[tt] [x-risk] The spread of survivalism in the USA

[Eugen Leitl]

----- Forwarded message from "Hughes, James J." <James.Hughes at trincoll.edu> -----

From: "Hughes, James J." <James.Hughes at trincoll.edu>
Date: Sat, 26 Jul 2008 15:50:09 -0400
To: existential at transhumanism.org
Subject: [x-risk] The spread of survivalism in the USA
Reply-To: For discussion of existential risks <existential at transhumanism.org>

AlterNet

Massive Economic Disaster Seems Possible -- Will Survivalists Get the
Last Laugh?

By Scott Thill, AlterNet

Posted on July 26, 2008, Printed on July 26, 2008

http://www.alternet.org/story/92706/

They used to be paranoid preparation nuts who built bomb shelters for a
place to duck and cover during nuclear dustups with communist heathens,
but their tangled roots go back to the Great Depression for a reason. If
you want to get sociological about it, survivalism started out as a
response to economic catastrophe. And now, with a cratering stock
market, a housing meltdown that has devalued everything in sight, and
skyrocketing prices for food, gas and pretty much everything else,
survivalists are preparing for -- and are prepared for -- the rerun. In
fact, they may be the only people in America feeling good about the
prospects of a major crash.

And the interesting thing about the once-fringe movement at this moment
in history is that survivalism has now gone green -- at least in theory.

>From peak oil and food crises all the way to catastrophic payback from
that bitch Mother Earth, there are more reasons to hide than ever.
Conventional society as we know it is already undergoing some disastrous
transformations. Ask anyone ducking fires in California, floods in the
Midwest or bullets in Baghdad. Maybe it didn't make sense to run for the
hills, stockpile water and food, grow your own vegetables and drugs, or
unplug from consumerism back when America's budget surplus still
existed, its armies weren't burning up all the nation's revenue and its
infrastructure wasn't being outsourced to a globalized work force.

But those days are gone, daddy, gone.

What's coming up is weirder. Author, social critic and overall hilarious
dude James Kunstler tackled that weirdness, otherwise known as an
incoming post-oil dystopia, in his recent novel, World Made by Hand,
which has since become one of a handful of survivalist classics. And as
Kunstler sees it, whether you are talking about gun nuts or green
pioneers, at least you are talking.

"At least they're aware that we've entered the early innings of what
could easily become a very disruptive period of our history," the
Clusterfuck Nation columnist explains. "Most of them are responding
constructively rather than just defensively. They're much more
interested in gardening and animal husbandry than firearms."

Not that the gun nuts have gone away. Their ranks have just diversified.

"The gun nuts have been on the scene longer than the peak oil argument
has been in play," he adds. "They were initially preoccupied with Big
Government and its accompanying narrative fantasy of fascist oppression,
which is why they adopted a fascist tone themselves. But peak-oil
survivalists are different from the Ruby Ridge generation. They don't
think that a bolt-hole in the woods is a very promising strategy. We
have no idea at this point what the level of social cohesion or disorder
may be, but if the rural areas, especially the agricultural centers,
become too lawless for farming, then we'll be in pretty severe trouble
because there will be nothing for us to eat."

That's not on the to-do list of author and SurvivalBlog owner James
Rawles, who has been getting asked more and more questions by a
mainstream press finally waking to the consequences of disaster
capitalism, climate crisis and the hyperreal dream of bottomless
consumption. He has fielded questions from the New York Times, and he
has taken an online beating from conscientious pubs like Grist, but he
hasn't gone Hollywood. The times, which are a-changin', have caught up
to him.

"There is greater interest in preparedness these days because the
fragility of our economy, lengthening chains of supply and the
complexity of the technological infrastructure have become apparent to a
broader cross section of the populace," Rawles wrote to me via e-mail
(but only after asking how many unique monthly visitors AlterNet
commanded). "All parties concerned may not realize it, but the
left-of-center greens calling for local economies and encouraging
farmers markets have a tremendous amount in common with John Birchers
decrying globalist bankers and gun owners complaining about their
constitutional rights. At the core, for all of them, is the recognition
that big, entrenched, centralized power structures are not the answer.
They are, in fact, the problem."

