I agree with you there can be very distasteful aspects of the prepper group, but it's like that with pretty much any group of people. The value of what they do

I agree with you there can be very distasteful aspects of the prepper group, but it's like that with pretty much any group of people. The value of what they do and/or the concepts they advocate can be separated from who they are. The further up the ladder of technological development you try to reproduce with prepping, and the longer the timescales of self-sufficiency you work towards, the more you are essentially engaging in an exercise to find out how to reboot civilization to a selected technology level, from another selected technology level. You also find out post-haste that this effort goes rapidly non-linear as you extend those two axes. There are related discussions floating around the Net about what it would take to establish a completely independent space habitat (or extrasolar planetary colony). Due to this dynamic, realistic rebuild-from-apocalypse prepping to current technological levels (or even 1940's levels) takes government-scale resources, and a very aggressive low-pass filter on the finances of prepping ensures the population of those preppers who alarm you will only ever be an extremely small and ineffectual group. There are way more imminent threats than this group. As groups go, politicians who vote for the Patriot Act and the increasing militarization of police represent a far more legitimate and immediate threat to you and society than these preppers ever will; anti-vaxxers against, say, polio vaccinations are also far more dangerous. But there are lessons to draw from everywhere and all experiences in life. From the preppers, learning about a measure of self-sufficiency doesn't hurt; for many working poor and middle class in the world, greater autonomy from rentier processes in our current incarnation of civilization definitely wouldn't hurt. From the politicians, learning the price of centralizing responses to risks instead of delegating responsibility to citizens can be instructive to future generations. Even from the anti-vaxxers, we can learn the value of understanding how to critically assess scientific research on our own.