Setting: Best way to create anarchy on Earth?

[Dauntless]

I've been trying to decide how to create a scenario for my game background which devestates the world to a degree that it doesn't make it slide into barbarism, but it does create widespread anarchy and havoc such that the geopolitical maps dramatically change.

My original choice was to drop a splintered asteroid onto earth, one making landfall in Russia, one in the Pacific and the other in the Atlantic Ocean.  The collision wasn't Jurassic-extinction sized, but on the order of magnitude of several scores of Krakatoas or Mt. St. Helen's....enough to send a huge plume of dust into the atmosphere that didn't quite trigger an ice age, but that nevertheless severely disrupted weather patterns.  And as we tragically witnessed so recently, we saw how devestating a relatively small tsunami did to south asia, imagine what an impact like that would do to coastal areas along both oceans where the waves reach a couple hundred feet high and go miles inland.

My next option was closely related...a sort of "Day After Tomorrow" scenario.  This was fine because my game world takes place in the near future (about 70 years).  I envisioned that a rapid cease in the flowing of the Atlantic gulf stream could cause the heat pump it creates to stop and thereby create a new Ice Age that would happen in just two or three decades (as some scientists now feel that ice ages can happen as dramatically as within just a few short decades).  The problem with this idea is that although on a cosmic scale, 2-3 decades is a drop in the bucket, that's quite a bit of time to give humanity to prepare.  Sure it would cause a lot of civil unrest but I'm not sure it would cause the level of anarchy that I was looking for.

The third idea I had was a pandemic of some sort of pathogen.  Many WHO (world health organization) officials believe it's just a matter of when, and not if, we get some sort of pandemic on the order of a influenza or worse bubonic plague type of outbreak.  The problem with this one would seem to be that while it could definitely cause some massive death tolls, I'm not sure it would cause the underpinnings of society to change.  Look at the Black Death in which about half the population of Europe died....it didn't really cause any massive social upheavals (although the low technology of the time may have been a steadying influence in this regard).

The fourth idea was to have the magnetic poles reverse themselves (a phenomena which has happened many times in the Earth's past), causing an EMP wave of untold magnitude to sweep across the Earth, essentially obliterating all electronic devices.  Who needs any of the above to cause havoc to civilization when all you have to do is turn off the electricity.  The problem here is that it may be TOO severe, and this more than likely would slide the world down into barbarism.  

A related fifth idea I had was a terrorist destruction of world economic markets.  Just place a couple EMP bombs in all the financial districts in all the major countries across the world, and watch hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars worth of digital currency get evaporated in a nanosecond.  Just like taking away electricity, civilization as we know it requires these financial institutions to run smoothly.  Even third world countries which may seem to not be involved in world financial markets wouldn't be spared, as ironically, these countries are even more enslaved to the world bank.  Imagine the great Depression of 1929, but 10 times worse.  The problem with this one is like turning off the electricity, it may be too bad....but then again, maybe not.  The more I think about this one, the more I like it though.

The sixth option was the old standby, a world war.  Make it have just limited NNBC (Nuclear, Nano, Biological and Chemical) strikes, but enough to cause even more damage than occurred in WWII, splintering countries and causing New World Orders to appear.

Any other ideas?  Of the five mentioned above, which sounds the most interesting?

[komradebob]

Finding the body of Jesus?

[TonyLB]

Okay, first, the quibble:  You mean chaos, not anarchy.  Anarchy is a functioning social dynamic without hierarchy... like many good gaming groups.

Which I think gets at the question you most need to address:  What sort of disaster is likely to make government, as it currently exists, totally ineffectual as a response?

The environmental issues are good ones, because modern governments are awfully bad at triage... tell them "You can save ten million people here, at the cost of telling one million people here 'We could save you, but it's not cost-efficient'" and they sort of thrash.

[Dauntless]

Gives new meaning to "finding Jesus" eh?

At the risk of hijacking my own thread (can you hijack your own thread?) , and tongue-in-cheek aside, I honestly don't think it'd be too impacting....unless this body started performing miracles.  Me personally,  and no offense to other Christians, I take a gnostic view of Christianity (since I'm Buddhist).  And for me, Christ was just another Buddha.

