Post-Apocalypse: Back to the Stone Age

[DCB]

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.

How about a toxic meme? In essence, the neurological patterns involved in comprehending this idea interact badly with certain hard-wired parts of the brain, leading to negative outcomes; for example, a feedback loop in the language wiring that leads to increasingly worse seizures.

Make the idea simple enough that it can fit on billboards, but complex enough that it requires reading rather than just pictures. The result is that everyone who can read - or who later learns to read any of the old languages - dies. That should offer long-term suppression of old knowledge, while still allowing enough of the support structure to survive (blind or illiterate adults) to remove worries about anyone surviving the transition period.

This would have lesser effects in less-developed parts of the world, but there are options for that (e.g., set it far enough in the future that literacy is near-universal; make it a deliberate attack that comes after a curable-but-expensive disease attack; have it transmitted by sound as well so only the deaf and illiterate survive; etc.).

Without this kind of ongoing suppression, though, it seems likely that people (a) with knowledge of what reading is, (b) surrounded by useful knowledge in written form, and (c) able to find books/tapes/etc. meant to bootstrap the learning-to-read process among that knowledge would learn to read that knowledge sooner or later.


A second alternative is to have people actively attempt to eradicate technology, perhaps due to blaming it for a terrible disaster (e.g., nuclear war); that's the setup for "A Canticle for Leibowitz".