6 ms·

I don't understand why people keep thinking that a financial meltdown means societal meltdown. There's plenty of places where the economy is or has already melt

I don't understand why people keep thinking that a financial meltdown means societal meltdown. There's plenty of places where the economy is or has already melted down even right now -- Sri Lanka, Argentina, Venezuela, etc. We can observe what happens when political institutions completely and utterly collapse, because it's happened multiple times already. What happens is not immediate apocalypse where people riot and society breaks down; it's mass protests, shows of solidarity, people help each other out, etc. The prepper scenario of "I've gotta defend myself against mobs out to raid for food" really doesn't happen. If we stretch it back a few decades we see things like the Wiemar republic, complete anarchy during the Russian civil wars when blacks, whites, reds, etc all marched across the countryside, Chinese civil war, or even just recently we have Yemen, ISIS, Ethiopia, and in none of these cases have a zombie apocalypse-style "have to defend myself with my gun and ammo" societal breakdown occured and people bartered with gold. It turns out that people organise very quickly, and a every-man-for-himself-style situation like in stories just doesn't happen. Maybe a civil war breaks out, maybe there are food shortages, but for the most part if violence breaks out, it's organised, mainly in the form of civil wars or local power struggles. One guy with a gun is not gonna help. Food protests are common, but rarely end violently. People keep thinking that "this time is different", and they're wrong every time.

