But what I’m realizing is that here in the West, when shit hits the fan, panic is going to be much, much worse. And I’ll tell you why. In the East, where they have collectivist societies, people tend to live with their extended families. Community is at the forefront of daily life. Even in China, for example, where there’s people living on top of each other in these massive, high-rise, complex projects, the priority is still on the community over the individual. So people in those societies, whether they’re theocratic societies, authoritarian, communistic, they always tend to put the state and the community above the individual.

And thus, prepping to them is a foreign concept. So prepping is a very American-Western thing, because at its core it’s about self-preservation. And when you find yourself a part of a community, your whole approach to preparedness is much different. And so what’s happening in the West, where we’ve been disconnected from family, disconnected from community, our identities aren’t tied to groups. We don’t enjoy the safety of numbers. In fact, most people are repulsed by living too close to people. Everybody wants their space. But there’s a realization that happens, because deep down we know when shit hits the fan, we need the tribe.

What happens when you see that this artifice that we’ve created, this very complex society that has yielded incredible returns over the last 50 years. In terms of technology, standard of living, it’s enabled us to have a selfish lifestyle. The reason why people are panicking in the West is because that is no longer sustainable. And as we regress back down the evolutionary tree, after SHTF, all of these amenities slowly start getting taken away, the tribe starts to become essential for survival. And we don’t have a tribe anymore. We’ve been completely alienated and disconnected from the tribe.

So for that reason, this realization occurs to people, and it manifests as panic. And so this is why you see the outrageous stockpiling of things like toilet paper. Because we don’t have the tribe to insulate us from these shocks to the system, accompanying the realization is anxiety that we’re not going to be able to deal with the situation by ourselves. So we have to compensate by immediately going out and buying as much shit as we can in order to continue this isolated mode of survival. But this is not a mode of survival that’s going to be replicable in austere times.

Individualism is a luxury that we only have been able to enjoy because of technology. In the absence of technology, you rely on a community in order to keep you alive and to keep you safe. And so the reason why the panic isn’t there in a lot of these collectivist societies when shit hits the fan, it’s because they still are close to the tribe. There’s this peace of mind to know that even though they don’t have three months worth of food stored, that their community will take care of them. Because they have their family, their extended family, they have their religion.

We’re a very secular society, so we don’t have religion. This is why so many people long for self-help groups. And it’s that whole fight club thing. And why the guy goes to all these self-help groups, because he’s trying to find his tribe. And then of course he finds that. We have no Great Depression, the only struggle is our lives type thing. The people who live in these societies that we tend to look down on right now as lacking identity, lacking eccentricity, they have a built-in protection mechanism against social chaos that arises in times of crisis because they have that strong sense of community that prevents them from panicking.

And it’s the panic that actually accelerates collapse. And it’s because we’re such a selfish society, we’ve been programmed to be, and it’s actually one of our strengths. The degree of innovation in a society is probably proportionate to the amount of individual freedom in that society. When shit finally does hit the fan, and the supply chain collapses, here’s the hypothesis. In a collectivist, theocratic society, you could have the breakdown of society without the panic that you would have if that same event happened in a Western, individualist society. I always use the example of the Gaza Strip.

This is a situation where there should be non-stop looting and lawlessness, rival gangs roaming the streets. You should see all the chaos that you would expect to see in an apocalypse movie, but you don’t. Contrast that with here, in any major city in the United States where it’s essentially going to be doggy dog because there is no shared sense of community. It’s a secular society, so people lack the ethics of wanting to do good or feeling obligated to do good or put the community in front of the individual. And thus, when we get the bad news, this is when the panic goes into overdrive, and people lose their minds because unlike those other societies, they don’t have a community to fall back on.

So it amplifies the angst, and they go and they make very brash decisions. What are some other defining features of Western society that make it far more vulnerable to a collapse scenario? The reliance on technology, the reliance on certain types of medication and psychiatric medication. As soon as the supply trucks stop rolling and the grossly disproportionate amount of people in our society who are reliant on psychopharmaceuticals to get them through the day, as soon as they don’t have those, there’s going to be a boomerang effect where you’re going to have a lot of people who are depressed or anxious because they don’t have their antidepressants.

