Galt's Gulch and the post-apocalypse

This has been bothering me a bit for quite some time.

One part of my story involves a bad future where an apocalypse resulted in the end of the world as we know it.

In this setting, a group of brilliant "self-made" geniuses retreated to secluded region of the continental United States. Using their advanced technology they managed to brave the disaster that shattered the world.

But several years later, survivors of the apocalypse began to rebuild although with great difficulty.

Although the survivors had to rely on salvaged knowledge and equipment, they soon unknowingly surround the Gulch from all sides.

Now the problem is that I don't know how to write the interactions between the Gulch and the other survivors. All I have so far is that a Posthumous Character in this story is a defector from the Gulch.

edited 7th Jul '14 10:43:52 PM by Worlder

I'd start with the question of how they manage to maintain their tech and their lifestyle. There's a lot of grunt work we're not aware of that goes into our modern day living, and in an apocalyptic world the fact that they need to be able to get food from somewhere would smack the Gulch people in the face. Well, it'd smack everyone in the face, but it would seem like it'd smack the gulch people even harder.

Factory robots and hydroponics?

Grunt work is not an issue. Nobody in Galt's Gulch was opposed to doing grunt work.

The real issue is that maintaining that kind of tech level simply isn't possible without a population of a certain size. There aren't enough people to be experts in all of the fields that you need experts in. You're massively on the wrong side of economy of scale. You don't have access to all of the natural resources you need, since advanced tech requires resources from a large number of places around the world.

This is, in large part, why technology took as long as it did to advance to the place it is today. Sure, people knew that you *could* build steam engines in the middle ages, but until you have enough industry to make building one worth the effort why bother?

EDIT: Your setup is actually kind of a smaller scale version of the first book in The Foundation Trilogy.

edited 10th Jul '14 2:58:26 PM by Bloodsquirrel

My biggest question was how were a bunch of isolationists in... what I think was a desert were going to get enough food to feed themselves. Presumably there were farmers, but you need space to grow food and the proper environment to grow specific foods.

Well, if the Gulch people are smart enough to foresee the apocalypse, we can also make them smart enough to scale back their technology dependence to the level that they can actually sustain for a decade or so with the people they have. There might be some whining that particularly delicate or resource-intensive tech is mothballed until things get better, but for the most part, the part about getting to live is a good incentive.

As for their relations with the scattered survivors, that depends on who is now in charge. Is it someone with the social intelligence to figure out that establishing trade and rebuilding the land is a good idea? Or an emotionally stunted technocrat who sneers at the idea of allowing the unwashed masses access to Gulch technology?

Depending on how closely your Gulch residents follow their namesakes, "emotionally stunted technocrat who sneers at the idea of allowing the unwashed masses access to Gulch technology? " I'd say the answer is "probably the latter". Remember, these are the people who essentially caused the apocalypse because they knew that they could survive it.

edited 16th Jul '14 9:05:34 PM by Madrugada

You can probably handwave the infrastructure problem by finding something the Gulch people couldn't sustain on the number of people/available resources and prominently mentioning that as a problem, while anything else they absolutely have to have for the purposes of the story exists unless your beta readers revolt.

Should the ultimate fate of the Gulch be dissolution at the unified hands of the other survivors?

Or should it be wiped out by its own follies?

Either way the technology and knowledge preserved by the Gulch will fall on to one person, my protagonist, while the Gulch itself is pretty much gone.

edited 20th Jul '14 4:07:22 PM by Worlder

Follies, but that's just me and my somewhat cruel love of watching Objectivists get their comeuppance

Own follies, possibly exacerbated by a fear that the surrounding scavengers are about to attack.

This make me think of Jeremiah.

edited 20th Jul '14 11:31:32 PM by Ekuran

Must resist Bio Shock joke. So how Objectivist is this Gulch? Because if they are I can't see this place lasting for a generation.

2/3 adhere to dogma, 1/3 is pragmatic.

Also, NCR vs Rapture. Just a thought.

edited 21st Jul '14 8:54:47 AM by Worlder

Any properly Objectivist commune would burn itself out within a decade. It's a ludicrously destructive and pointless philosophy.

And the NCR would win based on sheer numbers alone. Or they'd just sink the whole damn city.

I've yet to see any good reason to think that not based in absurd strawmen of objectivism.

@Bloodsquirrel

Well how should an Objectivist enclave behave in a world that got kicked back to the 17th century?

