The Collapse

The Collapse:

Africa's "forever wars" seem to offer a terrible picture of what human nature might be like. These groups are brigands, but somehow the brigands fail to provoke the response you would expect even in places where all governmental authority has failed: a few local families or tribes getting together and going out to hang the bunch for the common good. These are not soldiers they are fighting, after all, but criminals.

The Cold War's end bred state collapse and chaos. Where meddling great powers once found dominoes that needed to be kept from falling, they suddenly saw no national interest at all. (The exceptions, of course, were natural resources, which could be bought just as easily -- and often at a nice discount -- from various armed groups.) Suddenly, all you needed to be powerful was a gun, and as it turned out, there were plenty to go around.

That is not all you need, though; one thing we know from our own Dark Ages is that resistance is possible even when the walls collapse. Organized resistance can be successful in building a wall against such predation that, even if it is not universally effective, raises the costs of predation to such a degree that the predators go elsewhere.

This doesn't have to entail high costs; we saw the Anglo-Saxons resist Danish raiding with a fire beacon system and a small but organized group of people who would respond to raids when they saw the fires lit. The Danes were far more powerful and organized, in turn, than these African bandits. Saying that the system has collapsed explains the opportunity for violent predation. It doesn't explain how new systems don't spring up to resist those predators.