NYC Preppers

The New York Times has an article on NYC Preppers. Among the several informative links in Alan Feuer's article are the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia, Prepper Groups, and the International Preparedness Network whose founder, Aton Edwards, lives in NYC. A commenter linked to FEMA's prepping website, ready.gov.

The prepping movement, related to the skills-based minimalist survivalism represented by Ray Mears and Les Stroud, fits well with the MGTOW principle of self-reliance and granular resilience within local communities in a system-level disruption. While preppers distrust the system in general and some are overtly against it, prepping should aid the system's response to a broad emergency and hasten the post-event recovery by lightening the load on the system. Civil authorities are only human with human limitations. Victims cannot assume official assistance will be timely. Anything victims do to help themselves, the system doesn't have to do for them or at least helps authorities allocate resources.

In Rays Mears's Bushcraft episode on the Pemon, Mears describes the slippery slide from self-sufficiency to reliance on the system and the generational loss of traditional survival skills. The slide begins with accepting innocent-seeming manufactured conveniences that become needs when they replace native capabilities. A Pemon matriarch describes how school has displaced the time necessary to teach the village youth their practical heritage. The modern degradation of independence eventually results in lifelong city people who are born and raised to be dependent on a system that defines them, is out of their control, and only superficially understood.

The cost of modern conveniences and social efficiency is dear when the price is your masculine soul. Men ought to seek to reduce their helplessness, become practically independent, and learn to use the system without depending on it. Stuyvesant and Columbia should have preppers clubs or traditional men's skills clubs that include prepping.

Eric