The Course of Empire by Thomas Cole
The response to my article about how climate change is now unstoppable and people should consider what they will do to survive it included some questions of what those considerations should be.
I don’t want to go into the technicalities of survival preparation. There are plenty of books and blogs (prepper blogs) devoted to it.
But a lot of them miss the proverbial forest for the trees. Obviously you’re going to need the basics; obviously you don’t want to be in the worst places when whatever it is hits.
But less obvious is that the primary determinants of who survives will be social.
Strong and Wide Social Ties
Look, when the shit hit the fans, distribution is hard to entirely determine. Some people will survive, others won’t. Minus tons of money (not always as useful as one thinks, minus prep work) and maybe even with tons of money, what determines survival best is how many people care about you and want you to stay alive.
Are there people who will check on you? Share food and shelter and medicine if they have to? Find (or be) two strong young men and hump you out if necessary? Do people care?
If you don’t have a strong social group, and wider ties, if you’re essentially on your own or just with your immediate family (and it isn’t a huge clan), then your odds of dying or suffering going way, way up.
Don’t have this? Join a church. There are agonostic churches, by the way. Any functional church checks on its members, does visits, helps find jobs, etc, etc…This is a ready-made social group. Yeah, you have to do this stuff yourself, but it’s good for you to care for people and be cared for. When Emile Durkheim studied suicide in 19th century France, he found that atheists suicided most, followed by Protestants, followed by Catholics. This was based on social engagement (don’t transfer this direct, look for a church with social engagement).
If you absolutely can’t stand church, find some other close knit social group. People who look after each other.
Be On Good Terms with the Violent Authorities
Do the local cops like you? Do you give to the patrolman’s benevolent association, or whatever? Does the police chief know your name and care about you? If there is a local military base, are you on good terms there? If there is a local gang, are you on good terms with them?
I don’t care how many guns you have, or if you think you’re Rambo, organized violence beats unorganized violence. When shit goes bad, you want the people who are used to fighting as a group to think you’re a great person. You want them to defend you and not think of you as a victim.
You may have reason to hate some of these folks, those reasons may be good, but the best way to deal with an enemy is to turn them into a friend, and this is about survival.
Keep Your Resources Largely Secret
You aren’t Rambo, you don’t have an army at your beck and call, and you’ve done your work: You have food, water, medicines, maybe even power. Other people may resent that. They may ask you to share. You may not have enough to share with as many people as want you to share, and still survive. So keep it on the down low. I’m not saying don’t share at all, but conceal how much you have, and keep it hidden. Be smart about this, a semi-public stash you show to those you share with and a hidden stash are a good idea, for example.
Have Tradeables
In the old days, this used to mean cigarettes. In a crisis, it will mean medicines like antibiotics, drugs, medical supplies in general and anything else you can think of that will be in short supply and needed (iodine tablets for purifying water might be a hot item, for example).
You’ve got to be real careful with this stuff, see “secrecy” above. If people think you have a stash, and know who you are and where you’re from, this can go bad. Strong social ties, ties to the local violent authorities, and secrecy can protect you somewhat, but use your sense.
Careful Following the Crowd
Despite wanting to have strong social ties and all that, remember that the places that are worse to be are often the big center points: the stadium or whatever set up as a central distribution and camp out point. This is where the rapes and violence happen. You should prepare in large part so you don’t have to go there. If you do, visit only, don’t stay, and go in numbers with people good at violence and stay together. Dead serious on this.
Belong to an Organized Group
A good church qualifies, but any reasonably large group (50+ people) who are used to working together outside of work can qualify. When government fails, such groups, used to working together, can pull together. Bonus if the group tends to include people with technical, agricultural, and survival skills. Be on good terms with these people.
Concluding Remarks
The people who live, in good times and bad, tend to be the people who other people want to live. When established authority collapses, groups that already exist but aren’t dependent on that authority tend to take over; and yes, organized groups with guns tend to matter.
Want to live? Make it so you living is what other people want.
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realitychecker
As one who has been relentlessly attacked and slandered for years by my comrades on the left for preaching the necessity of being realistic about self-defense issues, I find myself drowning in irony at this moment.
Watt4Bob
It seems we’ve come to that point doesn’t it?
The point where it’s sadly necessary to explain to all present that it’s time to grow up and face the facts.
It’s been hinted at;
“The Hamptons are not a defensible position.”
