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Land, Guns, and Gold: Will They Save You?

HomesteadersShack.jpg

Respectable (and not-so-respectable) pundits have been predicting a worldwide economic collapse for the better part of three years now. The advice of these "doomsday investors" to their wealthy clients amounts to this: buy rural property, preferably a self-sufficient farm, somewhere far away from the big cities; and stockpile essential supplies, especially gold, guns and ammunition. It's an old idea that is becoming mainstream.

I live on twenty rural acres, just outside of a small town but almost two hours away from the nearest major city. Here we raise goats for meat and milk, cows for beef, and chickens primarily for eggs. We planted 150 fruit trees a few years ago, and the orchard is just now coming into production. We also grow some vegetables and melons in our kitchen garden, and an amazing quantity of figs from three ancient fig trees. Wild blackberries grow on the property, which my children harvest for the making of pies and jam. We don't own any gold, but we do keep a shotgun, a rifle, and a .357 revolver with plenty of ammunition on hand. Our water is supplied from a domestic well and a regional irrigation project, so we're independent of city water systems (but still dependent upon public utilities). It's not "self-sufficiency" or "independence" by a long shot, but it does put certain problems at a distance.

Therefore, I do consider myself qualified to have a few opinions on the "buy farms, gold, and guns" solution proposed by the doomsday investors.

In the first place, if you're a banker or some other type of city slicker, it won't be enough to flee to a self-sufficient farm away from the cities: you'll need to bring some experienced farm help with you. The knowledge and skills required to operate competently any kind of farm - nevermind a highly diversified self-sufficient homestead! - takes many years to acquire. To complicate matters, much of this knowledge is not written in books. You have to learn by working under the tutelage of others. A non-farmer attempting to survive this way in an emergency is going to fall flat on his face.

I think a more sensible solution is to obtain rural property near a small city or town, where you can establish a network of friends and neighbors who can help each other in a crisis. All things being equal, it's better to remain in close proximity to friends and relatives than it is to live in isolation in the countryside. But it does seem likely that the larger cities (> 500,000 pop) will be hardest hit in the event of an economic meltdown, widespread social unrest, or the dropping of bombs.

It's a good idea to own some land - just a few acres of fertile land should be plenty - even if you must take out a mortgage. Producing some of your own food is helpful even if it doesn't quite make you "self sufficient". In this way you can also avoid dependence on city water systems. You might owe the bank, but if the bank disappears in a crisis it will be hard to evict you. Your land might also be a source of rental income if the stream of foreign and out-of-region food sources dries up suddenly. Most importantly, you will be able to help friends and relatives fleeing the city if needed.

My least favorite part of homesteading is the livestock. Keeping animals is characterized by long periods of easy, low maintenance interspersed with inconvenient and unpredictable emergencies requiring immediate attention. Drop everything! But it seems to me that owning livestock is a pretty smart way to survive a temporary food shortage. Raising fruit and vegetables requires intensive labor and many precarious weeks of tending and growing. Once harvested, produce is notoriously perishable. Pastured livestock or fowl, on the other hand, can be "stored" for months by simply providing the animals with water. The meat is available almost immediately and on demand, in every season. You don't slaughter until you're hungry or you need something to sell or barter. One goat can feed a family for weeks, one cow for months. If you breed the animals they replenish themselves at little cost, usually without assistance, and in the meantime you will benefit greatly from the milk and eggs.

As for the guns and ammo, you're going to want these anyway just for use on the homestead, and I suppose they might come in handy for the defense of your property. But if you are thinking in terms of putting up any kind of resistance to armed groups of bandits, renegade soldiers or police forces, invading armies, etc., think again. For this, as with much else in life, you need the support of a community - in this case, a militia. And that means living in close proximity to like-minded and similarly-armed neighbors. Forget about building some remote fortress in the wilderness, and flee instead to the small cities and towns of America's rural counties.

Comments (72)

As for gold, well, I don't have a lot to say about it. Probably should have left it out of the title.

I'll tell you this much: I was just reading my home owner's insurance policy, and they don't cover gold. :-) Not that gold is likely to get destroyed in a fire anyway, though I suppose it might be buried in an earthquake or tornado or, of course, stolen.

No surprise there, Lydia. In the long run I'm sure gold is a fine thing to own. I have my doubts about its value in a time of severe economic crisis, at least domestically.

That should have been, Land, Guns, and Antibiotics. Sheesh, don't you guys know anything? You can't use gold for much except coins and fillings, but who wouldn't give money for a bottle of penicillin?

Really, the economic collapse will only be measured by the pain of the middle-class and the near-rich. The poor have already felt it and the rich never will.

I have about eight different text editors on my computer. How many pairs of shoes do you have? Not to restart the consumerism debate, but the only reason that the economy would collapse is that the people with money did it, oh, and the debt of the middle-class who can't seem to live within their means. The poor have nothing to collapse. Seriously, if Christians would take St. Paul seriously, there would be less pain in economics. What do you really need: food, clothing, and shelter. Eight text editors? If I weren't a geek, there would be something seriously wrong with that.

The Chicken

MC, it really depends on what you mean by "collapse". If the collapse is the dramatic loss of 9/10 of the value of stock, and the loss of 4/5 of the "value" of land, yes, the poor don't have it anyway, and the rich can afford it. But if by collapse you mean that oil doesn't flow, electricity stops, and water systems dry up, then the rich in the cities will find out quickly that people don't give a damn about all the pieces of paper they have that says that they "own" land and companies and planes. And the rich won't have any better skills for dealing than do the poor, they will be trying to call 911 while the gangs bust in the door to take the food and Perrier. As for the poor in that situation: the ones who are right on the edge of survival already AND who have poor coping skills (and limited education) will die off just about as quickly as the rich without skills.

Jeff, I agree with your assessment of gold: eventually, a new money system with gold might make a comeback, but that would be years off down the road. You have to survive until then. You need a little space, livestock, seed, and a water source, survival skills, and a network of pals with guns to come running when you scream for help. Anything else and you're dead meat. Possibly literally. And on top of all that, you still need a major dollop of luck (oh, call it Providence, but it's still not something you can command).

I'm soo glad that I should (God willing) be entering a Monastary next year

Do you really think America's economy could collapse such that people would need to grow their own food?.
When has such a collapse happened in any modern country save Russia during Civil War?.
Do you think America could fall as much?
I am really curious to know.

@Gian: We've come precariously close in the 70s and 80s with the gas crunches. Nevermind of course the dustbowls and depressions of the 20s and 30s when people did in fact starve. (Unless you don't think of 1930s USA as "modern.")

