Dependency and self-sufficiency are not opposites but extremes in both directions. It’s about finding the middle and and keeping it balanced as variables change.
Huh… self sufficiency is not a myth. There’s many parts of the U.S. where citizens are off the grid, some more extreme than others. However, if and when the shtf, being self sufficient might make you an easy and weaker target. I believe men should be building relationships with other men in the community. To teach and learn from each other on how to be sufficient not just for themselves but for their community or communities even. Most importantly survival skills.
Super skeptical. They mine their own metals? Produce their own magnets? Forget their own steel? Make their own batteries? Could you provide a few examples?
There are a lot of prepper types out there who might be theoretically 'ready" for societal collapse, but yes, they get there by already having a stockpile of societal goods and materials and of course guns. These folks likely have a great plan for what they’re doing when the bombs fall, but likely not a shred of the social and communal skills necessary to keep a functional society alive for the long term.
Maybe some of the more isolated amish communities could subsist for a while without injections of modern supplies, but even still we’re talking about less an “off grid” lifestyle and more like “radically reduced technology.”
Hm… well for example in the U.S. we have the Boy Scouts of America, this organization teaches boys and young men survival and general life skills. There’s a spectrum of “off-grid” citizens. One one side of the spectrum, they still work and make under the table money, which in turn they use to buy some resources. On the other side of the spectrum there’s citizens who have no communication with the general population. I guess the best way to see these examples would be on YouTube - searching for survivalist, off grid, and or self sufficiency.
It’s wild how many people out there have really solid plans for what they’re going to do when the apocalypse happens, but no plans for what happens in the subsequent months, years and decades after societal collapse.
It’s almost like the hollywood portrayal of survival in a post-apocalyptic world is as good at portraying the struggles and hardships of day-to-day survival as they at portraying people eating breakfast or having phone calls like we do in the real world or like, how many movies and shows give us the view into what real people really do all day long.
It’s that there’s just no views to be had from showing an audience the main character working at their job for nine hours a day and navigating securing a promotion, just like there’s no views to be had watching someone in a real survival situation shivering and crying every day for weeks at a time as they get sick and skinny and lose everyone they care about to infections and starvation.
Because fucking hunting and gardening won’t save you if World War 3 or the Turbo Space Covid Cordyceps Aids virus strikes unless you are already adept at living completely off the land, which outside a few absolute nuts out there, nobody is ready for.
What will save us if the shit really goes down is community.
People don’t survive, societies survive, it’s why we have one now.
well then you need to understand agriculture, animal husbandry, construction, woodworking, become a certified electrician, plumber and gas installer, brush up on sewing, first aid, and be prepared to starve to death or freeze to death if you fuck it up, or just die from standing on a rusty nail.
agriculture is the act of cultivating soil and producing crops…
should I go on or is that a good illustrative example of how the original request is so far reaching and unspecific as to be functionally useless.
It’s like asking “how do I make a game?”
a video game? a board game? a playground game? a card game? all of which require skills, disciplines, planning, research and understanding of mechanics that no one can summarize even in a single full length book, let alone a forum post reply.
The most vital thing isn’t doing everything the hard way - just being smart about doing it all yourself. It’s the sense that freedom is a function of actual independence, and actual independence is a consequence of ability.
Being self-sufficient should be a goal for every human being to strive for. Independence is a potent form of freedom that makes you feel like a magical eagle.
I’m not saying you should be Ted Kazynski or however you spell the Unabomber’s last name and live in complete isolation for most of your life, because it’s cool to have access to society’s benefits and all. But the more you can do for yourself, the more secure you will be in all ways. Basically don’t be a helpless or useless person.
The more self-sufficient you can be, the fewer societal resources you will take up, which could then go to someone else in greater need. That’s my perspective at least.
The organization I work for is all about helping people get back on their feet, and while I would never want to tell someone they should be more self-sufficient and rely less on us, there’s no denying that our resources are already stretched thin. At times, it forces us to prioritize those with the greatest need, even when others still need help.
