We’re the last generation of preppers and survivalists. Preppers are not irrational, we’re not paranoid and we’re not delusional, although some might appear that way. In fact, oftentimes the people who ascribe those traits to preparedness-minded individuals are likely overcompensating for the fact that in an age of technological specialization they lack the general skill sets that would see them through a collapse of said systems. Thus, they will die when shit hits the fan and they resent that fact and they resent people who probably won’t die, okay? But the motivations to prepare for most people are actually unconscious and they’re oblivious and I’m going to talk about the psychology of why people prepare today and this is probably going to be one of my most important videos that I’ve ever done on the channel because it’s going to get to the foundational philosophy of why we do what we do and why it’s so important.

There’s a prudently intuitive calculation at work when you embark on this journey in preparedness that seeks to mitigate an increasingly more risky, tense, hostile world of precarity where things can go bad at any moment and your lack of general skill sets that you’ve acknowledged because we’ve been held up on this technological edifice for so long through all of these industrial revolutions. We’re far removed from the primitive instincts that kept us alive for thousands of years. There were four main industrial revolutions. The first industrial revolution was mechanization in the 1700s. You had textile factories come online.

You had people starting to congregate in more densely populated urban areas facilitated by mechanized agriculture, windmills, gunpowder, the steam engine. Then you had the second industrial revolution which was electrification and in that you had internal combustion engines, you had the telegraph, you had the telephone, you had all these modern conveniences and appliances. Throughout each of these evolutions, we lose something as a physical animal. In the first industrial revolution, we lost muscle because we didn’t have to be out there doing all those rudimentary tasks that made us strong, that made us, even though we died a lot sooner because we didn’t have modern medical interventions and most people died at childbirth, we were much stronger.

So at every stage of our technological evolution, we die, a part of us dies. In the first industrial revolution, it was muscle mass. We became physically soft because machines, mechanized systems started to do the work. In the second industrial revolution which was characterized by electricity, we lost craft. We lost our ability to weave a sweater or choose whatever thing could be mass produced in a factory utilizing electricity. We lost the horse and carriage because the automobile replaced it and so on and so forth. In the third industrial revolution, that’s when we get into the age of digitization.

Mass media, mass communication, the internet, this is kind of up to the 2000s or so. We even get into automation at this point in time. Here, we start to lose mental faculty, we start to lose memory, we start to lose our ability to socialize to a certain extent, to discern what’s what. Because of course, now throughout this evolution, we’re more concentrated into densely populated urban environments so we get further and further removed. Unfortunately, with all of these technological evolutions, one supersedes the other. It’s not like if the ship were to hit the fan, we can just go back and there’ll be steam engines.

There’s no more steam engines anymore. It’s a burn the boat situation. Once you evolve into one, basically everything that preceded it is no more. This is why the Amish try to approximate what I guess would essentially be a pre-industrial revolution, state of subsistence. The fourth industrial revolution is the one that concerns me and it’s what got me thinking about this topic and wanting to make this video and that’s artificial intelligence robotics, cloud computing, quantum computing. This is the thing that is going to erode our mental faculties in ways that most people don’t even realize at this point in time.

We’re talking about our ability to think critically, judgment, decision making. I use AI on a daily basis to do my World War III updates. Is that an eagle that I hear? Anyways, cool. I use it on a daily basis in order to collate information, to summarize articles, because you’re trying to minimize the amount of noise and you want to dial into the signal. AI allows you to effectively strip out all the noise and condense things down to their bare essence exactly what you need and you can ask it questions. This is eroding our ability to think and make decisions.

Of course, this is a great consequence because should we ever have to regress back down the evolutionary ladder, not only do we not have the physical capacity, that eagle is really starting to piss me off back there. I don’t know if you guys can hear it on the screen. As we regress back down, maybe that’s a good omen, maybe I shouldn’t be dissing that eagle over there. What was I saying? As we regress back down this evolutionary pathway, the further we progress, the more our abilities erode and diminish to the point where there’s an awareness of this vulnerability.

Preppers understand this. Most people can’t articulate what I just said, not because they’re dumb, just because they viewed in very simple terms, I need to protect myself and my family should a disaster arise. But there’s a much deeper meaning to all of this, right? Much deeper meaning. It’s a realization that we’ve built something that’s so complicated, we can’t fix it were it to go wrong. There’s this underlying dread and angst that drives the prepper. And by contrast to everybody who the majority of people, 90% of people who just kind of live as though or who are oblivious to this, those are the people who in days gone by without being propped up by technology would likely have died, right? They’re the exceptions to the natural selection rule, and their existence has only been fostered because technology has created a place where they can survive without natural predators and things that would require critical thinking.