But here it is, we suddenly feel deeply, the responsibility to get our families ready to face the worst, so we don’t have to explain in the moment, why the man with a rifle just climbed over the back fence.
Reality is, on their way to the Hamptons, they’re going to stop at your house, looking for food.
I don’t know about the rest of us, but I’d rather not be surrounded by people surprised by all of this when the stuff hits the fan.
bruce wilder
I was wondering how this advice ought to be operationalized in a context typical of our fraying from the bottom, predators on top slow-mo collapse?
A lot of people seem to think civilization will collapse in a couple of weeks, as might be fit a Hollywood script. But, I tend to think we are living thru a 300 year process. What an individual in our generation is likely to experience will be a local crisis punctuating the general decline, meaning only partial recovery marred by intensified predation from above in the neoliberal food chain.
Think Puerto Rico.
Survival prep would be useful, as would migration in response to actual local crisis.
Do you want to live in Flint, MI? Maybe, you do not get much choice. How do you adapt there?
Apocalypse Now is not really a good guide.
Pdxreader
Yeesh. Between this and living on a diet of one’s prepper food stash that is about to expire, survival on those terms doesn’t really seem worth the effort.
I think I’ll concentrate on my invisibility skills like the old Indian chief in Little Big Man. Already half there. Being middle aged is the closest thing to invisibility. Failing that, I’ll just say to myself, it’s a good day to die, and maybe it will be.
Besides, I’m about to be eligible to retire in 2020 (not that I can afford to) and most likely my pension and 401k and soc sec will get stolen or made otherwise worthless by the republican granny starvers and their Wall Street goons very soon. A climate induced mad max apocalypse might be mercifully brief compared the slow death by a thousand cuts that is probably coming, maybe even before 2020.
different clue
@Watt4Bob,
” Reality is, on their way to the Hamptons, they’re going to stop at your house, looking for food.”
So give them some food and a map to the Hamptons.
Ten Bears
It does seem as if the goddess of irony, were there such a thing, has passed gas.
Best advice from one just a couple generations removed from hunter/gatherer, don’t vacate your bowels in the back yard has a much wider application than the smell, or whimsical anthropology. Don’t, for example, hunt/gather in your backyard, it attracts attention. Don’t attract attention.
Better advice: grow thicker skin. We don’t know how to do this, have forgotten. Many, will die.
It will not necessarily be the strong, or heavily armed, who will survive.
Jeff Wegerson
Starting long ago I believed that global warming would be a problem for my grand-kids; till I realized that no it would be a problem for my own kids; and yet now face the reality that it is a problem for me.
The Stephen Miller Band
Dom Raso is ready to Crush It. Crush what, you ask? EVERYTHING, that’s what. Including Armageddon.
I have news for the Survivalists who fantasize about The Road. The Road is just that, a Fictional Fantasy. Well, an Erection-Inducing Fantasy for the likes of you but a Nightmare for any sane person.
Don’t think you’re not already on a List as one of the First Groups of People to be eliminated when things get really Tight & Dicey. Your Fantasy will never transpire.
There will be a Culling by The Elite and you will be culled. In the meantime, they’ve sold you a Dream of the Future that will never transpire. All the Filthy Lucre you spent on Survivalist Paraphernalia. Suckers. Marketing can make you believe ANYTHING.
No amount of Firepower & Natural Know-How will preclude that Inevitability. You’re already Toast.
You’ve been Catalogued & Marked for Extinction.
There is no place for you on The Ark they’re fashioning to Ride out the Storm.
Riders On The Storm
That Man we gave a ride to, his name is Technology and Sweet Emily isn’t the only one who will Die. She’s a Stand-In for the Majority of Humanity if not all of Humanity and most of Nature too.
That damn Apple. Eve, The Scapegoat as Women often are and some like Hillary proudly earn that Stripe, couldn’t resist because we don’t fall far from The Tree.
Curiosity killed the Cat.
And Us too.
realitychecker
People just don’t, or won’t, get the obvious.
When supply lines fail, the folks at the bottom will be first and most affected, and they do not share your scruples about preying on the weak.
You are the weak. Your problem will be the lowest socio-economic folks then, not the oligarchs at the top.
There will be no niceties observed, and if they can take all you have, they will do so.
I know it’s unpleasant, but better start growing up if you really think Ian’s vision is valid.
If this is too foreign to your belief system, watch re-runs of The Walking Dead to see how the living will most likely behave in such circumstances. It’s a better guide than your perfect world fantasies.
