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Her Wokedness, Sister Artemis's avatar

I'm kinda tired, and mostly lurking, but I did want to say how nice it was, in the interview, to hear Hayes and Solnit just toss the term "mutual aid" back and forth a few times like it's something people say every day. They don't, but I do think about it a lot, and have ever since reading Kropotkin's Mutual Aid about a zillion years ago. That book changed the way I looked at mammals and other animals, and groups of us all, and what "success" means in the survival of a species.

Listening to the interview, and having read the first couple of chapters of Solnit's book, it's all right there: cooperation being the go-to, the auto-pilot reaction of so many because it fucking makes sense, and the other knee jerk reaction of fear and suspicion, of fucking things up because you go overboard in your anxiety about what might happen.

It's not that terrible things never happen. They do, sometimes cruel, sometimes just slimy, often both. But I think, more often than not, people act out of mutual aid. It would be nice to harness that wonderful energy more often.

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Jeanne B's avatar

Nora Roberts' Chronicles of the One series starts with a plague that kills of much of the world population as well as bringing magic into the world; it shows different reactions from cooperative groups and government as well as being a fun read - not too romancy

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