The main thing for me is that prepping only work if there is a transitory situation where a buffer can make it easier to navigate.
If we are going full steam ahead towards the collapse of civilization your prepping just delays the inevitable.
Also, if shift hits the fan, communities that are able to band together and work together will more likely do way better.
I don't care how much food and guns you have stockpiled if I can just take them away from you when I need them. If things are dire other will come for your stockpile.
Everyone should do some basic prep, because you are virtually certain in your life to experience "a transitory situation where a buffer can make it easier to navigate" at some point in your life.
This meme where if you prep at all, you must be worried about the zombie apocalypse is harmful. I do quite a bit of basic prep, but I am fully aware that in a total collapse situation it may not matter much.
I prepare because I have been in situations before where a buffer is helpful. I've been without power for 5 days before... and I live in a reasonably dense area, not the rural backwaters, a storm just hit me three different ways and there were repairs blocking the necessary repairs. I've been unable to get to the store for a couple of days. My furnace has gone out in the middle of winter. I've been in a "boil water" advisory. Who knows what else may happen? I don't prepare to live my life unchanged in these scenarios, but because I prepared I was not uncomfortable, and no social resources had to be expended to bail me out.
I particularly think every socially-aware person ought to have basic prep on hand for that last reason. Be ready to live in your own due to some disaster so that the people who really need the help can get it.
Having a couple of weeks of food,a few days of water, backup heating plans, and whatever else you need to survive for a couple of days is not paranoia. It's preparing for things that have happened all the time, and will continue to happen. Don't pass up on cheap, basic, pro-social readiness because you're worried someone will accuse you of being crazy and worrying about the Alien invasion. Be reasonably ready. Be reasonably resilient. Don't be totally dependent on a day-by-day basis on everything going perfectly that day.
That's all. This is cheap, easy, effective, and very likely to be helpful at some point.
yeah that's fine. i have food and water to last me 3 months. it's not the type of stuff I want to eat (classic emergency food that lasts for 30 years) but it's there. i also stock up on food regularly and i have a buffer where i could cook 2-3-4 weeks out of food that has a reasonable shelf life (think flour).
but this is just to absorb small bump. and i think it technically is called an emergency plan, not prepping.
You're a perfect example of what jerf is talking about. "I'll get the dog and you get the kids and we'll meet at Aunt Sue's place" is "an emergency plan." Stockpiling 3 months of rations is more prepping than 90% of Americans are likely to have ever done. But because of the stigma of "crazy preppers", you don't want to call it prepping.
That stigma is a problem. People need to be prepared for both short-term emergencies and long-term disasters, and they need to stop being made to feel that doing so makes them social outcasts.
In my experience, preppers miss or outright avoid the last part. Humans survive as communities. There's too much work involved and not enough redundancies with just a few people. Extreme preppers are anxiety induced hoarders.
I think there are different varieties of preppers, and some have communities.
Frankly, by some definitions, I'm a prepper which is rather surprising. I think if you live rural you tend to have a lot more supplies on hand. I used to keep 3 full days, but I now have a 7 day supply, and friends feel fairly justified in have a year's worth of goods. Heck, some of the base prepper playbook are rural hobbies (micro-farming) or just basic winter prep (generator).
Now, solar and wind have gotten a lot more convenient with people doing battery walls. I get the feeling that those folks just got tired of listening to the power company say wait.
I find it highly unlikely that people in Europe don't plan for any events, especially given the current situation in that region. I would guess many have a month worth of food and some sort of plan is the heat goes out.
No source.
I'm not referring to the act of prepping itself. That's not limited to America lol. I'm referring to the "prepper" culture that is most vocal on the english internet. The american prepper who fantasizes about living in some remote bunker stocked with foods and guns.
Of course it does, but the OP said "most". I'm also keeping a decent stock of food and other useful things, but when I compare to what US calls "prepper" I realize that's going on a whole different level. And it's not about stigma as other commenter assumed, its simply way less extensive and way less philosophical - I'm not preparing to survive the armageddon, just preparing to bridge over some flood days.
Isn't the point of the guns that kind of person stockpiles specifically to prevent people taking them? If you're already at the point where you're violently taking things, then they've pretty effectively made themselves much less appealing targets than like, supermarkets or great depression survivors.