I will also point out that the ever-increasing inequality we have already been witnessing would inevitably bring about the same result eventually even if the climate remained friendly.
The fittest will be the toughest.
nihil obstet
If I understand pre-history right, the first major technological fix to over-population was the adoption of agriculture, and that resulted in thousands of years of less healthy, generally more miserable human populations. I wonder if we might see anything like that during these troubles, which are at base, issues of over-population.
Steeleweed
You are quite correct that while ‘prepping’ can and should be a major effort, the bottom line will be your social tools and environs, and family as the basis – if you have family. I go round and round with the libertarians about their ‘devil take the hindermost’ attitude. They seem to think mankind arose from the slime through competition, and it’s true we out-compete many other life forms. But there’s a difference between surviving and prospering, and while dog-eat-dog may promote survival in the short term, long term survival needs prosperity to provide the surplus to tide you over the bad times. And prosperity depends on cooperation, not competition. One of my nieces and my grand-nieces are dyed-in-the-wool libertarian. I write of how their own family survived and prospered because the kids worked and sent money home to lift the notes and mortgage, how neighbors joined in to get everyone’s cattle rounded up, hay stacked, cattle fed, cows were milked when the family was away in some emergency. The shrug and mutter about “different times”. Yes, those times were different and a damn sight more difficult they the post-boomer world they grew up in. And those difficult times promoted skills and attitudes and social behavior which handled the difficulties. If their ancestors had thought and acted as they think and act, they wouldn’t be here today.
Sid Finster
Ferfal may not be most people here’s cup of tea, but he had some practical experience on surviving in Argentina.
Tom
First Off:
Water, nothing else matters if you don’t have access to clean drinking water. If you live in areas that don’t have natural access to clean drinking water, leave there immediately or figure out how to distill clean water.
Second Off: Know who is likely to gain power when US Government Control finally collapses and join the winning side. In many parts of the US, this will be drug gangs as they have the heavy firepower and means to use it with many gang members having military training as well. Cities will become war zones quickly much like in Somalia.
Don’t count on the US Military staying intact for long in the face of US Government Collapse either. Many soldiers will desert once the pay stops. A few charismatic leaders may rally company and even battalion sized groups to their banner and they may even continue to operate under the assumption of continuity of US Government, but with their supporting infrastructure gone, they’ll be isolated warlords for all practical reasons.
Once the US Military fractures, their bases become a looter’s dream of resources.
Overall, the winners of the new order will be those who can control the cities, not the rural areas. The cities have the population, the industry, and the raw materials needed to exert control over the rural zones using the transport hub advantage of cities to rapidly control territory in a bubble.
ponderer
I understand the sentiment, but for the vast majority of people it will be simply too late at that point. If it comes down to food, water, survival most of the population (99% will be fighting over the preppers scraps) won’t make it. You are about as well off to plant yourself in the most desolate place you can and try to survive there. You still can’t stop nuclear war, hordes of locusts, or whatever that will inevitably come. Pulling the rich out of their bunkers won’t feed the amount of people that will need to be fed even if we let the bezos and zuckerbergs fatten themselves up a bit. In the absence of an FDR type, we’ll most likely get to experience true socialism before that late stage so I would recommend trying to make sure its the kind of socialism that we don’t mind leaving our children too. When people are starving, great Depression, great Revolution, what have you, that seems to be the historical trend. It will still be the nation states fighting over resources it’s just a matter of what shape they are in. The other possibility is MAD of course, in which case you should pick a likely target and situate yourself in it and pray the Russians manning the launch systems are accurate.
Tom
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/04/04/world/middleeast/isis-documents-mosul-iraq.html?smid=tw-share
Found this and its information reveals further how the successor lords in the post-collapse period when US Government control fails, will build themselves.
It isn’t the oil that will make the successor lords powerful, it will be agriculture. They won’t be bringing a whole new system in, they’ll build right off the back of the old one, purging the troublemakers, but keeping those who submit.
Control of land is vital to sustain a successor state and whichever organized group can grab it and sustain it wins.
Willy
I’d sometimes wondered if instead of relying on the honor and rationality of allies and the relative human stability of others, if it wouldn’t just be easier to breed a crew of warboys and stock up on the silver spray paint.
There’s a lot of testosterone stupid out there.
But reworking Jesus into some kind of war god would take some thought. I may have to move to the middle east.