That's why I don't see the big hoopla over the popularity of the Da Vinci code (or its forerunner, Holy Blood Holy Grail).  The idea that descendants of Jesus are running around fascinates people I guess, because perhaps they believe it makes these people special or somehow more divine.  But because I take a gnostic stand on Christianity, I see Yeshua's teachings as trying to tell us that we are all "Sons of Man" (which is what Jesus almost always called himself, rather than the son of God).  In other words, Jesus was just saying, "live like I do, understand like I do, and you too can can become a Son of Man".  Orthodox Christianity however has trained people to believe that Jesus was unique and that people cam aspire to follow his teachings, but they can't ever be like him.  Instead, he is seen as an intercessionary for people on God's behalf.

But the idea is interesting....what if someone proclaiming to be the messiah returns, and can perform miracles to back it up (though Jesus himself often tried to hide his miracle performing, going by the backdoor so as to avoid attention to himself).  This would definitely cause some uproar and excitement within the Abrahamic-background dominated coutries.  Not sure it'd cause massive upheaval.  Unless of course this was the anti-christ :0

I entertain this notion mainly because my game background will have a very large element of gnostic (of which I include not just Christian gnosticism like the Cathars or Essenes, but also the Sufis of Islam, and the Kabbalhists of Judaism), Buddhist, Taoist and jnani (a part of the Hindu tradition) elements in my game world. Most people are familiar with Orthodox Christian elements, so I wanted to introduce other religious and philosophical concepts in my game.  There's an old Japanese saying, "If you know only one religion, you know none".

[Dauntless]

TonyLB-
Well, I guess I'm looking for a mix of chaos and anarchy then.  I want anarchy in the form of massive upheavals in the status quo of political, economic, and social entities across the world.  But I also want it to have created actual physical chaos, i.e. fighting and civil unrest that turns ugly.  In the environmental disaster scenarios, I saw it with a combination of small scare civil wars, where localized groups start fighting over scarce resources.

But you're right, if the government tells the people, "we can save 3 our of 10 of you, for the rest of you, God Speed", well, things are going to get real ugly.  Especially if there's some warning time before the impending disaster.  This could also work in the case of a pandemic in which some form of cure or immunization is discovered, but there's only a limited amount of treatment available.

[TonyLB]

So, above and beyond chaos, what moral issues do you want to explore?

[komradebob]

Think of it this way-

They find the body. There are no miracles. There are no secret scions. And no, the story is out and confirmed, with no way of putting the genie back in the bottle through devious super secret organizations.

A really horrible bout of existentialism grips an unnamed, nuclear armed, relatively religious nation. Suddenly one of the key societal glues just plain ceases to have relevance. The organizations that supported that religion suddenly lose the cornerstone of their economic support, becoming impoverished and subject to angry criticism overnight. People whose behavior was at least partly based on Desire for Heaven/Fear of Hell lose that basis of behavioral constraint. Perhaps some of them, even a large majority of them, begin to look to other faiths ( Islam? Judaism?).  If those faiths had their majority of adherents and learned religious scholars outside of said hypothetical country, you suddenly have a big part of your population that has become "politically unreliable".

Further, Christian missionaries start to be eyed with suspicion. All the old fears that those missionaries were nothing more than tools of superpower control and manipulation resurface, possibly with bloody results along the lines of what happened historically in Japan when the Christians were purged.

So, yeah, I can see a period of serious upheaval resulting from that. Not a permanent upheaval, certainly, but one that could provoke the sort of general cascading chaos you're discussing.

[Dauntless]

A really horrible bout of existentialism grips an unnamed, nuclear armed, relatively religious nation. Suddenly one of the key societal glues just plain ceases to have relevance. The organizations that supported that religion suddenly lose the cornerstone of their economic support, becoming impoverished and subject to angry criticism overnight. People whose behavior was at least partly based on Desire for Heaven/Fear of Hell lose that basis of behavioral constraint. Perhaps some of them, even a large majority of them, begin to look to other faiths ( Islam? Judaism?).  If those faiths had their majority of adherents and learned religious scholars outside of said hypothetical country, you suddenly have a big part of your population that has become "politically unreliable".

Are you saying that because a body is found, this refutes the assertion in the Bible that after Jesus' resurrection, he went up bodily to Heaven, and that therefore, if we can somehow verify that we've found his body (I'm presuming you mean his remains?) then all of of a sudden, a glaring error and fallacy of the Bible will have been created?  Well, such an incident may cause such a reaction in Christians in whom their faith was based in part upon reason (as St. Thomas Aquinas showed us that the two were not anthithetical).  But I think for a vast majority, they simply won't believe its true.  If many Christians believe in creationism even today despite overwhelming evidence of the reasonableness of evolution, then I'm not sure many Christians would lose faith over this, simply because they won't believe in the finding of the body.