Gian, in my estimation a collapse like that has a modestly low order of probability, but well above 5%, probably above 10%. Our social order is very complex, and nobody really knows just how the interconnectedness will play out in a bad turn, but there is solid reason to believe that it could be a total collapse of law, order, and basic services. You can easily expect minor melt-downs to occur, but each one uses up a certain amount of social and economic reserves of capital - social capital being held in, for example, people's expectation that law enforcement will come along and protect them most of the time. When you lose that expectation, you find people starting to hunker down, and starting to form vigilante squads...oh, wait, that's what we already have been seeing. See what I mean?

We have already used up a certain amount of social capital in such things as the sexual revolution, allowing the reproduction of the race occur outside of the natural social unit of the family. And in allowing "law" to be used to foster all sorts of injustices, turning a blind eye to common sense. There is only so much capital to use up before order cannot be maintained.

There is only so much capital to use up before order cannot be maintained.

The sad thing, of course, is that the solution is very simple. If all people would take the commandments to heart, things would clear up very quickly. We live in a fallen world, but we do not live in a world without grace. People have been lied to in so many ways. They now try to make their own grace, but to do that, they have to be their own God.

St. Paul said, "Where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more." One must assume that there is enough grace to see us through the mess, but we are so caught up in sin that we cannot see or use the graces that we have.

You want to stop the free-fall? Talk about sin. You may get arrested the first dozen or so times and ignored the next ten, but, like ancient Isreal, we really only have two choices: admit our sinfulness and repent or die.

Of course, Christians should not be alarmed in all of this mess. We have always been a people of the Cross. What bothers me so much is that Christians are worrying and fleeing from the Cross. This tells me that Christianity has become too much of an activity, today, and not enough of a relationship. Most of all, Chritianity has a particular relationship with suffering and death that no other religion in the world has. No other religion would think of the memento mori. While no one likes suffering, are we really better than our Lord?

It is the people who are running from their crosses that are causing all of the mess. This is the best statement of the cause of the current malaise that I can think of. People don't want to admit mistakes; they don't want to take responsibility; they don't want to look out for others; they want to save themselves. All of these actions, whether on the individual or corporate level, is a way of running from the crosses of life. Alleviating suffering is a good thing, make no mistake, but it must be done through the sanctification of the moment which the Cross provides. We have so much sin and so little use of grace, today, because people have been lied to and told that suffering, even the suffering of telling the truth in a difficult situation, is something that is best avoided.

The Chicken

There is something uniquely American about these disaster porn type fantasies about the collapse of civilization. Sort of like saying: "well, now is my chance to live how I want to, without the interference of the gummint!" I think Mr. Culbreath does knock that sentiment down a couple of notches towards reality, but the fact that people make an industry out of it (and make movies about it) says a lot about our culture. The truth is, we have so much, and are afraid of losing it. But fear makes people do all sorts of stupid things.

I was living in Argentina when their currency devalued in 2002 and the presidency changed hands a couple of times. Maybe they are more used to that stuff down there, but in spite of what the media made of all of it, cats didn't begin to marry dogs, it didn't start to rain frogs, and life continued on pretty much as usual. The more realistic scenario in this country is that we become more like a Third World country: the rich get richer, and so forth. Heck, the upper class of Sao Paulo, Brazil, can't even drive down the street for fear of kidnapping, and they fly home in helicopters.

While such social stratification is far from desirable, it is also far from societal collapse. All the talk of building a wall on the border with Mexico will soon be accompanied by a quieter movement to build walls within to keep the growing lower class out. Maybe that is my own "nightmare scenario", but it has already happened in many parts of the world, so why not here?

It is the people who are running from their crosses that are causing all of the mess. This is the best statement of the cause of the current malaise that I can think of. People don't want to admit mistakes; they don't want to take responsibility; they don't want to look out for others; they want to save themselves. All of these actions, whether on the individual or corporate level, is a way of running from the crosses of life.

I agree with this, well stated.

To put a word in for gold, in a devastating deflation/economic collapse such as the one hypothesized in this thread, gold is the only financial asset that will survive the resultant mass consolidation or collapse of balance sheets unscathed. It will do so because it is the only financial asset that is not simultaneously the liability of someone else. This is what makes gold the best form of capital to have on one's balance sheet. Those who possess gold (ie. the world's capital) when the rebuilding begins will be in a position to shape the future.

Our social order is very complex, and nobody really knows just how the interconnectedness will play out in a bad turn, but there is solid reason to believe that it could be a total collapse of law, order, and basic services.

Before that would happen, I imagine we would have some sort of emergency military take over.

"The truth is, we have so much, and are afraid of losing it. But fear makes people do all sorts of stupid things."

Maybe like vote for conservatives?

Suggestion, go check your medicine cabinet. A significant number of us are here because of things that would go away in the sort of collapse that you all are postulating. Diabetes? Thyroid issues? Heart meds? On Chemo? Go count your pills, divide by the dosage and that is either your life span or when your decline begins.

"You might owe the bank, but if the bank disappears in a crisis it will be hard to evict you."

That sentence means the courts aren't functioning and commerce is at the barter level.

"There is something uniquely American about these disaster porn type fantasies about the collapse of civilization. Sort of like saying: "well, now is my chance to live how I want to, without the interference of the gummint!" I think Mr. Culbreath does knock that sentiment down a couple of notches towards reality, but the fact that people make an industry out of it (and make movies about it) says a lot about our culture."

These fantasies seem to infect both the far right and left (hippy communes, anyone). Perhaps this topic should be kicked up a level and folks should at least consider that envisioning, certainly welcoming, the sort of collapse discussed here is symptomatic of other issues.

As with an asteroid impact beyond a certain size, survival isn't really a consideration in some circumstances. One of the things I enjoyed about Varanasi was watching all the well fed vultures hanging out. I enjoy rural life but I am under no illusion that, in the event of this thread's collapse, the creatures who would gain the most would be the turkey vultures who daily patrol out back.

On a final note, one should consider that things like I-5 are like a dagger pointed at one's heart.

Where is the picture from? Looks like Nevada or Utah?

The cabin, as I recall, is located in Modoc County, CA - defintely the most remote and sparsely populated region of this beautiful state.

I-5 may or may not be a "dagger to the heart". In an economic collapse, where fuel is unavailable or too costly, there won't be a whole lot of traffic. In a different sort of crisis - say a foreign invasion or civil war - you don't want to live near the interstate.

Re: Chicken's remarks and those of Mr. Vasquez: holy poverty solves lots of problems!

Jeff C.,

I personally doubt you'll ever have to worry about civilizational collapse, but in the meantime, did you ever consider renting out your farm as a "haycation":

http://www.suntimes.com/lifestyles/travel/2483330,kinnikinnick-farm-feather-down-caledonia-071410.article ?

The Singer family is considering taking the vacation discussed in the above article, but it made me think that with your friendly attitude and hospitality, your farm might be a perfect fit for this type of vacation business.

al, your 3:13PM Wherever it is, don't move there.

