Post-Apocalypse: Back to the Stone Age

[Ji ji]

It seems to me, Jonas, that you are a bit too optimist, Jules Verne-style :D
Our technological world is build over hyper-specialization and ultra complex mansion network.

However, let's imagine that, after a total catastrophe, humanity can return to medium TL in few generation. We can follow a total different fantastic path to obtain a TL1 world in near future.

In 20xx, a devastating pandemy strikes humanity. It can be a failed experiment of bacteriological world or anything you like. The disease kills everybody is infected by it. Everybody but 4 years (or less) old.
We can imagine that only a few of older survives to first months. However, there are enormous stocks of food long lasting in warehouses and shops, buildings to protect themselves (in a world with few or no predators, like USA or western Europe), cloth to cover themselves and so on, and somebody manages to survive. So, let's imagine that, over 1% of population (4 years old), only 0.1% survives to reproductive age.
70.000 kids became men and women.

Among these survivors, nobody can read. Moreover, there is a very low density. They will develop creol languages. They lack technological knowledge at all. They cannot read, ignore writing basis - for instance, phonetic value of letters - and so books are written, to them, in an unattainable code and in a stranger language, that is likely to be never discovered.
After two generations, stories about previous world are already far legends and myths. After six generations, they are a new simple religion. With the total loss of technological skills and the total impossibility to decifrate the least bit of information, they're returned to TL 0-1.
A stone age society in a world of wonders, remains of what is called "the god's era" or so on.

[ericthered]

I think we are also underestimating the resources it takes to teach someone to read. It doesn't happen by itself. Though there will be a few enclaves of those who have a line of people who can do such things.

[jason taylor]

In such a society librarians could become a profession of prestige; rather like Irish Monks. Someone has to take care of the Wisdom of The Ancients until it can be restored.

Heck, my boss would BE a princess instead of just looking and acting like one.

[Figleaf23]

Originally Posted by ericthered

I think we are also underestimating the resources it takes to teach someone to read. It doesn't happen by itself. Though there will be a few enclaves of those who have a line of people who can do such things.

It takes hardly anything to teach someone to read. A few texts and someone who know what the letters sound like can teach someone to read pretty easily.

[ericthered]

Originally Posted by Figleaf23

It takes hardly anything to teach someone to read. A few texts and someone who know what the letters sound like can teach someone to read pretty easily.

Every tried teaching someone? It takes time, and there is a lot more to reading than sounding out the words.

Which could be an entertaining plot point: the locals think 'reading' means understanding mere paragraphs of meaning, while the PC's can actually read.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Figleaf23

It takes hardly anything to teach someone to read. A few texts and someone who know what the letters sound like can teach someone to read pretty easily.

Particularly in a language with less complex and poorly adapated to its alphabet than English.

I'd also point out that the primary reason a lot of people learn to read is religious. If you are going to make reading at all rare, you absolutely must completely stamp out the religions of the book. Given that people cling to religions particularly hard in the wake of catastrophy, I don't see any plausible way you can do that and retain any pre-apocalypse knowledge at all.

[Ulzgoroth]

We've got all this metal and all these domesticated species around. Even if we lost too much ground for, say, electricity to be of much use to us, our agriculture has some big edges that aren't going to go away easily and we've got all the scrap iron you can eat.

Originally Posted by Ji ji

In 20xx, a devastating pandemy strikes humanity. It can be a failed experiment of bacteriological world or anything you like. The disease kills everybody is infected by it. Everybody but 4 years (or less) old.
We can imagine that only a few of older survives to first months. However, there are enormous stocks of food long lasting in warehouses and shops, buildings to protect themselves (in a world with few or no predators, like USA or western Europe), cloth to cover themselves and so on, and somebody manages to survive. So, let's imagine that, over 1% of population (4 years old), only 0.1% survives to reproductive age.
70.000 kids became men and women.

Among these survivors, nobody can read. Moreover, there is a very low density. They will develop creol languages. They lack technological knowledge at all. They cannot read, ignore writing basis - for instance, phonetic value of letters - and so books are written, to them, in an unattainable code and in a stranger language, that is likely to be never discovered.
After two generations, stories about previous world are already far legends and myths. After six generations, they are a new simple religion. With the total loss of technological skills and the total impossibility to decifrate the least bit of information, they're returned to TL 0-1.
A stone age society in a world of wonders, remains of what is called "the god's era" or so on.

Yeah, I was thinking on the same lines. The only relatively plausible way to actually put humans back to the stone age would be to really annihilate our accumulated knowledge, including the brains that house it. People may not have all that much in mere biological memory, but they know enough to blow past TL1 without even trying unless you've somehow scrubbed every material trace of the old world away.