BTW, as I mentioned, I'm Buddhist and I'm also a computer scientist, so one would expect that I believe wholeheartedly in evolution.  However, I'm not 100% positive, and I can understand some points of view of Creationists.

However, exploring the idea of loss in faith is an interesting one.  Would a mass loss of faith cause massive social upheavals?  In societies based on belief-based religions, I'd definitely say yes.  However, many that are already religious feel that they are in the minority, and therefore even if such were the case, there wouldn't be enough people that would face this existential crisis to majorly impact society.

[Dauntless]

TonyLB-
The game will be a transhuman/extopian setting...but a dark one.  The chaos causing scenario I'm looking for is actually in the history of the game setting.  As I mentioned, the game takes place about 2080 AD, but there's been a massive change in the world order of things.  I want some sort of near cataclysmic event to have taken place approximately 20-50 years prior (to give a chance for society to have rebuilt itself to some degree) and is also the reason why the chaos can't be too destructive, and the anarchy would have been temporary so that a New World Order would have time to assert itself.

The moral issues will be those relevant to a transhuman/extopian setting; namely how technology will change how humanity views itself and society.  The reason I say it is dark is because in the post-chaotic world, various factions of temporal power (policial entities) as well as memetic ones (religions, terrorist groups, ideological groups, etc) will be opposing each other.  At its core, the game will explore the technophiles vs. the luddites, and the haves vs. the have nots.

[kenjib]

Here are two more suggestions:

1.  The Rapture
Do some research on Christian belief in the rapture and current events in the middle east.  There are all kinds of scenarios in here.  First of all, it doesn't have to actually happen in a metaphysical sense for there to be an armageddon level event.  It just requires that certain people in powerful positions want it to happen enough to start a nuclear war.  Self-fullfilled prophecy and all that.  Or you could have an actual real biblical rapture fallout scenario:  The faithful have ascend to heaven decades ago and everyone else was left behind on Earth, which is now so devastated that it has become a living version of purgatory - rising from the ashes is a new materialist science unleashed from any moral constraints.  I kind of like melding the two as competing histories.  An armageddon has come and gone, but the nature of it is left ambiguous.  New christian cults emerge declaring that it was the rapture and that the new "immoral" secular-science order has created a purgatory on earth that can only be ended by overthrowing the technocrats and the prophetic emergence of a new messiah who recreates the harrowing of hell.  On the other hand are cynical secular materialists who believe that religious dogma almost destroyed the world and now power and order must be imposed through strict materialism, social darwinism, and the unfettered exercise of raw power.  Finally there are new age spiritualists and secular idealists who oppose both groups but have no power and no real answers, thus being relegated to the "punk" fringes.  There is little to no compromise between these fiercely opposed world views.

2.  Economic Collapse, Descent into Facism, and World War III
As the primary pillar of our economy now is financing, two factors together could completely collapse the U.S. economy.  First OPEC nations move from tying oil prices to the dollar and tie it to the Euro instead.  Second China and maybe a couple of other nations stop buying U.S. bonds to fund the deficit and start trying to sell the debt instead.  This creates a rush on selling the dollar, the U.S. government goes bankrupt, interest rates soar, inflation moves to devastating levels, jobs are cut, and families who now are at the highest debt levels in american history start losing everything they have.  This sends shockwaves throughout the world economy, creating geopolitical chaos.  In the middle of this, the U.S. still has more military power than the rest of the world combined and a population that has been trending over the past decades toward patriotism, glorification of the military, and villification of political dissent.  How are they going to stabilize their economy and try to reclaim the standard of living to which they believe they are entitled from those nations that destroyed their economy by pulling out of the dollar?  Also, how do the people in power make sure that those under them stand behind them instead of blaming them for the collapse (research the Reichstag Fire)?

As regards your concern about global warming being too slow to have a major impact, consider the potential scale of what could happen and the fact that there are not really 70 years to deal with it because realistically nobody would probably take measures drastic enough to help for many decades already into that time period.  Geopolitics usually only address solutions when every possible effort to avoid doing so has failed.

It also doesn't necessarily require 70 years to happen.  In case you haven't read it already, here is a report put out by the U.S. Pentagon in October 2003 to evaluate the geopolitical fallout of a sudden climate change:

http://www.ems.org/climate/pentagon_climatechange.pdf

I think one possible angle to your scenario if you want very serious devastation is that the threat of nuclear war really isn't any less than it was during the Cold War.  It has just been delayed for a time.  An increase in geopolitical tension could very quickly create conditions much more conducive to total global nuclear war than the Cold War was, especially considering the proliferation of nuclear capability (and current trend against non-proliferation efforts) that has continued to this day and continued to trickle down into the hands of less stable countries - some of which control important resources.  This tension can come from a large variety of sources, or perhaps even more than one coming together in a perfect storm.  If the leaders are sheltered in bunkers and the population is already starving to death anyway, who is left to stop the madness?

