Prepping for the modern dark ages

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I’ve always had some mixed feelings about the word ‘prepper.’ For those outside of the community it congers up images of people hiding in fallout bunkers with crates of MREs listening for the Geiger counter to go crazy. To be fair, there are plenty of us who do get carried away with preparing to survive the end of the world as we know it (TEOTWAWKI) and don’t focus much on the smaller things that are likely to happen.

Chances are slim that your power will be knocked out for 2 years by a North Korean EMP, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t prep for a natural disaster, or riots, or a hazmat spill, or even just plain old unemployment. I think there’s a bit of a siren song to prepping for big disasters because it’s easy to assume that once you’ve prepped for big emergencies, small ones will be easy. So we look at worst case scenarios prep for those, knowing that we’ll likely be ahead of the curve for other, smaller events that are more likely. 

It’s quite satisfying. You can think of a bad scenario and imagine the gear you need to survive it. You make a list, you buy the stuff, you pack it away, post on a prepper forum about it, then move on to the next, even worse scenario and repeat. 

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 I actually wrote most of what follows in mid 2019 and decided to hold off on publishing it. A few people were certainly talking about a possible civil war in the US at the time but it still had that same otherworldly tone as the zombie apocalypse so I filed this away for later. Then 2020 happened and we’ve learned all kinds of new things, like how to spell p-a-n-d-e-m-i-c, the fun and excitement of being mostly peaceful in a crowd of mostly peaceful protesters, what things you can and cannot substitute for toilet paper and of course how to count ballots in such a way that half the country is convinced of a fair election while half remains incredulous. With all of that awfulness happening there is still one thing missing.

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You see, it isn’t the notion of a civil war, secession, coup, balkanization, great reset, or the big igloo that was really gnawing on me. It’s what happens if there isn’t a big shooting match? What if it’s a slow gradual decline from first world living down to third world standards? 

 
When do you bug out? If you do go into hiding, do you stay there until capitalism breaks out again? The Romans didn’t turn the page on a calendar one day and discover that it was the beginning of the Middle Ages; they saw a gradual decline over several generations. Even if we accelerate that timeline to match today’s faster pace of communication and travel, the collapse of a modern day empire could easily be a matter of a few decades of decline rather than a single event.  

 
This possibility really crystalized in my mind when I read this post from Surviving in Argentina. It’s not long, so you ought to read it, but the thing I took away from it is that in spite of how bad things are in Venezuela (or were when this was written), people still talk about what they will do when it gets REALLY bad. In other words, the proverbial frog is in the pot and doesn’t realize it’s being boiled.

Now as I’m writing this there’s no way for me to know for sure that there won’t be a big fight. It’s always possible. But if things do suddenly get hot, regardless of who wins or loses, there’s a good chance your retirement is screwed up because your job/401k/social security/corner bank are all mixed in with the rest of the detritus from the conflict. The politics between right and left, red and blue, capitalist vs socialist, whatever vs whatever may be largely divided into rural and urban, but our economy is dependent upon both, and screwing up either one has some pretty nasty consequences. Some parts of the country have the necessary resources to survive without the rest, but that doesn’t mean they would have the resources for a high standard of living!

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Regardless of the reason, if the American economy really goes down the toilet (I mean, REALLY goes down the tubes not just bad week/month/year on Wall Street) devaluation of the dollar worldwide kills the buying power of the average consumer, you lose the economy of scale that keeps cheap goods flowing in from overseas, and there are precious few individuals in the States who are in the skilled trades needed to build and staff proper, highly efficient factories. In short, if large scale fighting breaks out over anything political, everybody in the country loses in some way. If fighting doesn’t break out, but we continue slouching to the left, then we will move further away from free markets and productivity over a longer period of time. Everybody loses, but does so a little at a time. There are probably a dozen plausible scenarios in between; many of them involve some sort of turmoil leading to long term disruption of our current high standard of living. 

 
So what can we do to prepare for something that drags out decades into the future? Stocking up on hard currencies is a nice idea, and not one I would dismiss lightly. Let’s face it though, most of us don’t have the ability to buy enough silver or gold to carry us over a decades long decline. Even if you do have that kind of money right now, what will you buy with it after a financial disaster? Look into the living conditions in most socialist/communist countries for the past century. The problem isn’t that there’s no money to buy things (governments are good at printing money) it’s that there’s so little available to buy. 

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 Homesteading is a pretty obvious approach, but requires land and labor. Many of us can’t really afford to create a proper, off grid, self-reliant homestead without making a drastic change in careers. Realistically, not everyone can homestead. We still need tools, supplies, fuel, and other modern conveniences to get by and those require factories, designers, laborers, banks, roads, power plants and so on. Even if you could live in a perfect little microenvironment where you wanted for nothing, remember that there are many examples of socialist or communist countries where private property gets seized for the good of…well for the good of someone other than you. So what other things can we do? 

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I say start building skills. Not the kind that are sexy, operator, Bear Grylis crossed with Chuck Norris fights a Sharknado type skills, but the kinds of things can you can use to get by or make a bit of cash in hard times, or just make your life better, good times or bad.

The assumption I’m making here is that even if the world does take a turn towards the realm of dystopian fiction, it’s really not likely that all of our ‘stuff’ just disappears and it's not likely that everything fails all at once. Could the power go out? Could the refineries shut down? Could there be widespread food shortages? Yes to all of the above, but the chances everything bad happening to everybody all at once are  slim. A more realistic picture is that we could face a future with:

        Significant unemployment/underemployment 

        Intermittent power supply/high priced or limited fuel supply 

        Limited long range transportation for goods and people

        Reduced availability of finished goods 

        Greatly reduced quality of manufactured goods 

        Loss of purchasing power due to inflation/taxation/redistribution

In other words HARD TIMES. In such a scenario having lots of cool gear might be comforting but won't last forever.  It WILL put a target on your back. It’s much safer and sustainable to be a valuable person than a person with valuable stuff.

In the next three posts, I’ll be discussing the various skills I would consider valuable for preppers who want to prep for long term economic depressions, the degeneration of a free market economy into a socialist one, or the disruption of the economy because of a sizable military conflict.