...However, I think you'd be pretty likely to exterminate the species there. 70 milion 4-year-olds worldwide have to survive to adulthood on their own and then manage to form breeding populations?

[jason taylor]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

We've got all this metal and all these domesticated species around. Even if we lost too much ground for, say, electricity to be of much use to us, our agriculture has some big edges that aren't going to go away easily and we've got all the scrap iron you can eat.

Yeah, I was thinking on the same lines. The only relatively plausible way to actually put humans back to the stone age would be to really annihilate our accumulated knowledge, including the brains that house it. People may not have all that much in mere biological memory, but they know enough to blow past TL1 without even trying unless you've somehow scrubbed every material trace of the old world away.

...However, I think you'd be pretty likely to exterminate the species there. 70 milion 4-year-olds worldwide have to survive to adulthood on their own and then manage to form breeding populations?

If someone can posit a catastrophe that kills everyone over four yet leaves seventy million four-year olds alive they can also arrange a way for them to survive.

[Yorunkun]

Allright, thanks for all the fascinating replies so far. This is very valuable to me.

I’m left with the impression that a natural disaster alone would not suffice to put mankind under in quite the way I want – it wouldn’t kill enough people and the retention and recovery of “lost” knowledg, esp. scientific concepts would be too swift for civilization to truly perish and an agrarian society to take shape. And I don’t want a weird coincidence of two events, or cascading failure, I think society is too resilient to not deal with it. No, I guess the only way we can plausibly do ourselves in is we do ourselves in. So consider this:

What if today’s global financial elite, that network of the super-wealthy and its bought henchmen, figured out that the worst predictions about Global Warming were actually coming true and that the only way left to halfway stop it was to drastically reduce the human population by 99%, right now. A managed collapse instead of impending global extinction, but managed of course according to the interests of those in power, The Rich. Yes, it’s pulpy and crass, but is it feasible?

Assume the Rich take preparations and unleash a genetically engineered swine-flu variant and actively attempts to drive the world into chaos and self-destruction. And once the dust settles, they round up the survivors and introduce a neo-primitivist tribal lifestyle, the people once again controlled through religion, working the land (organically) for their lords.

Reading is forbidden, books are to be burnt for fuel. Using old technology is forbidden, but there are few items left to be found anyway, and energy sources to work machines would be forbidden for fear of Global Warming and soon most people wouldn't even know what to do with those things anyway.

It’s back-to-the-roots fascism, like Ancient Rome, except run by evil capitalist holdouts from the present.

Would that work?

[Ulzgoroth]

Originally Posted by ericthered

Which could be an entertaining plot point: the locals think 'reading' means understanding mere paragraphs of meaning, while the PC's can actually read.

Uh. What's the difference?

Originally Posted by Yorunkun

Assume the Rich take preparations and unleash a genetically engineered swine-flu variant and actively attempts to drive the world into chaos and self-destruction. And once the dust settles, they round up the survivors and introduce a neo-primitivist tribal lifestyle, the people once again controlled through religion, working the land (organically) for their lords.

Reading is forbidden, books are to be burnt for fuel. Using old technology is forbidden, but there are few items left to be found anyway, and energy sources to work machines would be forbidden for fear of Global Warming and soon most people wouldn't even know what to do with those things anyway.

It’s back-to-the-roots fascism, like Ancient Rome, except run by evil capitalist holdouts from the present.

Would that work?

Who is providing the muscle, and are these would-be neo-Roman nobles really willing to knock themselves down to the same level as everyone else?

So, first off there's the ludicrous plot. That's of course vanishingly unlikely to come together, let alone succeed, like all absurd super-villain plots. But suppose we handwave past that, and have the world fall.

Then there's the step where the 1% and their minions are trying to take control of the world and lock down the survivors for de-education, and secure the more obvious caches of old technology. This is pretty much hopeless, again. Even if they're using old-tech, they can't possibly have the numbers to round everyone up, worldwide. You'd have free enclaves recovering to higher technology levels, then likely coming back for blood. Maybe if you make the plague not 99% fatal, but 100% fatal unless the 1% give you antiserum, you could get everyone under their thumbs.

Then there's the part where you've got three groups in your society. There are the new-minted peasants. They know too much, but you're oppressing them and you've taken all their materials away so maybe they're controllable until generational time makes them ignorant. There are the new oligarchs, who know too much and are almost certainly not going to keep to the prohibitions, so don't count on them to forget...but they're on top of the world, so maybe they'll refrain from breaking it. And then there's the people who actually made it happen. The muscle, if nothing else, but also anyone else who managed to be deemed too valuable to turn into peasants. (The gunmen get that automatically, on account that they'll certainly shoot their bosses before they'll enslave themselves.) How do you control them, and their descendants?