Doomsday Prepping: Reactionary Behavior or Inherited Instinct? | Hacker News Reader

Doomsday Prepping: Reactionary Behavior or Inherited Instinct?

seattleanxiety.com

18 pointsrzk49 comments

can anyone who lived through the past four years seriously doubt that possessing an independent capacity to withstand disruption is beneficial?

is anyone predicting the systems that most people rely on are going to become more resilient?

Having some months food and water on hand for emergencies? Sounds great. Building a fortified bunker to protect your property when the government is overtaken by brown socialists? Less great.

If prepping were divorced from reactionary doomsday scenarios it would be much cooler. It’s not that different than people who fantasize about being the “good guy with a gun”.

Prepping is divorced from doomers if we look outside mainstream media reporting.

In the PNW of the US, there are many thriving prepper communities of all political persuasions and I find that the vast majority of them are not doomers, and in fact, try to avoid doomers and satirize them.

I think of it as something of a hobby. A little bit camping-adjacent. But just a little bit.

It used to be a hobby.

But now we have major, extended weather-related events once or twice a year (wildfires and winter storms). And then there was the pandemic.

So now, it's a mission-critical thing.

I said in another comment, it is an endless task of talking down the newbies off the ledge of their doomsday prophecy.

"No we are not going to be in a Mad max world in 2 years!"

Agreed, but I've also experienced some Mad Max-ishness at the (small) town and neighborhood level during a couple of events (wildfire chaos and complete hosedness from winter storms) where my inner redneck engineer flourished.

When it happens at the atomic level, the larger government elements aren't really supplying timely assistance or even functional law enforcement.

There are tens of millions of people who practice emergency preparedness. There is only a tiny handful of people with private bunkers, and it's overwhelmingly just rich folks who treat it as an offbeat hobby or a status symbol - like a wine cellar or a collection of luxury cars.

I get that it's fascinating, but the "bunker prepper" argument has no place in a good-faith discussion of emergency preparedness.

[Edit: added "private" to address some irrelevant rebukes below.]

"There is only a tiny handful of people with bunkers"

uhm? Ever heard of Zwitserland?

Switzerland total population is just over 8 million - so about 0.1% of total. I think "tiny handful" is correct.

Not sure if I'm interpreting your response correctly, but every house and apartment bloc in Switzerland has a bunker.

During the Cold War, Switzerland maintained fallout shelters for its entire population (plus an extra 25%). If you owned a house, the government would periodically inspect the fallout shelter and verify that it was stocked with food and water. Cities had large, communal shelters.

Finland and Sweden were also big on fallout shelters.

> when the government is overtaken by brown socialists?

Interesting that you chose this example when nearly every socialist/communist revolution that has ever happened in history started with mass murder.

Surely "nearly all" is implicit in the word "revolution" more than in "communist"? (And socialism being so much vaguer in practice that I never know if the person saying it means "The Democratic Party of the USA" or the way that the nordic countries are "socialist", which are a long way from Chinese communism, which is itself denounced as being "state capitalism" by some).

It wouldn't be far fetched to argue Denmark is more socialist than China.

Having browsed the prepper communities for years it is actually pretty cool how reasonable a lot of them are. The big thing they have is constantly heading off the newbies with their doomsday prophecies/fantasies.

Most long term preppers advocate for a deeper pantry, so a few months instead of a few weeks, a few gallons of water in a shed. A focus on personal health as there is no point hoarding guns if you cannot run 100 meters. Increase personal skills that can be useful in a time of disruption such as basic medical aid. And community, that is key - "If you want to fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go with others." African proverb

A lot of them point out about how the stereo type of the food hoard on your own land with a small military of guns is foolish. That even if the worst case Zombie situation did arise, that just makes you a target for others and would have to become endlessly paranoid just to maintain a terrible lifestyle.

Yes, the focus on individual capacity is misguided and foolish. The focus should be on community resiliency instead of individuals.

The cool part about focusing on community resiliency is it increases the mental health and well-being of the community members, as well as helping the local economy by focusing on self-sufficiency!

Sounds nice but it's because community resilience is not a thing almost anywhere that people prep.

Individual capacity enables community resilience. If you have resources that can be shared, they can be shared with your neighbors.

Otherwise, we're either asking local government to invest in resilience or reinventing local government to ask this new body to invest in resilience. In either capacity, we are not investing in individual capacity, we're just trusting that the resources we need will be made available in time of need and sufficient to the needs of all.

Foolish in what sense? It's not foolish when it works. It can certainly shield you against individual problems, such as losing a job.

In many cases, there are benefits to scale, but the optimal scale varies from one setting to another. Sometimes, the optimal "unit" is your block. Sometimes, your village. Sometimes, your family. And sometimes, yeah, just you.

