Germany is not as stable as we think. Just ask its preppers | Hacker News Reader

Germany is not as stable as we think. Just ask its preppers

economist.com

Click bait. Just because there are preppers in Germany that doesn't mean it is not a stable country.

Saxon preppers expecting apocalypse, the title phrases it like a fact.

Yeah, it reads a bit like "We are all sick! Just ask hypochondriacs!"

How do you know that they didn't just watch a lot of American TV and YouTube and we didn't export our insanities into their heads?

Even that aside, do we judge the health of the US based on the opinions of preppers? What an inane article.

Honestly? I think many people do. Maybe not specifically peppers but other fringe groups. Though sometimes we pretend fringe groups are far larger than they actually are for long enough that they stop being fringe.

Given all that Germany went through the past century (albeit if much of that was self-inflicted), it's hardly surprising that "prepper culture" will find fertile ground.

Actually, I would say that their history is an argument against the case that they are unstable.

The fact that Germany had such a massive political and existential crisis that led them to war and genocide is still very much present in their memory. National pride is still something that is quite frowned upon (it would make people very uncomfortable say, if you walk around the street with a German flag and it's not clearly due to a football game).

On the other hand, I would say countries that have not yet had any cultural or existential crisis in the last few hundred years as a nation are more at risk of collapse. Unless the country and culture is constantly changing and evolving and its population are similarly keen to routinely update the status quo, at some point it will fall out of sync with, people will get upset and wonder why things aren't like the good old days, find arbitrary reasons for this (identification of perpetrators and allocation of blame) and the upheaval will begin.

I'm not arguing that German society or politics are unstable, rather that there is a justifiable deep-rooted fear of instability at an individual level - which doesn't have to be rational.

Ok that I agree with - German conservative culture does value 'keeping everything as it is and not changing anything except when absolutely necessary'.

This comment reeks of Americentrism. Germans are perfectly capable of coming up with their own insanities.

Apparently the rest of the world is not as capable of coming up with their own insanities as Americans considering how QAnon has gone global.

Yep. If you look into what these people believe in you will notice it is largely just a rehash of US conspiracies.

As a German, this is my impression, people have the same talking points like preppers have in the US, even if they do not make sense here. There was a very small prepper movement in the 70s and 80s because of an astonishing survival guy, Rüdiger Nehberg [0], but it focused mostly on survival. With the internet the prepper movement was exported from the US all over the world.

There is a prepper component to the German society though - probably because nearly every war in the last two thousands years in Europe involved Germany, with the 30 years war being especially devastating (my hometown lost 80+% of it's citizens).

Germany is one of the few countries that is keeping a reserve of grain in secret stashes (rumored to be ~150) after the cold war.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%BCdiger_Nehberg

https://archive.is/wzx3J

The Swedish government advises its citizens to become preppers[1].

I wouldn’t be surprised if the Germans do the same.

[1] https://www.dinsakerhet.se/siteassets/dinsakerhet.se/broschy...

They do. Ten days of food and drink is a lot less than four months, though.

https://www.bbk.bund.de/DE/Warnung-Vorsorge/Vorsorge/Bevorra...

Weather emergencies, blackouts, earthquakes, and sudden illness or quarantine are emergencies that are quite frequent. Therefore, many governments advise their citizen to maintain a stockpile to last something like 14 days. Longer than that implies a major breakdown of civilization that most individuals cannot effectively prepare for. This would have to happen on the community level at least. Unless you become a prepper and do it fulltime.

'Preppers', by definition, are those who have decided the world is unstable and on the brink of collapse. Their presence or opinion, by itself, is not an indicator of how unstable Germany is.

What would give an indication is how many there are. And the article references no polls or surveys or statistics on the number of preppers in Germany. The closest it comes is,

"There are around 20m preppers in the world today according to Bradley Garrett, an academic who has studied them; anywhere from 5m-15m are thought to be in America."

Let's say, 10M are in the US. That leaves 10M out of ~7.55B in the rest of the world. Assuming uniform prevalence, that's 0.13% of the population.

This is typical of much of modern journalism. Long-form emotional tone painting and little of substance.

