In the previous article I explained what the Western “democratic governments” have in store for their population in case of a major disaster. The worldview behind their planning can best be described as “pragmatic materialism”, which BTW is how Satanists would describe themselves if asked. However, I can easily anticipate readers’ questions: if shit does indeed hit the fan that hard, what, if anything, can we do?

Well, I’ve been studying disasters and the answer doesn’t conform to this “pragmatic materialist” paradigm, to put it mildly.

The “conventional wisdom”, if you listen to the American “prepper” community, is that one needs to stock up on food, water purifying equipment, guns and ammo, and in case of a disaster, defend one’s property against intruders. Essentially, they sort people into three major groups: the hapless unprepared victims, the predatory criminals and the prepared homeowners. When I listen to their theories, I try to envision the world they are describing, and my conclusion is that there are unlikely to be any survivors.

Let’s say the supply of food, water and electricity is disrupted. There is no rule of law. Follow the Maslow hierarchy of needs combined with the game theory in order to figure out what’s going to happen. The most prized assets will be the off-grid farms that have private water sources and can grow food. Also, those places will have food and medicine caches. The most desirable assets will be taken over by the most powerful forces, those most likely to resort to murder and robbery. They will take over the farms, kill the owners, and allow everything to go to ruin because they don’t know shit about farming. So, the theory that the ones best prepared for a post-civilization life will survive is very implausible; a much more likely scenario is that they will be the prime targets of undisciplined, panic-driven violence, which will further disrupt the supply of resources. Once the predators run out of food, they will resort to predatory cannibalism, because humans will be the most abundant remaining source of protein. After that, everybody dies. The scenario is very similar to that of the extinction of the dinosaurs: in the initial chaos, the carnivores and the vultures wipe out the remaining herbivores, and then they die off as this short-term food buffer is exhausted.

However, regardless of what the Americans might believe in their satanic worldview, my study of limited disasters shows a different pattern. You see, when shit hits the fan, the course of action that is most likely to result in survival is not self-centered predation, but cooperation. You don’t try to hog resources, because you understand that you are always going to lack something someone else has. Eventually, the resources are going to run out. The sociopaths do exist, but they are immediately treated as a foreign entity and killed off. The non-sociopathic armed gangs will trade protection for food, essentially becoming the paramilitary force that will guard the farms against attackers. The farmers will accept this as preferable to being killed, and will become the new serfs. The armed forces will become the new lords of the realm, and will form a hierarchy among themselves, resulting in new feudalism. How do I know this? Because that is what happens every time there is a major civilization-ending crisis. The armed thugs divide the food-production resources (farmland with serfs) among themselves. The serfs get to survive, the armed “knights” and “lords” survive. The sophisticated intellectual part of the civilization is wiped out. Nothing unrelated to food production and fighting has great chances for survival. In essence, civilization is reduced to a territory under control of a mafia gang: people get to mind their own business and have some semblance of normal life, but the price of this is paying for protection by the well armed militia. The territory is divided into areas controlled by different militias, which wage turf wars, until at some point they decide to merge, and then you get a state with “police forces”, and you even get “democracy” where you are periodically asked to choose which gang gets its turn in exploiting you for resources. As the baseline of violence is reduced and commerce is established between territories, there is need for high-level products and technology, which gives birth to sophisticated trades, and later to science and technology. The more connected the world, the more abstract structures it can support, until you get the global civilization that veers so far into the abstract it ends up destroying itself, and you get a reset into barbarism, feudalism etc., ad nauseam. That’s history of civilization for you.

Of course, we are talking about a civilization-ending event, not a species-ending one, but the irony is, in a species-ending event, the best you can do is try to preserve your spiritual integrity by cooperating with others from the position of kindness, trading for resources, offering services in exchange for resources, being helpful and protective, and simply continuing to do the best you can until everybody eventually dies. This would be very hard for the materialists, who believe this life to be all there is, but for the religious and spiritually inclined people it would be quite easy: in fact, it would be just another day in life, where you’re supposed to do the best you can in the available circumstances, and thus show God that you’re a worthy person who will remain faithful even in the darkest of times. You see, for the best people life isn’t about surviving, or having your family survive. It’s about being faithful to God by doing the best you can until the very end. And that is what you should do when shit hits the fan. Be the best version of yourself you can be, and you will leave this world as a winner. Choose to desperately fight for scraps, trying to survive at all cost, and you will lose everything, and still die.