In the coming Zombie Apocalypse, gold is worthless. Ammunition, medicine, food, and any technology which actually works and does something useful, keeps the Mall-Fortress humming -- not worthless. Also not worthless: negotiation skills.

Another thing which is worthless is thinking that we can plan for the Zombie Apocalypse in any sense which increases our individual survival odds. Any cache of food/medicine/weapons/land/etc you store up will be discovered by the same band of survivors who finds your corpse.

I love a good apocalypse story. But the truth is that we'll all - with virtual certainty - get our chance to die the ordinary mundane old fashioned way, in accidents, from cancer, old age, etc. And trivial things like the road signs on the street we live on, and millions of other mundane objects, and billions of other human beings, will persist after we are gone. Our loved ones will notice our departure, of course; but the big wide world will not. It scarcely notices the departure of famous and important people, let alone ordinary folks like us.

I tend to believe that apocalyptic thinking is a reaction against how small and insignificant we are as individuals: or, in Christian terms, a reaction against how utterly dependent we are upon God's Providence for each and every moment of our lives, and the lives of everyone we love.

I have to agree with the two or three posters who suggested an economic collapse would lead to government take-over rather than chaos. It is more practical to obey the President than God, contrarieties notwithstanding, and I suppose that political authority is as natural as agriculture in any case. I think the fear of apocalypse that people have comes from history being filled with racial, cultural and political annihilation. It is just as normal to die by violence as by cancer. Didn't Flannery O'Connor write a story about that somewhere?

All that being said, an increase in small farms and barns may be good in any economy. Is that the more interesting issue?

We're a long, long way from the sort of collapse envisioned in this thread. When asked what I'll do in the unlikely event that it happens, my answer can only be "Die, probably." The people of countries much poorer than this one aren't living in Mad Max's world, and even in Africa the cities are filling up and the countryside is no refuge. Industrial civilization isn't likely to last forever, but it will outlive all of us.

"I have to agree with the two or three posters who suggested an economic collapse would lead to government take-over rather than chaos."

The two aren't mutually exclusive. If anything they tend to go hand in hand many times.

I think the idea that "the government" would take over is reasonable. But which government? Local? State? Federal? A community with an infrastructure of the sort Jeff C mentioned? I'm skeptical of the idea that, should some type of serious and deep economic/political upheaval come to pass, we can trust that the federal government will have it together enough to step in and take care of things peacefully and orderly.

Besides, I don't really see anyone warning about an "apocalypse" here, or even societal collapse (What does this mean? Thundarr the Barbarian style life?) The fear seems to be of something more tame - war, unrest, times of serious economic strife, etc. The most dramatic example I saw - one of there being no cops who'll show up if a gang decides to bust into someone's home and take what they please - doesn't seem apocalyptic. It sounds like a good number of places in the world today.

I wonder if people realize that things don't have to go all crazy "The Stand" style to get really quite bad.

I should clarify that I think it - where "it" means some sort of more or less total collapse - could happen in (some of) our current lifetimes. I'd put the odds at something well under one percent right now, and I think in September 2008 the odds very scarily pushed into the single and possibly even low double digits.

I also agree with the commenter who said that death by violence is an ordinary, and often un-noted, occurrence just as much as cancer or whatever. Death in the Zombie Apocalypse, not so much. (Note: several billion unskilled, formerly fat-dumb-and-happy, suddenly literally starving-to-death human beings are probably more dangerous than several billion zombies).

If several billion currently first-world people are suddenly starving to death because of the collapse of all of our financial and industrial infrastructure though, I don't think comparison to third world economies is particularly helpful. I don't claim to know how it would play out, but I doubt that we have any relevant current or historical comparables, which is part of why I think "planning" for the event is just silly. Even in presumably "moderate' cases the idea that you will continue to "own" your hoard of gold - rather than being required to immediately surrender it to the Committee - assumes a continuity of present assumptions which most likely would not hold. IOW, if you have caches of valuable items, they'd better be secret caches, and you'd better be prepared to risk your whole family being hanged for keeping them secret. Or don't bother in the first place.

Yes, my tongue is partially in cheek here, but only to the extent that the "event" is extremely unlikely. Given the "event", I am completely serious. Planning for the "event" is like planning, not to avoid being struck by lightning, but what you will do in the moment you actually are struck by lightning. Which can't help but remind me of the question "Hey Evel (Knievel), what were you thinking right when you hit the ground?".

More complete Evel Knievel "interview" here.

It's worth noting that Christendom has endured things like this before -- that is, the rapid and drastic evaporation of civilization. Conditions in, say, Roman Britannia after the retreat of political authority from Rome were very grim, and suddenly grim at that. They may have been even worse a few hundred years later when the Vikings arrived and smashed to pieces the Saxon kingdoms of eastern Britain, along with all the Celtic monastic riches. For that matter, the cruel chaos of the robber baron era in the 12th century may well explain why the English hailed the arrival of the Frenchman Henry Plantagenet to rule their lands.

Is the prosperous 4th century Roman Britannia, contrasted with the starving and brutal anarchy of the early Saxon era, comparable to what would ensue if the nightmares of September 2008 had come to pass? I don't know. But I do know that it would be close to ten centuries before the British Isles recovered to an equal level of prosperity as they had known in late Roman times.

So lets envision a vast and suddenly starving modern population used to vegging out in front of "reality" TV or hanging out with gangsta cousins in the 'hood, many orders of magnitude larger in scope than anything which has happened before. Some significant number find themselves armed with modern weapons (including nukes, of course, but also all sorts of other smaller but very dangerous stuff), transportation, medical (think wiping out the enemy compound by introducing the Plague) know-how, etc.

I don't know what it looks like. Quite the contrary, I know that we can't predict what it looks like. Our individual conditions in such scenarios are utterly dependent upon God's Providence, not a whit dependent on (non-religious) preparations we choose-with-foresight to make right now. Rural is probably better than urban in the short term, but that may just be delaying the inevitable by a month or two.

I suppose if one were deeply concerned about the low-probability "Event", there is one inalienable asset which can be stored up: skills. But accurately predicting which skills precisely will be critical to any given person's circumstances is, I would contend, impossible. We aren't talking about a return to pre-industrial history, because all sorts of denizens of Pandora's box are in the wild. It would be something entirely different from any previous or contemporary putative comparables.

The subject of the post is what individual preparations should be made to weather the (very unlikely but not impossible in my view) storm. My answer: besides prayer and fasting, not much.

Shorter Zippy:

Excellent reasons for living in a mostly self-sufficient rural monastery: prayer and fasting.

Bad reason for living in a mostly self-sufficient rural monastery: fear of the Zombie Apocalypse.

Zippy, I take it that what the more serious worry-warts out there are envisioning is not so much Mad Max as something like the Argentinian collapse of 1999-2002, come to the U.S.

