This author’s note originally appeared in the December 19th edition of my author newsletter. To subscribe to my newsletter, click here.
I’ve been thinking a lot about self-reliance recently. I just finished reading One Second After by William R. Forstchen, and while it’s a good book—perhaps even an important book—I have to say that is not the sort of thing that is fun to read when you’re newly married and expecting your first child. It really makes you think about the things you take for granted, and just how fragile our world really is.
If you know the basic premise of the book, you’re probably nodding along sagely right now. If not, then you probably haven’t read much prepper fiction yet. One Second After is actually a pretty good book to start with, if you’re interested in the genre. In the next couple of weeks, I’ll write a proper review.
I don’t consider myself a “prepper” in the common sense of the word. I don’t have a stockpile of guns or ammo, I don’t really go for all the “tacti-cool” stuff that’s popular in prepper circles, and I don’t obsess over SHTF scenarios. That said, I’m not ignorant of the many ways our society could (or is) falling apart, and I do have contingency plans if/when that happens.
Probably the best prepper blog/resource that I’ve found is Listening To Katrina, which was written by a guy who lived through Hurricane Katrina and the aftermath. Lots of really fascinating stuff there, and he does a fantastic job of boiling his experience down into lessons for the rest of us. I discovered this blog just as I was starting to get more interested in self-reliance and emergency preparedness, and it did a lot to develop my thoughts on the subject.
Another big influence on me were the Forgotten Skills books by Caleb Warnock. A lot of really fascinating stuff there. He hits on things from the self-reliance angle more than the prepper angle, which is how I like to come at it too. It’s not about having two years of freeze-dried food in your basement that you never eat or use, it’s about living in such a way that you can provide for your own needs whether or not a disaster strikes, and produce more than you consume.
About a year ago, I took what I’d learned from these and other resources and mapped out something that I call my Path to Self-Sufficiency:
Learn how to store and use oats, beans, and wheat.
Learn how to make bread and maintain a sourdough culture.
Start an herb garden and learn how to garden.
Develop a storage system for canned and dry goods.
Learn how to make kraut and fermented vegetables.
Learn how to make yogurt and cheese.
Keep a garden for greens, tomatoes, peas, and peppers.
Learn how to can and pickle.
Finalize the garden plan (including compost).
Build a rainwater reclamation system.
Develop a source of off-grid power.
Build a wood-fired oven and learn how to make bread with it.
Learn how to hunt and process game meat.
Develop a plan for livestock.
Secure a source for eggs and milk.
Learn how to make clothing and work with textiles.
Build a shop and learn how to work with wood and metals.
Build a foundry and learn how to cast metals.
Build a greywater reclamation system.
Secure a source for homespun textiles.
Acquire productive land and improve it.
Build an off-grid cabin.
The items are listed in rough order, though I’ve jumped around a little bit since making the list. For example, Mrs. Vasicek and I have solar panels on our house (11), and we’re looking seriously into keeping bees (14). But it’s a pretty good reference point for answering the question “okay, what’s next?” Currently, I’m working on step 6, and when spring comes around I’ll dive into steps 7, 8, and 9.
A lot of this hearkens back to a blog series that I started several years ago, called “the self-sufficient writer.” At the time, I was exploring ways that I could incorporate what I was learning into my writing career and lifestyle. The goal, I suppose, was to show how it’s possible not only to make a living as a writer, but to achieve a healthy degree of self-reliance at the same time.
Would you be interested in reading that blog series if I brought it back? I’ve learned a few things since then, and would have to start it over from the beginning, but it’s an interesting subject that I enjoy exploring. And now that I’ve finally got some land to work with, there’s so much more to do.
The Path to Self-Sufficiency is very much a work in progress, and I doubt I’ll get to everything on it. A lot depends on Mrs. Vasicek and what she wants to do. With a child on the way, other projects will no doubt take priority, but with everything going on in the world, this is not a ball I think we can afford to drop. If you have any suggestions or stories of your own, I’d love to hear from you.
It is rare that I see something that truly makes me outraged. As trendy as it is these days to raise your fist and shout at the world, that’s something I generally try to avoid. But recently, I saw something that I just cannot let fly without addressing it directly.
