A little advice from someone studying extremist groups: if you’re in a social media environment where the daily ubiquitous message is that you have no hope of any kind of future and you can’t possibly achieve anything without a violent overthrow of society, you’re being radicalized, and not in the good way.
If the solution to your problems sounds like “we need a blank slate” it’s a lie. There are no blank slates, and the closest approximation people can generally imagine is “burn it all down and let God/fate/history sort it out”.
That’s not problem solving. It’s barely catharsis, in practice. It doesn’t just create more problems than it solves, it destroys more solutions than it creates.
Put the apocalypse down, and back away slowly.
Real solutions to complex, systemic problems are not so easily reduced to “us good, them evil; kill them.”
[image transcript:
Voting as Fire Extinguisher
When the haunted house catches fire: a moment of indecision.
The house was, after all, built on bones, and blood, and bad intentions.
Everyone who enters the house feels that overwhelming dread, the evil that perhaps only fire can purge.
It’s tempting to just let it burn.
And then I remember:
there are children inside.
—Kyle Tran Myhre. end id]
As some who used to write postapocalypse fiction professionally, I’m well familiar with the appeal of “break it all and build something better with the remains”. Hell, that was even a central claim by one of the characters in my main quest in Fallout 3:
And while it’s weird to call postapoc fiction “escapist fantasy”, that’s a big core of the genre’s appeal, the dream of trying to build something new from the ashes of a broken world. It gets to gloss over the terrible cost of all those ashes.
Now that I’m nearly two decades older and hopefully wiser, I’m much more drawn to stories about building something better from what we have now, with all the messiness that that entails. It means healing the traumas that keep rippling across the generations, not just sweeping them under the rug and starting again.
As a designer, it’s easy to look at the world and imagine how a better system would work. It’s harder to figure out how we get from here to there. It means acknowledging the problems and the people who are justifiably angry and addressing them honestly. But it’s the only way to actually make something that lasts.
Because burning it all down doesn’t give you a clean slate — it just leaves you with ashes and corpses and more trauma.
