Survivalism

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Survivalism is the making of preparations for an expected long-term or complete breakdown of society or its infrastructure.

Do not look at the light. Keep your head down and your powder dry. Beware mutants and zombies.

It may involve the hoarding of guns, food, and other supplies, the construction of fallout shelters or other shelters specific to whatever apocalypse they are expecting (there is actually one group[1] building - get this - an ark), the purchase of isolated rural property to retreat to during the crisis, hoarding some sort of barter currency in expectation of the complete collapse of the value of paper money (silver and gold are common bulwarks here), and either learning 19th century skills common before electricity or building "off the grid" power supplies in expectation of the world, or at least their region, being without centralized power generation for the indefinite future.

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[edit] What survivalism is, and what it is not

Preparedness, learning first aid and CPR, keeping emergency food and water supplies, emergency lighting and cooking gear, learning survival skills in case one is stranded in the wilderness, etc. are all recommended by most government agencies and groups like the Red Cross, even though most people don't make these preparations as well as they should.

What distinguishes survivalism from preparedness for survival during emergencies is survivalists expect a long-term or permanent breakdown in society's infrastructure, whereas being prepared for floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, fires, power outages, earthquakes, being stranded somewhere, etc. necessarily implies the emergency situation will be temporary.

For example, in case of being stranded, "survival" means finding just enough food, shelter, and water to keep oneself alive until one is found or reaches help, and signaling with the intent of being rescued. This implies society's infrastructure is still alive and well, and defines survival as keeping alive so as to return to society, not abandon it.

This is a very different sense than used by survivalists, who see themselves surviving apart from society or what's left of it. They don't want to be rescued in the event of an emergency, indeed some of them make preparations to defend their "retreat" against all threatening intruders such as FEMA, the Red Cross, or the local volunteer fire department. Hence survivalists are usually rugged individualists, and are largely concerned with their own survival rather than yours.

[edit] Origins

The popular stereotype is that survivalists wear camo 24/7, live in a bunker and have a stockpile of automatic weapons and a copy of Mein Kampf on the bookshelf, so one might be forgiven for believing survivalism had its origins in the militia movement (or vice versa), or among disgruntled former members of the American Nazi Party. Another popular belief is it had its origins in government civil defense programs of 1950s vintage, such as the ridiculous Duck and Cover.

One would be wrong on both counts. It actually had much more nerdy and wonkish origins, among back-to-the-land hippies and libertarian gold bugs grouped around libertarian newsletters of the late 1960s and early 1970s like the Innovator and Inflation Survival Letter. Many of the early leading lights of the movement were financial advisors and coin entrepreneurs advising people to store food and precious metals in expectation of economic collapse, and many of them were followers or graduates of the lectures of Andrew J. Galambos according to Brian Doherty's rip-roaring history of the libertarian movement, Radicals for Capitalism.

The racist-paramilitary reputation of survivalism, however, is not without good reason. The reason for it can probably be traced to a different group of (you guessed it) disgruntled former members of the American Nazi Party, most notably Kurt Saxon, who was also a former member of the Church of Scientology, the John Birch Society, the Church of Satan, and the Minutemen among other things. He claims to have coined the term "survivalism" circa 1975. Whether there is any truth to this is uncertain.

A third impetus came about with the directive by the Mormon church for its members to store a years supply of food in their homes, giving Utah a thriving cottage industry of businesses selling freeze dried food.

[edit] The end is near!

Since they expect a total breakdown in society, and expecting such a total breakdown from the usual floods, fires, earthquakes, and hurricanes is unrealistic at best, survivalists' apocalyptic visions come from other sources. Most of them are complete woo:

[edit] Realistic

There are really only a few that could conceivably occur and could conceivably result in long-term breakdown of the infrastructure (which excludes more ho-hum run of the mill emergencies):

as for the rest:

[edit] Disputed

  • Peak oil, the Long Emergency scenario
  • Y2K - disputed before January 1, 2000, turned out of course to be much ado about nothing very little[2]

[edit] Woo

  • "Earth changes"
  • The "Great Tribulation"
  • Christians will have to live off the grid for 7 years so they don't have to take the mark, 666 on their foreheads!
  • The world will end in 2012!
  • Societal breakdown is inevitable because of those of inferior genetic stock (read: minorities) being allowed to reproduce
  • Black helicopters occupying America to enforce the New World Order
  • The commies are coming and a small remnant must be ready to take to the hills and wage guerrilla warfare. Wolverines!
  • Fluoride in our water (or mind control rays, or the Russian Woodpecker,[3] or whatever) makes people stupid and will do the same for the U.S. as lead in the water pipes did for Rome
  • God hates (fill in the blank) and is about to do for the U.S. what He did for Sodom and Gomorrah
  • Another great flood
  • Zombocalypse - this one may be an elaborate spoof and is to survivalism what the Flying Spaghetti Monster is to creationism

[edit] Not woo, just juvenile

  • Grown up little boys for whom "survivalism" is merely an excuse to run around in the woods in camo and read magazines about mercenaries
  • Some survivalists have a grudge against society and want it to collapse, whether or not they actually believe it will (see: Unabomber)

[edit] Politics and religion

Ironically, many survivalists claim to be practitioners of Christianity,[4] a religion originally built on the willingness of converts to accept personal extinction in a process known as martyrdom. It also includes some New Agers, who believe in the end of the world because Ramtha J.Z. Knight said so, or "earth changes" are coming soon, or the Mayan calendar ends in 2012, or other woo. It has also attracted some white supremacist types who think society will inevitably break down what with all the minorities unless we institute a national eugenics program ASAP.