It’s this:
The Good
Extra Credits gets it right that modern politics (in particular, American politics) is a winner-take-all game for the independent vote. On that point, they’re spot on. Elections are indeed won on the marginal voters, exactly as they state.
Approaching political systems from a game design perspective is actually quite brilliant, and they do a good job of laying out the basic rules. Players start with a limited number of action points, and a (relatively) fixed number of victory points. The key to winning is to use your action points to grab the victory points that are in play—or to prevent your opponent from doing so.
My problem with this video isn’t with the concepts they lay out. It’s with the concepts they miss—and how those concepts completely overturn the examples that they give.
The Bad
First, they completely miss how the game board actually works. There isn’t a single game board on which both sides play. Rather, each side has their own game board, which may or may not accurately represent reality. Information shortfalls cause players to draw up an inaccurate gameboard, and thus waste action points by spending them poorly.
That’s exactly what’s wrong with the example at 7:51. President Trump didn’t win by “growing the previously tiny fear of refugees circle,” he won by recognizing that the Washington establishment was completely ignoring a large cohort of marginal voters. They didn’t even show up on the game boards. Over time, Democrats and Republicans became so far removed from their voting base that their politicking ceased to represent reality.
It all goes back to the Tea Party. Actually, it all goes back to Woodrow Wilson, with significant turning points at FDR, Social Security, Clinton, and NAFTA, but the Tea Party is a good place to start.
As our first black president, Obama was considered sacrosanct. He received a Nobel Peace Prize before he set foot in the White House, which is highly ironic considering how he went on to become the first US president to be at war every day of his presidency. But I digress. The point is, he was held above reproach. Anyone who criticized him was immediately branded as a racist. After all, how could you possibly attack our first black president??
As a side note, this is why the quip at 10:20 is so damned infuriating:
Luckily, elections aren’t the only battlefield in politics. The United States of America isn’t a “sit down and shut up, you lost” kind of democracy.
Obama’s response to the Great Recession was a massive increase in government spending, and an explosion of the national debt. When the Tea Party organized to protest this, they were painted by their political enemies as racists. This scored the Democrats a cheap victory, but it also distorted their game board. By deliberately mischaracterizing the opposition, they failed to account for them and began to suffer from information shortfall.
The establishment Republicans thought they could win by playing on a game board that matched the one the Democrats were using. Normally, this is a winning strategy. When the political landscape shifts, you don’t want to be stuck playing on yesterday’s board—you want to keep up with the times.
But the Democrats had deliberately distorted their board so that it no longer represented reality. In other words, they began to believe their own lies. The more the opposition pushed back, the more they doubled down, and the more distorted the boards became.
This is where political capital comes in, and it’s something that Extra Credits completely missed. Players don’t just have action points, they also have a certain amount of political capital that acts as a sort of multiplier for their action points. This capital is basically the good will and trust built up with the other side. It takes a long, long time to gain this capital, and once it’s spent, it’s gone.
Obama spent all his political capital in his first term, mostly on the Affordable Care Act. At that point, our politics became deadlocked. Combined with the fact that his game board no longer represented reality, Obama suddenly found himself in a position where he couldn’t get anything done.
The Republicans saw this, and decided to save their political capital instead of spending it. If only they could win a few more seats—if only they could win both the House and Senate—then they could defeat the Democrats. Until then, they’d just have to play along, building their capital until the time came to spend it.
In Obama’s second term, he doubled down on identity politics, playing the race card at Ferguson. This won him some quick victory points, but it also set race relactions in the United States back almost forty years and further distorted the playing board. He also played fast and loose with foreign policy, pandering to the Iranian Mullahs, the Cuban Communists, the Japanese Imperialists, etc. The reason President Trump was able to back out of the Iran deal so easily was because Obama completely bypassed the Senate, which is the only body with the constitutional power to ratify treaties with foreign governments.