thaumasiotes 3y ago
> The prepper scenario of "I've gotta defend myself against mobs out to raid for food" really doesn't happen. > Maybe a civil war breaks out, maybe there are food shortages, but for the most part if violence breaks out, it's organised, mainly in the form of civil wars. If a war breaks out, the tradition is that the armies will raid you for food. The issue was never that other locals would do it. A war breaking out is what people are afraid of.
- e63f67dd-065b 3y ago
  Ah yes, my gun and my gold will protect me against the organised army out to raid for food. That's what I meant -- people get organised very quickly. In Rwanda, people quickly formed armies and militias, the same in Ethiopia, Columbia, and literally every other time this has happened before. One guy is not gonna accomplish much. Civil war is also, by most measures, the least likely outcome. Usually civil war causes the breakdown, not the other way around. Usually it's really a deterioration of state capacity that leads to a powerless central government (see Venezuela, Yemen, Syria), or repeated coups that lead to unstable governance (all of west africa basically). Things are mostly stable, by and large.
  - true_religion 3y ago
    You’re pointing out yourself the usefulness of being one guy with a gun. Once you need to form a militia, you bring your gun and join your neighbors. That way you can actually resist the army. They will do more than just raid for food. They raid for people: conscription, slavery, and “comfort”.
  - tibbydudeza 3y ago
    In South Africa we strict gun laws - getting a 9mm sidearm is difficult enough - don't bother with something like an AR-15. But we have per capita probably the largest number armed private security companies - what happened when we had unrest in one of provinces - the owners of these companies formed self defense groups where they lived with their staff and had AK'47/AR-15 and stuff not available to normal citizens. Our suburbs are still racially segregated so they turned around those folks who did not fit the profile. They kept the looters out - but some got out of control and shot up innocent people that was in the wrong place at the wrong time. The army was eventually mobilized and the sight of soldiers and wheeled APC's convinced them it is was time to go home now that the professionals were here.
  - brutus1213 3y ago
    Thankfully haven't experienced it but my parents and relatives were in challenging situations during some parts of their lives. The point of Gold (as I was taught) is not to store your hoard of wealth but to facilitate getting out.
olivermuty 3y ago
I think that prepper scenario is way more likely in a «I got mine, screw you» society like the US. All the countries you list have their issues, but their base level of societal egalitarism is orders of magnitude higher. I would not be surprised if the US is one of the few countries to end up like Mad Max if the world order should fully collapse due to climate change or other large scale events.
- meheleventyone 3y ago
  I also think that the fact the prepper vision is a large part of the cultural zeitgeist makes it somewhat of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    It's not a large part of it. There's a large vision of self-reliance, which is definitely not the whole country, or more than half the country, but that's not quite the same thing.
- atdrummond 3y ago
  I’ve lived in two dozen countries and the US is the most community oriented of them all outside major cities. US charitable giving alone suggests your view of the country as individualism run amok is likely not the whole story.
  - TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
    The biggest share of US charitable giving goes to megachurches and other religious institutions who don't need it. A fair amount of the rest goes on political lobbying and influencing. The proportion that goes on direct no-strings plain simple humanitarian work is not all that huge. Most of the US population lives in cities. If the US wasn't "individualism run amok" it wouldn't have tent cities of homeless people, and its health industry wouldn't be bankrupting half a million people a year. (For example.)
rchtwlm 3y ago
>t for the most part if violence breaks out, it's organised, mainly in the form of civil wars or local power struggles. Yes, as we all know Sri Lanka, Argentina and Venezuela are all known for their low degree of violence.
- oblio 3y ago
  Violent places are not violent all the time, to all the people, in all the regions. Violence is frequently very localized, even in those very violent places.
bryanrasmussen 3y ago
most of the prepper fantasies seem to revolve around societal collapse - not financial - loss of electrical power grid etc. secondly it is true that most short term instability results in people pulling together, but I do remember a study from about 30 years ago on long term multi-generational social collapse (I think it was Eritrea) in which the population became much less let's pull together to get through this and much more f* you I got mine.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
doctoboggan 3y ago
When smaller countries collapse (as measured by percentage of global GDP) then the IMF, neighboring allies, etc can step in and keep things stable. If the US economy collapses, that's 25% of global GDP, not to mention the ripple effects on other economies and possible power struggles as countries try to adjust to a post US world. If you think the US is at risk of collapsing however I would suggest you buy a gun before gold.
- lotsofpulp 3y ago
  > If you think the US is at risk of collapsing however I would suggest you buy a gun before gold You need friends and allies before you need guns.
  - heresie-dabord 3y ago
    > You need friends and allies before you need guns. In one short sentence you may have summarised the difference between other societies and the USA.
    - bombcar 3y ago
      Friends and allies are no longer sold in the USA, but guns still are.
  - Ancapistani 3y ago
    As someone pretty well marinating in "right wing" - based on where I live and the social circles I tend to run in - you're mostly right. They aren't mutually exclusive; you can have guns and friends at the same time. You can even have friends with guns.
    - lotsofpulp 3y ago
      Of course, but from what I can tell, all the "preppers" seem to know that they need to buy supplies and weapons, but all of that is useless if you are not part of a community tight knit enough to be willing to defend you, and that takes years of work to build up and constant maintenance of relationships.
hliyan 3y ago
Sri Lankan here. I personally experienced this last year and was very surprised. We Sri Lankans love to criticise ourselves for our wonky moral compasses, so when the early protests started, I stocked up on food and installed an extra CCTV camera, expecting widespread riots and looting. They never came. There were many organised protests, and protesters did clash with riot police around government buildings, but people overall were unusually helpful toward each other. Several times, I had taxi drivers refuse to accept fare when they picked me up from a bus stop late at night (both petrol/gasoline and buses were in short supply for a while). Once a motorcyclist literally stopped by and handed me his spare helmet saying "If you're heading my way, I can take you". Many people (including my wife and I) drove around distributing food and supplies to folks we felt were in need. It's hard to describe what came over us, but it seemed like a common phenomenon that affected a lot of people. I still think if food became really scarce, selfish, violent behaviour would have emerged. But fortunately it never came to that and the country managed to go into a debt restructuring program with the IMF.
- tibbydudeza 3y ago
  People vs the corrupt govt of Rajapaksa - we are all in this together fosters this. The question of course is the very same people who voted in these clowns in the first place.
- brutus1213 3y ago
  Very positive post. Thank you for sharing. My spouse and I both had a short part of our childhood in a poor and wonky South Asian country. We both feel that people (and ourselves) are far less helpful to our neighbours and strangers in the west vs. back home. It actually felt different in the 90s vs. today. I recall being in the west and someone offering me a ride when the subway was closed (like 25 years ago). I just can't see that happening today. Just too many MLM schemes have been pushed on me, and too many reports of crazies on the news .. I dunno.
  - hliyan 3y ago
    Thanks for sharing. That reminded me of another experience: around 2012, the front left wheel of my car ended up in a ditch by the side of the road. I was considering calling a tow truck, when a crowd gathered and told me to get in the car and hit reverse when they gave the signal. Then they proceeded to literally lift the car out of the ditch. I had barely enough time to mumble thanks before the crowd dispersed as quickly as it had assembled. On the other hand, once in the New York subway, I was running toward the closing doors of a train, and some of the folks inside tried to keep the door open (which was not really possible) and clapped when I made it in by a hair's breadth. But then again it was a Friday night and many passengers at that time were a bit sloshed and quite friendly.
jokethrowaway 3y ago
Because governments indoctrinate people into thinking they're needed to keep society stable and safe. I'd argue the opposite is true. I suggest reading Larken Rose - The Most Dangerous Superstition. I feel way safer in places with a neighbourhood watch and local people banding together to fend off criminals over places where the police may show up some times, if they're done fining people for going 5km over the ridiculously low speed limit or jailing people for selling pot. Source: the EU pays my government to allow into the country jobless economic migrants, males in their 20s-30s, and local people have to defend themselves because the police won't do shit.
cmrdporcupine 3y ago
I think you're saying the same thing as this, but, to me ... The prepper fantasy clearly says more about the ethics/ideology of the person having that fantasy than it does about what a crisis-society looks like. By adopting that lifestyle they're basically giving an early look at how they might behave in crisis, and how they see their fellow man. And I think you're right; if you look at how people behave in times of flood or famine, they do tend on the whole to come together. From the outside looking in, I think in part it has to do with the history of parts of the US as a slaveholding society. In a society where a large minority (or in some places even a majority) are under the thumb of coercion, when order breaks down, there will be reprisals and violence. And I think this history has formed a cycle in some parts of the US long after the end of slavery, and also informs a lot of the gun ownership self-defense fetish there. e.g. for me, growing up in rural Canada guns were just a rather boring part of life because people hunted or had farms. But since then the have clearly become a kind of shibboleth, or cultural marker. Gun ownership is apparently at an all time high but actual hunting for meat is at an all time low.
dmurray 3y ago
In all of these scenarios, the prepper stuff like stockpiling ammo and canned food wouldn't have been much help, but storing your wealth in gold bars for the time after would have been a great choice, certainly compared to cash. The fact that society didn't descend into complete apocalyptic anarchy made it even better for the gold hoarders, because they didn't get robbed and murdered for their savings.
hcks 3y ago
> it's happened multiple times already. What happens is not immediate apocalypse where people riot and society breaks down; it's mass protests, shows of solidarity, people help each other out, etc What a bizarre interpretation. To this date more than 20% of Venezuelans left the country. What happens over and over is that fiat currency becomes worthless and that people who have the means to leave leave. Obviously if you own some gold you have a better chance of being able to escape to another country.

