SURVIVALISM

Guest Post by Ol’ Remus

What’s happened to survival websites? It’s not just the offensive popups, the finger-wagging about cookies, or the blackout if yer running an ad blocker. It’s the content. What kind of survivalist writes about dental floss for dogs? After all, you don’t eat the teeth. Nor will solar powered sprinklers be uppermost in your mind when the Death Squads For Democracy are hunting you in the hills.

“Keep it simple, stupid” used to be the common wisdom. Survivalism was mainly what you carried between your ears, not in your pack. It came from hard experience, not from Amazon. Survivalism was understood to be an in extremis proposition where death was the probable outcome even for the skilled and prepared. Now it’s country living with endearing retro practices from grandma’s day, a sort of Better Homes and Gardens for Inconvenient Times.

The Nearing’s adventure is the unalloyed endpoint of preparationalism, a worthy goal no one can legitimately gainsay. Such an attitude could see entire communities of like minded people through hard times. It puts things in their proper order. But back-to-the-land homesteading is more Thoreau than survivalism. Such preppers presuppose the Great Depression’s mannerly destitution rather than a Bosnia redux and thus own the same chancy assumptions as their neighbors.

Lesser bad assumptions have also trickled unchallenged into preparationalism. For instance, even the federal health hucksters have dropped the notion that diet influences, in any significant way, a person’s cholesterol level. And other than a few outliers, there is no negative link of any consequence between cholesterol and heart health. A decades-long study in England has concluded that statins are not only useless for any other than a small subset of the population, but actually contraindicated. Yet allegedly knowledgeable preppers offhandedly repeat baseless bromides to condemn the healthiest and most necessary of foods, fats namely.

I knew a bad end was assured the first time I saw food labeled “low calorie”. A people who intentionally degrade food has lost sight of shore. But wait, there’s more. Another assumption preparationalists choose to own concerns gluten. One, maybe two percent of the population is gluten intolerant, yet the supermarket shelves are full of pricey product that announce themselves as gluten free. Incredibly, another useful component of food is now officially a dangerous contaminant.

These are merely the more recent examples of self-destructive nonsense. The more egregious are too well known to flog here, “no salt sodium free” for one and overhydration for another. Push it all into a pile and you have today’s wisdom. If nutritionists actually knew all there is to know about food, they’d have to wrap it up and find another career. Yet they keep making new “discoveries”, and at ever shorter intervals, which means the half-life of their received truths is also shorter. They’d have us believe last year’s approved diet will kill us this year before we can push away from the table.

Sometimes I despair of the nonsense otherwise sane people can believe until I remember, they’ll be my competitors when the SHTF. And no, survivalists are not a brotherly band, nor can they be. Relying on survivors I have known, of slave labor camps for one, survivalists are not selfless patrons looking to pitch in for the common good. The root word “survive” is the tip off. Preppers believe themselves to be goal oriented cooperatives, and they will be until the way ahead narrows and darkens and hard choices become no choices at all. Then they become survivalists.

Mere hard times come to an end, and survivalism begins, when the word “hungry” reclaims its original meaning. Hunger is an experience that never leaves you, and in that sense it’s a gift. It’s the survivalist’s all-purpose knife for any Gordian Knot. It’s the supreme teacher, and it appears when the student is least ready. Hunger doesn’t value your preferences, nor does it arrive dressed in gingham with recipes to make shrimp creole more tastey. But be assured, you’ll recognize it when you see it.