I stumbled across Scott Carpenter's blog via a post he wrote last year about a WordPress XHTML validator plugin.
I liked his Moving to freedom
blog theme: free software, free culture, free
association, and as an Obama supporter at the last election, I also liked his choice of candidate at a caucus he attended a year ago.
So I was intrigued by Carpenter's post about
preparedness, because preparedness
and survivalism
are concerns I
associate with a kind of reactionary, isolationist libertarian politics that is a long
way from Obama's
community-focused politics.
Carpenter notes that he's not planning to buy into the guns 'n' ammo brand of survivalism, which I'm glad about because it's usually allied more or less closely with supremacism. But now that I've moved onto the topic, there's something I want to get off my chest about the politics of reactionary self-sufficiency, and it's this: wouldn't it be great if the focus of survivalist efforts was more on social sustainability? On co-operatively creating a reliable shared infrastructure instead of having everyone duplicate each other's efforts to provide power generation, water supplies, and so on?
I think that a community of nearby people investing effort in creating reliable common utilities would achieve greater efficiency, and more comprehensive results, than the same community of people investing the same effort in creating a large number of small isolated, systems. But why so?
Simply put: because not everyone has equal resources. In fact, even in an idealised world in which everyone* has a home and some land and some money (the kind of world often assumed by survivalist writers), not everyone has equal resources. For instance, if your house is in a valley it might have a well but little sunlight or wind, whereas if mine were on the adjacent hillside, it might have more wind and sunlight but no water supply. If, as neighbours, we shared our resources, we'd both have power and water; if not, we'd only have one or the other, and we'd each have to go to greater lengths to get the resources we were without than we would if we'd shared them.
This doesn't hold up in all circumstances, of course. If you live in a very isolated place, it may be more efficient for you to source or store your own fuel or water than it would be to try to share your neighbour's. But my point is, a philosophy that everyone ought to be able to survive without outside assistance presupposes a collapsed society, and if pursued vigorously is surely one of the fastest ways to create one.
* Everyone, that is, except the enemies
, who are often, in survivalist literature, portrayed as poor people who engage in looting. Whether they loot because they have no houses, land or money of their own in a world where those who do have these things will not share them, is usually left unclear.
Hi, Sam. Thanks for your interest in my site!
I read something recently (only remembered vaguely now) about how we should aim for more local production of power and other essentials so that we’re not all at the mercy of large-scale system breakdowns (or at least not all affected at the same time), and that seems to go with what you’re saying here. There’s some balance to be found between every household duplicating each other on the one end and having 10 million households dependent on the same infrastructure on the other.
I agree that we should work together as communities. I’m often pessimistic about where our society is heading, but if we can’t get along, we’re screwed. I’m still interested in self-reliance though — preparation for short and maybe medium term disruptions.
as they say. That’s often been my motto. But increasingly, I’m learning that in some circumstances, too much time/effort spent on preparing for the worst can leave one without the wherewithal to make the best happen. That’s the great pitfall I see in the hardcore survivalist community.
It’s great to see you’re interested not only in self-reliance, but – more importantly – in trying to strike an optimum balance between self-reliance and community reliance. Good luck with your efforts!
Still, there is only so much we can do. As James Thurber put it,
Although the post above is not about the guns ‘n’ ammo brand of survivalism, this seems a reasonable place to note that my point that “preparing for the worst can leave one without the wherewithal to make the best happen” probably applies to that brand of survivalism too. Disarming, it would seem, may be a community imperative.