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His observation is wrong. In all societies in which there is a power vacuum gangs take over. Witness Africa, South America, Burma, and the middle Eastern countr

• Veen 7y ago
  Yes. Stross’ article is old-fashioned pre-Pomo Marxist literary criticism—and is about as insightful as that genre usually is.
  • rpiguy 7y ago
    Exactly.
  • dang 7y ago
    Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here. Especially not name-calling ones. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    • Veen 7y ago
      There is no name-calling in my comment, which is merely an expression of my (rather obvious) view that the analytical framework Stross employs to critique zombie literature is drawn from Marxist literary theory, rather than, say, New Criticism, formalism, romanticism, structuralism, or any of the other analytical frameworks he might have adopted.
      • dang 7y ago
        I like formalism! My favorite was Shklovsky. The falling stone. Sorry, but "pre-Pomo Marxist literary criticism" counts as name-calling on an internet forum, unless you do something to make it clear you don't intend it that way—and you did just the opposite. Also, while I don't know anything about cstross really, I strongly doubt that he's a Marxist. The odds of an internet commenter spuriously spouting "Marxist!" are much higher. At a minimum, you'd have to make a serious case, which you didn't, hence the epithet "unsubstantive". Look at it this way: if you reduce someone's post to a theory you regard as stupid, as a reductio ad absurdum, you're narrowing the discussion rather than expanding it. We want curious conversation here. That's a different mentality. We all have it in us to do both—close down or open further—but unfortunately the default is closing down. On this forum, the idea is to go against the default for great good. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
• gamblor956 7y ago
  The term "elite panic" is a very real thing based in actual historical events. It traces its roots to the French Revolution, Russian Revolution, and Maoist Revolution, where the rich/elite were slaughtered and imprisoned by mobs of peasants. By comparison, the middle class didn't exist when these revolutions took place. The "middle class" is a very new construct that is only a few decades old, dating back to the post WWII economic boom.
  • TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
    That's not entirely true. The middle class used to be known as the bourgeoisie, and before that they were traders, merchants, and sometimes small-scale artisans, who were below the local aristocracy, but above the peasants, serfs, and cannon fodder. The US has a peculiar definition which includes workers who would normally be considered working class. The true middle classes are usually professionals with advanced specialisms that require above-average intellect and education, and typically include some element of management and administration. They have some political leverage, but typically less than they think. This version of the middle classes emerged as the administrative, technical, scientific, medical, and legal support for company owners and speculators during the Industrial Revolution. This is still recognisable today. (It was a huge problem during the Maoist revolution, and Mao went out of his way to destroy and "reeducate" this class - because they were capable of resisting him.) The upper classes rely on inherited wealth and power, make their money from property, land, share ownership and other forms of rent seeking, have direct personal connections to networks that shape policy and power, and don't need to work unless they choose to.
• rumanator 7y ago
  > Even the term “elite panic” is lie. The elite are fine in a disaster and they know it. Look at Venezuela, the rich and elite simply moved behind walls and continue on. Sounds to me that the need to move behind walls is a pretty strong indicator of the elite panic concept you are criticizing. After all, if they didn't panicked then why did they felt the need to coward behind those walls and man them with armed minions? And by the way, "fear the walking dead" is packed with seasons where the protagonists find themselves in a gated community where armed guards and passive protection measures are extensively used to keep the menacing zombies at Bay while living a pretty comfy life. Sounds a bit like Venezuela, doesn't it?
  • SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
    Because lots of people actually do want to kill them, and the walls keep those people out. It's the same phenomenon you see in South Africa - everyone who can afford it builds high walls and private security, because everyone who can afford it is a target.
    • rumanator 7y ago
      That's pretty much a definition of "elite panick".
      • the8472 7y ago
        Are reasonable defensive measures a panic?
        • rumanator 7y ago
          Why do you even assume that cowarding behind a castle with armed guards to keep neighbors at Bay are "reasonable defensive measures"? Sounds to me you're exhibiting "elite panick" while being completely oblivious to it.
        • stcredzero 7y ago
          No. Sociopaths and opportunists exist. Everyone should be prepared for that remote possibility, because the consequences are potentially large. Almost no one buckles their seatbelt fully expecting to crash in the next 5 minutes. That doesn't invalidate taking the precautions.
• jfim 7y ago
  > The elite are fine in a disaster and they know it. Not all the time, though. For example, Bloomberg reported a few days ago that Nigeria's elite, which normally flies out of the country for healthcare, can't do it now due to the travel restrictions across countries [0]. > The panic strikes the middle class more than any other group, because their status is the most easily lost. Unlike the rich, their power goes away with their jobs. Their lifestyle, however much you’d like to mock trips to Starbucks, weekend shopping at Pottery Barn, and all that - it all goes away. The tenuous advantage they’ve built up vanishes. Makes sense. [0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-02/trapped-by-coronavirus-nigeria-s-elite-faces-squalid-hospitals https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-02/trapped-b...