There's a notorious survivalist essay on the Argentine experience, which I assume you've seen:

http://www.silverbearcafe.com/private/10.08/tshtf1.html

Any thoughts on Arturo Vazquez' thoughts, above?

"The more realistic scenario in this country is that we become more like a Third World country: the rich get richer, and so forth. Heck, the upper class of Sao Paulo, Brazil, can't even drive down the street for fear of kidnapping, and they fly home in helicopters."

I must say, that seems to me more likely than some sort of "zombie apocalypse."

Steve, the author of the article you linked comes to pretty much the same conclusion I do:

So, where to go? The concrete jungle is dangerous and so is living away from it all, on your own.

The solution is to stay away from the cities but in groups, either by living in a small town-community or sub division, or if you have friends or family that think as you do, form your own small community.

Some may think that having neighbors within "shouting" distance means loosing your privacy and freedom, but it's a price that you have to pay if you want to have someone to help you if you ever need it. To those that believe that they will never need help from anyone because they will always have their rifle at hand, checking the horizon with their scope every five minutes and a first aid kit on their back packs at all times.... Grow up

Amen to that.

Steve,

Thanks for the link to the essay. I haven't read it, and I will.

Offhand I'm inclined to think that, for a whole host of reasons, well, let me put it this way:

Argentinian financial collapse : putative global economic collapse centered in the US :: losing a finger in a lawnmower accident : losing your head in a farming accident

In short, I'm very skeptical of the notion that they are commensurable. As a material matter from a global perspective - with apologies to any Argentinians, and without suggesting that Argentina and her people are anything less than infinitely valuable in human terms - postulating a world suddenly without a functioning Argentina is like postulating life suddenly without a pinky finger.

On the other question, a slow decline over a period of decades to something like Arturo Vazquez' scenario is possible; but a slow decline is a very different matter from a sudden collapse.

39°53′52″N 113°42′31″W

West Juab, UT?

What about it?

Utah? Really? My google image search deceived me.

To Jeff S.: Thanks for link and the kind words. Sounds like a fun time for the Singer family. I have considered it, in fact, along with other ideas in the category of "ag tourisim". The start up costs are discouraging and it seems pretty risky: there's a lot of farmland between here and Sacramento or the Bay Area. If I had $100K there's lots I could do with this place. Business-wise, the only thing that really seems plausible on the shoestrings we have is a highly diversified truck farm - but the learning curve is long and the labor required is daunting.

To anybody who has enjoyed that off-beat, Catholic series of three novellas posing as a single novel called A Canticle for Leibowitz, it's a cool coincidence that Jeff should accidentally have chosen a picture from Utah for a post on survival after a major collapse. (The book follows over a period of centuries the fortunes of a monastery founded in the Utah desert after a nuclear holocaust.)

Zippy, your approach strikes me as a bit fatalistic. Of course we all depend upon the providence of God and prayer is the first line of defense. But our actions and forethought are incorporated into God's providence. Obviously not everyone is called to prepare for an "apocalypse" in the same way, but it makes no sense to refuse to make some temporal preparations when they are easily within one's reach. Personally, I have no interest in a Rambo-esque survivalism that is concerned only with saving the skins of survivalists. The point is to preserve a little remnant of Christian civilization when the walls come crashing down, and to help as many others as possible, starting with one's own family and progeny. Sure, it might all be for naught, but that's true of anything else we might do in life. Sometimes our foresight is wrong: that doesn't mean we stop making plans and acting upon them.

I'm an enemy of the idea of individual "self-sufficiency", which is a fantasy in any case, but a proponent of regional and community self-sufficiency. If my utility services died tomorrow, I would be very happy to find a neighbor who knew how to pull some water out of the ground the old-fashioned way. I've been told there are still folks living around here who draw water manually from old wells on their property. I'm not going to find such neighbors in the manicured suburbs of Chantilly.

In the coming Zombie Apocalypse, gold is worthless. Ammunition, medicine, food, and any technology which actually works and does something useful, keeps the Mall-Fortress humming -- not worthless. Also not worthless: negotiation skills.

Zippy has spoken. Good, I can stop thinking now.

Zippy, your approach strikes me as a bit fatalistic.
In one sense my understanding is more optimistic than yours: I don't think an imminent, sudden civilizational collapse has an appreciable chance of happening. A long, slow (over generations) decline from where we are now is more likely by far, probably better than even odds on that, and even that is far from a given. The future just isn't as predictable as everyone thinks it is.

An old Warren Zevon lyric that has stuck in my mind for many years: "And if California slides into the ocean, like the mystics and statistics say it will, I believe this hotel will be standing, until I pay my bill". Zevon died of cancer in 2003, and what do you know, California is still there. Survivalist thinking is, in my view, most often a form of escapism from the mundane fact that most or all of us, including all of our loved ones, are going to live and die in ordinary ways after living ordinary lives in pretty much the society we find ourselves in now.

Mind you, Jeff, I agree with you in highly valuing small community, hard work, local interdependence, neighborliness, family, clan, etc -- subsidiarity, in a word. I agree that these should be encouraged and lived. Just not as a supposed individual personal bulwark against a sudden global collapse of civilization: 'cause in that event, all bets are off.

Given such a collapse, I do expect that one set of (material) preparations is as good as another, or as good as no preparations at all: who lives and who dies will have nothing much to do with survivalist-style preparations. Will having a survivalist cache help Bob and his family survive in particular, or will it get them robbed and killed when they would have been OK in the ordinary pack of helpless refugees? Who knows, and who can pretend to know? In that sense, yes, my understanding is more 'fatalistic' - pessimistic specifically about our capacity as individuals to predict and prepare for our own personal specific circumstances in such a low probability high consequence hyper-chaotic occurrence - than perhaps yours is.

Of course, "fatalistic" and "optimistic" are just psychological attitudes, and I expect that those psychological attitudes reflect different beliefs about what is true: both in terms of probability-of-occurrence and, given occurrence, our capacity to prepare meaningfully for our specific personal circumstances within the occurrence.

One thing I haven't been able to come up with is a non-question-begging scenario where it makes sense to hoard gold though. Some folks have an attachment to gold which as far as I can tell is completely irrational, as if it were the only valuable material in existence or were a uniquely valuable material. It is a great corrosion-resistant electrical conductor, and I suppose has its "uses" (of a sort) in fashion accessories. I'm not saying it has no value at all. But I think it is purely a matter of historical contingency that some people treat it as if it were unique. As the Chicken said above, antibiotics would be far more valuable, pound for pound, in a situation where industrial production stopped or slowed drastically and only stored material of both kinds was available for trade. I'd much rather be the guy sitting on the antibiotics cache: the gold guys would come begging.

In one sense my understanding is more optimistic than yours: I don't think an imminent, sudden civilizational collapse has an appreciable chance of happening. A long, slow (over generations) decline from where we are now is more likely by far, probably better than even odds on that, and even that is far from a given.

