Category Archives: society

Lamenting the degenerate moral standards of mankind

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I noticed something when I was browsing through my YouTube subscriptions these days.

The technology channels are very interesting, if repetitive. The gadgets that we have available today, and I mean the smartphones, tablets, laptops, desktop computers, are wonderful to the extent of surpassing most of science fiction predictions, except for the lack of AI. However, when I see what people do with it all, it becomes a fucking nightmare. ISIS recording destruction of precious historic artifacts in high def video; a bunch of utter morons constantly typing from their amygdala region, producing angry but at the same time demented comments, anxious that they will miss an event and fail to voice their worthless, idiotic opinions. It looks like millions of monkeys slamming on typewriters, and the result certainly isn’t Hamlet. More likely, it’s the common denominator and essence of monkey. We live in an era of the most beautiful technological artifacts, and the worst degeneracy of human spirit.

I am deliberately exposing myself to that in order to observe my reactions, and I can tell you, I’m getting depressed, because I feel that it’s all completely impervious to anything I could personally do.

For instance, labeling the opposition in order to provoke the “audience” into some kind of “moral outrage” which removes need for any further discussion, this appears to be the mainstream of what is considered to be an argument. Unfortunately, this always works, because the main motor of everybody’s participation in any kind of social activity is peer approval, which is most easily gained by manifesting outrage at everything that is accepted by consensus to be outrageous, and approval of everything that is accepted as laudable. Call someone a Nazi and you basically won, because if he’s a Nazi you’re not expected to actually argue with a Nazi, right? Publicly approve of helping puppies, hungry children and vulnerable minorities and you will be accepted by your peers as a good person, without any need to actually personally exhibit traits of goodness in any kind of a real situation. It’s all easier than solving actual problems, or deciding what is actually good or evil. You fight Hitler by calling him Hitler, as if all problems can be solved by proper labeling, which will result in likes on Facebook and retweets. Call a victim of pedophilia a pedophile-apologist if he refuses to claim victimhood and deals with his situation in some other way. Always sympathize with victims, always try to find the “oppressors”. Unless the oppressors happen to be Muslims. In that case, attack the victims, because the leftist organizations are financed by Muslim money.

And what can I do to oppose such idiocy? Because, you see, that’s what it all is. You don’t defeat evils by creating public outrage. You don’t become good by liking all the right things. You don’t actually win the second world war again if you call someone you don’t like a Nazi, punch him in the face, and then say, “of course it’s right to punch a Nazi, right?”. That’s how you become the closest approximation to the actual Nazis, because you mislabel in order to justify violence, and then you start persecution. It’s not even the right question; the right question is whether it’s permissible to call someone a Nazi in an argument, let alone justify evil actions based on labels. It is not – labeling doesn’t give your arguments strength, it only allows you to avoid using any, and instead to use ad hominem and ad consensu gentium, which are logical fallacies.

You become good, actually good, by appropriating aspects of God’s spirit, and thus participating in eternity.

Tell me, how many do you know who have succeeded in that? Not many, right? And tell me, what do you think is the rightful position of all the rest, in the eyes of Eternity? Precarious at best, yes?

If that isn’t motivation enough to stop deceiving yourself and others with worthless endeavors, I don’t know what would suffice.

Who’s the enemy, and how to win?

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Watching Alex Jones on his YouTube channel, one would get the impression that “the globalists” are the enemy.

Or is it the leftist liberals, the neo-Marxists, feminists?

Or is it the neo-cons?

Or is it the Muslims and their fifth column in the West, which tries to weaken our resistance to shitty civilization-forming ideologies and the shitty cultures that they form?

If you ask the liberals, it’s “bigotry” and various “oppressions” that are the problem.

So let me tell you what I think.

I think the problem is several levels removed from the place where humans usually look for it. As St. Paul said, it’s not the flesh that’s the enemy, it’s the evil spiritual structure that dominates over it. The war is not against human bodies of this or that group, it’s not against hardware. It’s against software, against the spiritual power, against ideologies and belief systems that contaminate the minds and cause evil and suffering.

Buddha would say that the problem is suffering. The cause of suffering is projection of spiritual power into illusory and ephemeral things. The solution is to detach and withdraw. When the inertia of the flywheel is spent, the result is nirvana.