That's right. Even the amount of preppers would only be an indicator of subjective stability. It could as well be a kind of new apocalyptic religion.

On a sidenote, the talk of social collapse is a popular propaganda theme of the extreme right.

> 'Preppers', by definition, are those who have decided the world is unstable and on the brink of collapse.

Not by definition. Maybe in practice.

You might be a 'prepper' even if you think the chance of society collapsing is only 0.1% because you think it's a prudent hedge against a highly unlikely worst-case scenario. This might be rational from a personal perspective if you have enough wealth to burn such that 'prepping' for this 0.1% situation only costs 0.01% of your net worth.

Oxford defines prudent as "sensible and careful when you make judgements and decisions; avoiding unnecessary risks"

How can it be sensible if one thinks it's 'highly unlikely'?

If one is very rich, then prepping may be financially affordable, but that doesn't make it cognitively rational.

> How can it be sensible if one thinks it's 'highly unlikely'?

Hedging a highly unlikely situation can still be sensible. Those two things are definitely not mutually exclusive.

If all your net worth is tied up in your house, it's probably sensible and rational to get fire insurance on your house, even if it's highly unlikely that your house will burn down. This question has been studied extensively in utility theory.

But should you get insurance in case a meteor hits your house? Fires happen often enough, but some events are low enough probability not to worry about. A house being destroyed by a meteor strike isn't worth spending money on.

X = P(bad_outcome) * magnitude_of_badness

Y = your net worth

You can trade-off one with the other.

People with lots of Y will be more happy to reduce Y in order to reduce X, because the marginal utility of Y declines with larger values of Y, whereas marginal utility of X remains roughly the same irrespective of values of Y.

> Fires happen often enough, but some events are low enough probability not to worry about.

This ignores the second part of X, which is magnitude_of_badness. Your house burning down has a smaller magnitude_of_badness than society collapsing which will likely lead to death.

It's also ignoring the marginal utility of wealth for large values of Y. Even if X is small, people with large Y will be more happy to reduce Y in order to reduce X.

I have known some preppers and I think there's a pretty clear line when it crosses into a paranoia, and begins consuming your life. A rich person building a panic room or even a very rich person buying an island is a different from somebody of humble means who eschews working, to live in the boondocks and stockpile ammo and food. But I don't think money itself is the divisor; a modestly wealthy person buying an island to escape Armageddon might also qualify.

Disagree with the first part. 'Prepping' has evolved into a subculture that is more and more removed from the actual scenario of imminent societal collapse. Even here in Northern California a lot of people engage in prepping/survivalism as a hobby and social group. Very few are the real tinfoil type.

Of course this supports the point even more that the article's premise is idiotic.

Funny enough you won't find many preppers in countries/regions that actually qualify as unstable, because it is very expensive to stockpile food reserves, water, medicine, generators, fuel, gold, valuables, guns, ammo, communication equipment. It is a very "first world" hobby.

> people engage in prepping/survivalism as a hobby and social group

Color me guilty! For me it started with cooking, that led to gardening, then hunting. Combine that with camping and here I am, part of a small group of very diverse people who like to spend time with as little modern conveniences as possible, as far away from modern life with the smallest possible food print.

We leave our homes with what we can carry, walk as far as we can, collect food en route and hide as good as we can.

If I would be a classic prepper, I would do this with the most important people in the world: my family, but I do not. It is just for fun and to meet different people and how to take care of each other without outside assistance. Challenging and suitable for everyone since you can do it for as long or short, as far or as close as your means allow you to.

A lot of it is actually pretty practical!

Growing your own produce is a pretty good way to keep yourself busy (and i find it relaxing), learn more about plants in general, as well as lets you have a better idea of what actually goes into your meals (vs store bought produce, which might have certain pesticides or other additives).

The same goes for cooking, for which there are also very tangible and immediate financial benefits, when compared to eating out. So much so, that people have organized various communities around the idea of cooking stuff yourself and doing so in an efficient manner, for example: https://www.reddit.com/r/MealPrepSunday/top/?t=month

Hunting also makes you develop more appreciation for having meat in general - personally, after having to drag a carcass from the forest all the way home and to help my dad prepare the meat made me view it as something to have occasionally, not as often as other people might. Of course, learning firearms safety and a thing or two about how to behave in forests is useful as well.