One way to approach answering this question is looking at history. Do individual people with a nice stockpile and contemporary weapons tend to survive the collapse of their civilizations (or even local, short-term famines for that matter)? I don't think so. For example, in Europe the social/physical structures that successfully faced these situations were walled cities & towns. Castles. Entire communities and decades of planning and construction.
IMO, no way this scales down to a single household - I'm chuckling right now picturing a knight and their family in a house-sized castle.
Another angle: if things get bad even just food wise, people who have nothing to lose will keep coming - starving people who will die unless they get to your resources.
To me prepping to survive by yourself is a dumb fantasy and a waste of resources that would be much better spent building resilient communities.
Are there instances of individual people (or small families) with stockpiles of weaponry in civilizations that collapsed? Yes, as you point out, there are historical nobles with armed guards in their castle/fort/estate, or just cities with militias, but I don't know of anything historically comparable to a modern prepper with a dozen guns and thousands of rounds for them. And even if there were, no amount of swords makes 1-5 people a match for a couple dozen assailants, but 1-5 people with loaded guns are much more of a deterrent.
And I agree that a community spending their time and resources working together is likely way more effective, but that doesn't mean the prepper's stockpile is easy pickings.
You've got to sleep eventually and I wonder how well all your fancy security systems will do once us-east-1 is down?
There's actually already a story of one (insane) prepper type infiltrating a Kentucky state representative's bunker to take it for himself (and killing a person in the process).
I'm a techy leftist opposed to guns. I'm absolutely not talking about myself.
And I don't mean a fancy security system. I mean a paranoid prepper with a basement full of canned food and a stocked gun case. The kind of person who is itching to live through a zombie apocalypse, and would eagerly start shooting at people that even vaguely suspected were coming for their stockpile. Their guns are a deterrent to taking their food. That's it.
I didn't think you meant yourself, but yes, the prototypical prepper in the basement with an apocalypse stockpile. It'll hardly be an impregnable fortress.
it works to a certain degree but what's your plan for sleep? what about if an organized group is trying to get to your supplies?
so guns work to prevent simple attempts, in the early stages. when you are in the anything goes stage you need a community and a way to be protected and protect others.
The value of the stockpile comes from the fact that being armed is useful.
You may be saying that whoever is coming for you has enough firepower and training to make your arms irrelevant. In which case your stockpile is just trade goods?
It’s not about skills, let’s take two people of equal training. A is living his life in a fortified location with a huge stoke pile of guns and tons of ammunition. B has a rifle, time, and the element of surprise.
Who do you think has better odds? How about if B has friends who also want what A has? Don’t get me wrong defensive positions are useful, they are simply less useful than groups of people working together. The best prep is a few supplies and a community of people ready and able to support each other think walled town not fortified nuclear bunkers unless you’re actually willing to live underground and have a lifetime of supplies at which point hiding is more effective than guns.
A group or community that has some arms is definitely in a better position than a loner with an arsenal. A group with an arsenal and good social skills to make alliances with other groups, and the tactical abilities to acquire whatever they lack and defend themselves from others, will be in the best position.
There's probably an ideal minimum of ammo to go with the guns. But more ammo is better.
I would agree that a single person defending a fortification probably not benefit from more than, say, two or three guns. One gun that has a decent automatic magazine size, and fast reloading, plus lots and lots of ammo. You need backup equipment in the face of possible failure.
WW1 trench warfare was dominated by artillery, which caused the majority of casualties, more than machine guns, rifles and disease combined. That is why casualty rates favored the attacker - they were sweeping up the suppressed remains after an overwhelming artillery barrage.
The same applies in modern warzones, what works as a defensive position against a gun-armed mob doesn't necessarily work against infantry with military weapons including mortars and grenade launchers, and vice versa - if you know your opponents don't have proper equipment, you can effectively make deadly defensive positions which modern militaries wouldn't be able to use against their opponents.
Artillery and mortars where hardly limited to attacking or defending. Sweeping up after an overwhelming artillery barrage presupposes the attackers having artillery supremacy. In a true stalemate both sides just get hammered by artillery with neither receiving a net advantage while both rack up casualties.