Jesus had a different take on it. He said that the problem is that Satan basically has power over the world, and is an active force that lies, binds and destroys souls. The solution was to redeem the world from his power by offering sacrifice of sufficient value, and simultaneously forcing Satan to administer the deathblow. It’s a complex equation, but it’s elegant and it had a good chance of actually working.

Because, you see, I think Buddha got one thing wrong, the one Jesus got right. The world is not a passive place where you just happen to invest your energy in form of projections and desires. The world is intentionally designed in such a way as to delude you regarding your true nature and the nature of reality, and to continually sing the sirens’ song of attraction, that provokes attachment and binds your fate to its own. The world is not a passive factor in our situation. It’s in fact the determining factor, exuding influence of such magnitude, that almost any degree of individual choice is outweighed and overshadowed. To say that the world is merely a given and that our attachment to it is our own problem to solve is like stating that gravity has nothing to do with the fact that we don’t happen to just spontaneously fly into space, and that we are holding on to the surface of the Earth by some act of our own volition. In a word, it’s false.

As for the humans, I would divide them into several groups. There are the ones who are aware of the situation and are actively working to counter it. There was about a handful of those throughout history. Then there are those who are aware that there’s some serious problem here, but are unaware of its exact nature, and are doing things that are sometimes useful, sometimes harmful, and sometimes useless.

There are those who don’t see it as a problem, but a great thing, who completely align their spiritual vector with that of the world, and who see attachment of spirit to matter as a great thing, and not a problem. And in the end, there are those who are unaware of anything, and just stumble around life like idiots.

The biggest problem is that the last group forms the vast majority of mankind throughout history. The vast majority of humans are as stupid as rocks. They merely want to preserve their existence as they see it, they want there to be more of things similar to them and less things that are dissimilar or threatening in other ways, they want to reproduce and they want to gain more influence. Tantric yoga would call them “the pashavi”, from pashu, which means “animal”, so it’s roughly translated as animalistic ones, the ones who are stupid animals who fight, feed and make little pashavi. In tantric yoga, the opposite of a pashavi is a yogi. A yogi understands that there’s a problem, he understands that he has to do something to get out of the problem, and he takes active measures, such as gaining knowledge, finding a guru who can teach him, and practising yoga with the goal of attaining liberation from the world.

So, essentially, the humans are divided into staunchly different groups according to the software that runs in their brains. They can be stupid cattle, they can be Satan’s henchmen, and they can be beings who strive for spiritual perfection and freedom, with varying degrees of success. In rare cases, they can be the agents of God, who possess true knowledge and power and are actually able to do something about it all.

As you are probably able to tell, my perspective differs significantly from anything that is widely believed.

My perception of the current state of worldly affairs is that the evil humans are running around like chickens with their heads cut off, wishing to do some evil, but without a supreme guiding evil force to direct them, and so they often contradict each others’ efforts, while increasing chaos, suffering and the overall amount of evil. The stupid ones are as stupid as they always were, only in greater numbers due to the exponential population growth, and the good ones are so outnumbered and they feel so dispersed and powerless, they are on the verge of getting completely confused and going crazy in this mess.

The thing is, the evil ones are not clearly divided according to ideology. You can’t just say “separate a certain ethnicity or religion or a political group, kill it off and thus solve the problem of evil”. You have evil globalists, but you also have evil nationalists, and evil Christians, and evil atheists. The evil ones are not all Muslims. Basically, there are different intellectual and emotional contents that exist on different spiritual vectors, and it’s the actual vectors that I find interesting, not the labels people put on them. I care whether someone has a spiritual connection to the transcendental or not, whether he understands the nature of the transcendental and the nature of the world, and whether he understands what spiritual choices and actions create what kind of a destiny for himself and others. Heinlein wisely stated that goodness combined with ignorance invariably results in evil, and I would express that as a mathematical formula, where intent multiplied with understanding determines the result. Good intent multiplied with shitty understanding equals evil. Shitty intent multiplied with good understanding equals evil. Only good understanding multiplied with good intent produces good results. Having in mind that people’s understanding of reality is shit, for the absolutely vast majority, you tell me if their intent matters. They are as likely to do evil deeds if they have the best motives, as they are if they have the worst ones. Having that in mind, I’m rather cynical about those who think they have a recipe for fixing things. The communists had it, the Nazis had it, everybody had it. Every damn fool thinks he can make the world a better place, and Buddha would rightly say that the only result of that is being attached to the world, and I would add that the additional result is usually adding your energy to the exact force that makes this world such a terrible place to begin with, because multiplying ignorance with zeal increases the overall “heat” of the chaotic pot in which we are all being cooked.

