Politics & Power Quote by David Brin

Brin’s move here is to deny the comfortable fantasy that collapse is mainly about germs, supply chains, or faceless “bad actors.” He starts with bio-terror plagues almost as a decoy: the kind of disaster plot that lets readers treat social breakdown like weather. Then he yanks the camera toward a more intimate culprit - not an apocalypse, but a personality type. The line “waves of selfish violence” frames brutality as contagious too, a second pathogen riding on fear and scarcity.

The bite is in “the kind of male human being,” a deliberately risky, gendered phrasing that’s less about biology than about a culturally rewarded script: grievance, entitlement, and the adolescent allure of being the hero in a kill-or-be-killed movie. “Nurses fantasies” is surgical. It implies these visions aren’t sudden; they’re cultivated, rehearsed, kept warm in private until the world offers permission to act them out. The “glory” he names is performative - status purchased through domination, with “fellow citizens” reduced to props, prey, or an audience.

Context matters: Brin, a science-fiction writer steeped in systems thinking, is arguing that the true stress test of a society isn’t whether it can absorb shocks, but whether it has inoculated itself against romanticized violence. His target is the myth that righteous force restores order. In his telling, that myth is the accelerant. The enemy isn’t catastrophe; it’s the man waiting for catastrophe to validate him.