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> not to have anything others would want.

Like food or the tools necessary to get food? Kind of hard to survive without that.

No, I think the OP is absolutely right. Humans are social animals, and large groups of humans are more powerful than small ones. Those who survive will be those who join the best groups. And the best way to ensure you're in a good group is to use your abilities to shape your group into a good group.

This is a good strategy past the first year.

Yes, because civilization collapse hits immediately in a single year, not a tens of years to century...

One year is good for surviving something local, like a hurricane or landslide or such.

This is why "preppers" make me laugh ... they go out of their way to stockpile these resources (food, guns, survival gear, etc). I don't know about you, but anyone I've ever met with prepper tendencies isn't shy about letting you know about it ... so now they're making it known that in an emergency, they will be the place for the mob to raid

Wouldn't the mob run away after a few people in front got shot? I'm sure there are historical examples for comparison.

The problem with security is you have to be right every time, they only have to be right once.

Your children are starving.

You can (a) run away and watch them starve or (b) rush the compound and hope to get some food.

Threats -- and demonstrations -- of violence are only reliable if the person being threatened has something to lose.

If you die then you can't help them anymore.

If you die, you don't have to watch them starve to death next week.

If there's a 90% chance you die storming the compound, a 10% chance you survive storming the compound and obtain food and a 100% chance you die if you don't find food soon, why wouldn't you take the chance at survival?

Because there may be other opportunities out there. If you leave, there may only be 5% chance you'll find other resources to survive. If you die there's 100% chance your kids will die.

>Threats -- and demonstrations -- of violence are only reliable if the person being threatened has something to lose.

I'm not convinced that people would be rational about their prospects if they were being shot at.

I've met some who are very quiet about it, presumably precisely for that reason. It's no surprise that you don't really hear about the ones who are highly-prepared but don't say much.

> This is why "preppers" make me laugh ...

Well, those are the "annoying vegans" of the prepper world. That or folks using publicity to scare up interest and sell you things here and now.

Any prepper with an actual interest in long-term survival knows the importance of OPSEC.

Keep in mind selection bias. The only preppers you know are the ones who let you know they are preppers.

Many mormons are "preppers" in that their religion urges them to stockpile up to a year of food.

One of my coworkers is a prepper and he almost never says a word about it. Even if you ask directly, you won't get much out of him.

I think you're experiencing selection bias.

This is the "rugged individualist fantasy" that the author talks about.

I admit many of us have fantasies of climate-change-apocalypse working out like that, but the author is correct: we will not be facing a sudden collapse of society allowing small bands of survivors to go live on farms, at least not in the first world.

Instead, in the first world, the effects we'll feel are billions of climate refugees moving across the world in search of safety and arriving at our borders. There will be there current border arguments x1000, and we'll either have to deal with the economic impact of having refugees or the moral impact of not. But those aren't the kinds of triggers that will suddenly lead to people going and founding communes in the remains of society.

More like nightmares.

I've read articles about Syria being the first casualty in the coming migrant wars due to climate change.

I posted a comment about this a few days ago and got downvoted into oblivion. Seems like hn doesn't take the climate refugee threat seriously.

It's not that the refugees are the threat. The problem is everything will be overloaded if you accept too many, and armed conflict is likely if you don't.

Closest places will get hit first.

A farming community will only last until someone else establishes martial superiority over it.

The best business is a protection racket. Establish martial superiority before someone else does. You can even offer a nicer protection racket than the others. But you’re gonna need organized firepower if you want to keep any of the wealth you produce in the long term

A protection racket might be the best business, but it's also a very risky business.

Somehow I don't get the American obsession with doomsday events. Sure, they make for a good story backdrop, but how realistic is it really? I have my doubts that's climate change apocalypse will be quick, I suspect it to be a rather drawn out affair. And just an individual could prepare for years or even decades of such things or believe one could just doesn't make sense.

And if you study real doomsday periods in history, the plague, the fall of the roman empire and such things, in the end society somehow survived. During the plague even wars that have started before it continued. And England kept the state and government prett much going.

And the larger, long term changes and impacts most likely cannot be mitigated on the individual level. Certainly not by stockpiling on stuff.

This seems more like a movie script expectation of what doomsday would be like. Doesn't history show that in most cases of natural disaster, communities tend to come together rather than devolve into violence? We always assume it will be everyone for themselves, everybody armed to the teeth, etc. Even in America I doubt that's how it plays out.

Communities yes, but they tend to toss out outgroups hard when they come for help. And then when a community can't deal with the change at all, it is more dangerous to others around. There are limits of what banding together can do in small communities.

Suppose the global trade is hit, you don't have enough food and growing things locally becomes impossible. Will you find someone brilliant enough to solve it in a small community? It's not very likely... War is more likely.

99.9% of humanity's history has been of slavery or subservience. Why would a collapse of modern society not change things back to how they always were?

You can't enslave people who are dead, the remaining few will have too much of bargaining power.

Look into what happened after Black Death epidemics.

So basically, don't be a woman?

I think a collapse of civilization will be hard on women yes. I'm not misogynistic and am an advocate of equal rights for all sexes but there are hard realizations about the sort of behavior we would exhibit in the wrong sort of circumstances.

Alternative: misogyny is so ingrained into our worldview that we view it as the default, natural state we revert to.

Or a child

Id suggest anyone not affiliated to a larger group would be in danger. I agree an outcast solo man might fare slightly better on their own, but in a dynamic enviro with other people a woman might fare slightly better.

This is how a lot of men expect things to go even within society. Sexual assault is ostensibly illegal but in practice does not always result in harsh penalties.

Actually, the opposite is true. There's no single explanation for it, but women tend to survive in much higher numbers during times of severe famine or catastrophe. It's likely a combination of several factors: Women have slower metabolisms and higher bodyfat, and they tend to form more close knit groups. Men tend to take on more physical labor, they tend to waste more energy, and are more likely to end up as social outcasts.

If you intrinsically have something people want and you're physically weak, you'd best make friends with Samuel Colt, the great equalizer.