> The lower class/working class/working poor, it's kind of similar to driving in states that see a lot of snow: There's an understanding if you see some poor bastard in the ditch and you can stop to help, you do, because next time it could be you. Liking each other does factor into how much effort they'll put into one another, and it's definitely possible to blow all your goodwill, but generally they assume there's a shared understanding that the shit stick is always going around, everybody's going to catch it, and everybody might need some help.
This kind of thing is also found in dangerous professions like ocean fishing. When someone needs help, providing that help is obligatory. Misfortune (and in the case of fishing, raw physical location) is too unpredictable for help to be allocated by any other means.
It's something that has really bothered me about Naomi Novik's recent Scholomance series. A lot of discussion is devoted to how the rigorous nature of the environment (terrible misfortunes strike at random, with about one in four people dying as a result across a four-year stay) means that nobody can afford to provide assistance for free. (Because, in the author's words, if you spend valuable resources helping someone else, then when a misfortune falls on you you may not have enough to survive it.) If you need help and you can't afford it at the moment you need it, you die then and there.
Which of course makes no sense on its own terms -- a creditless system like that is going to raise the mortality rate from 25% to 100% -- and flies in the face of everything we know about human communities in real-life difficult environments.
Novik is a great writer and the books are still entertaining, but this is just a mind-boggling failure of world building.
This kind of thing is also found in dangerous professions like ocean fishing. When someone needs help, providing that help is obligatory. Misfortune (and in the case of fishing, raw physical location) is too unpredictable for help to be allocated by any other means.
It's something that has really bothered me about Naomi Novik's recent Scholomance series. A lot of discussion is devoted to how the rigorous nature of the environment (terrible misfortunes strike at random, with about one in four people dying as a result across a four-year stay) means that nobody can afford to provide assistance for free. (Because, in the author's words, if you spend valuable resources helping someone else, then when a misfortune falls on you you may not have enough to survive it.) If you need help and you can't afford it at the moment you need it, you die then and there.
Which of course makes no sense on its own terms -- a creditless system like that is going to raise the mortality rate from 25% to 100% -- and flies in the face of everything we know about human communities in real-life difficult environments.
Novik is a great writer and the books are still entertaining, but this is just a mind-boggling failure of world building.