thaumasiotes 3y ago

> The prepper scenario of "I've gotta defend myself against mobs out to raid for food" really doesn't happen. > Maybe a civil war breaks out, maybe there are food shortages, but for the most part if violence breaks out, it's organised, mainly in the form of civil wars. If a war breaks out, the tradition is that the armies will raid you for food. The issue was never that other locals would do it. A war breaking out is what people are afraid of.

e63f67dd-065b 3y ago
Ah yes, my gun and my gold will protect me against the organised army out to raid for food. That's what I meant -- people get organised very quickly. In Rwanda, people quickly formed armies and militias, the same in Ethiopia, Columbia, and literally every other time this has happened before. One guy is not gonna accomplish much. Civil war is also, by most measures, the least likely outcome. Usually civil war causes the breakdown, not the other way around. Usually it's really a deterioration of state capacity that leads to a powerless central government (see Venezuela, Yemen, Syria), or repeated coups that lead to unstable governance (all of west africa basically). Things are mostly stable, by and large.
- true_religion 3y ago
  You’re pointing out yourself the usefulness of being one guy with a gun. Once you need to form a militia, you bring your gun and join your neighbors. That way you can actually resist the army. They will do more than just raid for food. They raid for people: conscription, slavery, and “comfort”.
- tibbydudeza 3y ago
  In South Africa we strict gun laws - getting a 9mm sidearm is difficult enough - don't bother with something like an AR-15. But we have per capita probably the largest number armed private security companies - what happened when we had unrest in one of provinces - the owners of these companies formed self defense groups where they lived with their staff and had AK'47/AR-15 and stuff not available to normal citizens. Our suburbs are still racially segregated so they turned around those folks who did not fit the profile. They kept the looters out - but some got out of control and shot up innocent people that was in the wrong place at the wrong time. The army was eventually mobilized and the sight of soldiers and wheeled APC's convinced them it is was time to go home now that the professionals were here.
- brutus1213 3y ago
  Thankfully haven't experienced it but my parents and relatives were in challenging situations during some parts of their lives. The point of Gold (as I was taught) is not to store your hoard of wealth but to facilitate getting out.

