Yeah. To be blunt, that’s the sort of thing you see from people who aren’t in actual mortal danger. When it comes down to the actual choice of “starve or take this hoarder’s stuff”, I think most people would end up picking the second. And the fact that they’ll have numbers on their side just makes it both morally more acceptable and practically easier to achieve.
In real life, people don’t just let that one selfish guy sit on his hoard of food while they starve. And in fact if there’s some remnant/replacement local government you can fully expect them to show up and help take out the hoarder.
Really, if we’re talking about a long-term collapse, getting into a community like the Mormons is the way to go. As discussed, they have a culture of preparing for disaster, even if it’s not perfect. But more importantly, you have a built-in community to reorganize around.
In a complete SHTF scenario, no amount of stored food will be enough. You’ll eventually work through that amount, even if you don’t lose any to bandits, pests, floods or the like. Any serious plan to survive long-term needs a robust plan to start producing new food as soon as possible. And as has also been pointed out, a lot of the machinery and animals we used to use for agriculture will be largely unavailable.
Which leaves us with humans doing all the work, with whatever hand tools you included in your supplies. That will suck, but we know it’s possible to grow enough food like that to survive.
You need a plan, and that plan needs to be robust. How you start growing food depends a lot on what time of year it is that the SHTF. Winter? Can you build a greenhouse? Spring? What should you plant first, to produce calories while you’re waiting for longer-term crops to grow? Summer? What wild plants can you find? Fall? What do you plant in the fall for an early spring growing season? And hunting year-round. Know what animals will be close to hand any given month, and how to catch them.
You need food to survive in the short term, 6 to 12 months, but if you’re not supplementing that as much as possible as soon as possible, you’re ultimately screwed.
A weird delusion of most preppers is that they’ll have the luxury of just hunkering down in their compound where they keep all that stuff. The key to surviving most catastrophes is to just run like Hell with whatever you can carry on your back.
This is true, and food will be one of the first concerns of a community but long term you need to be able to replace everything. Even if you stockpile tools eventually they’ll break, wear out, or be lost. Who knows? Former convicts might be in demand as people who can make a knife (shank) out of just about anything. Sure, so could a smith (possibly) but they’ll be busy making all sorts of other tools.
Even in established communities still employing 19th Century techniques you’d run into problems. Sure, the Amish still use draft animals to plow their fields but they don’t make the metal tools like plows that the animals pull.
Rebuilding, heck just the planning for rebuilding, is a lot more complicated that people realize.
I see nothing wrong with stockpiling if you do it over time because it has no sudden, deleterious effect on the economy. The rush on stores during COVID, however, hurt the ability of many people to satisfy basic needs.
Yeah, but simple hand tools are pretty robust, and if you buy the right ones, you can replace things like handles pretty easily. I’ve got woodworking tools that my great-grandfather used, which were used by professional carpenters for at least two generations, that could still be used today if I wanted to put the effort into fixing them. I did clean up and put new handles on a couple of axes a few years back just as a fun project, and could do the same with the others if needed.
Storing just the steel parts of a lot of hand farming tools like hoes and scythes wouldn’t take up much room, and raiding a few lumber yards or just local trees to make handles would be relatively easy. They won’t last forever, but at some point, the survival of the third generation after the apocalypse becomes their problem
What happens if infrastructure breaks down but there is no direct attack on people? I think this is the worst case scenario.
Right now the world has a population of around eight billion with an infrastructure to support that population. If we went to a world with a population of one billion people with an infrastructure to support one billion people (or eight billion people) that would be the worst catastrophe in history. But if we went to a world with a population of eight billion people but the infrastructure dropped to a level that could only support one billion of those people, it would be far worse.
That’s a world where people are quickly going to see that other people are a threat to them just by being alive. You’ll see a complete breakdown of society as people try to be among the one billion survivors rather than the seven billion casualties. Because the math says that for you to live, seven other people have to die.
But how would that happen? There are sci-fi scenarios that involve things like bacteria that eat oil and plastics, but even there, there would a lot of deaths as a result.
Pretty much anything robust enough to wipe out a large percentage of our infrastructure in a short period of time will also kill people. A slow decay of infrastructure probably won’t be perceived as a collapse even as it’s happening. It will just get gradually harder and more expensive to buy things, and people will figure out how to do without, and live with what’s closest to hand. They just gradually slip into greater and greater poverty. We’d still lose people to food insufficiency and disease, but it will be spread out enough to not really be seen as a collapse.
I agree it’s generally a science fiction scenario (a prominent example being S.M. Stirling Emberverse series) but I feel a non-fictional version is possible.
The reality is our modern infrastructure is very knit together. I feel it’s possible for some terrorist group to knock out a relatively small number of targets and cause the whole system to collapse.
There are also EMP weapons systems which are designed to damage electronic systems while having minimal effect on people (sort of the opposite of a biological or chemical weapon).
When Mom died in 2012, we had a long yard sale. One of the things sold was four boxes of dehydrated food. Each box was supposed to last for one year for one person. I remember them buying it in 1972.
My son says that they replaced the boxes somewhere along the line. But I’m not sure about that.
We warned people that it could be expired. They were still snapped up.
Exactly. The run on the stores if the SHTF will be a danger in itself. Start now if you think it might be necessary in the nearish future. There’s no way to stockpile for 20 or even 5 years in the future.
You’ll be really lucky if you can last 6 mos.
I’ll be dead in about 8 days. So my own survival isn’t a concern.
Like the California gold rush, I think those selling prepper supplies are going to do better than the people buying all that stuff, as they will have amassed enough wealth and resources to ride-out a SHTF disaster longer and more comfortably than their rube customers - but most likely they will just live better until age takes them. I see no moral hazard for making a buck off these people.
I watched one of those pepper shows a while ago - it struck me how terrible people are at assessing risks - this guy showing-off his stash of prepper supplies, while puffing away on a cigarette.
There’s another where a family is in a well-stocked shelter, except they forgot the can opener.
p.s. An ex-boyfriend, who knew I’d also read Stephen King’s “The Stand”, once asked me, “So, where would you rather go, Vegas or Boulder?” I replied, “Neither; I would want to die so early in the epidemic, my name would be in the book.”
ISTR reading about a polar expedition that was marooned somewhere, and they actually killed a comrade who was hogging all the food. It was a matter of survival for all of them. (No, they didn’t eat him; IIRC they dumped his body into the ocean, after stripping all his clothes off.)
The Carrington Event was the most intense geomagnetic storm in recorded history, peaking on 1–2 September 1859 during solar cycle 10. It created strong auroral displays that were reported globally and caused sparking and even fires in telegraph stations.[1] The geomagnetic storm was most likely the result of a coronal mass ejection (CME) from the Sun colliding with Earth’s magnetosphere.[2]
Combined with the serious neglect of our infrastructure, that could easily collapse the electrical portion of it for a long time while directly killing only a small number of people through fires and such.
In a modern Carrington Event the First World, so intermeshed with electrically powered devices of all kinds, would collapse into chaos. The Third World, which outside of the Westernized cities is far closer to the subsistence level of existence, would also suffer but on the whole be better able to handle a worldwide collapse.
As for me, I’m in my middle 70s, dependent on a number of medications, living in a coastal suburb north of Boston, and probably wouldn’t survive for more than a few months, especially without power over a New England winter. No point in prepping for anything more critical than a few days’ power outage, which already happens occasionally.