  • TeMPOraL 7y ago
    > Not all the time, though. And to drive the point home even more: many high-status politicians in Western countries have contracted COVID-19 and it's uncertain how many more will, and how many will die. Also: uncertainty creates a panic of its own.
    • TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
      Many high-status politicians are clueless fools with no idea how to avoid infection, or how to minimise the risk of contagion within their immediate circle. Most won't die unless they're in a vulnerable age group. But they will spread the infection to friends, family, and colleagues, some of whom will die. The median age in the House of Lords is 70. As for elite panic - armed gangs are already a thing in the UK and US. The suggestion they wouldn't move into a power vacuum left by the police/military when they're already battling for turf with violence, extortion, and intimidation is hard to take seriously. Yes, there are plenty of people who will help others, especially in nice middle class enclaves. But you only need a small minority of dark triad types willing to use violence to create an immediate problem for everyone.
      • devdas 7y ago
        That small minority sounds to me like the NRA types.
• stcredzero 7y ago
  The panic strikes the middle class more than any other group, because their status is the most easily lost. Unlike the rich, their power goes away with their jobs. Also note, that many (though not all) of the "aristos" executed in the French Revolution were people lower down on the hierarchy. These were the people more easily visible and accessible to the mob. The panic strikes the middle group the most, because the danger is the most real for them!
• Andrew_nenakhov 7y ago
  > In all societies in which there is a power vacuum gangs take over. Such gangs are the basic form of government. They have command structure, and a population base they exploit. Over time, as gang grows, it comes into conflict with other gangs and one eventually emerges as the dominant. Once in command over a big chunk of population, it either splits into many smaller bands, repeating the cycle, or it evolves to be more structured, and rules appear, which regulate how gang members operate and what they are allowed to do. You may know these rules as 'laws'. This happens because every gang eventually understands that in the long term, taxing a prosperous population is far more profitable and stable than unlimited plundering.
  • ThrowawayR2 7y ago
    How does your hypothesis apply to, for example, Mexico? Seems that "eventually" may mean decades, if not longer.
    • barry-cotter 7y ago
      It seems to apply pretty well to Mexico. Every time the cartels reach an equilibrium of violence where there’s a clear chain of command and territories violence drops. Then the Mexican state decides that having para-states on its territory is unacceptable, smashes them and violence increases. You see the same dynamic though not on the same scale in US organized crime history; the Mafia were brutal thugs just like the brutal thugs who are criminals in US inner cities now. The Mafia used violence less often because they were organized. People knew where they stood. Pay your protection money, don’t talk to the police unless they’re our police and you’re done. No crime is better than organized crime is better than widespread disorganized crime.
      • Ericson2314 7y ago
        > the Mafia were brutal thugs just like the brutal thugs who are criminals in US inner cities now. Hello? It's not 1990. Look at the crime stats. There's plenty wrong with today, but there isn't much organized or disorganized crime.
• UweSchmidt 7y ago
  Many societies with turmoil have managed to resolve the situation and went back to normal. Surely that depends on the attitudes of people, and especially leadership, on how to deal with the situation. Zombie television presents violence as the only option and the enemy as an incurable and unsavable evil. If the only option shown is to kill and build walls, then that's what they are programmed to do. In the real world people can always come together and compromise, share ressources and help each other. The foundation for this has to be built in peacetime.
  • ThrowawayR2 7y ago
    > "In the real world people can always come together and compromise, share ressources and help each other." That's starkly contradicted by the absence of toilet paper and other staples on store shelves at the individual level and the ongoing profiteering on and commandeering of medical protective gear and other medical supplies at the international level.
    • Aeolun 7y ago
      Germany is taking patients from surrounding countries. It’s not everywhere that things are like that.
• gwern 7y ago
  > His observation is wrong. In all societies in which there is a power vacuum gangs take over. Witness Africa, South America, Burma, and the middle Eastern countries in which we have removed the “dictators.” And it's particularly amusing because he just mentioned Haiti. What happened in Haiti is precisely why the American plantation class was so terrified: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1804_Haiti_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1804_Haiti_massacre
  • coliveira 7y ago
    The plantation owners in Haiti knew fully well that the revolt was deserved.
    • gwern 7y ago
      'deserved' has nothing to do with it. The American South elites deserved it almost as much as the Haitian planters did; and they were likely correct to fear it, contrary to Stross's glib dismissal of their fears as irrational.
