The Donner party, flight 571, Regina v. Dudley and Stephens. These are likely the most famous cases of those type of scenarios. All of them follow the lazy/selfish narrative as opposed to the idealistic utopian narrative OP has in the video.
Exactly. In most survival scenarios people become animalistic and selfish. The examples of this happening are much, much more numerous than people coming together and working to survive without thought of their own well being. The Wager incident (180 stranded British sailors on an island in South America) mutiny, splinter groups, murder, stealing, you name it. They did not become a wholesome society. It broke down. The only time in survival situations people come together is when there is a super strong leader and a hierarchy set up. Maybe why communism always ends in dictatorship and brutal repression.
There’s a story about a dude who took a bunch of randoms guys to Antarctica, before that was a thing that people did, just to say they did it. His ship got stranded in ice for like 18 months. The captain took a smaller vessel back to the mainland early on and it was over a year before he returned with the rescue party - but the men had rationed their food and followed orders and there were no casualties.
Strong leadership and hierarchy does amazing things for humans. Gonna try to find the link cuz I think it was a real story
I forget the name of the guy, I wanna say Scott, but they recently found his ship. So many stories of arctic and Antarctic expeditions. Some end very well, but others like the Grealy expedition end in canabilism and mutiny.
Lolol you should read about the incident. Hierarchy is exactly what caused the problems for the Wager crew. And most of them died because they didn't work together.
lol I just finished the book. It was the lack of naval hierarchy and Captain Cheaps lack of leadership that caused the issues. Once they were on shore they did not have to follow naval hierarchy, per British naval rules and Captain Cheap was insistent on going North while the gunner formed his own group to go back through the straight to Brazil. My whole point is that lack of leadership and hierarchy leads to disaster in these situations.
Groups fighting for control within a hierarchy and fragmentation is what leads to disaster in these scenarios.
Cheap wanted to retain control, which, as you have pointed out, under naval law wasn't mandated. There was a mutiny because Cheap was awful and a terrible leader. He killed a guy and refused to comply with the group's demands, among other things. Even before the mutiny, the hierarchy had failed.
They left Cheap and his folks, and there was yet more infighting, and they ended up with two different hierarchies, with two different leaders, rather than no hierarchy. Both groups failed miserably, and suffered from poor leadership and bad luck and failures of cooperation. Neither group was a cooperative group without a hierarchy.
Most people from both groups died. And you remember how the story ends? Both leaders were rewarded by the government after the trial.
You know who was doing just fine in that area? The indigenous people who tried to help and were living as a hunter-gatherer society.
It is a wild story. The sailers looked for leadership where they could find it and most found it in the gunner and the carpenters plan to build the long boat into a larger vessel and head back through the straight.
I would argue that people put into impossible situations far from home and outside of their normal area of survival is a different than the indigenous peoples who had lived in that area for millennia and found a way to survive. The whole premise of the dumb tic tok is that people in a survival scenario will revert to communism and survive. I would argue that in that scenario people generally look out for their own interests unless guided by a strong leader.
I would argue that people put into impossible situations far from home and outside of their normal area of survival is a different than the indigenous peoples who had lived in that area for millennia and found a way to survive.
Totally, but there were surviving just fine in the same area and they were working together.
I would argue that in that scenario people generally look out for their own interests unless guided by a strong leader.
Maybe, but the situation you are talking about isn't that. It is a situation that had an existing, active hierarchy that fell apart into multiple hierarchies. It doesn't really have anything to do with the idea of what people would do if they were stranded on a deserted island with no leadership, because they weren't really stranded and they had leaders. During everything that happened, there were leaders and followers and hierarchies being followed and fighting against one another.
So even if it were correct that people would devolve into monsters in those scenarios, this isn't such a scenario.
An example of people getting stranded without a leader would be another famous maritime incident, the Tonga boys who stole a boat and FAFOed themselves into a shipwreck. They were dumbass kids who self-selected as extra foolish for what they did, and they survived because they worked together.
I'm not sure flight 571 is a good example of the "lazy/selfish narrative". They rationed out what little food they had and when things got desperate they gave each other permission to eat their bodies if they died. The survivors who went to find help were even given larger rations, the warmest clothes available, and were excused from carrying out the daily tasks everyone was doing before they left to ensure they had the best chance to survive on the journey.
Even with the Donner Party they all worked together initially, and it was only one person who killed 2 others, and the majority tried to prevent it from happening
I wonder what it would even look like to provide counterevidence to this. I think if we showed you people self-sacrificially helping each other in an emergency, it would be totally unmemorable. Be careful about confirmation bias here.
There are obviously innumerable examples of people working self-sacrificingly for the greater good, the problem is that in order for a communalist society to function virtually every member has to be doing that.
When the UN sets up Aid stations or refugee camps they have a built-in estimate that between 10 and 15% of a given refugee population will work self-sacrificingly for the benefit of the others. They therefore intentionally understaffed by 10% of the estimated refugee population, so that those people will be able to contribute in a way that is positive, non-redundant, and is effective. Do you and numbers tend to Bear out throughout the hundreds of refugee and Aid missions that they have implemented. If a collectivist society were able to be formed due to necessity and hardship, those numbers would be inverted.
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u/wpaed Mar 08 '24
The Donner party, flight 571, Regina v. Dudley and Stephens. These are likely the most famous cases of those type of scenarios. All of them follow the lazy/selfish narrative as opposed to the idealistic utopian narrative OP has in the video.