Four Horsemen
In my teens, I read a lot of books from a much mocked series about a fictional planet named Gor. Ninety-nine percent of the series was some BDSM fantasy about men being naturally dominant, women being naturally submissive and eager to be sex slaves and similar blatant over the top versions of the subtler strangling themes of heteronormative culture seemingly the world over.
I remember almost none of it. After moving away from my home town, thus escaping the worst of this baggage in my own life, I never read another book in this series.
Exactly one book in the series really stayed with me. Tarl, the main character, finds himself among four tribes.
His initial contact with them is inadvertently stumbling across four horsemen, one from each tribe. They are incredibly unhappy to see him.
Much, much later in the story he finally realizes this was a meeting of "four kings." It takes a long time in part because all of the tribes have a nominal figurehead king, the elderly father of the actual king.
They are warlike, mobile cultures. Their actual king must be a competent General, still able-bodied enough to lead them in battle.
The elder king is a defacto assassination target for outsiders to openly see as the real power while only locals actually know who holds power.
The elder kings get fancy regalia to display so you can easily spot them. The real kings live more humbly.
Gor is a secret planet in our solar system on the opposite side of the Sun but otherwise in our exact path of orbit that humans are unaware of. Humans from Earth are periodically kidnapped by some giant grasshopper-like alien species to populate Gor for reasons I no longer recall.
One of the kings has in his possession a golden egg from this alien species for they have been tasked with keeping it safe for some reason.
The golden egg is, of course, something like an ostrich egg painted gold and openly displayed among the regalia of the figurehead king. The real egg is some nondescript leathery lump being kicked around casually and treated like a footstool or something.
I don't have a point, really. I have the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse on my mind and I'm wondering what might be the opposite of THAT.
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse vary some but are generally four large disasters that tend to go hand in hand, typically including famine, war and death. One foments the others and it tends to be a package deal. War leads to famine, famine keeps war alive and round and round we go.
Once you pull some thread and society comes unraveled, the problems tend to persist. The end of one civil war typically plants the bitter seeds of the next.
How do you uncollapse society? What gives us peace instead of war, food security in place of famine, stability in place of global pandemics?
I don't know. I don't think we even really have this concept. But we need some Pillars of Peace and Prosperity or Four Secret Kings or something to define how people can effectively combat The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and unbreak society.