Fair enough. But that broad brush fails to recognize the complexities of
the very community it is purporting to try to establish. Indeed,
difference is what survivalists seem to be running from, whether it is
historically the difference between blacks and whites, secularists and
true believers, or simply the haves and have-nots. It is that latter
crowd that the survivalists seem most worried about. Their separation
from society at large is arguably a retreat from community rather than a
striving toward it.


"I'd say that survivalism is indeed a celebration of community," Rawles
asserts. "It is the embodiment of America's traditional can-do spirit of
self-reliance that settled the frontier."

But that's also a generalization, especially when one considers that the
word "settled" is a coded reduction for a "near-genocidal wipeout of the
frontier's native populations," most if not all of whom were perfecting
a survivalist ethic by maximizing their skill sets and living in
symbiosis with the land that provided them what they needed in food,
tools and medicine. In fact, those settlements would have been
hard-pressed to exist without what Rawles earlier described as a
"centralized power structure," known as the expansionist United States
government and its military, paving the road forward. Each self-reliant
mythology carries within it grains of complicity in the community at
large, which is a fancy way of saying there's nowhere to run, baby,
nowhere to hide.

This is especially true today in our hyperreal, hyperconsuming 21st
century, where survivalism has become more of a gadget fantasy than an
earnest grasp for community.

"It seems a natural human impulse that we are hard-wired to follow as
circumstances require," Kunstler says, "although it is constrained by
social and cultural conditioning. To some degree, in our consumer
culture, survivalism is related to the gear fetishism you see in popular
magazines that purport to be about sporting adventures, but are really
about acquiring snazzy equipment. America in 2008 has become a cartoon
culture of Hollywood violence that promotes grandiose power fantasies of
hyper-individualism and vigilante justice. Add guns and economic
hardship, and spice it up with ethnic grievances, and the recipe is not
very appetizing."

This future cultural, environmental and geopolitical miasma is where the
survivalist and the mainstream converge in agreement. Both camps, pardon
the pun, are convinced that we're screwed down the road.

"The next Great Depression will be a tremendous leveler," Rawles
prophesies. "If anything, life in the 22nd century will more closely
resemble the 19th century than the 20th century. Sadly, the 21st century
will probably be remembered as the time of the Great Die-Off."

"I don't consider it a total wipeout," Kunstler counters. "It's a very
big change, but people are resilient and resourceful. Look, imagine if
you were a person who had survived the Second World War in Europe, and
you were walking around Berlin in the spring of 1946, a year after the
end of the war. A once-magnificent city has been reduced to rubble. Your
culture is lying in ashes. Yet, people pick up and rebuild."

That is, if they're sticking together. If they're scattered and fending
for themselves, and taking armed retreat defense tips from SurvivalBlog,
that makes rebuilding a bit more complicated. Which, in the end, is
where survivalism is most ambiguous. Is it a growing population of
forward-looking realists who are smartly preparing for the die-off
brought on by climate crisis and economic collapse, so they can pick up
themselves and their people, and rebuild with that "can-do" spirit, as
Rawles calls it? Or are they simply gadget-fascinated fundamentalists
afraid of change and challenge, so afraid that they'd rather hide and
hoard than join the fight?

The jury is still out. But, according to Rawles, it will soon have its
diversity mirrored by survivalism's changing demographic.

"I think that in the next couple of decades," he explains, "we will
witness the formation of some remarkable intentional communities that
will feature some unlikely bedfellows: anarchists and Ayn Rand readers,
Mennonites and gun enthusiasts, Luddites and techno-geeks,
fundamentalist Christians and Gaia worshippers, tree huggers and horse
wranglers. We welcome them all. Because the threats are clearly
manifold: peak oil, derivatives meltdowns, pandemics, food shortages,
market collapses, terrorism, state-sponsored global war and more. In a
situation this precarious, I believe that it is remarkably naive to
think that mere geographical isolation will be sufficient to shelter
communities from the predation of evildoers."

Scott Thill runs the online mag Morphizm.com. His writing has appeared
on Salon, XLR8R, All Music Guide, Wired and others.



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