All of this combined to create a perfect storm that President Trump rode to victory in 2016. There was a massive reserve of marginal voters who hadn’t had a voice for years, and were completely unaccounted for on the Washington establishment’s game board. By playing identity politics, the Democrats had completely ignored them, and now they were desperate for a champion. That champion was Donald Trump, who—unlike the establishment Democrats and Republicans—was playing on a game board that actually represented the political reality. Furthermore, he had a massive reserve of political capital to draw on—capital that the Republicans had been hoarding for years. The Democrats had already spent all of theirs, not only with Obama, but with the DNC’s primary rigging and betrayal of Bernie Sanders. Suddenly, a bunch of the “gimmie” points slipped out of their hands.
The Ugly
And here we come to the worst part about the Extra Credits video—the part that really gets under my skin. The view of American politics that they present is so distorted by their own ideological possession that it completely lacks all self-awareness. It’s precisely this ideological dogmatism that pushed Donald Trump to victory in 2016, and will most likely push him to victory again. As someone who voted for Obama in 2008, I’ve already decided to vote for Trump in 2020.
Consider the animation. All of the political symbols are blatantly pushing left-wing causes, from the rainbow flag and the neon pink hair to the guns and the female symbols. Why not throw in a Gadsden Flag, just to round things out a bit? Even the thumbnail shows a “person of color” (I really hate that term) in liberal blue scheming against two conservative reds.
If that was all it was, though, I’d roll my eyes and ignore it. But it goes much deeper. Much, much deeper.
Civil rights is the fight for equal treatment under the law and in daily life. Sometimes it’s a defensive battle to ensure that people keep the rights they have, and sometimes it’s a proactive battle, like fighting for people who do not currently enjoy equal status.
Those are two completely separate things. The first is a negative right, the second is a positive right—or in other words, the first is a right from government overreach, the second is a right to government intervention.
The civil rights movement of the 60s was all about tearing down Jim Crow laws on the state and federal levels. These laws enforced segregation and made black second-class citizens. It was not about forcing Christian bakers to bake cakes for gay weddings. Those are two totally separate and incompatible things.
The American Revolution gave us the Bill of Rights, which is essentially a list of things the government is not allowed to do. In contrast, the French Revolution gave us the Declaration of the Rights of Man, which is a list of things that the government is obligated to do. The American Revolution succeeded, while the French Revolution failed. The American Revolution gave us the most powerful and prosperous nation in the modern era, while the French Revolution gave us the guillotine, the Reign of Terror, and two centuries of catastrophic European wars.
But never mind all that. Let’s just throw out these two separate and incompatible things under the same issue banner, and paint everyone who disagrees as opposing “civil rights” entirely:
But what if you’re a conservative candidate? At first, you might look at this and think: “Yikes, barely any marginal votes and the Liberals have this circle on lock! Not even worth trying.” What if you were to spend a few action points here by, say, taking an opposing stance to a current civil rights movement, whether you do that directly by, say, supporting a bathroom bill or indirectly through dog whistle tactics? You might manage to shock the liberal majority of gimmies in that circle, who will then demand a liberal response.
What about the Overton window? The Left has been using it to gaslight conservatives and libertarians for years. Case in point, this video by Freedom Tunes:
If calling the Left on their bullshit is “dog whistle tactics,” then we aren’t even living in the same country anymore—and that’s what makes this so dangerous.
For a democracy to work, both sides need to be able to talk with each other in constructive way, where both sides genuinely hear each other. When that becomes impossible, we fall back to political tribalism, which grows like a cancer, tearing our society apart with political violence and, ultimately, civil war.
If you are so locked into your own worldview and beliefs—so entrenched in your own echo chamber—that you cannot acknowledge what the other side believes about themselves, then we’re done. The United States is over. Our republic has ceased to function. Democracy dies in darkness—not the darkness of bad journalism, but the darkness of ideological possession, which blinds us from seeing each other as we really are.
And this is why Extra Credits’ conclusion is so deeply, horribly wrong:
We are in this 24/7. Even outside the election cycle, a civil rights activist can always push whoever is in office to take action. Exactly how to go about this will probably require a few more episodes to cover.
No. That is NOT the solution. Doubling down will only make things worse—much worse. The only way out of this cycle is to genuinely listen to what the other side is saying, not to force everyone else to listen to you.