As to a gun armed mob, it really depends on how capable they are. A defensive position is of limited value vs a well trained sniper using even a simple hunting rifle. The basic issue is it’s difficult to actually defend yourself without also exposing yourself. This is further degraded when talking about a single defender who can’t benefit from overlapping fields of fire etc.
Our hypothetical survivalist would benefit from training, but they don’t receive the primary benefit that keeps modern military casualties low, access to trained and well supplied medical personnel.
Analysts of actual WWI battles by experts. Don’t get me wrong early in the war attacking in daylight over no man’s land was ruinous, but tactics evolved and eventually favored the attack and counter attack.
Not that post apocalyptic battles will involve artillery and tanks, but it is still informative.
Vietnam ambushes, WWI trench warfare, etc. It seems very counterintuitive casualties where often lower for the attackers and counter offensive than the defenders.
First, an ambush is not a traditional attacker role. The ambusher has the pre-prepared position and is leveraging an intelligence advantage.
A counter attack similarly isn't assaulting a prepared position.
Otherwise this is an ignorant view. Attackers can have advantages because of initiative. They can pick their place, time, and methods, find the weakest point, etc.
They can also choose to not attack at all. Which they do all the time. The number a times attackers have been repelled and destroyed despite possessing the initiative is innumerable.
Assaulting a prepared defensive position in it's strength is widely acknowledged to be a really stupid idea and you don't do it unless your other options are worse.
And yet after the invention of the gun attacking a prepared defensive positions often results in fewer casualties.
Defensive structures offset but don’t eliminate the advantage of initiative, especially when you start talking about a lone defender who needs to sleep etc.
Manoeuver has always been useful. Modern mobility and arms haven't changed that. Gaining superior firepower or leverage at the decision point is the real take away, not who is attacking or defending. Fixed structures are always an asset, but you still have to recognize that it doesn't eliminate the need for intelligence and superior strategy.
Your conclusion about defense being essentially useless is still dead wrong.
Once the first few home invasions, rapings, and pillagings of sleeping residences have occurred. Word will spread. The would be invaders will encounter a round the clock watch setup by a neighborhood or family that invited all their cousins and can afford a 24/7 watch, with dogs, home made alarms, and man traps.
And those attackers will have the fight of their lives on their hands. Once their surprise element is gone, they lose the initiative to things they can't anticipate without serious new intelligence and all advantage is now reversed and you enter the counter attacking and ambush scenarios which you pointed out, are very effective.
> defense being essentially useless is still dead wrong
That’s not my conclusion, it’s that defense roughly counters the otherwise overwhelming advantage of attackers.
> round the clock watch watch setup by a neighborhood
That’s assuming a great deal of cohesion in your post apocalyptic scenario. I have no problem saying large communities provide a significant benefit, but that’s a product of a working society not something you would see after say a disease kills off 99.9% of the population.
how do you figure it's of little use? big difference between breaking in to loot a house you know is unarmed, versus one known to be armed and possibly keeping watch
> The main thing for me is that prepping only work if there is a transitory situation where a buffer can make it easier to navigate.
Everything on this planet is a transitory situation. A buffer will always make situations easier to navigate.
Case in point: having a social or monetary safety net is a buffer against e.g. unemployment.
> I don't care how much food and guns you have stockpiled if I can just take them away from you when I need them.
You need to have at least your own guns in order to take away resources from people with guns. Ideally though you would just have skills that are valued, so you can trade resources for skills and not shoot each other. People (grown men of sound mind, especially) tend to go to far lengths to avoid violence, especially if they've been exposed to it in the past.
My then teenage son was obsessed with the zombie apocalypse and therefore prepping. I tried to convince him that being handy and not being an asshole were the two best survival skills he should focus on.
Lol, cans of tuna. I laugh because the was a brief while that I was eating far too much tuna, having realized how cheap and lean a source of protein it was -- only to realize a few weeks later that you really are advised to avoid eating it more than once a week or so, at least with any regularity, thanks to the presence of high levels of mercury these days. Now I really want to see a post apocalyptic film featuring mercury poisoned lunatics running around in a Cormack McCarthy landscape.
