The new survivalism

Rod, That doesn't mean Apocalypse Pretty Soon, but it does mean that we should be thinking about new and more sustainable ways of living at every level.

This is exactly true. I'm blown away by guys like Mr. Marcom in the article, buying old silver coins to use as currency - huh? Are we investing or surviving here? If you want something to trade other people with during a collapse, try seeds, well sucker rods, medical supplies, guns, ammo, bowsaws, fuel, matches. A lot of good gold will do you. I remember reading how in Stalingrad during the war you could trade a dozen fur coats or serious gold bullion for a single loaf of bread or some eggs. I've never understood the gold hoarders, because if times get rough you could make a killing trading for gold with your hard goods.

buying G.P.S. units, a satellite telephone - again, huh? For what? To call in an SOS? Like anyone is going to care about some loner in the hills dying of something when a million people are rioting in the city?

a hydroponic kit - another big myth, that people can just change their diet and lifestyle overnight. There are documented cases of people starving to death (especially young people) when their diet is changed suddenly. I've read cases of survivalist nuts who try and live on their supplies for just for a few weeks as a test, and end up in the hospital, seriously sick. Not to mention the water problems, and the diseases that would spread.

No, it will be people like the Mormons, who are already eating the food they store (and most importantly have large social networks of families, some farmers) who have the hard times figured out. But poor guys like Marcom would do much, much better merely staying on their own known turf, or even move to a small rural town if they are truly worried (I agree that water would be a serious problem in larger cities, and difficult to solve). But running off alone in the woods is the very last thing somebody should do who expects collapse. That's somebody who has never done it for any length of time.

...make real progress writing my "Benedict Option" book!

Your timing is impeccable; remember 81%? I think this would really sell if given the right title subheading.

I just updated the initial posting with more information about Barton Biggs. Apparently he's a far more serious figure than one might have expected. His information reminds me of various things I've read and heard from New York sources recently that the higher up in the financial industry you go today, the more worried people are about the precariousness of the financial situation because they're the ones who have the most information about its actual condition.

Let's keep history in mind - what put the cramps on the Germans so they got so nasty in the first place?

Wikiedia tells us that German currency abandoned the link between the PapierMark and gold due to the outbreak of the First World War. In 1924 following the armistice, the Dawes Plan allowed for the Allies to attempt to collect from Germany the $26 billion in war reparations debt owed (a portion of which they themselves had borrowed on credit from the US). After five years the the German gross national product still could not support the in excess of one billion dollars deficit payments, their currency deflated dramatically and had to be twice reissued under new names, and then they defaulted. The French and British armies occupied the German Ruhr the industrial heartland of the coal and steel industries. The debt was renegotiated as the Young Plan in 1929 at one quarter the original level. Between agreement and adoption of the plan came the Wall Street Crash of 1929. The American Banking system canceled the credits that made possible the Young Plan. Moreover, the downfall of imports and exports affected the rest of the world. By 1933, almost two-thirds of world trade had vanished.

West Germany finally paid off the principal in 1980. Ninety years later, the reunified German government has resumed payments of the interest to the Bank for International Settlements.

Is the true dimensions of the terrible pall that the spectre of national indebtedness casts now dawning on folks...?

Try imagining the mercenaries of the UAE's sovereign wealth fund occupying the Texas oilfields, or Chinese cadres of financial analysts occupying the Wall Street branches of the banks the own, or your great grandchildren still paying the interest on reparations to Iraqis...?!!

Right reason and justice have a nasty habit of being real and true, and ineluctably ABSOLUTE as history bears witness...

Since it is impossible to make homemade insulin or even stockpile it as it goes bad after one month in the refrigerator, I'll just have to get into the warlord business.

I read Bigg's first chapter, thanks for posting it. I found it interesting, and realy enjoyed the "contra-contrarian" quip.

One thing that really sunk home: the section Ignore the Opinion of Experts: They’re Not Reliable Forecasters.

I had a frightening experience the other day watching a clip about peak oil with an expert sitting on the panel. I thought I was learning something, and then this "expert" said a bunch of things about something I've worked with personally for over a decade that was completely false. This wasn't just an error in judgement, but rather absolute fiction, something anyone with even basic experience would laugh at. His entire thesis was based on this falsehood. I was like: how many things have I heard that I don't know much about, yet swallowed whole?

But regardless of how "expert" experts are, a book worth reading is about the futility of using experts today is The Black Swan by Taleb. He explains how modern activities are not linear like nature is (2,4,6,8) but rather exponential (2.4,8,16). We are easily fooled by randomness because humans have evolved in a world driven by nicely linear bell curves, but now live in a man-made exponential world that defies our expectations. Example: the tallest man in the world isn't barely double the average (height follows a bell curve), but the richest man in the world is tens of thousands of times richer than the average (exponential). This creates wild crazy events that no expert can predict, even if he knows everything there is to know.

"Seriously, if we had a complete cizilizational collapse, some form of order is going to be restored pretty quickly. Keep enough food, water, batteries, and other essentials in your house to get by for 2-3 weeks."

And figure on sealing up the place and staying indoors for 2-3 days or until after the next heavy rain, whichever comes sooner, to avoid any fallout.

Why, sometimes when one reads this blog and some of the comments, one thinks that a part of you and some of your fans wants the eschaton to come, and for all the bad people and things in current society to be smote with a terrible swift sword...