I certainly hope you're right, and in fact I mostly live as though you are right. I don't know how to live otherwise. And honestly, I don't have a clue as to whether the growing number of doomsday pundits know what they're talking about. My position amounts to this: civilizational collapse has happened before; most things that have happened before will happen again; we seem to be a pretty strong candidate this time around (barring mass repentance and conversion). As to whether the "event" will be sudden, slow as molasses, or in-between I won't even venture to guess.

Given such a collapse, I do expect that one set of (material) preparations is as good as another, or as good as no preparations at all: who lives and who dies will have nothing much to do with survivalist-style preparations.

Zippy, this statement just defies common sense. In a food shortage - as the Argentinian wrote - it matters if you have alternative food resources. In an energy crisis, it matters whether you have fuel stored for your vehicles and equipment and if you have the necessary skills to survive without them. In a bleaker, sudden, total crisis, it matters whether you have family, friends and neighbors in close proximity to help with whatever emergency needs there might be. You yourself mention the storage of antibiotics as something better than gold ... so which is it? Is one set of preparations really as good as another?

My guess is that you don't actually believe that, but you are revolted by the misplaced priorities of those who take apocalyptic warnings as gospel and can't bring yourself to admit that they might still be on to something. That's perfectly understandable, but as the saying goes, "just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean everyone isn't out to get me".

Zippy, given some sort of faster-than-generations collapse, it is surely more realistic to think that those who took preparations have a better chance of surviving than those who took no preparations. It might raise their chances up to a very modest 5%, instead of a very improbable 0.5%. But that's a 10-fold improvement.

It is true that there are so many different variations on what could happen that predicting one specific scenario (and preparing for that one) is not likely to be accurate. However, at least 50% of all preparations are applicable to almost any sort of collapse at all, and some of the other preparations apply to half of the more probable scenarios. So a decent planner can be prepared for much of what is likely to be needed even without being an accurate predictor of the specific scenario.

I myself suspect that I will not survive, that I will be in the class of the millions who die fairly quickly, because (a) I have health issues, (b) I have limited knowledge of making do without a supermarket and a home improvement store around the corner, and (c) especially because I don't foresee being able to get from the city to whatever refuge I may establish as a likely prospect. But thinking that I am not a likely survivor doesn't imply that it makes no sense to at least consider whether the prospect of a collapse is within the probable realm of the foreseeable and act accordingly. My personal opinion is that some kind of collapse is definitely foreseeable because it is the natural consequence of the sum total of social trends that can be seen today, taking those trends together with our inability (so far) of reversing them or slowing them down, despite our best efforts.

I agree that there is a reasonable chance that the outcome will be instead a long, slow side into a more barbaric society, but that's only one option. It really depends on how quickly certain key components of social order unravel: law and transportation being key. A widespread medical disaster might disrupt either or both. In any case, the fact that a slow collapse is realistic doesn't preclude a quicker collapse being reasonable also: they might each have a 30% likelihood.

The gold rush is little more than a scam. Interesting that when gold hits record prices, people start telling you to go buy it. It's generally wise to buy low and sell high, not the other way around.

Well, as I said, I was in Argentina during the 2002 crisis, and there was no collapse really. But what did happen was that certain things began to change. I was a seminarian, and the seminary that I lived in was about forty miles outside the city of Buenos Aires. The countryside, really. But even before the crisis, the lay brothers had to stand guard over the chicken coop with a gun to prevent people from stealing our chickens. They couldn't really stop anyone, so we got rid of the chickens. Once the crisis hit, the stables that used to have their horses graze on our land stopped doing so because people would steal the horses. Heck, once a brother complained that someone stole a cattle door off of one of our fences. This doesn't even include the times that our seminary was assaulted at gunpoint, which happened before I was there, but was the reason why the alarm was set after 10 p.m. Also, people used to steal the copper wires from the telephone lines, so we sometimes went weeks without a functional landline. A lot of this happened prior to any sort of "crisis" per se.

In short, I think that if you really, really want to survive once such a crisis happens, you pretty much have to jettison morality altogether. As one lay brother said, "they'd steal our last names if that were possible". Even if you are protected by a neighborly posse with guns, it still may not be enough to maintain any semblance of social order as we know it.

Tony:

...it is surely more realistic to think that those who took preparations have a better chance of surviving than those who took no preparations.
My own judgment is that no, any "preparations" for an (unprecedented) fast collapse event are as likely to be the very thing that gets a person killed as they are to be the thing that saves him. Radical trust in God's Providence is (literally) the only thing which makes rational sense, in my view, when specifically postulating a sudden halt in our financial and industrial systems. I could be wrong, as always, but I don't think I am.

We have many times the population we had during the Great Depression. That population is many times less prepared for a primitive life. And even if that population were perfectly prepared to (say) old-school manually farm for food, retro farming does not have the production capacity to feed more than a small fraction of everyone. You can't fool Mother Nature. That means mass death, survival rates in the low tens of percent within the first year: the zombie apocalypse, except that the zombies are intelligent, capable, hungry, desperate, technologically armed fellow human beings. Even if we managed - under martial law or something, which would immediately moot and render dangerous-in-themselves any of the kinds of survivalist preparations we are talking about - to feed a large percentage of our own population, the vast populations of other nuclear-armed countries like China - to whom we owe vast quantities of money, providing pretext for war - would be starving literally to death at unprecedented rates. You can't eat nukes, of course, but if they are all you have you'll try to convert them into food.

I could be wrong, of course, but that is in fact my own judgment: that (1) a sudden collapse event is very unlikely; and (2) individual "survivalist" preparations for such an event are as likely, given the event, to be the very thing which kills you as they are to be the thing that saves you.

Matt Weber:

The gold rush is little more than a scam.
Agreed. There are true believers, those who exploit the true believers, and true believers who exploit other true believers. It is kind of a cult really, the Gold Cult, and it makes no rational sense to me whatsoever.

Jeff:

You yourself mention the storage of antibiotics as something better than gold ... so which is it? Is one set of preparations really as good as another?
As individual, survivalist-type preparations, any given preparation - take hoarding gold or hoarding antibiotics as examples - is as likely to get you killed as it is to save you.

That doesn't mean that, given a situation of scarcity and secure ownership in which to trade, everything is the same as valuable as everything else. In my discussion of gold, I grant for the sake of argument that the protagonist in our story has lived on into a day with secure ownership and free trade in which he owns the antibiotics and somebody else owns the gold. Given the stipulations, gold is basically worthless compared to antibiotics.

How he ended up being the guy with the antibiotics is another matter, as is how secure ownership and free trade came about. Both are simply stipulations in the story. Maybe he got them by murdering the family of the guy who originally hoarded them. Or maybe he got them after their murderers were hanged by the Committee or whatever. In general, stipulating a state of affairs for the sake of argument does not in any way validate the idea that it is rational for us as the actual people we are to make certain specific preparations for that specific state of affairs as specific characters in the stipulated scenario.

