Comment by netcan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by netcan | Hacker News Reader

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Preppers. Zombie Movies and our love of apocalypse is fascinating. Repping is similar in some ways to Cosplay, I think. It's a hobby intertwined with the way our fantasy obsessed minds work. It enables people to keep engaging with their fantasies. In this case, the weirdly persistent apocalypse fantasy.

When I was about 14-15, I loved Stephen King's "The Stand" and some of my friends liked it too. The youth fetish culture didn't really exist in that time and place, but the book and its post apocalypse world fascinated us. We talked out what we'd do and how. Find an island. Rescue damsels. Train dogs.

It's a persistent sort of a fascination. Interestingly so. It would be fun to find out more about the art history of zombie apocalypses.

Under this, in some way, is the fact that major catastrophes and cultural "rebooting" plays a pretty substantial role in human history. I find the idea that the world's flood myths (Noah, Atlantis..) relate to catastrophic flood events. Religions tell us about past catastrophes and promise future ones. There are some pretty interesting suggestions that the early fertile crescent civilizations' (eg Egypt) sudden rise are actually rebuilding events following the catastrophic demise of earlier (EG Gobleki Tepeh in Turkey) civilizations. There's also a lot of genetic evidence of major population collapses at several points.

There's also post war baby booms and some other bits and pieces suggesting that we are hard wired to think apocalyptically.

Interesting stuff.

As you say, apocalyptic thinking seems to be deeply wired into the human psyche.

If your threat model predicts a high probability of nuclear war, civilization-threatening pandemics, or other end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it scenarios, you should probably move to a defensible rural homestead with solar panels, a long growing season, and a fresh water supply -- that's an hour away from the nearest interstate. I hear the intermountain west is nice this time of year.

What's interesting is that few prepper/survivalist discussions -- that I've seen, maybe I'm missing them -- mention the opportunity costs of moving to the backwoods. I interviewed Y2K prepper/survivalists who quit their jobs and followed approximately the above advice. The problem arises when the collapse, well, doesn't happen. And you're two hours (in the summer) and six hours (in the winter) from the nearest emergency room.

Also once you sell that city condo or suburban house and move to your self-sufficient rural homestead, you then have a strong incentive to predict the collapse is coming. Maybe it's not going to be Y2K after all, but how about suitcase nukes in big cities? Or bioterror? Etc. There's also a subset of religious survivalists who seem to want an ungodly and immoral secular society to meet its doom; I wrote about this for Wired here: http://archive.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/1999/01/1719...

There seems to be a very high overlap between the prepper 'community' (I hesitate to use the term about such self-avowed rugged individualists) and those who anticipate a race war, war with Islam, or some similarly catastrophic political event. There are many people who still have a chip on their shoulder about the civil war, and seem to yearn for a different social order.

> a race war, war with Islam, or some similarly catastrophic political event.

At least one of those is, essentially, already in-progress. At least one of those is, essentially, a farce.

Determining which is which is left as an exercise for the reader.

The problem I have is that anticipation and desire or problematically intertwined, especially when the anticipation becomes communal. Where I come from we term this the Messiah's Donkey thinking.

> I find the idea that the world's flood myths (Noah, Atlantis..) relate to catastrophic flood events. Religions tell us about past catastrophes and promise future ones.

...except one of the morals of the Noah story is that nothing but God can help you when God calls your number (1). Prepping for the big one isn't a very biblical idea. The general advice of the Bible is that you could be dead in an hour, so preparing your soul for eternity is way more important than a bag of flour (Luke 12:16-21).

Being ready for hurricanes or what-have-you would fall under general wisdom, I guess. But I don't think it's directly addressed in the Bible.

(1) There's also the moral that God wants to redeem humanity despite its flaws. It's not a bleak story, fundamentally.

Stories develop over time and they pick up the morality of the time when they are being told.

For an analogy, there are speculations that the mythological story about “Helen of Troy” relates to customs of basically… kidnapping women in raids (they were a seafaring culture) at the time Homer was writing. So, we get information about the morality of the culture doing the writing but also information about earlier events.

For a repetition of the pattern, the trojan war itself was fought by people of a culture had already “collapsed,” followed by a dark age and was in the process of rebooting. They were transcribing oral traditions and that’s why we know the Homeric stories today, the writings of the early revivalists.

Maybe Homer’s great grandma had a basement full of canned soup and a nice cabin in a strategic location.

Yup. I think a lot of the extrene nut-cases get a disproportionate amount of the attention placed on the whole prepper movement, but a lot of people are into it just for the either the fun of it or as a practical exercise in self-sufficicency. It's kind of like mixing tough mudders with zombies: you get to mix exercise with fantasy.

Apparently some use zombie apocalypse as a euphemism for race riots.

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