“Prepping” is a trendy meme, and it seems to usually means preparing a backpack with stuff you’ll need when you leave the city or town and go live a life of brave, individual survivalism in the woods. That is delusional; a fantasy that comes from watching too many movies. A lot of aspects of our society might well break down. If you look around, they already are. A go bag is not going to save you.
Societies collapse all the time, historically speaking. It’s the norm. Luke Kemp is a lecturer at Cambridge who’s studied 400 societies over 5,000 years and identified some common trends. He points out that “History is best told as a story of organised crime.” He argues that humans are innately generous and naturally egalitarian, but something about the formation of societies enables the establishment of small groups of sociopaths (like Putin), narcissists (like the orange baby), and manipulators (like Xi Jinping), and then:
“…as elites extract more wealth from the people and the land, they make societies more fragile, leading to infighting, corruption, immiseration of the masses, less healthy people, overexpansion, environmental degradation and poor decision making by a small oligarchy. The hollowed-out shell of a society is eventually cracked asunder by shocks such as disease, war or climate change.“
We’ve been propagandized to think that the collapse of a society is a bad thing, but Kemp also points out that “after the fall of Rome, people actually got taller and healthier.”
Nowadays there is too much population to completely disburse into the wilderness with go bags. And anyway, the prepper idea is flawed because it’s not really a return to pioneer subsistence; but on a cartoonish idea of what that really was. Modern preppers hoard canned goods and bottled water, and apparently believe that whatever firearms they take with them contain infinite ammunition, or can be easily reloaded if you find the right sticks and rocks. It’s a fun fantasy, I suppose.
The kinds of things that are really going to break down will tend to be things like air traffic control, delivery of hydrocarbon fuels like gasoline and diesel, and depending on your location, maybe easily available water. But even if the high-level oversight of society, like a federal-level government overseeing millions of citizens breaks down (which it seems to be), local-level organizations are more resilient. So staying where you are and strengthening the connections around you, in your community, is a better approach if you think society in the larger sense is circling the drain.
And Bill McKibben has. the solution to your energy worries: it’s solar. Set up a substantial array of solar panels and keep warm in the winter, enjoy hot food and warm water, and power your personal transportation. And maybe even help your neighbors with the power you generate.
What you need is not a go bag; it’s a stay bag.
Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse by Luke Kemp