Of course, some people might take it a bit too far - like having a bunker in their basement or stockpiling MREs for years, many of which will simply go bad, but i'd argue that most things, even having your own generator are pretty reasonable in the grand scheme of things, especially in regards to bad weather conditions and inconsistent power supply.

All those stockpiles make you in unstable regions probably also a target.

I agree, but want to add that I think 'prepping' is in my genes and also in the genes of many of the settlers who left Europe and colonized the new world: They left because they did not trust a king or a church.

They romanticized self sufficient farming. Isn't that 'prepping' taken to the extreme ?

And even knowing the percentage of peepers in a country doesn’t tell you much about the stability of said country; social factors can affect that rate independent of how likely a collapse is.

I'm pretty sure a perhaps 2B of those ~7.55B don't have electricity, or loss of electricity would be an inconvenience.

Electricity may not be the best proxy for stability, but it's a huge deal in my life, and I think important for a lot of of those ~7.55B. Electricity also requires a lot of infrastructure.

I don't think it changes your analysis. I wanted to highlight Stability for a random HN reader is probably more complex than stability for a random human.

> 'Preppers', by definition, are those who have decided the world is unstable and on the brink of collapse.

As others have noted, not necessarily - there are many shades here. Depending on your situation, being prepared for unforeseen situations is not paranoiac but sensible. The key point is how much time, effort, and mental energy you put in this. Having some cash, food and basic tools just in case is one thing - piling up tons of stuff and worrying constantly is something different. The former is actually something to be promoted as a healthy attitude in an ever-changing world. And even if noting serious happens until the end of your life, you have the comfort of knowing, "At least I'm a bit prepared."

To announce being a prepper would be bad OPSEC. Maybe there are way more, taking OPSEC seriously, sitting back and giggling madly in anticipation of 'the EVENT' which enables them to write told you so with their bullets onto the crumbling walls!1!!

Our collective memory is short. It is within our lifetimes that Germany was split between West Germany (BRD) and East Germany (DDR). The article describes the collapse of DDR, and while it was a softer landing than the rest of the soviet bloc, it was still a collapse of a state.

There are many examples within the collective memory of generations alive today. Yet we don’t seem to learn as much as you’d think we should. Those that don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it?

East Germany did not "collapse" in any sense relevant to a discussion about preppers. It peacefully re-unified with West Germany and was never in anything resembling a state of anarchy.

The shortages of pretty much everything and stasi terror tactics of the 1980s would resemble a “collapsed” state in most western views. It was not as bad as USSR or what we normally think of as a collapsed state (e.g. Haiti of today), but it sure was not even close to the western Germany standard of living. The article also goes on to describe poverty for the main protagonist well into early 2000. While I’m not German, so will likely never truly understand the cultural implications, the partitioning off of the forced soviet state in east Germany was a terrible outcome and had similar dire consequences as what happened in the rest of the eastern bloc.

There's nothing wrong with preparing for adverse conditions, covid lockdowns have surely proved the benefit of that.

But that's different to preparing for the end of the world, 'end times' or whatever it's referred to.

In that case, a basement full of beans might help for a while, but ultimately, it's the same as 'wealth' now. It doesn't really matter how much money you have, unless it's more than you'll ever use, it matters how much is flowing to you on a regular basis, sustainably.

For 'collapse', it's probably much better to invest in a skill that would be useful in that situation, than in any kind of cache.

It's an interesting article and worth a read but the headline is straight up garbage.

"The earth is not as round as we think. Just ask flat earthers".

"The vaccines are not as good as we think. Just ask the anti-vaxxers".

It's basically a story about this one person.

"HackerNews articles are not as well moderated as we think, just ask the commenters"

If Germany is not stable because its preppers, imagine the USA....

Extremely clickbait title, but I guess it has done its job considering we are now here talking about the article.

Why is it assumed by the author that the reader thinks Germany is stable?