At a massive scale, things start falling apart again, because the government - or any other organization notionally responsible for the well-being of millions - is not going to be particularly invested in your individual outcome. You're just a small part of a statistic that might be tracked somewhere. You don't quite qualify for a particular benefit because of your unique circumstances? Tough luck.

Convincing "community" to prepare for a potential problem before they are actually smacked in the face with it is a tall order.

Being prepared is part of community resilience. This is a false dichotomy. If you are totally unprepared for anything you are a burden on the community. If you at least have some basic ability to survive and help out others in an emergency that is anything but foolish for the community to support. Of course you should also invest in the community and other collective resources as well.

i agree that community resiliency is preferable. with this mindset, i help organize skillshares that support community food sovereignty, among other things.

community resiliency is also often overlooked in media - it's easier (and better marketing) to make a show about "preppers" buying merchandise. but the community aspect exists, probably even among those individuals, and gets much less attention.

but we live in times that make it difficult to build, find, and keep community. many people find individual projects more accessible. and in the end, individual capacity contributes to community resiliency.

the most radical (not reactionary) people i know are working all of these angles at once.

I was surprised how resilient our logistics networks were, in the face of the pandemic. I thought things would go much worse. It gave me more confidence in the adaptability of our system.

While I think that supply chains are pretty resilient... were we watching the same thing?

We had a mild disease making rounds - far less serious than some of the pandemics of the early 20th century, let alone before that - and we had multi-week shortages of TP, followed by multi-year shortages of ICs and cars.

Yeah, no one died due to not being able to buy TP, but it wasn't all that confidence-inspiring. Pre-COVID, would you have thought that the supply of such a basic and easily-manufactured good is so weirdly inflexible?

Most, possibly all of that, was due to the mass lockdowns - something we'd never attempted before even in the face of much worse pandemics.

because COVID was no more severe than flu, not airborne Ebola that everyone at the time pretended it was.

said no one who worked in hospitals in 2020 and 2021

Not sure I'll ever get over it

what has changed since 2020 and 2021, exactly? there's no cure, there is no permanent vaccine, and I doubt that even twitter neurotics who had two syringes in their handles when COVID was le current thing bother getting their bi-weekly booster, which means virtually all of us are unvaccinated again.

and yet the world keeps spinning. does that not suggest that the detractors were right all along?

we got a new current thing for the media and twitter checkmarks to yell about, and COVID quickly ceased to be a problem - less than three months after "winter of severe illness and death" promised by the white house in december 2021.

You might want to check the CDC website about excess WEEKLY deaths during COVID. That was WITH all of the extra precautions, lock downs, etc. I haven’t seen a flu season that looked like that.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm

See also the Howtown video "How do they count Covid deaths?":

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JS2rCjvjYLU

> what has changed since 2020 and 2021, exactly

For starters, the virus itself has changed.

Resilience is overrated and zero-sum. Once systems are antifragile they can really expand the ergodicitic envelope for the benefit of all. Working against the second law is futile anyway; embrace entropic accelerationism.

Do you have any examples of how this could be done?

OK thank you taleb. How do you propose to make our food, medicine and clean water supplies antifragile?

I would imagine the answer here is something along the lines of: "let a few billion people starve."

Thus the rise of Eco-fascism begins! Last year I wrote a piece on Ted Kacsynski's passing. To summarize 6000 words - some decent ideas, absolute mad man who did more harm than good for his cause, I REALLY hope that folks don't emulate his actions. I deeply fear that with peaceful protest being outlawed in places, violent protest become inevitable.

This is something that Garrett Hardin was writing about in the 1960-80's. 'Tragedy of the Commons', 'Lifeboat Ethics' and 'Filters against folly' are all works of his worth studying as it shines a spot light on the ugly side of humanity and our impacts.

This unfortunately lead to him adopting a lot of anti-immigration stances and some downright racist ideas. It is an a damn shame considering he had a real knack for cutting through the crap and highlighting some of the bigger long terms issues of our behaviors.

I really hope we don't go down this path, but everyday it looks like we are slowly taking another step there. May we live in interesting times.

The question is too broad.

If we get another covid-scale disease, lockdown, closed borders, a year's wait for vaccination, etc., with similar risks to life and quality of life?

Then life goes on as normal, after a brief initial period of just enough people simultaneously choosing to make sure they have the basics for the those basics to no longer be on supermarket shelves.

If Russia rolls through Ukraine, then decides to keep going until it reaches the old Iron Curtain?

Then I'm 170 km on the wrong side of the new border for someone whose entire knowledge of Russian is [da, nyet, vodka, mir, privyet], but they'd probably let me leave.