  • mcguire 7y ago
    Did you miss the rest of that comment: "Even the term “elite panic” is lie. The elite are fine in a disaster and they know it."
    • gwern 7y ago
      The Haitian elites were not fine in their disaster. And other elites (viz the American south's elites) knew it. That's the point.
• SideburnsOfDoom 7y ago
  > Even the term “elite panic” is lie. FYI, there is at least one book written on the subject based on research of real-world disasters https://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/21/books/21book.html https://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/21/books/21book.html https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6444492-a-paradise-built-in-hell https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6444492-a-paradise-built... Cory Doctorow writes about it as well: https://boingboing.net/2013/04/14/elite-panic-why-rich-people-t.html https://boingboing.net/2013/04/14/elite-panic-why-rich-peopl... https://www.kirkusreviews.com/news-and-features/articles/cory-doctorow/ https://www.kirkusreviews.com/news-and-features/articles/cor... It is hardly Mr Stross's own idea, and I would not dismiss it so glibly after a minute's thought and a very shallow understanding.
  • kortilla 7y ago
    A widely spread and aged idea doesn’t make it any less wrong.
    • SideburnsOfDoom 7y ago
      Sure, though a comment on HN by someone who first heard the term 20 minutes ago and misses the main point of it, _really_ doesn't make it wrong.
• Baeocystin 7y ago
  >Asia after WW2 was different because the West essentially sponsored state corporate Facism in Japan and Korea until they had 30-50 years to evolve into something resembling a true democracy. My father was a high-ranking US diplomat stationed in Taiwan during the early White Terror years. You have no idea how hard the people on the ground were working to stop Taiwan from tipping over in to a full dictatorship. It may seem hard to believe nowadays, but this was the era of the Marshall Plan and the rebuilding of Japan- US foreign policy was strongly focused on building allies' infrastructure, both civil and legal.
• kelnos 7y ago
  Agreed, and the author (whose work I generally love) seems to also set up a straw man, considering cases where a small, single-digit percentage of humanity is affected. Sure, in that case, there won't be much social upheaval, as most institutions of "civilization" will remain intact. If you consider a zombie story in the vein of The Walking Dead, we're confronted with a world where something like 90-99% of humanity is dead or zombified. Governments are gone, militaries are gone, industry is gone. I expect we'd see a pretty violent world where people try to protect their immediate family and are naturally distrustful of all but small groups of people. I don't think this has anything to do with so-called "elite panic"; if you reduce people to constantly struggling to fulfill basic survival needs, and remove any kind of laws or consequences, people will do whatever they need to do, and resorting to violence will end up quite common.
• andreilys 7y ago
  Thank you for this response, I was about to answer the same but you've done a much better job of expressing my sentiment.
• SuoDuanDao 7y ago
  I think I realised what strikes me as untrue about the 'elite panic' idea - that 'pulling together in emergencies' Stross referred to is typical to temporary emergencies. I don't think the Elite's fear is anywhere near as irrational as he paints it. There's one unsettling fact I keep thinking about in regards to this topic - before everything went to hell, Rwanda and Afghanistan both had higher literacy rates than was typical for their respective regions. I think Stross's very middle class values are out of touch with the reality of the human condition in a way that both the very rich and the poor aren't. I say this as a fan of the Laundry files, I think he might be having trouble imagining realistic near-future settings because realistic depictions of the near future don't have a middle class, and that is not something Stross can quite envision.
• axguscbklp 7y ago
  Yeah, I lost a bit of respect for Stross' intelligence when I read that part about elite panic. Stross also doesn't seem to understand that just because a person prepares for the possibility that the masses might become violent doesn't mean that the person necessarily thinks that outcome to be the most likely one - it's just better to be safe than sorry. >The elite are fine in a disaster and they know it. Only if the disaster is relatively manageable. History has many examples of elites being killed during political upheaval.
• xapata 7y ago
  > In all societies in which there is a power vacuum gangs take over. Not all. Read some anthropology and you'll find interesting examples of large non-hierarchical societies.
• crazypython 7y ago
  Interesting, can you share the name a book, preferably rife with examples, where I can learn about the "In all societies in which there is a power vacuum gangs take over." thesis?
• panarky 7y ago
  Here's a contemporary example of elite panic cynically deployed to sway an election. Georgia Rep. Paul Broun released an ad warning that "in uncertain times like these," it’s important to protect yourself against "looting hordes from Atlanta" along with video of him carrying a rifle. https://twitter.com/mbaram/status/1247597527987339269 https://twitter.com/mbaram/status/1247597527987339269