olivermuty 3y ago

I think that prepper scenario is way more likely in a «I got mine, screw you» society like the US. All the countries you list have their issues, but their base level of societal egalitarism is orders of magnitude higher. I would not be surprised if the US is one of the few countries to end up like Mad Max if the world order should fully collapse due to climate change or other large scale events.

meheleventyone 3y ago
I also think that the fact the prepper vision is a large part of the cultural zeitgeist makes it somewhat of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  It's not a large part of it. There's a large vision of self-reliance, which is definitely not the whole country, or more than half the country, but that's not quite the same thing.
atdrummond 3y ago
I’ve lived in two dozen countries and the US is the most community oriented of them all outside major cities. US charitable giving alone suggests your view of the country as individualism run amok is likely not the whole story.
- TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
  The biggest share of US charitable giving goes to megachurches and other religious institutions who don't need it. A fair amount of the rest goes on political lobbying and influencing. The proportion that goes on direct no-strings plain simple humanitarian work is not all that huge. Most of the US population lives in cities. If the US wasn't "individualism run amok" it wouldn't have tent cities of homeless people, and its health industry wouldn't be bankrupting half a million people a year. (For example.)

rchtwlm 3y ago

>t for the most part if violence breaks out, it's organised, mainly in the form of civil wars or local power struggles. Yes, as we all know Sri Lanka, Argentina and Venezuela are all known for their low degree of violence.

oblio 3y ago
Violent places are not violent all the time, to all the people, in all the regions. Violence is frequently very localized, even in those very violent places.

bryanrasmussen 3y ago

most of the prepper fantasies seem to revolve around societal collapse - not financial - loss of electrical power grid etc. secondly it is true that most short term instability results in people pulling together, but I do remember a study from about 30 years ago on long term multi-generational social collapse (I think it was Eritrea) in which the population became much less let's pull together to get through this and much more f* you I got mine.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

doctoboggan 3y ago

When smaller countries collapse (as measured by percentage of global GDP) then the IMF, neighboring allies, etc can step in and keep things stable. If the US economy collapses, that's 25% of global GDP, not to mention the ripple effects on other economies and possible power struggles as countries try to adjust to a post US world. If you think the US is at risk of collapsing however I would suggest you buy a gun before gold.

lotsofpulp 3y ago
> If you think the US is at risk of collapsing however I would suggest you buy a gun before gold You need friends and allies before you need guns.
- heresie-dabord 3y ago
  > You need friends and allies before you need guns. In one short sentence you may have summarised the difference between other societies and the USA.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    Friends and allies are no longer sold in the USA, but guns still are.
- Ancapistani 3y ago
  As someone pretty well marinating in "right wing" - based on where I live and the social circles I tend to run in - you're mostly right. They aren't mutually exclusive; you can have guns and friends at the same time. You can even have friends with guns.
  - lotsofpulp 3y ago
    Of course, but from what I can tell, all the "preppers" seem to know that they need to buy supplies and weapons, but all of that is useless if you are not part of a community tight knit enough to be willing to defend you, and that takes years of work to build up and constant maintenance of relationships.