It is my opinion that the solution is not in introducing more energy into the system, in form of various efforts within the world. It’s not in the attempts of self-control, as if we are the ones to blame for falling, and not gravity. It’s not in trying to magically extract and transform evil that is contained in the world, in hope of making it good. The solution is to break the pot in which we are being cooked, even if we are to fall into the fire at first. This world needs to die.

Recycling

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Every time I have to purchase equipment I think about recycling, and I’ll share some of my thoughts on the subject.

There are several kinds of recycling:

  • Upgrading or servicing the existing equipment in order to extend its usefulness in its current function (example: upgrading the existing computer’s RAM and replacing HDD with an SSD in order to increase its performance, and keeping it as your current device).

  • Re-purposing obsolete equipment after its replacement had been purchased, and relegating it to some secondary yet necessary role (using an old computer as a HTPC for playing movies, or to replace a family member’s even older and weaker device).

  • Selling equipment on the used market in order to extract the remaining value in form of money, and leaving it to others, who might find the performance satisfactory, to get the remaining use from the device. Donating old equipment can be seen as a combination of that, and giving the money to charity.

  • Disassembling the device and re-using it for parts.

  • Recycling the device for raw materials which can then be re-used for manufacturing a new, modern device.

You basically have the same issue with cars; when you have an old car, how long does it make sense to invest in repairing it and keeping it in function, and when is it more sensible to buy a new or newer vehicle and relegate the old one to a secondary role, give it to a family member who might find it useful even in its present state, sell it to reclaim the remaining value, sell it for parts or have it recycled for the raw materials?

I recently watched a YouTube channel about a married couple that left the city to live on a parcel of land in some rural part of America, I think Idaho or something similar in the mountains, and they basically decided to do it on the cheap, living in a trailer while they gradually build their infrastructure from scratch, using mostly reclaimed materials. When they managed to do something by using essentially their own labor and almost no other resources, they were very proud of their achievement. The whole thing struck me as an example of bad economic thinking, and I’ll explain why.

First of all, the closer you are to processing the raw materials, the cheaper your labor. Essentially, whatever else you do, it will be cheaper to do it, get the money, and use part of that money to pay for the cheaper labor of the lower-qualified workers. If my work-hour costs ten work-hours of a backhoe operator, if I learn to operate a backhoe and use it to do work, I didn’t save n backhoe operator hours, I wasted 9n of my hours worth of money. Essentially, every hour I spend doing someone else’s work, is a loss of money, because I’m no longer earning the money to finance the spending, I’m using up my reserves and reducing my earning potential, because I’m learning how to do work that’s 10x less valuable on the market, and forgetting how to do work that’s 10x more valuable. The only reason why one should abandon his work and learn how to operate a backhoe or mill tree trunks into planks is if it’s more valuable on the market than what he’s already doing. Essentially, the efficient way of doing things is to do your job and let others to theirs’. That way, you get paid for what you do, and you pay others for what they do, and the net result is a wealthy society. If you neglect your job in order to “save money” by doing the others’ job, you are basically abandoning your career and starting anew, from scratch. If that’s what you want to do, fine; also, if that makes economical sense to you, it means that your career is either not bringing you the income it is supposed to, or you didn’t do the math.

So, basically, there appears to be some kind of a mathematical equation that shows if investing work and suffering poor functionality of equipment is worth more than the money-value of investing in either new equipment or in others’ labor. At some point, it’s more economical to get rid of something and either sell it or scrap it, than to keep owning it. On the other hand, at some part of the function it makes more sense to fix something and prolong its useful life than to invest money in a replacement. The most important variable seems to be the value of your labor, and the importance of some piece of equipment for your work. To me, it makes more sense to invest in the newest computers, than to invest in a new car, because I don’t use a car for work. Even if a car breaks down, it doesn’t significantly alter my ability to earn money. It simply becomes less convenient to get groceries. However, if my computer breaks down or even if it becomes too slow, it is a disaster and I need to replace it as soon as I can pay for the replacement, because if my computers die I’m basically fucked, because I use them for both work and information-gathering in order to be up-to date with things, not to mention keeping others up to date. Essentially, I can do without a car for a month, and I can do without a computer for a day. My absolutely essential equipment consists of a desktop machine, a laptop machine that is a fully-capable stand-in replacement for the desktop machine, and a smartphone that makes it possible for me to leave my home office and stay completely up to date with work and to react immediately when necessary. With those three devices, I can basically be completely mobile, go somewhere for a day or ten days and keep working. Without a smartphone, I couldn’t leave the office during work hours, in case I’m needed; since my work hours are 9 to 22, I would get out of shape and degrade quickly. Without a laptop, I couldn’t leave town for more than a day; hence no vacation, and I couldn’t recover from the accumulated strain, and would therefore degrade. Without a desktop computer, it’s game over. So, essentially, I could do quite nicely without most of my clothes, or without a car, or without my walls being freshly painted, and I can easily skimp on those and use the time when I get the car fixed as an excuse to take a walk. If my computer, laptop or a smartphone dies, the only walk I’m talking is to the computer store to get a replacement, because the moment I stop working is the moment I start the process of functional degradation. A taxi driver will have different priorities – for him it’s car first, everything else third.