The gold rush is little more than a scam. Interesting that when gold hits record prices, people start telling you to go buy it. It's generally wise to buy low and sell high, not the other way around.

People who trade gold and know what they are doing do not trade the price but instead, like any other commodity, they trade the basis or the difference between the spot price and the nearest futures price. The signals are just somewhat different with gold and silver than they are with non-monetary commodities.

The average guy isn't or shouldn't be trading the metal whether in the physical or futures markets. He is buying physical coin periodically and holding it as a form of insurance. He looks to buy on dips in the price but since he isn't actively trading the metal and has no plans to sell his coins for paper money, the price he pays is largely irrelevant in the long run.

That gold is money, that it is the best store of value, can be established as objective fact by noting that gold's marginal utility, unlike all other commodities, doesn't decline or declines so slowly as to be nearly constant. We know this because gold's stocks-to-flows ratio is a high multiple around 50 to 80. In other words, it takes 50 to 80 years of annual gold production to equal the existing stores of the metal. For all other commodities the ratio is a small fraction around 1/3 with silver in between. Unless they want to argue, unconvincingly, that the entire world is simply irrational for its gold-hoarding behavior, those who are anti-gold are going to have to explain why all the gold ever mined still exists, as bullion or coin, in vaults or private hoards and only very little of it has been consumed either for industrial purposes or in the form of jewelry.

I imagine in a Zombie Apocalypse that antibiotics will be very valuable and will command a high price. Those with excess stores of medicines will happily trade for gold coin and those with coin to offer will get a better price than those who can only offer butter, shoes, cows or whatever else it is they possess. It is impossible to know exactly what you'll need if this disaster scenario plays out which is why you're going to want to have money.

Problem solved. Get silver: a coinage metal thats also an antibiotic.

The Chicken

"West Juab, UT?

What about it?"

Not all collapses are equal. Political types are usually terrible (Rome). The worst sorts seem to rise. Plagues - not so much. The herd is culled and the survivors do well (much of Europe in the late Middle Ages).

Anyway, assuming the best - i.e. a mass die off, communities like Callao, UT (seven families and a one room school and umpteen miles from anywhere on bad roads would likely do ok. After all, white folk managed in the mid 19th century and Native Americans for millennia earlier.

Isolation would be an advantage, hence my mention of the disadvantages of being only a hundred miles or so from The Hordes on a good road and surrounded by miles of flat (read indefensible) land.

(BTW, Jeff, being so close to a major population center, have you considered gourmet veggies? I have eight or so varieties of lettuce as well as other greens and things and they seem rather easy to grow.)

Survival will be more a function of winning the genetic and geographic lottery and less of amassing a horde of anything that wasn't useful. Gold? Gold! We don't need no stinking gold!

Sec. 48. . . . . For supposing an Island, separate from all possible Commerce with the rest of the World . . . : What reason could any one have there to enlarge his Possessions beyond the use of his Family, and a plentiful supply to its Consumption . . . ? For I ask, What would a Man value Ten Thousand, or an Hundred Thousand Acres of excellent Land, ready cultivated, and well stocked too with Cattle, in the middle of the in-land Parts of America, where he had no hopes of Commerce with other Parts of the World, to draw him Money by the Sale of the Product? It would not be worth the inclosing, and we should see him give up again to the wild Common of Nature, whatever was more than would supply the Conveniences of Life . . . .

Well...

Zach Frey and I (hi, Zach!) briefly hashed this out a couple of months ago, and the "gaming" question in apocalyptic scenarios is this, at the risk of sounding like the audience in "Match Game":

How Apocalyptic Is It?

Something on the order of Roman Britannia happens once every millenia or so. And even that was a unique case--a near-total blackout, total end of urban life after 450 AD, a void in the written historical record which frustrates historians to this day. The only "contemporary" source between the arrival of the Saxons and St. Bede is the British monk Gildas, and he's as discursive as all heck, obscuring more than he illuminates (no pun intended).

That's about impossible to imagine, short something on the order of a successful EMP attack or plague. [Oh, and as an aside, Roman Britain really was not prosperous--from what the archaeologists can tell, the population did not grow during its tenure as a Roman province, and represented a net drain on imperial resources. Basically, the Empire grafted urbi onto a tribal society, and once the legions were gone, the cities soon followed.]

Frankly, there is no safe place from a disaster of that magnitude--only battered pockets ruled by warlords.

Short a civilization shattering disaster, it's important to point out that the cities are there for a reason: they are natural centers of organized human life, commerce and cultural endeavor. For the most part (boomtowns, planned/planted cities notwithstanding), they are organic. There is a reason they exist where they do. In other words, urban is urban and rural is rural for a reason. London was a sodden, long-empty ruin when Alfred The Great took it from the Danes, but the English rebuilt on the same site--because it was an ideal place for a city.

In a more slow motion tumble or less devastating event, cities are natural centers for relief and reorganization. In the Great Depression, you did not see de-urbanization--far from it.

And finally, I am reminded of (of all things) Laura Ingalls Wilder's "The Long Winter," during which her town of DeSmet was completely cut off from civilization by constant, pounding blizzards which began in October and did not relent until April. Under the right (or wrong) conditions, you can run out of resources in a rural area even faster than in the cities.

In other words, it truly depends upon the scenario.

There are intangible things, however, that make a Roman-style collapse fairly unlikely: for one thing, we know more things. We know how many diseases spread, we know how to navigate better, we have an understanding of fuel sources and mechanics, we know how to generate cheap electricity, etc. Unless we lose all of that knowledge, such a complete collapse is not likely. What is likely, given the selfishness that has grown in the last few decades of the last century, is an every-one-for-himself situation, instead of sharing.

Still, we have the knowledge of how to feed everyone on the planet. If we, as a race, would focus on only that, the entire planet could survive everything except an extinction-level event. The machines wouldn't suddenly be unable to work. The major problem, again, is the politics that would block food from reaching people. Think sub-Saharan Africa and the unnecessary poverty. That is probably closest to what things would look like.

The Chicken

Still, we have the knowledge of how to feed everyone on the planet.

And that is due almost entirely to cheap oil and dependent technologies. I'm not a "peak oil" prophet or anything, but the radical dependence of the world food supply on one resource is concerning.

In other words, it truly depends upon the scenario.

Exactly. And our ability to accurately predict the precise individual scenario is exactly nil.

(BTW, Jeff, being so close to a major population center, have you considered gourmet veggies? I have eight or so varieties of lettuce as well as other greens and things and they seem rather easy to grow.)

I should look into that a little more. I know a produce broker who works the restaurants in Bay Area. The last time I talked to him, he said he was "too smart" to be a grower even though he has land. Not sure what he meant by that ...