Because if you don’t have this intuition that something is wrong, or maybe for some people, it’s just obfuscated by maybe just had they haven’t realized it yet, because they’ve not because they’re brainwashed, per se, but maybe they just haven’t had an awareness. They haven’t had that aha epiphany yet, that something is wrong with this situation that we’ve, there’s a certain existential acknowledgement to knowing that you’ve burned the boats. And that should this whole thing collapse, it’s not like we can just go back to the third Industrial Revolution, or the second Industrial Revolution.

No, it’s going right back to the Amish, right? Because all those things that preceded it no longer exist. There’s no more steam engine, there’s no more heirloom tools. You know, I can go and get a silky saw, which is going to perform amazingly well, better than, you know, a lot of those heirloom tools ever would. Because it’s got impulse hardened teeth and nickel plated and all this stuff. And, you know, it’s made in a Japanese factory, in a highly specialized Japanese factory. But we can’t go back and get those old bucksaws. I mean, you can find them, you know, you got to go and search online, there’s places that sell them.

But what I’m saying is, it’s not as readily available as it once was. So for this reason, we’ve entered into this Faustian bargain of sorts, where it’s a burn the bridge situation. We know that a part of us throughout this evolution dies at every step of the way. I wish I had my 22 right now. I love birds, but that bird is driving me completely nuts. Shut up! Is he calling out to me? Is he trying to tell me something here? Like what’s going on? Anyways, the people who are oblivious to all of this, they’re like the walking dead, you know, they just, I can’t explain it.

There’s, if you’re dialed into this, this thing where you see that you feel that something is wrong, you sense that we’re drifting further and further away from those natural capabilities as we approach this new transhumanist precipice of evolution. If there’s an underlying angst that you feel about that, that is perfectly justified. People who don’t feel that really don’t have survival instincts, right? So it’s really make or break at this point. Either we, because we have to go all in, it’s kind of like when you get onto a spaceship and you’re about to go to another planet, you know, it’s, it’s do or die at that point.

And we’ve all entered the spacecraft of these industrial revolutions. And most people are unaware that they’re in a spacecraft or an incubator, whatever you metaphor you want to use to understand this, this predicament that we find ourselves in. Those people have defied the laws of natural selection by utilizing all of these institutions that prop them up and these, this critical infrastructure that allows them to exist whilst completely oblivious to their animal nature that is going to be required should all this go away. So we hope it’s not going to go away, but understand that this is the reason why preppers have this underlying angst to life because they acknowledge that the cybernetic age is upon us.

People are going to be modifying themselves very soon. And we’re already cyborgs and depends on how you want to define it. But as we do that, we are underlying physiology and neurology that’s brought us to this point in our evolution, progressively erodes. And it’s that which is going to see us through SHTF. So this is why you have people in this mad dash to try to be self-reliant, even though you can never approximate the lifestyle of an agrarian, you know, self-reliant person because you’re always trying to blend it with modern conveniences. So for example, at my house, I have geothermal heating.

This is technically an off-grid system, but it requires a specialized mechanic in order to fix it if it ever went wrong because it’s such a complicated system with all kinds of semiconductors and microchips and software. And, you know, it’s incredibly confusing. Now, in principle, you could have something that was more analog, but that’s not what we have, right? So we’ve got to be careful when we’re trying to approximate a self-reliant lifestyle that we’re not just trying to replicate the fourth industrial revolution. You know, I think about apps like, I think one of the apps is PictureThis, and you take a picture of a plant and it’ll tell you if that plant is edible or not.

Well, that’s great, but it requires the cloud, okay, requires AI in order to, I think it requires the cloud for the most part, it requires AI in order to use the vision detection system to know what it’s seeing. So the point is that those tools are all great, but there’s a reason why the Amish do what they do. It’s because they appreciate what I’m talking about right now, right? They see that it could all collapse at any moment. Again, I hope it doesn’t because I’d like to see humanity prevail and propagate throughout the cosmos, but I hope I gave you something to think about today.

Anyways, I know I gave that eagle back there something to think about. The Faustian bargain of technology, the beast as Christian eschatologists might refer to it. Is this going to be our downfall? That is the question. Let me know what you think about this in the comment section below. I gotta go and find a gun to shoot that bird. Just kidding. [tr:trw].

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