How would one get in touch with such an organization should they find themselves off their feet unexpectedly?
Not having any issues right now, but I think it might be easier to get an idea now that I have resources like a phone with access to the internet than after finding myself in such a position where who knows if I’ll own anything.
Out of risk of doxxing myself, I don’t want to give too much information, but specifically we work to help set up immigrants and refugees with housing, healthcare, education, and other resources, so I am not sure if it necessarily applies to your circumstances. Though my particular role is not that glamorous, I just maintain the infrastructure.
If you’re in the US, you can often dial 211 (depending on your city) to get connected with various resources depending on need, or crisis lifelines in an emergency. Local and state governments will also often host sites or portals with access to various social services they offer. Sometimes even a 211 website for both at once.
In emergencies, hospitals will also always be able to help, but keep in mind a lot of their services are not free. Ask up front if various consults/appointments come with a charge before you end up with a bill. But even if they’re unable to provide anything directly without charge, they can often still put you in contact with services they contract with, such as social workers or community wellness representatives, who may be able to provide free help depending on your circumstances.
I’ve heard even just popping over to public institutions like town hall or the local library (but not schools, avoid schools if you look homeless) can be a helpful place to start to get familiar with resources in the community.
The more self-sufficient you can be, the fewer societal resources you will take up, which could then go to someone else in greater need. That’s my perspective at least.
But the more self-sufficient you are, the more resources of yourself you need to supply yourself. So you can provide less societal resources. If you do not need to provide clothes for yourself, you have more time caring for elderly, etc.
As another view, the total resources need does not directly change by changing who does what. The advantages of helping each other are in the OP. At some point however, I would think, the overhead of organization grows so large that it may not be worth it anymore. Just think of the amount of work put into “useless” administration in many countries. But in a 30 person village, this is probably negligible.
Edit: Thanks for helping other people on the feet!
AA got it right as far as that goes. Leadership revolves.
AA would be one of the biggest organized cults on the planet if the founders hadn’t thought of that.
Now, not everyone can be a leader, and those who can’t won’t generally volunteer. So, what you end up with in a small community is a handful of leaders who don’t agree on everything and therefore represent the needs of the people in the group a lot better.
Whether we like it or not, positions of leadership tend to happen naturally. As long as we hold sacred the fact that there is no truly central leadership, it shouldn’t devolve into a cult.
It might just be a part of our nature though. When you enter recovery they give you a list of places to avoid (they gave me one anyway) because the revolving leadership has fallen apart and a single personality has taken over.
That’s only one factor in a high control organization.
There’s a theory that the longevity of a commune comes down to making costly sacrifices. This signals to the group that you’re not going to be a freeloader. Things like praying at a set time every day, or going to services tends to make religious communes last longer. The tasks don’t have to do anything in themselves; they just have to exist and take up some of your time and effort. Religion has an easier time mandating these things, because you can put the whole reason for it on an ephemeral deity rather than something more concrete. In fact, this signaling to the group may have been the reason religion developed in the first place.
Well that’s not the part I’m talking about. I’m talking specifically about the leadership.
I’m an atheist who attended AA for years and I never worked the steps. The old heads definitely start to put the pressure on you after awhile though. “Yer higher power could be the universe.” Well, yeah, but it specifically says god.
The Conquest of Bread was a breath of fresh air! I cannot believe I read a book about politics / economics that was actually optimistic and left me feeling good about fundamental human nature.
People are generally pretty good at self-organizing to solve problems, and have done so effectively in small communities for thousands of years.
We have the technology* and productive power to ensure everyone enjoys a decent standard of living.
Much of the scarcity we face today* is artificially created and entirely avoidable if we produce to meet needs instead of maximize profits.
Things like laziness, corruption, and greed can largely be addressed by ensuring that all of a person’s needs are guaranteed to be met. Many people we currently* call “lazy” are either stuck in a hyper-specialized job that they can’t leave because they need to sell their labor to survive, or unmotivated because much of the wealth they produce is absorbed by someone else. And people tend to take more than they need more often than not because they are stuck competing with their fellow man for resources instead of cooperating for the common good.