And our ability to accurately predict the precise individual scenario is exactly nil.

May I suggest that an informed and educated guess about general possibilties - rather than the accurate prediction of a precise individual scenario - could be sufficient reason, for some, to make preparations?

Zippy, your "all or nothing" approach to the question is baffling to me. I would agree that a "zombie apocalypse" (funny video, btw) is highly unlikely; therefore, most need not prepare for total collapse, but for material shortages and hardships that are out of the ordinary. There's a lot that one might do - that some might reasonably do, anyway - to increase the odds of survival, and to make oneself useful to one's neighbors, in the face of what appears to be certain economic and social difficulties in our futures.

Jeff:

Zippy, your "all or nothing" approach to the question is baffling to me.
All or nothing is not a feature of my discourse, it is a feature of the proposed class of scenarios. For example, from the article:
But this doesn't stop Biggs from telling his readers what they need to do in order to wait out the end of the world: "Your safe haven ... should be well-stocked with seed, fertilizer, canned food, wine, medicine, clothes, etc. Think Swiss Family Robinson." He goes on to suggest that, when the post-apocalyptic hordes attack, the survivalist money man should shoot first and ask questions later: "A few rounds over the approaching brigands [sic] heads would probably be a compelling persuader that there are easier farms to pillage. Brigands tend to be cowards."
If someone takes me to be saying "don't ever do anything to prepare for the future", well, I don't think that is a fair reading of my comments. Preparing for a severe economic downturn which does not threaten the basics of civilization that is one thing: one can choose careers, portfolios, etc in such a way that sensible things might be done, given the prediction (though one could be very wrong in the prediction and should sensibly plan for other scenarios also).

I take the subject of this post to be scenarios beyond that though: where basic financial, industrial, and law-and-order systems have broken down. Why else even talk about guns or growing your own food?

"Worldwide economic collapse", "doomsday", etc are not my words - they are the words I am responding to. I've already mentioned that long slow declines are a different matter. (They also aren't the sort of thing where it makes sense to talk about stockpiling food and guns, let alone joining the gold cult). Anyone who thinks he can prepare for his specific situation in a sudden economic and social collapse of the sort discussed here - where, say, massive numbers of people within a year from going to the grocery store to having to grow their own food to survive - is engaged in a pointless fantasy, in my view. One might as well propose with equal realism "if I were to find myself on the moon with a month's worth of food and oxygen, how would I survive", or "If I were kidnapped by mad Russians and air-dropped into the Amazon rain forest, what would I do?" Those kinds of things make for fun fiction and not much else.

"Worldwide economic collapse", "doomsday", etc are not my words - they are the words I am responding to.

Granted, Zippy. And in the event of a total catastrophe for the human race, I see your point and agree. But the argument remains a tautology: "if collapse is defined in such a way as to make preparations useless, it follows that preparations for said collapse are therefore useless." The "doomsday investors", whatever their shortcomings, are obviously not defining "collapse" in hopeless terms. Perhaps what you have is a quibble with their choice of words rather than a quibble with their advice given their obvious presuppositions?

I don't think it is at all clear that "worldwide economic collapse" has to be so universally devastating, or that there is nothing at all one might do to increase the odds of survival. Industrial agriculture will not come to a complete halt: there will be food, but it will be scarce, possibly scarce enough that many will starve. The situation will likely favor those who are ahead of the curve in the agrarian arts and (here's the wild card, I grant you) living in relative peace and security. The latter possibility may be a wild card but it is certainly not out of the question.

So, people will ignore their Christianity? I suppose a necessary requirement for a world collapse would be for the world to become de-Christianized. Otherwise, we would be morally obligated to look after the other.

In any case, I still want to cast the profit escalation inherent in the current stock system to be one of the primary culprits. If companies only had to look after their own instead of investors, this non-equilibrium near-chaotic mess we call Wall Street would not be one of the primary driver of the de-humanization of business. Out-sourcing, down-sizing, etc., are done all in the name of keeping investors happy.

The "coming" collapse is a topological dual of the chaos on Wall Street.

Just the observations of an economically-challenged individual...

The Chicken

Jeff:

But the argument remains a tautology: ...
Tautology was a feature of the subject matter before I ever said a word though. If it is about the kind of collapse discussed in the article, in which a wealthy investor in the United States has no out other than to have a wilderness retreat where he can stockpile guns, grow his own food, provide for his own security, and live like Swiss Family Robinson, as a response to sudden crisis, then it is just silly to think he can make any preparations which are not as likely to get him killed as save him.

If we are talking about middle-class preparations like "maybe I should be a nurse instead of a computer programmer, because the former will still have a job in this country in the future", or "maybe I should pay off the mortgage early", that is one thing. If we are talking about preparations like "I should move to the country, learn to farm the old school way by hand, stockpile gold and guns" - specifically for the purpose of surviving the catastrophe rather than for other reasons (there may be fantastically compelling other reasons to do such a thing, but that is off-topic) - then we are talking about the kind of collapse where it is ridiculous for anyone to think that such preparations are going to help.

So yes, there is a kind of tautology here. But it is an intrinsic feature of the subject matter itself, not merely my discourse. Don't shoot the messenger.

Zippy, even if a complete collapse makes it likely that 90 to 98% of humanity will die off, the notion that preparations to survive are more likely to cause one to be killed off than not is nonsense. If you think that there are aspects of the situation that could reasonably lead to greater danger if you make some preparations, then a reasonable person could take those greater dangers into account and prepare for those dangers as well. If the dangers CANNOT be reasonably foreseen, then you cannot reasonably suggest that a person is just as likely to be in greater danger precisely by preparing for a collapse. Either you are just gunning on a pure guesswork hypothesis, or your hypothesis has reasons which a reasoning person can think through and deal with.

Radical trust in God's Providence is (literally) the only thing which makes rational sense, in my view, when specifically postulating a sudden halt in our financial and industrial systems.

But radical trust in God is the only appropriate approach in any and ALL foreseeable futures, and indeed in the current now that was yesterday's future. It doesn't change the equation in the least. Many of the people who have learned radical trust in God, and who make no worldly preparation for disaster, simply die in the disaster as God intends, making a last final offering of their suffering for His sake. Some of the people who, totally relying on God, ALSO use the wisdom He grants to make
some reasonable preparations for disaster, manage to weather the storm with small or large difficulties, as He in His Providence deems good for His plan. Radical trust in God does not preclude planning by those whose duty it is to plan for the future. As Joseph taught Pharaoh. Making spiritual preparations is more important than making physical preparations, but they don't interfere with each other.

That's about impossible to imagine, short something on the order of a successful EMP attack or plague.