We’ve entered a very dark time in American politics, and not because President Trump is a Nazi. The fact that so many people can legitimately believe something so ridiculous is symptomatic of the underlying problem. If identity politics and political tribalism prevail, then the United States will break apart. Whether by secession, insurgency, or some other form of civil war, the American experiment will end, and we will revert back to the cycle of tyranny and chaos that has defined human history since the invention of the sword.
Guns, gold, and food storage. If ye are prepared, ye shall not fear.
The first thing most people think of is the zombie apocalypse. Which makes sense, considering how popular zombie stories are. The signs of collapse are clear and present, with no room for ambiguity. The world has come to an end, and the only thing left is to pick up an improvised weapon and fight.
In the real world, though, collapses are almost never so black and white.
When the housing market collapsed in 2008 and brought down the global economy with it, I was in college. With panicked capital looking desperately for a place to go, gas prices spiked to over $4 a gallon during the height of the summer. Then, as credit markets completely fell apart, retailers were forced to sell at rock-bottom prices just to keep their cash flow problems from driving them into bankruptcy.
So what did that look like? For me, an extremely expensive road trip back out to Utah, followed by a spending spree. I bought a really nice corduroy sports jacket for $15, and thought “hey, I could live with this recession.” Two years later, I was singing a very different tune.
In any collapse, people’s experience of the collapse varies wildly. Take the Euro crisis, for example. A couple of years ago, the Germans I chatted with online dismissed any claim that the EU was on the verge of falling apart. Now, the UK is holding a referendum on exiting the union, and no one really knows which way it’s going to go. Germany has not (yet) experienced the kind of depression-level unemployment that many of the southern countries have. To the middle-class government worker in Athens who lost all their savings in the recession and hasn’t been getting a paycheck for years, the German narrative of Greek laziness as the root cause of the crisis does not conform to reality.
When Ernest Hemmingway was asked how he went bankrupt, his answer was “gradually, then suddenly.” The same can be said of most collapses.
But there are different kinds of collapses. There are total collapses, such as the USSR where the entire national system just completely fell apart. Then there are more segmented collapses, where different parts of the country (Detroit) or sectors of the economy (banking, housing, construction) fall apart, leaving the rest weakened but still standing. Then you have all the stuff that happens on the level of individuals and families, such as bankruptcy.
Each level feeds into the next. If enough regions or sectors go down, it can bring down the whole system with it. Likewise, if the disintegration of families becomes too widespread, every other aspect of society falls apart. We see this right now in a lot of Black communities right now. Police brutality is certainly a problem, but it is a symptom and not a cause.
Very rarely does a super-virus come out of nowhere and turn everyone into zombies. The collapse happens gradually, then suddenly. People who know what they’re looking for can see it coming a long ways away. Everyone else clings to their false and misleading narratives (“the housing market can only go up!” “the rich should pay their fair share!” “Black lives matter!”) because the message is comfortable and doesn’t require them to change.
That is why self-sufficiency is so important, especially for us writers. We cannot afford to be comfortable. We cannot afford not to change. Perhaps there was a time, way before indie publishing, when writers could just sit back and write pretty words all day, but I doubt it. The industry today is changing so quickly that it’s easy to be left behind.
Every career writer will experience a crisis where they will be forced to reinvent themselves or face the utter collapse of their career. That’s according to Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Katherine Rush, who have been around long enough that I believe them on this point. If you know that your career is going to collapse at some point, shouldn’t you do all that you can to prepare for it? And if you’re already preparing for a personal collapse, why not take the extra step and prepare for something larger?
Personally, I think that the collapse is already upon us. I’m not yet sure what kind it is, or how total it will be, but I do think that when we look back, we will see the Great Recession as a prelude to the main event. Right now, it is easy to ignore or dismiss because no one’s experience of the collapse is the same. We are all like the seven blind mice arguing about the elephant, whether it is a fan, or a pillar, or a rope, or a spear. That’s what makes this period so dangerous: the fact that there’s no shared experience yet. It creates the kind of environment where false and enticing narratives can thrive.