He also does some back-of-the-napkin math to show that it takes less than a year’s worth of labor to produce everything a household needs for a year, and that the remaining labor time of that year should be open for people to cultivate different skills and pursue their passions. He argues that the distinction between what we today call blue-collar and white-collar work is unhealthy, and that everyone should do a bit of both.
His central thesis IMO seems to be that in the event of a socialist revolution, people shouldn’t be afraid to immediately start doing socialism. Take inventory of the food & start giving it to the hungry, figure out how many empty houses the community has & start housing the homeless, stop growing cash crops / producing niche luxury goods and start growing food / manufacturing necessities until everyone’s needs are met. He sternly warns against half-measures: maintaining the state’s use of violence or keeping track of some kind of currency or propping up political leaders are all things he claims will spell the end of a revolution before it gets off the ground.
I really loved the book. I feel like it provided a great example of what communism could (and IMO should) look like without all the baggage of so-called communist states like China and the USSR.
*= The book was written in the late 1800s. I think a lot of it holds up really well and some points seemed like they really called events that would happen in the next hundred years. That being said, it’s probably not as airtight today as it may have been in 1894.
The issue I think I have with a lot of this stuff is that’s it’s been written well over 100 years ago. The language is hard to understand, and these authors rarely get straight to the point. It’s hard enough to get my head around modern political texts, never mind the old ones. This isn’t just a criticism of Krapotkin, Marx is even worse in this regard. I still don’t really understand half of what the communist manifesto is talking about if it’s even relevant anymore. Old texts don’t always deal with issues like climate change or overpopulation. It’s easy enough to say we can feed people now, even with the overpopulation, but once climate change kicks in hard it’s another issue.
I would also worry about counter-revolution and why anarcho-communist revolutions haven’t stuck to the extent other revolutions have. There are lots of nations that have tried marxism, few seem to have had anarchism for a similar length of time.
A fuckload of people are really going to have to make an effort to get their shit together for that to happen. As things stand the majority are dead weight.
I think at this point, we are just flat out overpopulated. There are simply too many people competing for resources and a significant number of them just merely exist without contributing a whole lot back to society.
Yea, it’s really hard to get my head around any kind of communist type of ideals when I know I’d be doing 3x the work of pretty much everyone around me for the same outcome as them. Not that capitalism is much better but at least with that I get SOMETHING more to show for my efforts
Right now under the capitalist systems there are countless jobs that are detrimental to the world we live in, or don’t actually produce anything of tangible value.
We would be a lot better off if a lot of people just didn’t do their “jobs”.
We don’t need a hundred types of sugar water, Or McDonald’s plastic toys. Landlords, bankers, stock brokers, financial planners, most lawyers are all useless.
Overpopulation is also a Malthusian myth. It isn’t that we have too many people. Under capitalism resources are not distributed well. It doesn’t make sense that most of us are working in a system that expects infinite growth with the finite resources our world is limited to. All in order to make a handful of people increasingly wealthy while the rest of us increasingly can’t afford to live a basic, simple life.
We can and must work toward building a new system (spoiler: it’s called Anarchism) while dismantling the old, inefficient, destructive system we are currently forced to try to survive in.
Which part of what I said is not true? My point was most people are fucking lazy and will do everything they can to leave shit to be done by others. I’m always the one at my job cleaning up after other people’s fuckups and the one people go to for answers because I actually made the effort to learn everything. Under capitalism this is noticed by my superiors and I’m top of the list any time a promotion becomes available and I have an in if I’m trying to get hired at a different company and people I know have went there resulting in more pay for me than my coworkers who don’t make an effort in their work. Under a system where everyone is just given what they need I would be getting the exact same life as people who are doing far less than me.
Also how can you say overpopulation is a myth and simultaneously say there are finite resources in our world? Finite means we will run out.
