Subculture of Americans prepares for civilization’s collapse
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/21/us-usa-civilization-collapse-idUSTRE80K0LA20120121
I freely admit that I often talk of the brewing apocalypse and expend thought considering what approaches to take to ameliorate the effects of a societal collapse. However, in my analysis there is so little that can productively be done that it almost makes preparation pointless. Then, of course, there is the whole anarchy effect and anyone ‘smart’ enough to have prepared just becomes a big fat target for those who didn’t prepare and the more aggressively you prepare to defend yourself (meaning loading up on arms and ammo), the bigger and fatter target you become. As such, unless you can some how prepare yourself in a near total vacuum (surely you will tell friends and loved ones, right? You have just ensured that you will have at least 10x more mouths to feed!) your preparations, no matter how elaborate, will be inadequate. Since I personally only have a thin veneer of civilization myself I know how incredibly easy it is to swing into anarchy (note, though, that anarchy is unstable and almost immediately devolves into gangs, dictatorships and/or strong man groups) when civilization collapses. Our culture (unlike, evidently, the Japanese culture, where they patiently waited for help after the tsunami) seems to favor riot responses and dips into anarchy, so unless you have organized yourself to be a large enough, strong enough group to defend yourself from attempts to extract your hard gotten gains, you are just building up a stock pile of resources for someone like me.
Having said all that, I have advocated taking steps to prepare for bad things happening, but doing such preparations in such a way that nothing is wasted in the event that bad things fail to materialize. If you want to be able to survive in the event that the infrastructure collapses, why not act to live off the grid now? Having a huge diesel generator and thousands of gallons of fuel sounds like great insurance against bad times, but do you realize just how difficult it is to start a huge diesel generator without properly functioning batteries? And what happens when the fuel you set aside turns out to have been deteriorating and being eaten by microbes and fungus in the intervening years? During the last great blackout many companies realized that without proper maintenance backup generators are a very expensive and totally useless waste of resources. So, if you want to be able to survive without any infrastructure when the infrastructure collapses, don’t wait, get off the grid now! The same with stored food, start a rotation and work to nearly exclusively eat the oldest portions of your 2 year supply of preserved food, that way, none of your food will be older than 2 years when (if) the collapse comes, not to mention you have worked out which suppliers actually suck and how to prepare interesting meals with those raw materials. Spend the time _now_ to develop the skills and harden your body for the constant back-breaking effort needed to produce enough food to survive on yourself. Realize _now_ that your backyard is not large enough for you to survive, or realize _now_ that a fruit tree doesn’t supply fruit a little bit each week during the year, but all at once over a period of a week or two and learn how to preserve the food for a year or longer.
Living independent of society is very challenging (to put it mildly) and while I expect riots, etc. when (if) our society collapses, I fully expect something to replace it pretty much straight away and without knowing what that is going to be (gangs, local strong man, etc.) you have no idea what is appropriate preparation. So, unless you want to live like old-style hippies off the land in some location where it is just too damn far for the refugees to come after you, why bother with all that effort? It is almost certainly likely to be totally wasted in the event of total societal collapse and if the collapse is local (like with Katrina), help will (eventually) show up and the best preparation is just to have a bunch of batteries (which, of course, you have to use before they go bad) and a week or so worth of food and be done with it.
