Comment by cmrdporcupine | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cmrdporcupine | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

"Prepping" in North America is tied up with Book of Revelations apocalypse fantasy, settler-colonial "rugged individualist" entitlement, like you say, victimhood identity. Ted Kaczynski stuff, or "Red Dawn" or religious fundamentalist. Often with a nice tinge of "might makes right" and "I need to prep before the guvmint' takes over"

But compare and contrast with the Swedish "preppers" in this DW documentary:

https://www.dw.com/en/swedish-preppers-a-nation-rehearsing-d...

The personalities and motivations of most of the people are night and day different from what you find among US "preppers." Neighbourhood preparedness groups. Using words like "solidarity." Talking about how important it is for communities to "stick together" in case of war or other problems. Government assistance in planning for emergency -- state produced pamphlets and rationing kits. Inviting Syrian refugees in to talk about their experiences in the civil war and strife, and what they can learn from them. Stuff that would make US preppers squirm in their seats.

(FWIW I grew up rural Alberta, Canada and my parents were big into the outdoors. Backcountry camping, archery, guns, wilderness canoeing, etc. were a big part of my life. But my father was German and very left wing / social democratic. His tone and emphasis on these topics was night and day from many other people we'd meet.)

> Neighbourhood preparedness groups

That's really interesting. Thanks for posting this.

You raise a good point: for people in Europe, the risks of war are much more recent and more likely given all the land borders and thousands of years of history combined with different cultures and languages.

So what you point is not individualist prepping but communal prepping.

It's also worth noting Switzerland where "prepping" is basically government policy. There are bunkers, stores, weapons caches, etc. American prepping is inherently anti-government so I'm not sure you'd qualify what the Swiss do as "prepping" per se.

Yes, though I'd say: Risks of conflict and history of recent conflict are potentially just as high in North America. But those risks are broadly internal or civil rather than external. And so that's how the form the "prepper" ideology takes. Swedes fear the Russians; North Americans fear themselves or their own oppressed internal populations.

What I mean by this is: North America has a very recent (and actually still current) history of the seizure and occupation of internal "unsettled" lands by force -- from the indigenous people that lived there. And also I guess in the US from Mexico. 200 years ago this took the form of explicit physical genocide -- physical warfare and displacement of the natives. 50-100 years ago the form of explicit social genocide (residential schools, reservation system &the Indian Act in Canada, the Potlach ban, forbidding indigenous languages). These days its economic.

So the frontier settler mentality is strong and tied deeply into North American culture. The idea that this is a "land for the taking" in which the strong survive and the model of successful individuality is to carve out a piece of self-sufficiency in it.

Combine with the history of slavery in the US south and the ongoing cultural/racial war built around racial ideology there.

imho the self-sufficiency meme in North American culture has always fantasy been mostly cover for what is really a form of organized state violence and racial injustice.

(FWIW my own family on my mother's side was granted [or sold for very cheap] a section of land on the Albertan parkland by the British crown as long as they cleared and settled and farmed it. From which my grandfather had his subdivided section and a portion of the extended family still owns. The sale of my grandfather's farm directly funded at least a year of my university education (and my sibling's), and also the purchase of my first tractor here on my own hobby farm.)

I am curious how you have come to this conclusion in characterizing the motivations and reasoning for preppers in the US.

>...apocalypse fantasy, settler-colonial "rugged individualist" entitlement...

Is this based on any conversations with any of them? This reads like a fantasy and very at odds with the actual humans I have met who are "preppers."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com