Were you never taught that it is wrong to steal? It's attitudes like this that make the collapse of civilization even possible. People who willingly, even eagerly, go feral and abandon their civility.
Taking by force, stealing from others, is a great way to dramatically shorten your life expectancy.
Many preppers DO work to create parallel structures -- the "bomb shelter" approach is pretty plainly just a way to buy a little time in the event of catastrophe (but it does come in quite handy in the event of the far more common blizzard, hurricane, tornado, or heck, pandemic). Prepping on basic skills will likely outlast any stockpile of Chef Boy-ar-dee (and besides...after 6 months of that stuff and nothing else, do you really WANT to survive?).
But all that aside, the issue is, nobody is quite sure what exact scenario they're prepping for. Simply having a buffer so you can avoid needing to panic while some direction is felt out is worth having, but the limitations of it are worth being aware of as well.
"Also, if shift hits the fan, communities that are able to band together and work together will more likely do way better."
I'm not sure if you're just using prepper in a derogatory way, or general way. If people aren't practicing some self reliance before an event happens, then it's unlikely they can contribute to the group survival.
I don't know many preppers, but it seems the shows and articles I've seen showed that preppers know they need a community. It seems that this thread is mostly discussing a characture.
I once watched a youtube video of a guy talking about the offensive uses of flamethrowers who said they actually kill most people via carbon monoxide poisoning in bunkers rather than burning them to death. I think it was meant to try and make them seem less macabre, but it had the opposite effect for me. Certainly didn't make a bunker sound all that appealing as a defense.
I'd say the Preppers are "correct" when society collapses. Not before. Even then, I don't think that massing a collection of guns and canned goods is necessarily the best way to survive after societal collapse.
Instead, it will be the people who manage to build new societies from the rubble. I'd imagine that creative engineers who can ensure clean water supply and working electricity (or other smaller services) would be more valuable. Indeed, we can look back at history and think of the Rice Kingdoms of Japan / Korea / Vietnam. Yes, there was a sizable security force (Samurai), but it was rice / food that determined power.
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The kinds of "prepping" that these preppers are aiming for is this kind of weird... Mad-Max and/or Walking Dead scenario that has more basis in fiction than history and/or reality.
I'm not necessarily saying "guns aren't important'. But even ancient Sparta was unable to wage warfare without support of food-and-water. There's a reason why Athens / Athena is the goddess of wisdom + war, because war requires supplies and supplies requires logistics, and logistics (back then) required a Navy.
> I'd imagine that creative engineers who can ensure clean water supply and working electricity (or other smaller services) would be more valuable
In the World War Z novel, there's a section where the head of rebuilding in the US is speaking and talking about the new power structure in post-Z society as they look to rebuild.
He talks about how it's the blue collar workers: carpenters, farmers, plumbers, electricians, and their skillset that end up becoming the new key individuals in society because of their ability to build up from a collapse. It's not just hoarding guns and ammo. Those can be dealt with and they are dealt with by the military. Even a smaller military still has enough resources to take care of the local militias (preppers with guns and food).
But if you REALLY want to survive and thrive post collapse, it'll take practical skills to re-build.
How your creative engineers manage to engineer if they're starving or at the mercy of gangs? Only if they're well fed and protected in a strong community can they thrive and help back.
The first warlord to protect the nerds and solidify logistics will build the strongest army.
Sparta never became a world power. Raw brute force alone does nothing. The first move of the Great Khan was to capture bureaucrats from China to organize his army.
That's what separated the Spartans from the Great Khan, and that will be the same issue if society ever degenerates to that state again.
You're thinking macro, I'm thinking micro. I don't care of the grand scheme of things like standing armies etc, I care to have the means to live or survive long enough to anything survivable (so not planet destroying asteroid or full scale atomic war, but local disruptions, civil war etc)
Guns and non perishable food aren't enough and they're not a warranty either, but they're a good start and better than nothing.
> I don't think that massing a collection of guns and canned goods is necessarily the best way to survive after societal collapse.
> Instead, it will be the people who manage to build new societies from the rubble. I'd imagine that creative engineers who can ensure clean water supply and working electricity (or other smaller services) would be more valuable
The guns are the foundation for all the other things.
Guns aren't even the foundation to warfare. Food is, as is the efficient movement of food, allocation of food.