Also Atlas Shrugged never seemed to touch on the ability of Galt's Gulch to defend itself. But I'm sure if Ayn Rand knew about drone warfare, the Gulch would be defended by hundreds of UA Vs and sentry guns.

edited 22nd Jul '14 11:09:59 AM by Worlder

...yes it did. They had a shield that was designed to hide the entire gulch. Defense through secrecy was a major plot point. They didn't have strong military defenses because none of them wanted to fight a war, and they didn't have the numbers or the resources to fight an army even if they did.

And while the super-science was a component of the book, it wasn't ever relevant to the philosophy itself. They've had behaved the exact same way they did in the book, only without the magical engines that ran on Earth's magnetic field. With 17th century tech, they'd have all just reverted back to farming.

The primary problem with having an objectivist commune for an extended period of time is that objectivism is very much against using force or indoctrination to perpetuate itself. The gulch had no government to speak of, which only worked because it was full of people who were hand-picked to fit in. Realistically, you'd have 1-2 generations of peace and quiet before the lack of any central power allows people who drift away from objectivism's view against using force to violently take over.

Stepping away from Ayn Rand-ism a bit, I'd just apply human folly to everything. The adherence to dogma overcoming the sense of pragmatism, like what you have with real-world religions and organizations over time.

I'd be more interested in how long after the apocalypse this story takes place - if the protagonist is of the third generation or so, the gulch could easily have fallen to internal strife, but remain physically in places. (And I would have converted grunt work machines to combat this threat, myself, such that there basically aren't any left.)

On the other hand, if the protagonist is a survivor of the gulch survivors, and it's a few generations down the line, there could be nothing left of the original gulch (and no one who remembers what exactly happened).

Also - a 'shield' wouldn't be necessary, if the gulch is surrounded by a natural wasteland even before the apocalypse. Does anyone recall those plans for a long-term nuclear dump in the US? One idea was to make the area around the dump as creepy as possible, with concrete warning pillars that don't need translation or such. Defense through secrecy is nowhere near as effective as an impossible terrain, I think.

@Bloodsquirrel

So you are saying the Gulch is unfit survive in the type of savage future usually found in the Mad Max movies or the Fallout games?

A future where strong leadership is as important as necessities such as food, water, and shelter.

My protagonist is an android and the sole heir of the technological knowledge of the Gulch, but in the beginning she doesn't even know that.

edited 22nd Jul '14 1:23:13 PM by Worlder

The problem isn't external threats. The Gulch's residents were characterized as being very determined individuals, and didn't have problems working together when they needed to. They'd do just fine as long as they were facing threats that were reasonably within their resources to handle.

The problem is that you're not going to get carbon copies of those individuals every generation down the line. Galt's Gulch relies too much on its members being individually principled and exceptional to work as a long-term society. Societies usually use things like religion, natoinalism, or idolization of their leaders to remain politically stable, but objectivism is against all of those things. Existing political orders tend to be interested enough in perpetuating their power to proactively suppress dissident elements. That would be an anathema to Galt's Gulch.

If you're looking to write the Gulch's downfall, you're best off having it work on three levels:

On the first, they're reliant on technology that was taken with them before the apocalypse and that they can't replace. Some of it is breaking down, and some of it just can't support many more people than the Gulch originally had. This gives you a catalyst for internal strife.

On the second, members of the Gulch aren't living up to their ideals. Some people are jealous of those who are doing better. There's crime, but nobody likes the idea of a police force. Some people want the benefits that their grandparents reaped but don't have their work effort. One guy just straight up wants power, and is charming and manipulative enough to exploit people around him. This gives you a moral and ideological conflict, and it's a lot more tragic to have a society fall because of internal flaws than because of things completely outside their control. There''s internal fighting, which weakens them enough for the third factor.

On the third, outside forces want the Gulch. They don't have technology, but they've got numbers and a conqueror mentality that makes them willing to take substantial casualties to expand. This gives you the actual agent of their fall, which is important because societies never completely destroy themselves on their own. They can go to crap, but at the end of the day few people are suicidal enough to completely wipe themselves out.

edited 22nd Jul '14 2:35:37 PM by Bloodsquirrel

Hmm, I think I now know what would be the MacGuffin of my story, the location of the Gulch.

The Gulch has a become a mythical location like Shambhala or El Dorado. Whoever can find the Gulch and access the knowledge within can rebuild the shattered world in his or her image.

edited 22nd Jul '14 3:01:07 PM by Worlder

What form does 'Keeper of the Gulch Codex' take in the protagonist, Worlder? For that matter, why would an android leave a safe location?