Anarcho-communism (and similar ideologies) isn’t really about everyone being equal, that’s a silly goal that would take enforcement and calculations, it’s not practical. Instead, anarcho-communism is a different way of living based on cooperation rather than exploitation and doing what is needed for people rather than what a few rich owners want.
You and a “lazy” person won’t necessarily have the same outcome. A person unwilling to even pick up after themselves or contribute would still be guaranteed housing, food, and health care, but that’s about it. You on the other hand could work to have a nicer place or acquire things, so long as you aren’t getting them exploiting others or common resources. If you build a nice chair the anarcho-fuzz isn’t gonna come and take it to split it amongst the community.
The thinking around “laziness” needs to change. A person unwilling to do even the absolute minimum might be called lazy, but A person unwilling to trade their time for money isn’t a bad thing. It’s not the “lazy” people that wipe out species, start wars, and cause climate change.
Let’s also not forget that a lot of those “lazy” people are actually struggling with illness, insecurity, lack of critical resources, discrimination, burnout from “the grind”, or just plain don’t see the point in contributing much to a system that never seems to contribute anything back. Guaranteed housing, food, and healthcare would fix a lot of the problems that cause “laziness”.
Our society already produces far more than we need, it’s just sucked up by the owner class. If we removed the owner class and their hoarding, we could all work less and still have more than enough to provide for those unwilling or unable to completely provide for themselves.
I personally would be happy to do a bit of work to help ensure people aren’t starving or freezing to death because they’re going through a depressive episode or even if they’re just “lazy fucks”. Pretty sure every one I’d consider a friend thinks the same.
You know, it’s people with an attitude like yours, unwilling to help out without direct benefit, who I consider lazy, not the person with low ambition.
I’m more than happy to contribute to benefit the group. I don’t consider enabling freeloaders to be a benefit. If I want to feed someone that sits around not doing anything all day I’ll get a cat.
A broken leg is a temporary condition. As soon as it’s mended I would be back at it (if not before, I also have computer skills that would not be inhibited by a broken leg). Laziness is a personality issue and they will not overcome it if they just have everything they need handed to them.
I say ambition, drive, greed, etc are personality issues that cause harm to others and the environment.
While I’m sure there are a few individuals that would rather sit and die than go get some food, this is not something to actually be concerned with. You watch too much right wing TV telling you there’s a whole class of people that just want to take from you, but what’s actually happening is that this group is being stolen from and what you see as laziness is often just an unwillingness to facilitate being stolen from.
I wouldn’t dismiss the concerns of overpopulation entirely. Simple math tells us that, unless we are able to create a society with infinite resources (i.e. post-scarcity), it will always be necessary to make sure our rate of consumption is less than the rate of replacement.
So far, we are losing that battle, given the significant amount of non-renewable resources we consume at a global scale. On top of that, unchecked development which is needed to ensure that the needs of massively overpopulated regions are met endangers what few natural/renewable resources remain, which carries the threat of food scarcity, loss of drinking water, and permanent environmental damage on ecosystems that we depend on.
We’re overconsuming more than we’re overpopulated. It’s probably possible to reach sustainability with our current population if we curtailed consumption, but our consumption driven economy would have to change at a fundamental level. We’d need to impose strict taxes on waste and heavily subsidize efficiency while redistributing wealth from the ultra polluting ultra rich.
Overpopulation myths distract us from the real culprits of our unsustainable system. We need to cull the fat cats before we cull the masses. Population control should always be the last resort, while redistribution should always be the first.
Exactly. Self sufficiency is definitely a myth. Humans cannot survive alone for long. You simply cannot make tools that will keep you alive for long. You’ll have to venture back to civilization to get anything worked via metal at the very least. Just the basic crafts for clothing, shelter, tools and food is more than any one person can handle. It took whole tribes and villages even at the earliest points.
Now if you mean: how can I live in a cabin off the grid with minimal contact (1-2x a year) then that’s doable.
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