And this equation of priorities, of things you can sacrifice if necessary, things you can live without if necessary, and things that are your yellow, orange and red lines – of gradual degradation, inability to recover the lost capability, and irreversible loss of capability and eventual destruction, are universal, and that’s why I used this example. It’s a matter of life and death to the entire Western civilization, because they are fucking with the Russians in a way that can be mathematically expressed. You can slander them, sanction them and reduce the price of the goods they export so that you harm their economy. That’s their yellow line – they can take it for years, knowing it will harm them, but the alternative is a nuclear holocaust that is an even greater harm, so they will take the loss for the time and maneuver to change the strategic situation. You can build up weapons at their borders, depose governments in their neighborhood in order to destabilize them, surround them with military bases, and try to draw them into a conventional war. That’s the orange line, something they can take to a degree, but will very quickly maneuver in order to avoid anything that would either imminently cause a direct war, or irreversibly degrade their position. When you cross their red line, you and everybody you know, love, hate or have ever heard of reaches the temperature of the Sun within 30 minutes.

That’s how it works. If you can’t help it, you live with it. If you can’t live with it, very bad shit starts happening very quickly. It’s all game theory, nothing new here. Use common sense to see where their red line is. Cross it in order to die.

Statistics vs. individualism

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There’s one interesting apparent contradiction in my political views.

On one hand, I am almost an absolutist meritocrat, which implies extreme individualism to the point of negating any kind of collective identity. You are what you are, and no kind of identification with some group changes your essential nature.

On the other hand, I acknowledge the fact that when people identify with a certain group, or a belief system, they don’t really act as individuals, but as instruments of that group or a belief system. Essentially, mobs break shop windows, loot and set cars on fire. It’s not done by individuals. People essentially give up their personal identity in order to become a part of a bigger entity, a mob, or a cult, or a nation, and this bigger entity is, for all intents and purposes, the active party. ISIS is not merely a group of individuals, it’s an evil collective entity. I understand that the legal system recognizes only individual guilt. The karmic law is even more strict – like gravity, which functions on the level of massive particles, although it appears to function on the level of stellar bodies, the karmic law functions on the level of individual kalapas of spiritual substance, although it appears to function on the level of souls.

We have two major issues. First, how to handle the need to use statistics in order to evaluate broader sociological phenomena, with the need to evaluate individuals on the basis of their personal merit. For instance, if we encounter an individual who belongs to a statistical group that has certain unfavorable general characteristics, are we justified in applying negative general prejudice against that individual? For instance, if we are in the middle of the second world war, and we encounter a German, do we assume he is a Nazi? If we encounter an Asian, do we assume he’s an overachieving nerd with high proficiency in maths and science? If we encounter an African, do we assume he’s a low IQ person with inferior level of education but above average physical skills and strength? All those assessments are justified based on statistics. However, the problem with statistics is that it doesn’t give us a number, but a histogram. It gives us a statistical distribution of certain properties in a population. Speaking as a photographer, you can look at a certain population’s IQ histogram and see whether it’s “overexposed” or “underexposed”, basically by looking at the position and shape of the “bell”. However, there’s another important information you can get from the histogram, and those are the extreme extents of the information contained within the histogram, basically the datapoints containing the lowest and highest measurements. Herein lies our dilemma. If you have a population whose median IQ is 80, the lowest measuring individual has IQ of 50, and the highest measuring individual has an IQ of 150, what do you assume about the group in general? The leftist ideologues would have you believe that pointing out that IQ 150 individual is enough to negate everything else and is to force you to treat every individual in the group as someone who is potentially an IQ 150 person. The extreme racists would point out the lowest-measuring individual and try to make you believe that all members of the group should be treated as the potentially IQ 50 individuals. A realist would say that the realistic expected IQ for a random member of the group is most likely to be within one standard deviation of the median IQ, so it is best to expect normal values but be open to the exceptions; essentially, you have certain expectations but you give individuals a benefit of the doubt when you evaluate them on an individual basis.