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Dauntless,

I don't know what you mean by "best way." I think you'll continue to get a bunch of disjointed or highly-personalized responses until you clarify that.

Best,
Ron

[ADGBoss]

Actually I think collapsed society is something that narratively you build backwards, in my opinion. You may want to know specifically where your society ends up before you decide HOW it arrives at its current state. Disaster is anecdotal (not to those who live through it) in terms of the aftermath, because it is the consequence of disaster that is important.

Environmental. Survival can range anywhere from a lil tough (i.e. no Starbucks or Denny's) to brutal and day to day (scarce food, mutant cockroaches.)  Environmental dangers could be wide spread and traditional modern conveniences would be non-existent. This would not necessarily cause absolute chaos but it would certainly create a huge economic disaster for the modern nations.

Political. How easily could America slide into chaos and civil war? I would guess much easier then we think.  Regionalism is not dead and neither is racism.  Political elections are becoming increasingly vicious. Abortion is possibly a sleeping giant that splits even devout Catholics into several camps (Pro Choice vs. Pro Life and Peaceful Protest vs. Violent Protest). Now consider, America is relatively stable. Other countries rely on her support and good will. If we faced chaos and pockets of anarchy or secession here at home, what would our overseas troops and citizens do? How would they be treated? Twilight 2000 anyone?

Spiritual. Rise in suicide. People lose faith in God, government, and granola. As an aside, regardless of what our personal beliefs in Jesus might be, many people have very strong belief and faith in mainstream Christianity. Finding the body of Jesus would cause some consternation. There was a novel written and I cannot remember the name but the premise was interesting: God's body was found on the bottom of the Atlantic(?) and so the Human race put God on trial for crimes against humanity. Interesting ideas.

Instead of the Journey defining where you are now, where you are now will define the Journey i.e. how you got there.  


Sean

[daMoose_Neo]

Actually, point of note, I don't think finding the body of "Jesus Christ" would be all that damaging- for one, how in the world would we know a 2000+ year old body to really be that of Christ, and two, it simply wouldn't make sense that doing so would drive people to Islam or Judiesm as all three are, for the most part, part of the same over all concept- major differences are in who the "savior" is/was.
What you WOULD likely see in such a discovery, were it possible to ID it beyond a shadow of a doubt, is a flocking to totally different faiths- your wiccians, native american spirit beliefs, etc etc.

[kenjib]

I think it would either be rationalized, denied, or sidestepped, or Christianity would just change a little bit to adapt (like how deism has become a somewhat mainstream current), as has been constantly happening since the enlightenment when science was somewhat freed from Christian bias.  I think that evolution was a much more fundamental threat to Christianity and it has been weathering that for 150 years using the techniques given above without worldwide chaos.  Why would finding the body of Jesus be much different?

[Dauntless]

Excellent point Ron.

By best, I mean it should satisfy several conditions I have in mind:

1)  This chaos/anarchy period has happened in the past...roughly 20-50yrs prior to the start of the game world setting.  The current game world setting is transhuman in its genre, so therefore, there is a high level of technology that is extant.  

2)  The chaos/anarchy period will have drastically altered and/or restructed the current geopolitical landscape.  In other words, most countries around the world that exist today will take a different form by 2080AD.  Either the geopgraphical boundaries have changed, the political form former countries take are different, economic policy has changed, etc etc.  The chaotic period should have been a major contributor to this change (either directly as in the case of war, or indirectly say for example by encroaching glaciers)

3) The damage can not be too intense, otherwise civilization will not be able to rebuild itself within 50 years. However, I have toyed with a possible alternative possibility for this in which the devestation was massive...say 90% of the population dying, but still being able to rapidly redploy civilization and technology within 50 years (ala a Morrow Project renaissance, or from having Colonies which existed on other planets which could repopulate Earth).

Given these constraints, what method of chaos will best create a plausible environment for Earth to reach a transhumanist-level society by 2080-2100?  The question may be asked, why create this chaos era?  I wanted to radically alter all the current political entities that exist today and redraw and redefine them.  A sort of controlled apocalypse if you will.  This will allow me to have both a connection to the past as well as creating a new canvas to write new societies virtually from the ground up (well, from whenver the traumatic event happens).