I was lucky enough to marry him at all due to the twin barriers of money and bureaucracy. There was talk at that time that this Great Recession would continue to metastasize into something far worse, and that we'd have to lean on the lessons of our elders to ride out an economy that would make the Great Depression look like a period of relative prosperity. People coped with it in different ways, though mine was to look at examples of self-sufficiency and drop-out culture to see what I could make of it. I bought books and magazines about off-grid living and homesteading. I taught myself to cook and preserve. I read the excellent Possum Living cover to cover multiple times, asking what lessons I could take from it immediately and which I could work toward long term. I spoke to people I trusted about the need to prepare for this future, this time when we would have to rely on ourselves rather than steady paychecks or pension plans. No one wanted to hear it, so I kept my newfound interests and theories to myself. Eventually the storm passed, but I emerged slightly more prepared for the next time we'd be left On Our Own™.

I'm not an expert in survivalism or backwoods living. I'm keenly aware that I am not as prepared as I'd like to be for the upcoming Worst Case Scenario, for the Sparkling Disaster that will likely come to pass. But I am slightly more prepared than I was the last time those in power apologized for the inconvenience and quietly left us to our own devices. It's a continuing ebb in my neck of the woods, this semi-rural Rust Belt enclave where I consider myself lucky that my Worst Case Scenarios come as the occasional rogue wave, rather than a multi-generational drowning flood. I have family and resources, but it pays to be ready. Life can change in an instant. I've seen that happen.

Whatever is coming is uniquely bad, and the only thing we will each be able to control is our reaction to it. We must ask ourselves what we're doing to stay as healthy as possible, how we plan to care for our families and communities, and what skills we're suited for that can become sources of income or barter if the bottom falls out of it all. We need to be prepared to take on roles in a game that we may not be keen to play, but that we must engage in regardless. We must be ready to stay alive and keep others alive, as well as cared for in all the ways that matter. We must be ready for Rome to retreat into dysfunction, and to keep flourishing if another Dark Age descends upon us. Most of all, we must be ready and willing to build something better, even if it can only be a better version of ourselves. That may mean finding common cause with people you disagree with, or with organizations that don't reflect your beliefs. As long as those organizations aren't in the business of actively harming the vulnerable, so be it. We can no longer be in the business of purity tests and hot takes and dunking and ideological righteousness. We must now be in the business of preserving life in all its forms, human and beyond.

We will very soon be On Our Own™. But we can be together in our abandonment. And we can build something better in its wake.