Will we reverse course and take the steps necessary to reverse the collapse? I’m not optimistic. Ever since the Great Recession, our policies have focused on putting off the pain as long as possible rather than fixing the root causes of our social and economic problems. At this point, I doubt that this nation has the political will to endure the pain necessary to fix our problems. In other words, we’re caught in a vicious cycle, and it would take an extraordinary event (like a war) to break us out of it. That, or hitting rock bottom.
But even if something extraordinary did happen, and we avoided the collapse to enter a new era of peace and prosperity, I would still strive to develop the skills and habits of self-sufficiency. Why? Because not all collapses look like the zombie apocalypse. Sometimes, the collapse is so small that no one experiences it except for you.
No matter the variety of collapse, the best way to be prepared is to be self-sufficient. Independence is the ability to take care of yourself when everything else you depend on fails. For that reason, a true indie writer is also a self-sufficient writer.
About a year ago, while doing research for prepper-type stuff, I came across this interview of Ted Koppel, discussing his book Lights Out.
It piqued my interest, especially since Ted Koppel is not the kind of person I’d peg as much of a prepper/survivalist. The part about the Mormons sounded interesting too, so I reserved the book from my local library and checked it out.
I was not disappointed.
Lights Out is a fascinating examination of the possibility and ramifications of an attack on the US power grid, written by a veteran journalist with dozens of high-level connections across both the government and the private sector. It starts with a tour of the system’s vulnerabilities, quickly moves on to the government’s contingency plan (or lack thereof), then assesses the general preparedness of the rest of the country and what we could expect to happen if the power grid went down. Ted Koppel makes a compelling case that:
The infrastructure of the power grid is highly dependent on the internet.
This dependence has created a series of vulnerabilities that could destroy large portions of this infrastructure.
The private sector has failed to reliably safeguard against these vulnerabilities, mainly because the companies at the failure points have little incentive to develop the safeguards.
State and Federal agencies cannot impose sufficient safeguards because of lobbying efforts and privacy concerns.
Because most of the infrastructure is generations old and not standardized, it would take months or even years to replace key components in the event of a successful attack.
The Russians and the Chinese already have the capability to bring down our power grid, and with the proper expertise it is fully within the capability of rogue states like Iran or North Korea, or non-state actors like ISIS, to do so as well.
The Federal government fully expects an attack on our power grid in the mid to near future, but the various agencies do not have a clear plan for how to deal with such a contingency.
The general US populace is woefully unprepared for such an attack, except for certain communities such as the Mormons. They would not be able to provide for everyone, however, and would probably use force to defend themselves in the event of a collapse.
The only way our society could survive an attack is if everyone who can afford it would store three to six months of food, water, and emergency supplies. Otherwise, if the power grid went down, a collapse would be swift and catastrophic.
Freaky stuff. What was really freaky was the way that people who should have been taking more responsibility, such as the CEOs of major power companies or the directors of Federal agencies such as the DOD or DHS, all seemed content to pass the buck and give Ted Koppel the run-around. He described in detail some of his interviews, and the way in which various officials passed him off to one another like a hot potato.
And then he got to the Mormons.
I have to say, the chapters about the Mormons were some of the more fascinating parts of the book. Ted Koppel only expected to get a phone interview, but instead, Elder Henry B. Eyring flew him out to Utah and gave him a personal tour, including the welfare farms, the distribution centers, the canneries and home storage centers—they even found a local Utah family to cook him a food storage dinner! The gold-ticket treatment definitely impressed him, and that shines through in the book.
Of all the books about Mormons written by non-Mormons, I have to say that Lights Out gives one of the fairest treatments I’ve ever seen. Ted Koppel touches only lightly on church history and doctrine, but he makes it clear how these things tie into our emphasis on self-sufficiency and preparedness. While his impressions are quite favorable, he doesn’t shy away from asking the difficult questions, such as whether we would take up arms to defend our supplies if roving hordes threatened to take them from us by force. As he points out, there’s a great deal of constructive ambiguity from our leaders on that point.
If you’re as interested in potential doomsday scenarios as I am, or in emergency preparedness and self-sufficiency, this is a great book. It raises some frightening concerns without being too alarmist or devolving into sensationalism. For those who are concerned about this sort of thing but don’t have much experience with preppers or prepper culture, the book offers a fascinating look at this growing subculture and the motivations that drive it. Definitely worth a read!
