The Apocalypse Brings Out the Best In People: Difference between revisions

* Most characters in ''[[Alas, Babylon]]'' are examples of this after nuclear war irrupts between Russia and the USA. The main protagonist, Randy Bragg, goes from a lazy, failed politician living on his family's inheritance, to a strong and capable leader. Also, on a society-wide scale, the nuclear war causes an end to segregation, at least in the area where the main characters live.

* In Alexandr Solzhenitsyn's history ''[[The Gulag Archipelago]]'', a massive compilation of the horrors perpetrated by the Soviet Union upon its own people, there is a small amount of space given to the optimistic attitude that even the personal apocalypse of being arrested and sent to a work camp can still bring out ''good'' in people. Most prisoners relinquished their morals when they entered the camp and instead took up the aim of 'surviving at any price,' even if that price meant stealing the small daily bread allotted to another suffering prisoner. But there were indeed some people who avoided falling into this trap of despair and evil:

'''Solzhenitsyn:''' As soon as you have renounced that aim of 'surviving at any price,' and gone where the calm and simple people go--then imprisonment begins to transform your former character in an astonishing way. To transform it in a direction most unexpected of you. And it would seem that in this situation feelings of malice, the disturbance of being oppressed, aimless hate, irritability, and nervousness ought to multiply. But you yourself do not notice how, with the impalpable flow of time, slavery nurtures in you the offshoots of contradictory feelings.... You are ascending. }}

* Most of the Americans in [[1632|''1632'']] and its sequels are hillbillies from a small town in West Virginia, and had [[Mass Teleportation|the town not been transported back in time]] to Germany during the [[Thirty Years War]], they would probably have remained a group of working class miners and locals from a small town in the early 2000's. Once they [[Fish Out of Water|come to terms]] with their new universe, their future knowledge base and cultural attitudes give them an edge that propells some of them to grand positions on the world stage, and many of them find personal fulfillment in surviving in their new world that they might never have achieved in their original timeline.