Fact Free America

We tend to get locked into a reality.  It is not always exactly a "fun" reality, but it is a reality that gives us some sense of control and self worth.  Within the preperationist camp it tends to follow the logic that all can be cured with sufficient food stores piled away in a one bug-out-bag-distance safe haven, or possibly by having picked the prefect caliber on the perfect platform of semi-automatic rifle.  For some it is a hide-out in the deserts, for others it is a quite get away along some creek in a National Forest.

I ran across a piece that I thought addressed this tendency well.  As it is from the Nation, it takes a leftword slant, but IMO it is almost universally applicable to modern American culture.

The sad truth is that even when presented with concrete and irrefutable evidence, some people still prefer the reality they want over the one they actually live in. Herein lies one of the central problems of engaging with those on the American right. Cocooned in their own mediated ecosystem, many of them are almost unreachable through debate; the air is so fetid, reasonable discussion cannot breathe. You can't win an argument without facts, and we live in a moment when whether you're talking about climate change or WMD, facts seem to matter less and less.

The examples are legion. Most of those who believe that Obama is a Muslim (roughly one in three Republicans) also loathe his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. But Muslims don't have pastors. They also claim that Obama's 1981 trip to Pakistan as a student is evidence of his Islamic militancy and his dubious beginnings: he must have used a foreign passport, since the country was on a "no-travel list" at the time. It wasn't. In fact, in August that year the US consul general in Lahore encouraged Americans to visit, and before that, on June 14, the New York Times Travel section had run a 3,400-word piece explaining that Americans could get thirty-day visas at airports and border crossings.

IMO there are so many specialist preperation sites, that you could spend all day reviewing them, and never leave them to look at reality from a different perspective.  A few of the sites do put a different slant on our current problems and situations, but most of them sort take a consensious veiw, that it will all end now, it will all end quickly, and that we are all going to be living in a precious metals only economy very soon.

That may come to pass.

But, as I hope I have illustrated in previous posts, there have been so many collapses in so many permutations, that it is a good idea to see exactly what happened before.   The Collapse of Cahokia looks an awful lot like a Mad Max scenerios on the surface.  But even here, a close looks at so many permutations.  Some of the neighboring groups did not collapse, or at least not all the way for many hundreds of years.  Some of the groups broke down into smaller units, and then had a delayed reaction collapse.  Probably only the immediate urban area of Cahokia had a quick collapse.

So even with the collapse of a (advanced) stone age society there are many stories within the stories.  Some preperation for future problems would probably be helpful, but so would a lot more attention to what was going on within your society, and figuring out who was doing what .  A slow strangulation gives time for looking around and repositioning.