And all of a sudden, that, on top of the chaos that is already ensuing, is going to just create even more chaos. You have a society of people who are incarcerated far more than what is the global average. So you have a lack of education in a lot of places. It’s crazy to say, but literacy, educational achievement is at record lows in the West compared to other societies. You have a society of entitlement where a lot of people just haven’t had to start the game at square one, like maybe they did after World War II.

You know, a lot of people are riding the coattails of their parents’ success, their grandparents’ success, and they’re running on inheritance, essentially. It’s hard to have an existential crisis when you have a tight community. I think why existentialism became a branch of philosophy when it did, it’s because it emerged at a time when Western society was starting to flourish. And there’s a certain sense of dread in knowing that should the whole artifice start to fall apart, in the entropic way that we anticipate it’s going to be a crisis because a lot of how we define ourselves and a lot of what we find meaningful here in the West is defined through the accumulation of stuff.

And so if there’s an event that’s going to take all that stuff away, then of course it’s a major crisis. But if you define yourself through your community, if you define yourself through your religion, it’s less of a fall, and those are hard things to lose. Like you always have those even if shit hits the fan. So it’s not like this huge existential crisis, right? I’m an agnostic, but I can appreciate this fact. When God died, it left a certain emptiness in people. So they had to fill that somehow. So you fill it with hedonism, you fill it with secularism, you fill it with addictions to this, that, and that’s another thing, the Western obsession with addictions.

You have to fill that void that was left in the wake of God dying in the Western psyche, and not just God, but community, right? Because those two things tend to go hand in hand. You have a collectivist society. It either tends to also be some appreciation of the sacred more than there is in a Western society where it’s just about the mundane and the profane. This is why SHDF will be so raucous, because there’s no moral compass in people that is synchronized with a community that they’re a part of because we don’t have a community.

Our lives are ephemeral nowadays. It’s a great word to describe our approach to life, single serving everything, like Brad Pitt said in the movie Fight Club. Everything is fleeting. There’s nothing permanent. There’s nothing that you can confide in, that you can trust, because divorce rates are so high, and we live in this swipe right, swipe left culture. There was a time when you bought a car, and you had that car for 30 years. You bought a TV, and you had that TV for 30 years. You married someone right out of high school. You were with that person for the rest of your life.

But now, it’s the complete opposite, and just one thing after another. It’s just like the shorts and the reels and the TikToks. That is reflective of the lack of commitment to anything, because we’re just living this ephemeral, capricious lifestyle. That is just one thing to the next. When the shit hits the fan, any uncertainty that presents itself now, is just like, oh my God, I can’t handle uncertainty, right? Whereas, collectivist society, uncertainty, there’s safety in numbers. You can confide in the group. But when we experience uncertainty here, it’s amplified by all these things I’ve been talking about.

The reason why we’re preppers at all in Western society, and the reason why a lot of collectivist societies can’t rep their heads around this, it’s because we need certainty. We need security. We need regulation. We need laws. We need all of that stuff. And we can’t handle a world where there’s not a protocol for everything. And of course, if you are thrust into a world of uncertainty, that is an incredibly anxiety-inducing state. So this is why, as preppers, we acknowledge that shit hit the fan here is going to be much worse. It’s a longer fall from grace, we’ll say, with the West.

In a collectivist, traditionalist society, they tend to be closer to those things that sustain life. So they know where their water comes from. They maybe source a lot of their food locally. They already have a responsibility, from a neighborhood watch point of view, for policing their communities. Whereas we’ve outsourced all of that to the government, by and large. And as such, there’s this realization of how naked you actually are. Everybody, as I’ve said, is going to have that realization. At some point in time. We’re all going to have it. The only difference with a prepper is that they’re choosing to have it before the shit hits the fan.

And not five minutes afterwards. So this all culminates into a nervous breakdown because of this epiphany that we have. That we’re all alone. And that the only person who’s going to look out for you is you. So it’s better to have that nervous breakdown and spread it out before the crap hits the fan than immediately afterwards, because we’re all going to have it the way things are going. The best way to support this channel is to support yourself by gearing up at CanadianPreparedness.com where you’ll find high quality survival gear at the best prices, no junk and no gimmicks.

Use discount code PreppingGear for 10% off. Don’t forget the strong survive, but the prepared thrive. Stay safe. [tr:trw].

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