This post is going to be political. Consider yourself warned.
I am not afraid of terrorists. I am not afraid that I, or anyone I love, will be caught up in a Paris-style terrorist attack. For one thing, most of the people love live in Shall Issue states with very few gun restrictions. Time and again, the second amendment has proven to be an effective line of defense against terrorists, mass shooters, and other deranged individuals who consider themselves above the law. Gun laws do not stop these people (surprise!), but a responsible armed populace does.
I am not afraid of a massive economic collapse, though I suspect that another one is imminent. I just looked at my mutual funds and realized that they have flatlined for about the last year—which is exactly what happened just before the collapse of 2008. The Chinese stock market collapse earlier this year is having repercussions across the world, but an economic collapse is something you can personally prepare for, and I believe very firmly in the principle “if ye are prepared, ye shall not fear.”
I am not afraid of a massive societal collapse, of zombies roaming the landscape—either the literal undead zombie or the metaphorical people-as-animals type. I consider a collapse of this kind to be highly unlikely, because if there’s one thing the Great Recession taught me, it’s that there’s a very big difference between the collapse itself and people’s experience of it. In some parts of society, the last collapse was barely felt at all. In other areas of society (such as Detroit), the collapse has never ended. Rarely do all sectors of society collapse at the same time—and even if they do, it’s still something that you can prepare for.
I am not afraid of any of these things. However, I am terrified that the United States, like Rome of old, is about to witness the death of the Republic.
In his groundbreaking book The Next Hundred Years, George Friedman discussed this dilemma at length. He foresaw the 21st century as a fundamentally American century, with the Pax Americana defining the geopolitical landscape. Many of his predictions have been and are currently being vindicated, including the return of an aggressively expansionist Russia, the gradual collapse of Europe, the economic development of Mexico, and the Chinese economic slow-down.
Yet the tension between Republic and Empire was something that he could not resolve, except to say that it is imperative that we find a balance between the two. A Republic places moral constraints on the power of the state, tempering the forces of Empire. When the Republic is destroyed, the Empire ceases to be benevolent and becomes totalitarian.
So why do I bring this up now? Because the recent events in this country have left me profoundly disturbed.
In October, House majority leader John Boehner (R) stepped down from office. Before he went, however, he and his cronies in the Senate and the House of Representatives rammed through a bill that effectively abolished the US debt limit until March 2017. Immediately after the bill was signed, the US debt jumped by more than $300 billion in a single day, and it has been rising precipitously ever since.
(As a side note, the debt-to-GDP ratio in the United States is now as bad as the PIGS countries in Europe—you know, the ones whose sovereign debt crisis precipitated the economic collapse in Europe, which has been FAR worse than our own collapse. That alone is enough to be frightening, but again, an economic collapse is something that I can prepare for. I’ve lived through one already, after all.)
And what was Our Glorious Leader’s response? He praised them, natch.
In fact, he’s doing more than that: he’s BANKROLLING them. That’s right: the same administration that gave the NSA a mandate to spy on the entire US citizenry and established a legal basis for drone strike assassinations of US citizens is now bankrolling a movement of domestic civil unrest.
With no debt limit.
There’s a term for these students, and that term is USEFUL IDIOTS. According to Wikipedia, useful idiots are “propagandists for a cause whose goals they are not fully aware of, and who are used cynically by the leaders of the cause.” In other words, they are pawns for evil and conspiring men who use them to sieze power and control.
This is not a new thing. In the Cold War, the KGB devoted the vast majority of its resources not to espionage, but to subversion. In this manner, they infiltrated, destabilized, and ultimately siezed control of several third-world countries. The primary target of their subversion efforts was always the United States and her allies. Defectors such as Yuri Bezmenov repeatedly warned us of this threat.
