Where should I Go? (Dale Allen Pfeiffer)

  (Mountain Sentinel) -- The following article originally appeared in The Mountain Sentinel two years ago. Currently there are a number of people making panicky statements that everyone needs to relocate. To present a fair assessment of the idea and to help calm people down, I have decided to reprint this article for free.

  Since this article was written, my family has moved from Appalachian Kentucky to Evansville Indiana . Evansville is not a haven of preparedness. It will face many problems as we enter an age of energy depletion and impoverishment. Our reason for moving here is that we have a lot of family in this area, and family can be a far more important resource than any other.

  My daughter is in public schools now. While she does battle with the authoritarian rigidity, patriotic propaganda and religious zealotry that plague the public schools, she is at least making friends.

  For my part, when I can spare a little time from working on novels and short stories, or playing the fiddle and the banjo, do a little work with the local sustainability group, and the food co-op.

  As this article asserts, there is no place in North America that is ideally prepared for the joint crises of resource depletion, environmental destruction and economic impoverishment that now loom before us. Relocation is an option, but for many people it is not the best option -- perhaps for most people.

  Many people have asked me where they should go to survive the end of the oil age. People asking this question generally fall into one of two groups, those who believe that civilization will disintegrate into lawless chaos where former neighbors will be preying upon each other and hordes of murderous starving bandits will swarm out of the cities to feed on the suburbs. The other group are those who see things breaking down, but not to the point where they must seek to defend themselves against every stranger. These people want to find a community and/or a farm where they can become self-reliant.

  I will address the total breakdown group first. If there is a total breakdown of civilization and we are left with neighbors preying upon neighbors, then there is no place you can go. Whatever remote mountain hideaway you sneak off to, in this scenario you will have to deal with pillagers out to take what little you have. Anywhere you go, there are already people there.

  In this day and age, the only places you can go to hide away are lacking in human population because they are so inhospitable. There are so few people there because it is so difficult to live there. And the few people who already live there probably meet that ecosystem's limited carrying capacity for human beings.

  As someone who has lived alone in the wilderness, I have to ask you: do you really want to be a hermit. Do you want to spend your entire day struggling for the basic necessities? Can you make your own clothing, build and maintain your own weapons, grow, forage and hunt enough food to feed yourself, lay in a sufficient store of fuel to keep you from freezing in the winter? The list goes on and on. Sure, you can survive off what you forage and hunt, make clothes and blankets out of hides, and live in a debris hut; but do you really want to?

  Stop romanticizing about the myth of the rugged individualist. It is just that: a myth. Almost all of the rugged individualists I have met were maladjusted misanthropes who would likely have been institutionalized if they had lived among others. This is not to say that I have not known many sane and balanced mountainmen and mountainwomen. But the sane ones do not live in total isolation, however limited their interaction might be, they are part of a community.

  Consider indigenous peoples throughout the world. They are not rugged individualists. They all belong to tribes. Their sense of identity is closely linked to the community of which they are a part. It is their family and their safety net. They could not imagine trying to make it on their own and would wonder why anyone would ever want to do such a thing. When they are taken out of their tribal setting and placed in modern civilization, they are lost without their community.

  The pioneers were not rugged individualists. They knew that community was the key to their survival. They worked together to build their community, plant and harvest their crops and provide everyone within their community with the necessities of life. It was only with difficulty that their sense of community was squashed by the modern industrialized community and the centralized state.

  Let's get this straight. The myth of the rugged individualist is extolled by the dominant socioeconomic system because it helps cover up the atomization of society, and it leaves the disillusioned and disenfranchised uninclined to work together towards an alternative.

  And where did you ever get the idea that you will have to fight your neighbors for survival, or that the cities will unleash hordes of desperate degenerates to pillage the countryside? This is an unlikely scenario. Sure there might be a rise in crime if the established order breaks down, or there might not. In large part, this depends on us.

  When we look at examples of collapse, we do not see much real change in the crime rate. In a socioeconomic collapse, here does seem to be a relationship between the crime rate and the strength of community. The more tightly knit the community is, the lower the rise in crime, and vice versa.

  During the Great Depression, people helped each other. Though they may have little to share, they did share it. During the collapse of the Soviet Union, people helped each other. Even in North Korea, people helped each other -- though they were terribly repressed by there government.

  The counter-argument is that this is a different situation. There will be no recovery, and in the United States people are atomized, selfish and overly competitive. We are no longer predisposed to help each other, and there is very little sense of community left. Where people were once loyal to their community, they are now loyal to their company. And if that company closes its doors to them, they will do whatever it takes to survive.

  My answer to that is Argentina. The people there were highly atomized and terrorized. More so, even, than people in the United States. Decades of experience taught them not to concern themselves about their neighbors; to look out only for themselves. But when the Argentine economy collapsed, the people banded together to create one of our best examples of how people can respond positively on a grassroots level to a collapse. For details on this, I refer you to my article Coping with Collapse; Examples from Argentina in the The Mountain Sentinel, Vol. 1 No. 1.

  The scenario that the collapse of the dominant socioeconomic system will result in a dog eat dog situation is another myth. This myth most likely evolved from the misconceptions of social Darwinists. It is reinforced by the fear mongering of the U.S. news media which portrays our communities as dangerous places full of murderers, rapists and thieves. And it is fleshed out by our entertainment media (that is our manufactured perception of reality) that thrives on cop shows and violence.

  We are taught that it is a dog eat dog world, where you must always watch out for the other guy, and where the successful businessman is he who reads The Art of War. Then we internalize the perception of crime and violence that we are fed daily by our media. It is no wonder that we wind up projecting our own fears and insecurities onto the world around us, believing that the collapse of the dominant system will leave us fighting each other for our very survival. 

Hog wash. 

Continued at The Mountain Sentinel