If society collapses, the most powerful fighters will be the dude who remembers how to raise donkeys and horses, so that food can move around and organize an army.
There's a reason why Genghis Khan first attacked China of all places. The great Khan needed to recruit bureaucrats to organize the logistics of his army.
It doesn't take very long to realize that standing armies themselves require a society with laws, rules, logistics, organization. Pretty much every ancient warlord understood this.
A good army / war requires a good society: food, education, laws. If you can't provide that, then you can't march an army for more than a couple dozen miles.
There's a good series of blog posts about this. [1] In particular I took away the idea that a bigger army needed more wagons (and donkeys, horses, cooks etc) and was NOT necessarily always more effective. There is a natural limit to the size of an army based on the logistical capabilities of the time. This is one of the reasons why modern warfare gets really large scale and awful. Lots of good details about foraging. Having played a lot of D&D over the years I always tended to ignore the logistics beyond bringing a 10 foot pole and a 50 foot rope into the dungeon.
Self sufficiency and self reliance are just good skills to have regardless for the well being of your family. When did it become some type of negative epithet to call someone a 'prepper'? We all know the story of the grasshopper and the squirrels.
One thing really irks me though about this.. It really speaks to the city privilege of some of these authors and their editors to even assume a position of "hey maybe these preppers were right all along"; how condescending. It is my way of life to harvest my own resources, build my own things, and support my community through thick and thin, that is my culture and my legacy. To use that as an ideological strawman is about as disrespectful as it gets.
"Self sufficiency and self reliance are just good skills to have regardless for the well being of your family. When did it become some type of negative epithet to call someone a 'prepper'?"
I think most people who prepare are not called preppers, nor think of themselves that way. During the cold War, there were all sorts of preparedness info being given out by rhe government. Some people made bunkers, I'd say most tried to have about a month's worth of food just on a natural rotation in the pantry.
I think specialization of labor and increasing wealth tends to wipe out a lot of self-reliance over generations. Why fix your own toilet if you make enough at your regular job; or work too many hours to get to it; or that you never saw your parents do that kind of work so you don't know what to even look up?
Grasshopper and the squirrels? I heard the fable as the grasshopper and the ants.
Wouldn't the squirrels just eat the grasshopper, instead of having philosophical debates with it? I mean, c'mon, you expect me to believe that an invertebrate and a mammal even share a common language!? Inconceivable!
The advantage of squirrels over ants is that the former are a lot better roasted than the latter, giving sustenance to both the listener as well as the narrator.
Just looking at any of the commonly cited reasons to prep (unrest, natural disasters) especially in developed countries and how they played out in the end, what you see is neighbors banding together, volunteers arriving from all over the country and random people donating large chunks of money.
I like to think of the preppers‘ cynical and pessimistic mindset as ultimate projection: Just because they would defend their food stash with a gun doesn‘t mean others wouldn‘t share their last can.
It’s hard to evaluate whether prepping was (or is) right or wrong. Although the article identifies Covid as a turning point in mainstream acceptance of prepping, it’s still notable that even during Covid prepping wasn’t actually necessary. Despite the heavy supply chain disruption, the system did ultimately pull through. Also, Covid-useful items like masks, hand-sanitizer, dexamethasone and ventilators weren’t in the typical prepper inventory (but maybe social distancing was!).
So I think we must imagine a significantly more dire scenario than Covid against which to evaluate how worthwhile any given prepping activity is.
Also worth watching out for is the anti-society, extreme individualist fringe of prepping culture, which is not only an unproven mitigation against societal collapse, but might actually be one of the forces that causes it.
(2017) “Prepper” as resilient citizen: what preppers can teach us about surviving disasters
Abstract:
"Prepping is a social movement of individuals and small groups that are learning how to effectively survive potential disasters and long-term change. My current research indicates that preppers believe governmental and non-governmental services are vulnerable, and thus have limitations in their ability to respond, given large-scale change due to disaster. While maintaining the belief that these services can be important for society, preppers train to meet their own individual/familial needs. This paper will discuss how those localized preparations create nodes of action that can act in supportive roles to larger systems of response, creating webs of resilience."
My buddy and his wife took some disaster survival training. He said it was very eye-opening.