Survivalists are not necessarily on the political hard right and there are some with views across the spectrum, including completely apolitical, and a left-wing contingent mostly associated with the 1970s "back to the land" movement, but the hard right does tend to predominate.

Typically survivalism grows and ebbs over the years, and holds some attraction for mainstream people during times when a (realistic, not woo-based) potential major crisis gets a lot of media attention: economic collapse in the 1970s, global thermonuclear warfare in the early 1980s, Y2K in the late 1990s. Each time, the mainstream folks inevitably lose interest within a year or two, leaving a core of true believers expecting one or another sort of woo. (Also, the wild-eyed apocalyptic woo-meisters and assorted right-wing extremists tend to positively repel normal folks, and normal folks usually also quickly figure out there is a difference between preparedness for emergencies and survivalism, and opt for the former). As of this writing, woo-based survivalism seems to be more prevalent than ever. The left-wing contingent (moribund since about 1981) has recently made a comeback, largely motivated by the "peak oil" theory and an extreme interpretation of the potential effects of global warming (we have the books of James Howard Kunstler to thank for this), and by William Strauss and Neil Howe's prediction of an imminent crisis period lasting 20 years. Because of this the usual rightie-dominated survivalist forums are starting to complain about all the lefties who have been showing up of late. However, extreme-right interest in survivalism also appears to be at a high point right now, for various reasons (the War on Terror, predictions the culture war will expand into an actual shootin' civil war, that big bad Islamic threat, Barack Obama is the antichrist, etc.)

There has also been a resurgence of interest in reality-based preparedness since Hurricane Katrina. Many of those involved have begun using the term preppers to describe themselves, and possibly also to distance themselves from the political and religious extremism that survivalism has come to be associated with. Promoting reality-based preparedness for emergencies has become official government policy. September is National Preparedness Month. Make a plan - get a kit - be informed.

Ironically, the sort of long-term breakdown survivalists expect has happened in recent years - in Somalia, a country where few people had the means to make the sort of elaborate preparations survivalists make. Survivalism is a game for the idle rich in search of self-actualization; those who actually have to concern themselves with day to day survival can't afford it. The big irony here is if the breakdown survivalists are expecting actually comes, they (like everyone else) will suddenly be dirt poor and forced to adopt the lifestyles of remote third world villages - places where cooperative living is a necessity and a stance of rugged individualism (in this case, a euphemism for being willing to knife someone in the back for a carton of powdered milk) is a one way ticket to starvation - in order to survive.

[edit] Sci-fi

Science fiction author David Brin wrote an entire postapocalyptic novel, called The Postman, on the subject of how survivalism siphons off resources needed to keep society running, before noted self-career-imploding Hollywood hack Kevin Costner turned it into one of the least comprehensible movies ever.

Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's book Lucifer's Hammer is also a postapocalyptic novel with a more positive view of survivalism than Brin's work. (However, it is also viciously misogynistic, crowing about the death of feminism in one passage.)

[edit] See also

[edit] External links


[edit] Footnotes

  1. ↑ They're in western Maryland, which is not to be confused with the rest of Maryland -- western Maryland is mountainous, isolated, tends to get snowed in in the winter, and is more like West Virginia and south central Pennsylvania than the likes of Baltimore -- and yes they are building an ark, right next to Interstate 68 where I'm sure they will be safe from God's next big flood although all the sheeple fleeing Pittsburgh, Baltimore, and Washington D.C. on same Interstate 68 when TSHTF may be a problem for them.
  2. ↑ While the Y2K "bug" was a very real issue, it would not have destroyed society, but just made some financial transactions screw up until they could be fixed. It did, however, provide full employment for a while for COBOL programmers who forgot about centuries changing. It is well known that the world will in fact end in January 2038, when 32 bit Unix timestamps overflow, given that God runs Unix.
  3. ↑ The Russian Woodpecker was the name given by shortwave listeners and ham radio operators to the Soviet Union's top secret Duga-3 missile radar installation; the name came from the sound of the signal in an AM shortwave radio, which resembled a high-speed tapping. It powered up in the mid-70s and went off-line in 1989 for reasons still not publicly known in the West.
  4. ↑ http://www.teachingaboutreligion.org/Demographics/map_demographics.htm
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