(SO glad to see that character used correctly for a change, btw. And yes)

I... was going to make something else the second post. Then again? Something else reminded me of this, so...

This story will take place in two places. One of them is a small vent on a slightly larger, singular volcano. One is not.

Years and years ago, I had the joy of wandering through the great basin, aka the yellowstone supervolcano caldera. It's a bit smaller than the mountain it sits at the foot of, but still has some area despite being pretty puny compared to the other volcanic mountains.

Mostly, but not entirely, I was traveling through the geographic south of this... AZ, NM, some of NV, etc. The southern reaches of this handle someone being a bit midtone-brown a lot better than some other lands, frankly.

Somewhere early in this, I ended up with a mild dehydration headache. So, like a not-complete-idiot, I started cheerfully skipping around, looking for some of my favored tools. I asked... just about everywhere I could find, and I left it fairly open. Sea salt, rehydration salts, et cetera, et cetera. Any way they could get it to me.

None of the crazy white folk of nevada, arizona, or new mexico had ever, ever heard of this.

For those who are new, the first thing one learns about desert survival is a simple fact : water is a poison. If you drink it, you die. What you need is salt - and a complete salt; sodium chloride is not a complete electrolyte profile, whereas your blood plasma is basically barely-dilute seawater.

Water is poison; salt is life. This is one of the two minimal things one would need to know to be a nonsurvivalist in a hot desert climate.

The other, of course, is the "mad dogs and englishmen" quip; it's still true. So, let's review...

- the entire populace in all the major cities of this region lack even the most basic knowledge of living in the area, to the point that they wouldn't even know why one would want these. To the point that asking for completely-standard dry prepackaged medical rehydration powder (sea salt + glucose) in a bloody pharmacy is met with confusion.

- they continue to structure their activity cycle so that the bulk of activity happens in midday, rather than evening-to-mid-morning, in a hot equatorial desert.

- I'm pretty sure they can not find their own water.

Even the slightest and shortest of disruptions would kill the entire populace; I honestly put the survival rate at less than a day for the whole area.

The other tale of a land is the colonial rape of Africa. When the great white people showed up, they built large, concentrated cities directly on the water.

Much of Africa is malaria country. A decent amount of the indigenous populace was living in much-less-densely-populated settlements (concentration=pandemic, even when you don't wallow in your own filth... and the Jews had lower plague rates than the post-roman europeans simply from not wallowing in their own filth)... which were deliberately far, far away from the water.

It's an adaptation that stands alongside sickle-cell anemia in terms of surviving the land.

Sadly, of course, this sometimes continued in the wake of the colonial destruction, meaning it's not just white people dying of their own stupidity now. There are aftereffects.

More to the point, however - how often have you heard some NGO with an appeal that "poor, poor kshwambe {insert stock photo of someone not named kshwambe here} has to walk a loooong ways for water?"

Yeah, let's just drill an open well so their basic survival adaptations are sabotaged by a brand new mosquito hatchery.

Most of the NGO appeals are like this. With few exceptions, the successful branches of humanity were "homeless," i.e., nomadic. The violent branches of... okay, you lost your family status, unlike small insects and soil fungus... are forcibly-settled slave societies. "A new job" is the way of slaves, while ending restrictions on peer-based buying and selling is self-direction. And so on.

As profoundly racist as I am, being a white person from south of Hadrian's wall is not the problem. The cause of this is the master/slave relationship. If some happy white person - any happy white person - had come alone to backpack Africa and decided to camp by the slow-moving water's shore, they would have left within a freaking hour, long before they slowly adjusted their campsite into a small village, and then a city. If the "great cities" of the basin - Phoenix, Vegas, whatever - were founded by someone just wandering, choosing to stay a bit longer where there was a nice view, and so on, people would not schedule their activity cycle for maximum activity in the heat of the day. And so on...

The master-slave relationship is always one of massive loss. In this case, it means that the entire GDP of the USA could probably be wiped out by one bored person, because they don't belong on the land in the lowest of mechanical senses. On a broader scale, it means that your entire economic system, imposed at gunpoint worldwide and based essentially on slavery... is a large economic loss; the middle ages sucked because the serfs could have better spent their time inventing new kinds of wealth.

If all your numeric wealth can be wiped out in truly-trivial fashion simply because it was centrally planned in a system idiotic enough to allow this, do you actually have wealth and power - especially when those two illusions are what created this massive liability and loss in the first place?

More to the point, given the astronomical losses represented, did our 'great masters' come up with this bullshit themselves? Or did some other party find the most suceptible people and proceed to shovel them a pile of horseshit?

European history - by which we mean mediterranean history, because those other white people aren't actually people - suggests it came out of the east, as in "all of a sudden, there were totalitarian kingships in the eastern mediterranean." Arctic and north pacific history suggests south asia, as in "when they came up from south asia 50,000 years ago, we found them simpering, codependent cowards, and thought this was odd."

...but the role of Soissons-Normandy in the robbing of the Templars and the antisemitic riots in south spain right after the recipient's short foray to the border ended... also suggests it came from the east; the policies of Constantius implemented in the lands of Constantine. As well as... everything else that great place has done.

In either case, the world is cheerfully self-destructing. Your total lack of agency is just part of it.