alxd of the Story Seed LibraryAug 25, 2023

I find https://www.okdoomer.io/youre-not-going-to-make-it/ to be a nice little essay for all those people who think they can just leave the society during a #climateApocalypse and live #offGrid nicely.

It states again and again: you're not going to make it on your own.

We either build resilience together, as a #solarpunk society and communities, or we won't make it.

Let's not romanticize off-grid, homesteading and bunkers.

One more good line:

"The best kind of prepping is emotional."

You're Not Going to Make It

I read about this one family... They were tired of society. They thought civilization was unraveling. They wanted to live off the grid. Authorities found their mummified remains a few months later. The family died from exposure and malnutrition. They didn't make it. A while back, a prepper tried to

OK Doomer
Show threadSylvestre

@alxd

Strikes me how this whole discussion leaves out indigenous and other traditional communities that are living without most Western stuff because they've never had it. Who have lived that way through very hard conditions, stuff like colonization, and now the climate apocalypse that is already on in their regions.

Isn't that the natural place to look / learn / do basic research if you want to start spinning fantasies about what living "off the grid" (without present Western infrastructure) means? What survival and resilience without such infrastructure requires?

I don't know much about the matter, but I know that societies that survived for long in harsh conditions are not individualistic; they didn't and don't survive as nuclear families. Quite the opposite. And from all I know, a lot of energy goes into developing and continuously maintaining and caring for communal life / social relationships for it to be successful.

So I'd say, yeah the prep is emotional and that includes emotionally going beyond individualism, beyond "me myself & I (& perhaps my nuclear family) in a bunker". That latter vision is absurd given (pre)history, by which I mean evolutionary time spans. Some of us could only stop living in extended communities because of this recent increase in automatised infrastructures making more direct and basic cooperation unnecessary (for some!).

Aug 25, 2023 at 3:52pmWeb
Show threadSylvestreAug 25, 2023

@alxd

So I'd say, meaningful prep is more like grassroots organizing and learning solidarity and how to get along with different types of people, than like playing Indiana Jones alone in the jungle (though sure of course practical skills are good, but the point is to share and trade them!).

Totally anecdotal, literally a few days before the Ukraine invasion I read how the UA army was running prep workshops for small groups of civilians in Kiev that predicted it could happen and requested training. There was stuff on what to stock and what to have in your evacuation backpack. But the main point they hammered home was, get to know the neighbors in your apartment block, talk to them, find out who they are. Because you will have to share and trade resources, cooperate to organise them, coordinate neighborhood security wards, etc. Better chance if you know and trust each other.

(Source some article in a Polish leftist zine)

I think this is a pretty down to earth realistic approach. I think Naomi Klein or a similar figure said a phrase about the broader climate crisis that was memorable to me (vague paraphrase): as soon as you start thinking in terms of individual action, you are already losing. She meant preventing the crisis, but I'd think it applies to riding it out, too.

Show threadVincarsiAug 25, 2023
@sensitivityisstrength @alxd yeahbutt doncha know that saying we can learn *anything at all* from indigenous groups is the noble savage myth? Doncha know that they didn't have the wheel so they're too stupid to compare ourselves to? And trying to say colonizers lied about them is offensive to white people who are sure they know better? They *couldn't* represent a more stable social system that might scale if we tried. (A sampling of responses I've gotten from trying to make this exact point)
Show threadMekkAug 25, 2023
@sensitivityisstrength @alxd those communities were and are small. Living in groups of dozens to hundreds is completely different from living in cities of millions. So we may look for some inspirations (like more cooperative and less competitive children games and edu) but in general those are completely different problems and contexts.
Show threadSteve Moore Aug 25, 2023

@sensitivityisstrength @alxd

Link to a related post -
https://toad.social/@ArrowbearMoore/110566615518682279

So much attention is focused on “how” we are living. i.e. all the stuff we are producing & consuming, the cultures of capitalist or fascist consumerism. It may be as important to focus on the “why”, to what purpose are we doing this. Understanding who we are, how we got here is critical. Yuval Noah Harari explores this in his book Sapiens. We need to get over ourselves, re-indigenize our cultures.

Steve Moore :toad: (@[email protected])

Attached: 1 image As it turns out, our notion of “self” may be all in our mind. The ventral medial prefrontal cortex of the brain is where the concept of self as an individual develops. The notion of “self”, of independent individualism, may be a miscalculation, leading to splintered social structures. Past #Indigenous societies offer examples that we are capable of supporting uniqueness while working together to benefit the universes around us. #Nature #Science https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-our-brain-preserves-our-sense-of-self/ https://bigthink.com/the-well/eastern-philosophy-neuroscience-no-self/

toad.social