hliyan 3y ago

Sri Lankan here. I personally experienced this last year and was very surprised. We Sri Lankans love to criticise ourselves for our wonky moral compasses, so when the early protests started, I stocked up on food and installed an extra CCTV camera, expecting widespread riots and looting. They never came. There were many organised protests, and protesters did clash with riot police around government buildings, but people overall were unusually helpful toward each other. Several times, I had taxi drivers refuse to accept fare when they picked me up from a bus stop late at night (both petrol/gasoline and buses were in short supply for a while). Once a motorcyclist literally stopped by and handed me his spare helmet saying "If you're heading my way, I can take you". Many people (including my wife and I) drove around distributing food and supplies to folks we felt were in need. It's hard to describe what came over us, but it seemed like a common phenomenon that affected a lot of people. I still think if food became really scarce, selfish, violent behaviour would have emerged. But fortunately it never came to that and the country managed to go into a debt restructuring program with the IMF.

tibbydudeza 3y ago
People vs the corrupt govt of Rajapaksa - we are all in this together fosters this. The question of course is the very same people who voted in these clowns in the first place.
brutus1213 3y ago
Very positive post. Thank you for sharing. My spouse and I both had a short part of our childhood in a poor and wonky South Asian country. We both feel that people (and ourselves) are far less helpful to our neighbours and strangers in the west vs. back home. It actually felt different in the 90s vs. today. I recall being in the west and someone offering me a ride when the subway was closed (like 25 years ago). I just can't see that happening today. Just too many MLM schemes have been pushed on me, and too many reports of crazies on the news .. I dunno.
- hliyan 3y ago
  Thanks for sharing. That reminded me of another experience: around 2012, the front left wheel of my car ended up in a ditch by the side of the road. I was considering calling a tow truck, when a crowd gathered and told me to get in the car and hit reverse when they gave the signal. Then they proceeded to literally lift the car out of the ditch. I had barely enough time to mumble thanks before the crowd dispersed as quickly as it had assembled. On the other hand, once in the New York subway, I was running toward the closing doors of a train, and some of the folks inside tried to keep the door open (which was not really possible) and clapped when I made it in by a hair's breadth. But then again it was a Friday night and many passengers at that time were a bit sloshed and quite friendly.

jokethrowaway 3y ago

Because governments indoctrinate people into thinking they're needed to keep society stable and safe. I'd argue the opposite is true. I suggest reading Larken Rose - The Most Dangerous Superstition. I feel way safer in places with a neighbourhood watch and local people banding together to fend off criminals over places where the police may show up some times, if they're done fining people for going 5km over the ridiculously low speed limit or jailing people for selling pot. Source: the EU pays my government to allow into the country jobless economic migrants, males in their 20s-30s, and local people have to defend themselves because the police won't do shit.

cmrdporcupine 3y ago

I think you're saying the same thing as this, but, to me ... The prepper fantasy clearly says more about the ethics/ideology of the person having that fantasy than it does about what a crisis-society looks like. By adopting that lifestyle they're basically giving an early look at how they might behave in crisis, and how they see their fellow man. And I think you're right; if you look at how people behave in times of flood or famine, they do tend on the whole to come together. From the outside looking in, I think in part it has to do with the history of parts of the US as a slaveholding society. In a society where a large minority (or in some places even a majority) are under the thumb of coercion, when order breaks down, there will be reprisals and violence. And I think this history has formed a cycle in some parts of the US long after the end of slavery, and also informs a lot of the gun ownership self-defense fetish there. e.g. for me, growing up in rural Canada guns were just a rather boring part of life because people hunted or had farms. But since then the have clearly become a kind of shibboleth, or cultural marker. Gun ownership is apparently at an all time high but actual hunting for meat is at an all time low.

dmurray 3y ago

In all of these scenarios, the prepper stuff like stockpiling ammo and canned food wouldn't have been much help, but storing your wealth in gold bars for the time after would have been a great choice, certainly compared to cash. The fact that society didn't descend into complete apocalyptic anarchy made it even better for the gold hoarders, because they didn't get robbed and murdered for their savings.

hcks 3y ago

> it's happened multiple times already. What happens is not immediate apocalypse where people riot and society breaks down; it's mass protests, shows of solidarity, people help each other out, etc What a bizarre interpretation. To this date more than 20% of Venezuelans left the country. What happens over and over is that fiat currency becomes worthless and that people who have the means to leave leave. Obviously if you own some gold you have a better chance of being able to escape to another country.