TLDR: We're all on our own for 72+ hours. Getting to know your neighbors beforehand is a good precaution.
Per your comment, I wonder if prepper training could be a way to build communities, to replace those first lost to the automobile and now to social media.
"Prepping is an act of community resilience, “the capacity to anticipate risk, limit impact, and bounce back rapidly through survival, adaptability, evolution, and growth in the face of turbulent change” (Plodinec, 2009). For example, Huddleston’s (2016) study of a Midwestern prepping group indicates that the micro-resilience of these groups enhances larger local systems and may improve a community’s ability to withstand disaster. The philosophy of preparedness encompasses protecting one’s families from disaster, homesteading and sustainability. Their belief in self-reliance, approaches to survival (sheltering in place or leaving the city), gathering resources (supplies and skills) and networking, demonstrate capacities of community resilience (Faulkner, 2018)."
from:
(2020) "New Yorkers’ Street Smarts and Survival Smarts During the Pandemic: Preppers, Community Resilience and Local Citizenship"
"Conclusion: During the COVID-19 pandemic, urban preppers bolstered community resilience by relying on prepping strategies to protect themselves and shelter in place more effectively, and sharing their knowledge and resources with their neighbors. Their philosophy of self-reliance has helped them to survive the pandemic and brace for future surges. As noted by the Partnership for New York City (2020), “the pandemic unleashed political, racial and economic tensions that can either leave the nation’s largest and most important urban center in chaos or. . .provide the impetus for working together for recovery and positive change.” Now, survival is dependent on the resilience of the city. ..."
As someone who lives in an area commonly threatened by hurricanes I don't know where this exclusivity between "Prepper" and "Community member" came from. I'm all for being the friendly neighbor willing to contribute when a disaster strikes, but I also don't understand how that conflates with having a generator and a few days of non-perishables stashed in a closet somewhere. Especially considering you'll just be more useful overall when you having functioning tools
My recommendation to any of these prepper types is to do sort of a disaster recovery plan dry run - actually take a week vacation or something like that and simulate the disaster you're planning for. So turn off the power, water, and internet and just live your plan for a bit and see how it goes. If you really want to prep, try it in a few different seasons.
You'll likely discover practical issues that you can fix, but you might also find psychological issues could come up, though being free to end the simulation at any time might make it more fun than depressing.
I've never done the above on purpose, but as someone who definitely has some innate prepper curiosity built in, I can say that actually living through a disaster of the sort above really disabused me of a lot of notions. You can prep for a lot, but the thought of actually trying to live through some sort of long term apocalypse is too depressing to contemplate, though perhaps that's just my perspective as someone used to living in relative affluence.
It presumes that people need to be pessimistic in order to feel that prepping is worthwhile, for one.
Prepping isn’t just about surviving the collapse of civilization. It’s about being ready and helpful when a natural disaster hits and your entire neighborhood is without electricity for a week.
Basically, the mindset is more like “don’t put all your eggs in one basket”. Completely relying on a complex society and supply chain will leave you vulnerable.
> Preppers, as the community of bunker builders and food hoarders is known, emerged during the Cold War as fears of nuclear holocaust drove some people to go to great lengths to prepare for survival in a burned-out world.
The mentality of storing supplies in case of an emergency, or simply as a matter of practicality, is older than the cold war. Long term storage of food for times of need has been the rule rather than the exception for all of human history, except for maybe those few, strange decades after WWII. Drying, pickling, burying, canning, and so on: your great grandparents were certainly "preppers", if they lived in a rural area, even if they didn't know the term. The framing of this practice as a paranoiac response to the cold war was something the media created, to have some group to deride, and through tidal processes it was inevitable they would reappropriate it eventually, to have some new trend to write an article about.
But really, nothing has changed: the idea that the supply chain will always be there to provide anything we want, anywhere, at any time was what was crazy, not the precaution to store things against the day you might need them.
If we are going full steam ahead towards the collapse of civilization your prepping just delays the inevitable.
Also, if shift hits the fan, communities that are able to band together and work together will more likely do way better.
I don't care how much food and guns you have stockpiled if I can just take them away from you when I need them. If things are dire other will come for your stockpile.