popular prepping

POPULAR PREPPING

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note: I love to question the victors version of history.  Why Russia was a threat and attacked by the Germans click here
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Is prepping popular?  You see headlines such as “really rich dudes are building bunkers” and you see all the cheerleading by the home team, prepper publications looking for any main stream media headline to latch on to for validation and you just might get some sense that prepping is getting much more acceptable and respectable.  Well, don’t believe that bullspit.  Number one, anything the bulk of prepper sites are doing is going to automatically be wrong.  If Las Vegas bookies allowed betting on prepper predictions I’d gamble a good chunk on doing the opposite of whatever that gang of mouth breathers stipulated was in store for the future.  Ones like The Economic Collapse guy, I can understand his brain damage.  He was a lawyer in DC, after all.  You know he ain’t wired right.  Throw in some weird bible prophecy and you’ve got yourself offal for brains.  Your popular demigod living up in Idaho, he was an officer in military intelligence.  An officer?  They inhabit a world all of own, where unicorns frolic on rainbows.  And Intelligence?  CIA rejects without the budget.  And these are the “leaders” of that gang?

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And number two, any industry you run across, any small  following, they are all the exact same.  Their worldview is the correct one, their niche group the center of the universe, their gang the one that is the coolest.  If that is a bunch of Goths or Punks or electrical engineers employed in Dubai.  If it is a neighborhood of immigrant Montenegrin steel workers.  Like attracts like, in business or in love, in hobbies or in news.  And because we are all adrift in a sea of crap, past the point of the twilight of the nation state, fifty years into an economic collapse that shed its cultural cohesion almost at the very beginning, we are desperate and clingy and will join any tribe no matter how small or insignificant and make them our universe, probably devoting more mental energy trying to belong than we give to our dear spouse.  In terms of complex organization the nation is pretty high up there, but instinctively we crave a tribal group and always have.  The nation was readily acceptable as a substitute as long as there was a two way agreement as far as responsibilities and rewards, but the nation state long ago ceased being a partner and instead became parasitism.  All this disfunctionality you are seeing is just the messy divorce.  People sense if they don’t actually know that the relationship has soured and they seek substitutes.

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At this point, the nation has stopped being a protector or provider and is now just a parasite, as its replacement is no where strong enough to replace it.  But people don’t need to be intellectual giants to re-invent the wheel of social organization.  They grasp instinctually at what has always worked before, the family or the tribe.  They might be stuck with the nation until its demise but they turn to family or tribe for order in their lives, a feeling of security ( it is not acceptable to accept welfare, if you are an older generation who accepted the nations WASP work ethic, but younger generations who see the nation as nothing more than a Taker see nothing wrong with taking from the Taker.  Since the nation never offered them security they feel they owe it nothing, especially not loyalty or hard work or effort at most anything ).  The family as a security device usually only works in a primitive resource scarce setting, where group cooperation isn’t conducive to resource procurement, the tribe or band becoming dominate when the opposite is the case.  We aren’t primitive enough in our food procurement that the family is dominant.  For that we need our tribe.  It isn’t a surprise that family unity has suffered in this collapse.  As one social cultural dynamic is declining, another is slowly attempting to take its place, and since decentralizing down to the family doesn’t make economic sense the tribe or band is dominant. 

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The Great Basin Indians, the Shoshone ( as a loose group, there are sub group tribes such as the Piute ), had to constantly move about for substance, their primitive shelters not the case of savagery or ignorance but of the need to stay nomadic.  Each person needed between fifty and a hundred square miles for foraging ( cattle in the same region needing about the same, but in acres ) and the surpluses were seasonal.  To take advantage of that the families formed loose bands for those seasonal gatherings, but the rest of the time the family was all that was needed or desired for food gathering ( family banding groups, interestingly, seems to be the primary focus as to the need to prohibit incest.  The need to marry out to other families was a bonding for security mechanism.  What I had thought to be an instinctual need to avoid inbreeding didn’t necessarily hold since the prohibition extended to non-blood relation step-children.  The instinctual part was covered in another study which showed that close living arrangements at a certain age range imprinted a mental block on amorous feelings, and there is a basis for observed inbreeding aversion, but taking the universal taboo as a whole with its variations, some groups embracing first cousin unions, others adverse to any but third or higher, and other details, it seems that incest prohibition was primarily to use unions as diverse group unifying mechanisms.  Peter Farb’s “Man’s Rise To Civilization” is a fascinating look into the cultural differences in the North American Indians dictated by their resource base  ).

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A band is ties to families that is loose or temporary, a tribe a continuous grouping of families.   In our current condition, the family does not secure resources as well as a tribe.  Nation states were most efficient when they attempted to mimic the 150 Rule, which is nothing more than the number of people the human brain is capable of dealing with on anything other than an abstract level.  There is no unity in tribes over 150 members.  Our brains aren’t big enough to sort our interlinking relationships past that number ( and 150 is the maximum ).  When nations attempt to interfere with the social customs invented to unify but separate groups into the ideal size, a lot of disfunction is generated ( in corporations that ignore this rule, no one coordinates or communicates.  In smaller than that number groups, cross department ties present a much more cohesive organization ).  Once centralization exceeded the natural maximum, big for bigness sake or more appropriately bigness for the survival of the organizations sake, the urge for alternate tribal ties became much stronger.  Long before the nation became a dysfunctional entity, tribal seeking was normal.  Reverting to tribal importance as the dominant sought organization was natural and easy.

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Now, as we know, with any tribe customs and traditions serve a purpose internally and yet to outsiders make no sense.  When outsiders attempt to make sense of them they invariably get the translation wrong.  And when tribal insiders try to take their world view and apply it to the outsiders, they also make little sense.  When a prepper ( Like the Shoshone being comprised of multiple sub-groups even as custom and need unify them into a whole, preppers and survivalists and homesteaders and etcetera are many different bands loosely affiliated even as they squabble amongst themselves incessantly ) looks outside of his tribe and attempts to apply his customs to others, he is bound to look through his world view prism and see, well, nothing more than a fantasy.  Other tribes see things the way you don’t.  A rich guy prepping for the apocalypse isn’t a prepper.  He is essentially building a fortification against proletariat mobs trying to steal his money, but under no circumstances does he view his future as an economic collapse or a systematic break down.  He is ONLY looking at wealth preservation, not collapse insurance. 

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You do understand that while he is using your same words, he isn’t speaking your language, don’t you?  It isn’t all that difficult to understand.  With insurance, you have incurred a cost.  With wealth preservation and growth, you expect an increase in your wealth or at the very least to avoid any lose.  One costs you money to provide a security and safety feature.  The other is about wealth, and wealth that is not allowed to shrink.  Unfortunately our modern sensibilities look at the loss of profits as a loss of wealth, highlighting how unrealistic our expectations are.  A guy looking around in fright that he will lose profits, does not a prepper make.  A guy spending money for future security, he does.  One is a lose and the other a growth.  As a prepper you can talk about “investing” but you aren’t buying future wealth, only security.  A person interested in wealth preservation and wealth increase does not seek the same things in life that you do.  So all these “gold investors”?  They are not preppers.  They are seeking to increase their wealth, even if they pretend they are only protecting it.  All their double top secret decoder ring language is geared towards profiting off of their gold holdings.  Gold is not personal security, food is.  Gold is wealth preservation with the expectation of a return on investment ( in modern thought-traditionally it was never more than wealth transfer and storage, never an investment ).  We continue tomorrow.

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