The second major issue is that of prejudice. If prejudice about groups of people is based on some kind of evaluation of past experience, should we treat it as informative and trust it, or should we treat it as inherently limiting to our potential to fully experience an individual?

Those issues are something I was thinking about for quite some time, and I’m not sure I have a universal answer. I can only tell you how I deal with the issue.

I am aware of statistics, I am aware of the prejudice, and I use them as sources of information. If some social group is known for increased delinquency, and I see a member of this group sneaking around my property in the dark, and running away as he sees me approaching, I am going to assume he’s some kind of a thief, or worse. However, if a member of that same social group asks me to help him with his car because it broke down, and I have no reason to suspect deception in that particular case, I will help him in any way I can. If a member of that same social group, statistically notorious for low IQ and high criminality, asks me sophisticated questions about science, philosophy or religion, I will immediately assume that this person belongs to the extreme right part of his group’s histogram, and apply my other set of prejudice about extremely advanced non-typical individuals who are usually an exception to all statistical expectations and can be treated only on an individual basis. So, essentially, I always have informative prejudice, but I’m very flexible about choosing which set of prejudice to trust and in what circumstances, and the end-result looks very much like treating individuals in a completely fair and unbiased manner, based completely on their personal qualities. However, I get to this result based on my personal application of Bayesian weighing; it’s never that formal, of course, and it’s not like I explicitly award positive or negative points for each perceived quality and evaluate the person based on their sum, but the implicit process that I go through is essentially that: you get -50 points for your race, +200 points for your verbal expression, +500 points for the intellectual level of your question and +700 points for the spiritual context of the intellectual dilemma, bringing your final tally to 1350 points. Alternatively, you can get +50 points for your race, +25 points for your nationality, -500 points for your verbal expression and intellectual coherence, -700 points for the intellectual merits of your question and -1000 points for the spiritual context, bringing your final tally to -2125 points. Yes, I do evaluate race and ethnicity either positively or negatively, but as you can see, the value I award to those isn’t anywhere close to that which I award for anything within the individual’s personality traits, education and spiritual magnitude. There are certain properties that I would award the symbolic value of 10000 points (either positive or negative), which is sufficient to outweigh absolutely any number of other considerations combined, for instance if I sense evil darkness and a satanic presence from a person. I don’t care what the fuck that person thinks or believes, and other considerations are even less significant. Also, if I feel great spiritual magnitude and clarity from a person, a strong positive vector, this is going to outweigh all other considerations. Essentially, I’m going to rely on my prejudice for the first 100 Bayesian weighing points, but anything that a person can influence by providing direct feedback is going to award him at least thousand points, either positive or negative, and my inner spiritual compass is going to outweigh almost any kind of feedback from the person. For instance, Romana’s initial tally was like half a million positive points from my inner spiritual compass, and a few hundred negative points based on the content of her e-mail which was basically all the wrong shit. Biljana’s initial tally was also half a million positive points from the inner sense and almost nothing from anything else, because she didn’t really communicate anything informative. In Romana’s case, I actually thought she was intentionally testing me, because of the huge difference between the sensed spiritual magnitude and the negative intellectual and spiritual value of everything she said out loud. So, it’s not that I evaluate people only based on what they personally do – sometimes, it’s difficult for them to fuck up so much for it to even matter, if what I feel about them is strong enough. But if I get no spiritual inner feedback about a person, if I have no personal communication with the person that would help me get a good estimate of their personal merits, yes, I am going to rely on the stereotypes and prejudice that will guide that minimum of attention given to that person, which appears to be completely irrelevant to me in all meaningful ways. If you’re a Jew or an Asian, I will assume that you are educated, smart, hard working and competent in what you do. If you’re an African or a Gipsy (including Hindu lower castes), I will assume the worst about you until proven otherwise – I will assume that you’re uneducated, unintelligent, prone to criminality and deception, bound by malignant traditions and culture of your ethnic group, and incompetent in everything you do. If you’re of European origin, that will get you zero points, because I usually function among the white Europeans and this is a normal value that awards no additional points. I will also have expectations based on nationality – I would expect an Ukrainian to be a liar and a thief, a Serb to be a loud arrogant fuck, a Croat to be a backstabbing cunt, an American to be self-confident and ignorant, a Hindu to be traditional and to think in formulae, a German to be polite and civilized, an Italian to be loud and emotional, and so on. However, all those expectations, either positive or negative, will amount to one tenth of the impression created by the first sentence that you write.

