Cormack McCarthy, with his usual apocalyptic visions and sometimes gratuitous lessons from unlikely characters gave a version of Plan B in “The Road.” The setting is the distant aftermath from some unspecified global disaster (possibly nuclear war). All but the most basic human structures failed. The world is still burning. Few individuals have ever seen a child. Work is salvaging what remains and hiding from bad people. Only a few good people remain. Most are organized into roving bands of cannibals.
The book is about what remains after the crash of human structures. The love of a father for his child. The child ‘who carries the fire’. The quest they take to survive, to find refuge, to nurture the fire. Then there are the bad people. The bond of love and the goal seem the only difference between good and bad.
McCarthy seldom spells out his lesson, but a lesson take might be taken is that, in the contact of our human capabilities, only our complex structures such as great power nation states could have produced such a global disaste. From chaos theory, perhaps disasters are inevitable. Again from chaos theory, perhaps efforts made to protect ‘Plan A’ simply increase the complexity of our structures, prolongs its existance and end in disasters of much greater magnitudes. (NB; we are protecting Plan A big time) (NB: there is no Plan B. Plan A preempts alternatives and attracts adequate defenders) The only true change possible is as a response to an apocalypse. Plan B is true change, and disaster is its pre-requisite
Plan B is the aftermath, and there always is an aftermath—some better than others. Plan B might be recognition that there is nothing that we own or possess that is truly ours except the thing that calls itself ‘I’; the self, the soul, the sprit or however it might be known. It is our only wealth, and that thing desires only our experience good or bad (and we will have bad experiences). Our safety is recognition that there is no refuge, no insurance, against threat. **** happens! Make the best of it, and recognize that all experience nurtures that which we call I., which our only possession, our only worth. The only way we can diminish our worth, or kill the thing that says I is to accept somebody’s else’s experience as if it were our own (that maybe what TV and many mass social pheonm are about). Investment in protection only guarantees delayed but more apocalyptic results. Mass media seem little more than supports or Plan A—ways to seduce individuals into accepting the experience of others as their own; ways of marginalizing our own experience to ourselves; ways to kill that which says I.
Simple minimally protected structures are robust and our best guarantees that we live our own experiences what ever they might be and in doing so we will remain of value to ourselves and to those around us. One individual with enough skills and equipment to survive is about as simple as human structures get. That is a thing to experience, and if we do, our I’s will be as large and rich as they might be.
Just live our own lives and have our own experiences. That’s Blan B I’m just back from a 7 day solo canoe trip. My experience and mine alone: My I is busting at the seams, my nation state is marginal, the economy meaningless. I’m happy. My wife is happy I’m back. I wonder why?