We can see the subversion process in action through the development of Left-wing movements like modern feminism. If you can spare an hour and a half, I highly recommend that you watch this video where Youtuber Sargon of Akkad interviews Erin Pizzey, the founder of the women’s shelter movement. What began as a movement to genuinely help victims of domestic abuse was blatantly co-opted by Marxist elements and folded into the modern feminist movement as a front for raising money. Even though men are also victims of domestic abuse, there are almost no shelters for men because this would threaten the taxpayer gravy train that has been siphoned off by the feminists for years. And the scariest part? That the radical feminists ultimately won. Our modern society has been reshaped by them in so many negative ways that it’s hard for us in this generation to see the forest for the trees.
But as scary as third-wave Marxist Feminism can be, it’s not them that I’m afraid of. They are, after all, little more than useful idiots. What frightens me are the evil and conspiring men (and women) behind them.
Are the old Soviet subversion programs still active and in operation? Probably not. The modern FSB is a shadow of its former KGB self, as the numerous Russian intelligence failures in Ukraine have shown. For all its aggressive bluster, Putin’s Russia is weak.
Still, it’s worth pointing out that the Soviet Union was never completely dismantled. When we conquered Nazi Germany, we held the Nuremberg Trials to root out Nazism and exterminate it. We did no such thing in Russia. Many of the former Soviet elites are still in Russian government today, foremost among them Vladimir Putin himself. The institutions of the communist state were reorganized, their personnel shuffled around, but they were never completely abolished.
That said, I don’t think it’s the Russians who are directly pulling the strings. I think it’s far more likely that their socialist allies and sympathizers in the West (men such as Bernie Sanders, though I suspect he’s just another useful idiot) took over the subversion programs once the Soviet Union fell, and have been using them for their own ends ever since.
This is why I am so deeply opposed to “social justice.” It is such a vague and nebulous thing that anyone who calls for it cannot help but become a useful idiot. The one thing that all social justice warriors have in common is the belief that a more powerful government is necessary to fix all problems. Naturally, this plays straight into the hands of those evil and conspiring men.
Social justice has become something of a buzzword in recent years. It defined the 2015 Hugo Awards, which was a localized but still significant battle in the ongoing Culture Wars. That was how I was first introduced to SJWs and their repulsive identity politics.
But again, it’s not the SJWs that frighten me. They are perhaps the most useful of idiots, but they are still just useful idiots like the others. It’s the movers and the shakers behind the scenes that frighten me—the evil and conspiring men who see them as a means to accomplish their own ends.
And the thing that terrifies me most of all is that the target of these evil and conspiring men is the Republic itself, or in other words, the rights and liberties enshrined in the Constitution. When those are swept away, the Republic will be truly dead. And my greatest fear is that the day is fast approaching when the Constitution will hang by a thread, with precious few to uphold it.
I can prepare myself for an economic collapse. I’ve lived through one before. I can build my food storage, learn how to be more self-sufficient, take measures to defend myself, and prepare contingency plans in case of SHTF. I can insulate myself and the people I love from most disasters.
No, I haven’t abandoned the Self-Sufficient Writer series. The path to self-sufficiency is an ongoing journey for me, and I wanted to take some time to learn a few things before I shared them here. My attempts at gardening this year ended rather badly, but I learned a lot from it and I’m carrying those lessons to other projects like an indoor herb garden, which seems to be doing well. Expect some interesting posts in the next month or two.
I started this blog series in order to explore topics like homesteading, emergency preparedness (also known as “prepping”), and the self-sufficient lifestyle from the perspective of a career writer, or really anyone who freelances in a creative profession that affords them a great deal of flexibility.
When you are a writer, you are your own boss. You set your own hours. You can work from anywhere in the world (or in space, I suppose), so long as you have an internet connection. And while it takes a lot of work to be successful, it’s not like a nine-to-five assembly line job where you’re doing the same thing all the time. Creative work requires periods of down-time where you “refill the well,” so to speak, where you typically switch focus to something more mindless in order to allow your creative batteries to recharge.
In short, writing is a profession that allows a great deal of space for pursuing a self-sufficient lifestyle. And that’s important, because it’s also the sort of profession that requires a degree of self-sufficiency, at least for those who intend to make it a lifelong career. With writing, there is no security. There is no minimum wage, $15 or otherwise. You never know when the market will fall out from under you. You’re constantly vacillating between feast and famine, and when you first start out, it’s usually more famine than feast. If you don’t have all the other aspects of your life in order, it’s going to be a really rough (and potentially deadly) roller-coaster ride.