The eschaton? Not quite. But the chickens coming home to roost, possibly. It all depends on whether you think we've been living virtuous, temperate lives or not. If not, then there will be consequences, not just for ourselves but our communities.

Yeah, I'm with Rich. If the urban thugs don't get to you first, you can be sure the military (or paramilitary groups) will. In Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven's apocalyptic Lucifer's Hammer, the military rounded up survivalists and took their supplies and weapons. That book actually has some pretty realistic scenarios (including the deaths of those stuck without insulin.)

In Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven's apocalyptic Lucifer's Hammer, the military rounded up survivalists and took their supplies and weapons. That book actually has some pretty realistic scenarios (including the deaths of those stuck without insulin.)

In Lucifer's Hammer, what enables the Stronghold (where the protagonists/heroes live) to maintain a semblance of civilization is organization, coupled with decent & competent leadership. Yes, you have a community with plenty of farmers & farmland, and people who know how to survive the fall of civilization. But you also have leaders organizing these people to work for the common good. E.g., by clearing fields to create new farmland; salvaging canned goods, etc., from abandoned retailers; preventing hoarding of food & essential supplies; guarding the border of their territory; enforcing justice; and (in the end) organizing armies to defeat their enemies.

I heard of a family that built and stocked an extensive pantry of non-perishables "just in case." The father lost his job and the family fell on hard times. The family, which wasn't exactly small, lived on the stockpiled foodstuffs and supplies for quite some time.

Call me naive, but I don't see the current financial crisis yielding the fall of civilization. Another Depression at worst, but even the Depression didn't destroy the Republic.

That being said, food stockpiles, etc., could still prove useful in a depression.

Yeah, in the same vein I just saw Ron Paul on YouTube, I guess he was testifying before Congress, and he basically said the same thing, ie, "This is going to end in a bad way."
We are overextended, and a correction needs to take place. Like Paul says, we can't keep doing what we've been doing because we cannot afford to do so. Something has got to give.

In any case, becoming more independent would be a good thing for each and every American.

Paul says that our entire government philosophy is screwed up, and I tend to agree with him. We can no longer afford to police the world as well as take care of every American from cradle to grave.

I certainly hope that we don't have another Depression, but in any case things are certainly going to get tight...hopefully we will weather it and come out leaner and meaner.

you don't need a "fall of civilization" to have enough disorder to make you dead.

True. Falls of civilization don't happen everyday, but civil disorder can occur from time to time - e.g., from a natural disaster, or a depression.

As for 1930s Europe...if I'd been a European who foresaw what was coming, I wouldn't have bothered holing up somewhere with a decade's worth of survival goods. I would've immigrated.

For me, the greatest personal lesson learned on and from 9/11 was how psychologically unprepared individuals are to contemplate the unthinkable. If a certain potential event or set of events is beyond one's capacity to contemplate, one won't contemplate it. I stood there on the Brooklyn Bridge watching those towers burn, denying to myself and out loud to someone else that they would fall.

It's easy to make fun of survivalist types as paranoid nuts. Down the road from where I grew up lived a distant relative who hated our family, and who apparently hated everybody. He was hermit-like, and amassed automatic weapons in preparation for the race war that would end civilization. We all thought he was a kook, because, well, he was a kook, and a nasty man.

But not everyone who foresees calamity ahead is like this guy, not by a long shot. Before lunch today, al Qaeda could set off a small nuclear device in Washington, DC, decapitating the US Government. The country would be under martial law by sundown. World stock markets would have collapsed. The global economy would almost certainly enter a great depression. And our people, most of whom live in cities, with all that entails for a loss of agricultural and other practical skills necessary to survival -- which most Americans had during the Great Depression, living as they did in rural areas and in small towns -- would be left figuring out what to do. And that would be just the beginning of the trouble.

Is this likely to happen? No, of course not, at least not in the short run (but would you be willing to bet money on it not happening in DC or NYC over the next 50 years?). But it absolutely is not unthinkable. We don't think about it in large part because if we take it seriously as a potentiality, that would require us to make some sort of provision for how we would live. Spend five minutes thinking seriously about what you would do under a condition of martial law and economic collapse, with resulting food shortages and possible civil unrest. Where would you go to be safer, and to feed your family? How would you do it?

It doesn't take long with this kind of exercise to make one realize how precarious our position is.

On Rod's other point - would this Benedict Option book look at the foundation of new, traditional, self-sustaining, Benedictine monasteries (such as Clear Creek) and the communities that have grown up around them?

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Wow, miracles DO happen! Godisaheretic actually said something intelligent and coherent.

It IS worth wondering how Kunstler thinks he's going to manage in upstate New York once all the millions of people fleeing societal collapse reach his doorstep, and want to steal the food and provisions he's been presciently storing.

I'm not woried about that in the least, because I don't see any such collapse happening. But if I were Kunstler, I'd be collecting a huge stash of weapons.

thanks, astorian... ;-) ...
I sure hope you're right about no such collapse... though...
if it comes to the need for a "huge stash of weapons"...
just think...
that would probably mean a catastrophic collapse...
and after that chaos...
there would be little left to counter the spread of any Myths...
so...
your personal favorite Myths would most likely find a ready audience...
Myths most likely would do much better in civilizational collapse than in the continuing increase of modern societies...
anyway...
have a nice day!

faith hope love joy peace to all...
Forgive God...