Ian Welsh
Unlike the fantasy livers, I spent a good chunk of my life living in the third world. I also hunted, fished, and did some farming (I don’t like farming, it’s hard work for little reward.) I owned my first rifle at 12, though I’ve never used anything but hunting rifles and shotguns. I am quite unhealthy, but it wouldn’t be hard for me to regain the necessary skills if I had my health
That said, in bad times, it is always organized groups who win. Always. See what happened in Iraq: the government falls apart, and who steps up? The tribes, yeah. But also the churches. Same thing in Somalia, and so on.
And yes, don’t shit where you live. I pretty much said that in the post, Keep your head down.
The military will do various things in a truly bad situation; but the first bad situation will be where the elites are abandoning ordinary people and using the military. And when it gets worse, some units will stay together or reform and become the new warlods and gangs.
Be on their good side.
But understand that collapse will come in stages. You don’t need to worry about the feral shit if you can’t handle a semi-Puerto-Rico scenario. You won’t make it to the feral shit.
JavaK
Here is a close approximation to a number of the concerns; Join the volunteer fire department. This takes care of a number of the social / in good with concerns. This applies mostly to small towns of course… which is probably where you want to be during these times. For my town, the average age is 60 in the department. Heck, its even a kind of church come to think of it.
realitychecker
And never forget that we are all on the way to dying, anyway. Time is the harshest mistress.
All the prep talk is just about postponing the inevitable for a few moments, relatively speaking.
But it is basic nature to fight for a few extra of those moments.
sealintheSelkirks
If this un-civilized civilization collapses as quick as a deflating balloon how long before the cannibal bands are roaming? The power goes off, the food spoils in the markets, and if the cities are not quarantined by troops with shoot-to-kill orders it won’t be much more than two weeks is my guess. How long before those same troops join the bands or run for the hills?
There are NO defensible positions, not really. Not when the cities empty out and hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands follow the roads out and come hunting food in the depleted and despoiled rural and mountain areas of the US (where I live). The myth the city folk will be following is the one that rural areas are just chock full of food not understanding that rural mostly means poor which means few financial resources to stock much of anything and all of that is brought in by truck from the city distribution points to the local stores and walmarts! Won’t be long before those walmarts are guarded by men with guns.
Not much critical thinking in the average starving human…never has been in recorded history. Lots of cannibalism, though.
And I loved the ‘be on good terms with violent authorities.’ So live under some psychopathic warlord gang of murdering rapist thugs with badges who’s meds have run out, or a religious cult leader without his Prozac but lots of followers because he talks to god? Is that actually living?
Well maybe but only until the extreme radiation from all the wildly out of control and melted-down Northern Hemisphere nuclear power plants spews death around the globe gets there. Fukushima’s latest radiation counts would kill a human in a week according to Greenpeace’s latest measurements they snuck out of Japan. That probably won’t take long, either, thinking about it as the workers will head for their families in a crisis. It’s what humans do.
With the accelerating effects on the climate that Global Warming is causing, having any expectations of being a ‘survivalist’ is…ludicrous. If India and Pakistan finally do start their nuclear exchange when both country’s gigantic populations go berserk from starvation; that alone will stop Global Warming by ushering in Northern Hemisphere nuclear winter. There won’t be much point to that ‘survivalist’ concept then.
Shades of Nevil Shute. Reality is rarely amusing.
Hugh
Nation-states with weak civil society and institutions will go the way of Somalia, Libya, Syria, etc. Reversion will be to tribal or sectarian grouping. These are highly unstable, large amounts of inter-group violence, and unable to manage and sustain large populations.
Countries like the US with much stronger and established civic societies and institutions have a much higher chance of surviving in some form. Preparing as a society increases our odds. Lack of preparation decreases them. We are currently in the latter category. And our society and institutions under attack from the rich and elites are eroding. I can well see the country slipping into a state of permanent martial law. I do not see it falling apart, primarily because we have an integrated national economy. Finally, I can see some areas being largely abandoned in the Southwest, Louisiana, and Florida.
Sid Finster
@Ian Welsh: why do you think that tribes are so important in any Third World country? Did not you write that throughout history, the fastest way to wind up dead or seriously disadvantaged is at the hands of your fellow humans?
Well, at the same time, in a milieu without any law, the only folks who can be counted on to have your back are your fellow tribesmen. Which is another reason why it is critically important for most of us to never do anything that will get us kicked out of the tribe, regardless of anything that tribe is or does.