But there are other reasons to pursue a self-sufficient lifestyle—reasons that apply not only to writers, but to people of all walks of life. With the tragic events in Paris last week, those reasons are becoming more and more apparent to everyone with the courage to recognize them.
We live in a global society that is on the verge of a catastrophic collapse. The economic and geopolitical pillars that held up the old order are buckling, the chaos and bloodshed in the developing world has started to spill over, and our modern consumer lifestyle is completely unsustainable. A detailed discussion of all these factors would require multiple blog posts, but for a writer like me who studies this sort of thing, it’s becoming increasingly apparent that the strain on our culture’s failure points is becoming more severe.
One of the responses to this has been the prepper movement, also known as survivalism. It’s been around for a long time, but has grown significantly in recent years. And there’s a lot of good that’s come out of it. Preppers believe that individuals should take personal responsibility for themselves and their families, in order to be prepared when shit hits the fan (SHTF).
There’s certainly a lot of overlap between preparedness and self-sufficiency, and the more seasoned and experienced preppers tend to fall in the space between the two. But there are also some key distinctions between the typical prepper mentality and true self-sufficiency which can be quite instructive.
The typical prepper spends a lot of time and energy on guns and ammunition, and is more likely to see their neighbors as the enemy in the event of a collapse. In contrast, those who are self-sufficient are more likely to reach out and help their neighbors, understanding that the first step to helping others is to take care of yourself.
The typical prepper is obsessed with doomsday scenarios where the entire society collapses all at once. In contrast, those who are self-sufficient are more focused on personal emergencies, such as accidents, unemployment, medical conditions, etc. They understand that it is far more likely that they will face a personal catastrophe than a widespread general one.
The typical prepper spends a lot of money on stockpiling supplies and equipment that they may never use. In contrast, those who are self-sufficient actually save money by buying the things they know they are going to use and getting it in bulk or when it goes on sale.
The typical prepper stocks up on dehydrated foods and MREs that they probably would not enjoy living off of, since they do not rotate through it. In contrast, those who are self-sufficient understand the principle of “eat what you store and store what you eat.” For them, food storage is a lifestyle as much as a contingency plan.
The typical prepper has a lot of camping gear and a massive “bug-out bag” that probably has more stuff than they can carry. In contrast, those who are self-sufficient are much more prepared to “bug-in,” with a garden that yields fresh food, livestock such as chickens or bees, and other aspects of a home economy that enable them to withstand disruptions without having to abandon their homes.
The typical prepper tries to do everything himself, so that he can face the post-apocalyptic world on his own. In contrast, those who are self-sufficient understand the importance of community and are more likely to band together and barter with others for the needs that are more difficult to fulfill on their own.
In his book More Forgotten Skills of Self-Sufficiency, Caleb Warnock devotes an entire chapter to the differences between the prepper mentality and the self-sufficient lifestyle, with the controversial chapter title “STOP BEING PREPARED.” While I think there’s a lot of good to be said about emergency preparedness, it’s important to understand that the intersection between preparedness and self-sufficiency is the optimal place to be.
Preppers who do not develop the skills of self-sufficiency tend to let their preparedness lapse, and people who pursue a self-sufficient lifestyle without understanding the need to be prepared end up missing some of the most important reasons for pursuing self-sufficiency in the first place.
In the Mormon scriptures, there is a verse that reads: “if ye are prepared ye shall not fear.” That is one of the most important points of both preparedness and self-sufficiency: it gives you security and peace of mind, both to face the major disasters and the personal ones as well. For those pursuing a creative career that has little to offer in the way of security, that peace of mind is key. It allows you to be more creative, because you don’t have to worry as much about your basic needs. It gives you confidence and helps you to think positively, even in the face of hardship. And while this series is more about self-sufficiency than it is about preparedness, the two go hand-in-hand. Because without a mentality of personal preparedness, the self-sufficient lifestyle is ultimately incomplete.