There's at least one more (and I'm not saying that they're bad examples or unrealistic at all - I thought of something and want to keep the discussion going): the tendency of the next generation to think that the previous generation is full of it. Let's say that...

A) the machines all work, because someone had the good sense to leave behind all the Owners' Manuals anyone could ever need and there's no huge jump in tech that an older generation can't keep up with.

B) The ideals are solid, at least to the extent that everyone is aware that they're all in it together. (This raises another question, actually - is their population at a high enough level where they can afford to have forced exile as a near-capital punishment?) Following from there, there's also a strong belief in Reading The Fine Manuals and not dying today.

C) The defenses work (the passive ones work so well that the outsiders have no idea the Gulch even has weapons), and no one approaches the Gulch. The outsiders are certainly aware of it, perhaps as a real location instead of just a legend, but day-to-day survival just makes mounting expeditions seem like a waste of precious resources.

In short, a best-case scenario for a generation or two. So, with a functioning society that's not looking to die in the foreseeable future, no one should want to leave and everything should keep running like clockwork.

That's where the teens come in. They're getting bored and want to see something new - travel the world, and all. There's something beyond the shield or barrier or quantum particle field (etc.), and the old folks are dumb for not seeking them! (You've all either heard this before, or are in the process of thinking it yourself. Be honest.)

The kids all attempt to leave for some reason that the original creators of B) simply didn't foresee, and take with them the labor force that A) requires, eventually rendering C) unnecessary or causing it (either by causing the Gulch's downfall, or by leading outsiders back).

edited 26th Jul '14 7:43:11 PM by DeusDenuo

Reading what people have already written, a few thoughts.

First of all, the society should collapse on its own. This is partly because I, like some others in the thread, hate Objectivism, but it's also because, at the end of the day, an objective (har har) reading of Rand's philosophy reveals that the whole concept is unsustainable.

Others have touched on the fact that even if the Gulch survives for a few generations, there's no guarantee that any of the descendents will be as capable as the founders. That's true, but I'd also question how sane and/or fit the founders were in the first place. We're talking about a group of people, after all, who engineered the apocalypse in order to perpetuate their ability to gloat about "I've got mine". In short, you've already got a group of deeply dysfunctional people here. They might be able to work together in the short term, but a falling out among the founders is hardly an impossibility—I'd be stunned if it didn't happen at some point. There's also a distinct possibility of an individual, or group of individuals attempting a coup d'etat, because when you assemble some of the smartest, but most fundamentally selfish people in the world, there's going to be at least one who wants to give orders to the rest. The risk of this gets worse and worse of course, the further down the line we go.

The society is also likely to stagnate intellectually, morally, philosophically, and even technologically. However much Rand might have claimed to be against indoctrination, you can't build a society on an ideology and not expect the elders to try ramming that ideology into their successors. Since the ideology in question is the exaltation of the individual and the demonization of the state, you're likely to get people who are highly loyal to the concept of the Gulch, but who may not give a damn about their flesh-and-blood neighbours. This means that during any crisis, they aren't liable to help each other the way they should. You are likely to see people hoarding their secrets, and refusing to share any new discoveries they have made, or sharing them only with their closest confederates, which means the tech level of the Gulch might on average be more advanced than that of the outside world, but in practise is going to be quite uneven. The military will be a joke too—either composed of a few oligarchs' retainers, forced into it my their masters, or non-existent (the state can't use conscription, after all). Throw in the corruption that's going to run rampant (see the Guilded Age) and an increasing unwillingness by anybody to do grunt work (which is going to happen in a society based around extreme individualism and the notion that special snowflakes deserve special treatment), and the whole structure is ready to come down. It's going to be clannish, crooked, and reactionary, and that's without even getting into the inevitable power struggles I touched on in my first paragraph.

Finally, the outside world is going to exterminate the Gulch when they find it. They'll have good reason to as well. A society that was erected around the concept of letting the rest of the world hang itself (or worse yet encouraging them do so) so long as its residents get ahead, is one that isn't going to make any friends. As soon as the location comes out, the surrounding nation-states, empires, and barbarian hordes are going to march in and raze it to the ground, due to a not incomprehensible mix of moral outrage, greed, and revenge. The Gulch, with its internal divisions, poor and/or undemocratic (depending on if an internal coup has happened or not) leadership, and ineffective military will fall pretty quickly.