About preparedness

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I was thinking about disaster preparedness – prepping, in short – considering I’ve noticed a strong increase in the instinctual-level warning signal, probably broadcast through the global astral field. It communicates immediate and urgent need to stock up on supplies and prepare for a disaster, because when it begins it will be too late, the supplies will become inaccessible. I’ve heard of many instances where people, always the older ones, prepared for the war by stocking up on food and other supplies in their basements, before the 1990s war in Yugoslavia. Obviously, people can sense that shit is about to hit the fan, but only the older ones, who already have had personal experience with war, actually act upon it.

The instinct itself is very similar to that of a squirrel who feels a strong urge to collect acorns and nuts and store them in a hole in a tree where it will hibernate. It’s a very basic, animal urge directly connected to survival. For something like a limited war, this instinct is extremely useful. Stocking up on non-perishable supplies will not get you through the crisis entirely, but will give you a very comfortable margin of time which allows you to avoid desperate options later, and the ability to plot a course of action which doesn’t include extreme risk is what will actually help you survive. For instance, you don’t have to try and rob someone’s food cache, or to go out and risk sniper and mortar fire in order to attempt something. The priorities are clean water, medications (for people with chronic conditions), food, fuel and weapons. Essentially, water is the biggest issue. If you don’t have access to pure drinking water, death from water-borne pathogens is the bigger threat than sniper fire. However, the problem can be solved if you stock up on bleach; two drops per liter of water, stir and leave for 30 minutes to kill the pathogens and you have drinkable water. As for food, stock up on carbs and fats; protein is easy. You can hunt for protein (which includes collecting the earthworms and eating the pets), but carbs and fats are freakishly hard to get from nature, outside of modern agriculture. Stock up on whatever you would otherwise eat, just have a bigger quantity in store and rotate the supplies so that they are always fresh enough. If you think it’s silly, think about Aleppo, Syria. Imagine being trapped there after the war had started. Your options are basically eat whatever you have in your apartment, or go out under sniper fire and try to get something to eat, in a situation where nobody really has much, whatever they have is guarded with guns, and distribution of humanitarian aid is an excellent opportunity for mortar fire by the enemy. Fuel is a big problem, especially in cold weather. Without fuel, you can’t prepare food, or get warm. It increases the chance of people getting sick and dying because of nonexistent health care in those conditions. Also, the cheapest non-perishable foods, like flour, beans and barley, will require cooking. Also, if the electricity runs out, the perishable foods in the refrigerator will need to be eaten quickly. Having your own solar power generator, strong enough to power the fridge and the oven is a great asset, but almost nobody has access to that, so it’s not really worth mentioning. The problem with having supplies is that people who don’t have supplies will be tempted to take yours, especially if they have a gun and you don’t. So, having a gun with plentiful munitions is an absolute life-saver in those situations. In a civil-war situation, people can be divided into active and passive elements of a situation depending on whether they are armed or not. Translate “passive” as “victim”. Also, people who can rely on other people and have plentiful social contacts with the neighbors are more likely to be able to trade for whatever they need. Expect “grid” to fail – gas, water, electricity, phone, Internet. Those who use gas in bottles for cooking will fare much better than those who use gas supplies from the grid, for instance. The more “off grid” your installation is, the less modern and convenient it is in the normal circumstances, the more resilient it is in the case of outages and infrastructural collapse. You can get gas in bottles from somewhere, but if you’re connected to the city’s supply, you will probably need to rework/replace your kitchen stove in order to be able to cook food. Also, if your central heating system uses gas or electricity from the grid, expect it to stop working. For this kind of outages, think Vukovar, Sarajevo, Mostar, Aleppo or Donetsk. We’re not talking nuclear war or a Chicxulub-level asteroid strike, we’re talking things like a civil war, where a city is expected to be split into segments based on the communities, with riots, armed gangs and all sorts of shit taking place, which makes it very dangerous to go out. Even in case of a natural disaster, such as a flood or an earthquake, there might be infrastructural collapse, widespread looting and violence, and you want to have some level of isolation from that until it blows itself out and order is restored. The worst possible scenario of this kind is the siege of Leningrad in WW2. I know more about it than I would like. Millions died. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a picnic compared to what happened there. In early 1942 some 100000 people died every month, mostly from starvation. Not fun. I interpret all the atrocities committed by the Soviets in Germany, later, as a reaction to that. You see, shit like that actually happens, it’s not some far-fetched conspiracy theory. At almost every single moment there’s a place in the world where you have a natural disaster or a civil war or a siege. Being able to endure for two weeks without exposing yourself to danger or starving is very useful.