If an EMP or solar flare destroys the power grid, I don't think there's much I can do; even if I bought some farmland and some oxen to pull a plough without needing to maintain a tractor, my total experience of blacksmithing consists of making some hoops on an activity day at the Weald & Downland Living Museum some time around 1993 when I was about 10.

People who have struggled to get needed items in the past, or who have lived in poverty and learned how to use whatever is available to fit their needs, may have more of a hoarding propensity. The mindset of seeing an otherwise garbage-bound object, and finding potential utility for its remains means you are less likely to dispose of garbage. In a truly scarce world, you survive with little, but in the current world of abundance you quickly run out of space and then memory of all the stockpiled stuff that could be useful when you really have a use for it.

Ironically, Software Developers do Doomsday Prepping _literally all the time_: Imaginary (aka 'Pretend') Problems are much "fun" to solve.

self preservation is at the root of prepping and is an inherited instinct. However, these days, prepping has been integrated into the social media sales process to the point it has more in common with fashion than instinct or reactionary behavior IMO. I can't think of a single source i would trust for information regarding preparing for large scale disasters, it's all ads.

Maybe you should trust information from FEMA for instance? Or just the Department of Homeland Security in general? While there is certainly an aspect of consumerism in some prepper communities the actually serious people tend to default to advice given by actual authorities that deal with disasters in the real world. Serious preppers tend to focus more on rotating their potable water supplies and making sure the backup batteries are charged than buying whatever tacticool new PDW is being marketed on instagram

https://www.ready.gov/ Is the most obvious resource and has a whole bunch of valuable information.

Hmm, FEMA. That’s the heck of a job brownie team, right?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_government_re...

Ahh yes two decades ago there was some issues. This clearly makes any disaster preparedness advice from this organization totally useless. You know what while we are at it we should all reject libraries, freeways, the park service, and the postal service as I am sure at some point all these institutions had a clear and public failure and that obviously totally invalidates anything else they do.

It almost never snows where I live. It's pretty remote, 4 roads in, 4 roads out of town. Hundreds of miles to a big city.

Anyway, like 6 or 7 years ago there was a freakish huge snowstorm. Dumped feet of snow. Collapsed some roofs in town (including an auto dealership which was a sight). The county doesn't keep snow plowing equipment (and who could justify the expense given how much it snows here?).

Anyway, it shut down the roads for days. No way to leave. The stores were nearly empty. It was pretty wild and eye opening.

This is only one of many things that can happen. Fires, floods, other "acts of God" to say nothing of potential acts of other humans. A lot of things can happen and suddenly everything you depend on no longer works. It can happen, and it can happen where you live too.

Eventually the government may be able to fix things, but they aren't magic either, even when they are competent and motivated to actually help. I helped clean up from a major hurricane once, the military took over. Everything. Distributing water, cleaning up the streets, directing traffic. And it seemed they did reasonably well but it takes a bit to set all that up and assumes the tragedy is local enough help will be able to organize and come in from outside.

Now, I'm not suggesting going full survivor. Surviving years of nuke fallout and zombie apocalypse probably isn't reasonable for most people.

But in my opinion if you aren't prepping to stay alive (food, water, heat, personal protection and a way to get communications with no power) for a week or two, and maybe up to a month or two in case of emergency you are being short sighted and taking unnecessary risk.

Anyone who dismisses disaster preparedness as something only requiring "focus on community" sorely needs a read of HN's Zalewski/lcamtuf's Practical Doomsday book[0]. It is ironic that should some type of Hurricane Katrina situation befall their neighborhood, they'll be the first in line begging their "doomer prepper" neighbors for their 50gal drum of water and bowl of rice after the first few days.

It's also bewildering that software engineers who spend their 9-5 trying to imagine and calculate likelihood of the possible faults and risk in their computer systems fail to extrapolate that to any real world problems, but I guess the human experience of "never happened to me yet, not a problem" is stronger.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/dp/1718502125/

If its doomsday scenario, you are dying either way faster or just a tad slower

> While preparing for potential disasters is warranted, it is still best to make sure it does not become an all-encompassing preoccupation.

The article sort of fell apart for me when I realized that only at the end were they making a distinction between prepping and hoarding. Now, I'm not sure whether they've been talking about "the management of stockpiled household items in anticipation of market disruption" or "being insane" the whole time. Which makes sense, because the question of whether keeping additional resources on hand in case you can't get them is reactionary or instinctual is a false dichotomy: you can easily reach the same conclusion in a lot of others ways. For example, by looking at history, or by looking at current events, or from sitting and thinking about what the smartest thing to do with spare resources might be, or by following the emergency preparedness guide provided by the government agency of your choice, just for starters.

The article is generally confused and definitions of words seem to shift throughout.

I'm also unsure of what the question posed by the title even means. Reactionary, I suspect, does not mean what the author thinks it means.

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