Ian Welsh
Tribe’ll take care of you, it’ll also kill you.
CHOOSE your tribe. You have that option in the modern world in a way you did not for most of history.
Tom
@Hugh
Mass Martial Law is not possible in the US due to the large number of guns in private citizens hands, no means to pay for mass troop deployments necessary to secure all the major cities and still have a logistic train, and troops as in Syria defecting en-masse and turning on each other when ordered to fire on civilians.
When collapse comes, there is no Hezbollah, Iran, or Russia to bail the US out. Europe lacks the means having gutted their militaries, and Mexico is fighting its own drug fueled civil war. Canada will just quarantine its border.
Ten Bears
To be clear I wasn’t in the least critical, and my “don’t vacate your bowels in the back yard” quip somewhat flippant: on revision I added the bit about the smell which may have fouled up the context. I should have left it whimsical anthropology, where it applies to every level of your discussion from clan to cholera.
Perhaps the only issue I might take, raised as I was by college educated atheist socialist union activist grandparents of mixed ancestry hiding out in a merchantile in the Middle of Nowhere Oregon, is with the notion of “tribes”. Much more clannish in orientation, of a nature from, for example, my uncle the Hell’s Angel or my Outsider days raising hell all over Cascadia hooking logs to helicopters with like minded individuals, often camping out on wilderness job-sites and all that entailed to my position today as Patriarch and … ahhh, spiritual advisor to a closely knit family of thirty-five or forty only about half of whom I would trust in a pinch. I’m inclined to trust about ten, with a measure of confidence in the ten they trust. But that’s a personal thing, everybody needs to figure what they would be comfortable with, and, again, that doesn’t necessarily negate the don’t crap in the yard angle.
It is refreshing we are willing to talk of this.
bruce wilder
There is a somewhat interesting major feature article in the New York Times reporting on the results of researching the archives of the government established by ISIL. The upshot is that they ran a tight ship, so to speak, putting the bureaucracy of the modern state to work to collect a panoply of taxes, fill potholes and distribute war booty. Brutal, yes. It is also clear that these terrorists wanted to govern and govern effectively.
The fantasy of general apocalyptic social collapse, the (former) Archdruid taught us if you were listening, is a psychological defense mechanism. It is not without application, as local catastrophe may well create such conditions in a fleeting way, as war or weather, combined with bad government sweeps past. But general conditions are likely to be characterized by domination by a sclerotic state, relieved only by reinvigorating the state by the authoritarian impulses of fanatics and fools.
The kernel of truth is that, to an increasing extent, we are badly governed. The liberal welfare state, powerful and technically effective, that emerged from WWII, is increasingly an empty shell, subverted by a relatively handful of greedy sociopathic parasites and an amoral class of operatives who support them.
A decline of civilization means that the extractive power of social and political hierarchy is turned against the greater mass of society, which is left to suffer in despair and desperation as its sustenance if diverted upward to the few. Those on top of the hierarchy are parasites, but they are parasites that can be quite cunning and determined about keeping their host alive and “stable”.
The parasites might fail. We can hope — but recognize that it is a bitter hope at best. And, they will fail in the long-run — that is what the decline of civilization is, the fall down the rocky slope of Seneca’s cliff. The physical and biological inertia driving climate change and ecological collapse represent a power human self-governance is too weak to confront effectively.
At best, social cohesion in a tribe of our own making, may arrest the toboggan run down the hazardous slope for a time. Overthrowing the parasites will provide some relief for the host, but new boss same as the old boss, human beings just have not worked out how to hold those in power to account, to bind the leaders to the welfare of the whole followership (and vice-versa! [recognize that humans make lousy followers and that is a big part of the problem]) Good government by fanatics or charismatic authoritarians is not so easy to achieve or sustain past one lucky generation and may be only marginally better than the governance of self-righteous but clueless liberals in service to the worst billionaires and sociopathic corporate executives.
Ian Welsh
Ten Bears,
I agree about the don’t vacate. If it came across as defensive, my bad.
Tom W Harris
“Be On Good Terms with the Violent Authorities”
Reminds me of an anecdote about a Soviet KGB man questioning a perp about his interaction with a policeman:
KGB: Were you intending to be provocative?
Perp: No sir.
KGB: Were you intending to be subservient?
Perp: Why, no sir.
KGB: Then you were intending to be provocative.
So not worth it, especially at age 75.