There are sane, intelligent, and informed people out there who suggest that an EMP attack is actually positively likely within the foreseeable future. And there are doctors who have published books raising the prospects of certain disease futures that approximate plague-style effects on the social fabric. Not all of these people are projecting such future problems in order to become rich, famous, or powerful, but because they are sincerely concerned about the risk and are better informed than non-doctors and non-physicists and non-intelligence experts: they are experts in their fields. We non-experts can certainly question their methods and their assumptions, but there are far too many such avenues of disaster for us to reliably conclude that they are, uniformly, so unlikely as to be irrational grounds for preparatory action. Especially considering that some of the potential vectors of disaster have, as their source, intelligent agents looking to achieve just such a result, rather than mere chance circumstance (i.e. plans whose likelihood of coming to fruition can only be estimated based on evidence that comes to our eyes in spite of efforts to hide it, so that it is intrinsically impossible to be certain how much other evidence is out there successfully hidden).

So, people will ignore their Christianity? I suppose a necessary requirement for a world collapse would be for the world to become de-Christianized. Otherwise, we would be morally obligated to look after the other.

Chicken, I think we can safely say, given the rolls of pro-abortion and abortion-in-the-case of-rape supporters, that many, many people could be reasonably suspected of ignoring their Christianity. Maybe not an absolute majority over the whole world, but probably a majority in many locales, especially in higher density places, and especially in places that never were Christian to begin with.

Also, it does not require a supposition that we would resort to mobs and anti-social desperadoes to suppose a catastrophic collapse in the transport and power industries. A collapse in those industries due to an EMP event would cause mass starvation regardless of a Christian attitude of helping each other, without positing major miracles. While I don't discount the possibility of major miracles, I don't see how to plan for them in specifics either.

Tony:

You understand me perfectly, though you apparently disagree. I think it is utterly foolish pessimist-porn to take seriously the idea that one can rationally make 'survivalist' preparations for an event in which 90% to 98% of the population is killed. This is entirely different from (say) choosing a career or portfolio which is resistant to economic downturns, which is simple prudence.

I think it is utterly foolish pessimist-porn to take seriously the idea that one can rationally make 'survivalist' preparations for an event in which 90% to 98% of the population is killed.

Which is why Stephen Hawking is pushing for us to leave the planet. More than one planet gives us options.

The Chicken

Zippy, that you think it is foolish you have stated 4 or 5 times now. But you have yet to offer a reason for said thinking. It should be (by now) evident that not everyone sees your reasoning. Maybe if you offered that reasoning up for viewing, you could make a difference in how the readers here think about the question. Merely positing your opinion without explanation doesn't accomplish that.

Tony:

It should be (by now) evident that not everyone sees your reasoning.
It is evident that all sorts of people hold all sorts of crazy opinions, utterly disconnected from reality, about all sorts of things. I've found this to be very commonly true of otherwise normal, apparently sane individuals: there is almost always some subject about which each person is a raving lunatic. Apocalyptic survivalism is a particular kind of crazy that for whatever reason has strong appeal for particular sorts of people in our present culture; and in my experience arguing with raving insanity is not a productive enterprise. I've expressed my view, including cursory reasons why I hold it, in a blog combox, on the off-chance that anyone is interested in it. That may not be what you want, but that is all that is on offer from the secret weapons/food cache.

I've found this to be very commonly true of otherwise normal, apparently sane individuals: there is almost always some subject about which each person is a raving lunatic.

Must...resist...temptation...can't...resist...temptation...giving in...

About what are you a raving lunatic, Zippy?

Ahhhh, but if I knew that I would stop being a lunatic about it, wouldn't I? ;-)

That's about impossible to imagine, short something on the order of a successful EMP attack or plague.
There are sane, intelligent, and informed people out there who suggest that an EMP attack is actually positively likely within the foreseeable future. And there are doctors who have published books raising the prospects of certain disease futures that approximate plague-style effects on the social fabric.

I don't see how my statement really argues with yours. I have read through the summary of the government report about the possible devastation of an EMP attack that was published back in '06 or so, and I've also read Forstchen's "One Second After," which is an "Alas Babylon"-ish look at an EMP attack on modern America.

More to the point, it tends to reinforce my argument that all that would be left would be battered enclaves trying to hold off the night--an exceptionally difficult scenario to meaningfully prepare for. Especially given what it would do to most people's modes of transportation. You're not getting out to your country place if your vehicles' electronics are fried. If you happen to be in your country place, the flood tide of desperate refugees (with abundant functional weaponry) is headed your way, however slowly.

As to plagues, I admit to considerably more ignorance, but do not discount the possibility, especially given the ubiquity of modern worldwide travel.

Lydia, the secret is this: thinking that a pronouncement of opinion from on high, without rational support, constitutes useful discourse.

Those who one their own blogs and wish to spout opinions without rational support are, of course, free to pursue that objective. This site, in my understanding, is dedicated to the robust defense of what remains of Christendom, and that defense implies something more robust than unsupported opinion.

I'm not sure what refuting crazy survivalism has to do with defending what remains of Christendom. Other than, I suppose, advising Christians to avoid it along with all the other forms of crazy out there.

But in any case, I don't have time to elaborate on the reasons I've already cursorily given, because I am too busy stocking the bomb shelter with interferon, which is bloody tough to come by on the black market. Plus I have a lot of work to do on the EMP-resistant helicopter and the flying HAZMAT suit; and you just have no idea what all is involved in setting up a nuclear powered greenhouse in Antarctica, let alone the secret submarine network needed to evac me to my island lair when the apocalypse hits.

Hehehe, and you forgot that Antarctica won't be reachable by sub or covered in ice with the coming melt-down / flash evaporation when the asteroid hits. Terrible forward-thinking.

If you took all the short moments you repeated THAT you think it is crazy, and combined them so prove WHY it is crazy, you would have had time.

Gold is the new currency going forward. It will lead to cAtastrophic disruptions but that is enevitable because of the worthless dollar. Every country that has a dollar as currency will be screwed. Goodluck and stay safe.

This article refers to a book which describes what happened when money became worthless in Germany, Austria and Hungary after the destruction of the Holy Roman Empire:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/7909432/The-Death-of-Paper-Money.html

Near civil war between town and country was a pervasive feature of this break-down in social order. Large mobs of half-starved and vindictive townsmen descended on villages to seize food from farmers accused of hoarding. The diary of one young woman described the scene at her cousin’s farm.

"In the cart I saw three slaughtered pigs. The cowshed was drenched in blood. One cow had been slaughtered where it stood and the meat torn from its bones. The monsters had slit the udder of the finest milch cow, so that she had to be put out of her misery immediately. In the granary, a rag soaked with petrol was still smouldering to show what these beasts had intended," she wrote.

Which would seem to strengthen Zippy's case.

The passage you're quoting refers to events during the Weimar hyperinflation of the 1930s, not the the breakup of the Holy Roman Empire.

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