In such circumstances, probably the best thing you can do is wait out the first period of randomness and chaotic bloodshed, and when you figure out what’s going on, make an assessment on whether to get the fuck out or to wait it out. Each option has strengths and weaknesses. However, there are possible scenarios in which getting out isn’t an option, because there’s nowhere for you to go. There are people who have romantic notions of taking a backpack with supplies and going into the woods to “live off the land”. Be absolutely certain that if you do that, you will die. Every shelter you make, every fire you light, is a beacon attracting all kinds of criminals to your camping site, and be assured that there will be criminals in the woods. They will rob you of your resources, and if you resist, they will kill you with impunity, and possibly even eat you. Your home, in most circumstances, will be much more easy to defend from attack. If you don’t already live off the land now, don’t even think about attempting it later. It stopped being possible for humans to live off the land in great numbers in late Pleistocene, and it forced them to invent agriculture, not because it’s fun but because it was the alternative to starvation. I walk through the forests all the time, and it’s true there’s wildlife there – boars and deer, for the most part. I’ve seen pig tracks, and I’ve seen deer occasionally. However, to attempt to survive by hunting the woods for pigs and deer, let’s say that this couldn’t even feed a small village, even if they hunted the animals to extinction. There’s simply too many people for this to work. In order to calculate the number of people who would die in case of a great disaster that would restrict food production, just have in mind that throughout history, human population was as big as the food supply allowed. So, if food production drops to pre-industrial levels, human population will drop to a pre-industrial level. Numerically, this means a sustainable population of around one billion people, which means six billions would die. This, of course, is an optimistic assessment, because the ensuing chaos and conflict would mean that those who are sentenced to death from starvation will commonly resort to banditry of all sorts, and the expectation that one billion people will be able to grow food on pre-industrial level while surrounded by hungry mobs of crazed people is naive. Some isolated, inaccessible areas might continue to function normally, but for the most part, in the rest of the world literally everybody would die before there would be any kind of peace again, because the most realistic and effective survival tactics in those times would not be agriculture, but armed robbery. However, this will not be the universal outcome. In some parts of the world, people are very disciplined and would be much more effective in surviving great hardships. In America, however, I would expect the worst kinds of nightmare.

So, to summarize. Being prepared for a limited disaster scenario is a good idea. Those things happen with such frequency, it’s very likely for a person to experience at least one such scenario during his or her lifetime. Some experience several. However, trying to survive a civilization-ending cataclysm such as a nuclear war or an asteroid strike is naive and pointless. Even if there were survivors, the factors leading to survival would probably be too random to be able to prepare. Most likely, the low-tech, off-the-grid, already living off the land, secluded closely-knit communities separated from the rest of the world by some natural barrier that is very difficult to overcome without modern technology, would have the greatest probability of survival. In urban communities, I’m afraid that there can be no long term survival. I personally know how much food I have to buy for my family every week, and it’s very easy for me to extrapolate the probability of our survival if the urban food supply were to be disrupted. Also, we are completely dependent on the grid – gas, water, electricity, everything. In those circumstances, survival is an illusion.

So, preparedness. By all means, be prepared for low-level extraordinary events, such as an earthquake, a flood or a civil war. Pay your bills, wash your dishes, have some excess of non-perishable food stored, have a bottle of bleach for disinfecting water, have battery lamps and power packs for charging your phone when there’s no electricity for five days. But above all, be prepared to leave this world, because all humans must die. Be prepared for war, but above all, be prepared to meet God. If you are, everything is easy.