Does The Economist has a disaster recovery plan?

I'm more or less a german 'prepper', but this article doesnt really tell good reasons to prep. I personally think everyone should have food and water stored for atleast 14 days(which is also something the government recommends), because natural disasters or other disasters can still hit you, even when your country is stable.

As for the stability of the country: In Germany we sadly have a very misguided energy policy. We are essentially building back more than we are building up. We are closing down or planning on closing down nuclear and coal, yet we are not even building enough renewable energy sources to cover the needed demand. Our energy storage capabilites are not enough. We dont have all the powerlines build or even planned that could transport the offshore wind park energy into the deeper mainland. We will be missing multiple gigawatthours in the future. As it seems Germany is just planning on importing the difference from countries around us. Sadly this makes not only the german grid unstable, but the whole european grid. We already had 2 close calls in the european grid this year, which luckily were resolved by the engineers. We are going closer and closer to an actual blackout, and this could cascade into larger areas of europe, since the grid is interconnected. A real blackout, and not just a temporary power out will take 10 to 14 days to resolve in optimistic calculations. If there are problems getting the grid started again this could well take longer. No power means: No running water after 1 day at best, no supermarkets, no fridges, no heating, no cooking on usual stoves, no phone calls, no internet, no fuel stations, etc. Of course no phone calls means you cant call the police, which is very practial for criminal gangs. No phone calls also means you cant call the firefighters, and if there is no running water whatsoever they will have a problem quickly as well. Streets will clog up because of accidents and cars running out of gasoline, blocking of the supply ways for hospitals. So they will also get into troube relatively fast.

I could go on but I think you get the gist of it. A blackout would be like a temporary 'collapse' because the whole modern way of living is just suddenly halted, with people not being perpared for that. Now I think this scenario would be less drastic if people were aware of the danger and prepared accordingly. If everyone has some food and water then the shortages wont be as drastic immediately.

Now I cant predict the exact date when this will happen, but I think that in the 3 years this will happen, unless we radically change our energy policy. Janurary next year will be interesting as there are some powerplants permanently going offline, which will increase the instability. You just need to have a bad day with not enough or too much wind and little sun, which is likely in the winter, and then you already have it. Add to that an increased demand though heating, light, etc, and the odds start looking worse.

Some interesting links for the topic: https://www.smard.de/en (An official realtime tracker that shows how much energy is being produced by what source)

https://www.bundesrechnungshof.de/de/veroeffentlichungen/pro... (This one is in german, but here you can see some official data on the whole grid situation and its future.)

Tss Tss! Nicht gegen den Strom schwimmen, Äh sprechen. Das ist Värrbotähn!

Besides that, what do you think how much of the prekariat, be it 'Aufstocker', Hartz-IV, 'Scheinselbständige', or otherwise living in strange circumstances without much money even have the possibility/ability (spacewise/circumstancewise) to stock up on things? Not to forget, the students, our saviours, the future elites in Wohngemeinschaften, sometimes too stupid to even open a can? Or too lazy/stressed out to shop at all. Mensa, Döner, streetfood or delivered by heroes it is.

OTOH, I've heard in some parts of Asia, in very dense cities there isn't even a small kitchen space available anymore. And mostly they still manage. So what?

Isch sing dann mal mit der Stimme von Rudi Carell: Lass Disch Überraschen! ;-)

Germany is doubling down on bad decisions, they basically gave up on software and they are ready to give up on other high Tech. This is what a gambler looks like, when he believes to be on a "luck streak" and wants to recover from recent losses by betting the farm.

With regards to Software, SAP is still german and runs the worlds biggest companies

Yeah, but people who use Haimer indicators or Audi cars constantly talk about how great they are, while people who use ABAP (SAP's flagship language) constantly talk about how shitty it is. SAP is not the Audi or even the Volkswagen of software; it's the Yugo.

I'm curious why the grandparent thinks Germany is giving up on high tech. From afar Germany looks like a high-tech powerhouse, including in software.

Ableton, Star Division, Revision (the demo party), and the Chaos Computer Club are much better exemplars of the German software scene than SAP.

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