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Disunion, Union, Preachers and Doers

Only dead fish follow the stream -old Scandinavian expresion

It has been a while since my last post but I have been pretty distracted, I must admit. In this post I focus on some psychological lessons I have learned watching the past couple of weeks. This are lessons I already knew but the past few weeks have really been a reminder of them.

Many, maybe most, people have a very counterproductive threat assessment and response process. Initially, they fail to see a threat coming, then flip a switch and react in a rigidly doctrinaire manner (in a sense, overcorrection) and become increasingly rattled at anyone suggesting threats or costs emerging from that reaction.

I have a public health background, with a particular focus on the statistical measurement of health risk. I had experience with the fight against SARS. So I have to confess that I might have had a leg up on many folks in terms recognizing the Covid-19 threat early.

Nonetheless, it was stunning to witness how reluctantly folks recognized and admitted the Covid-19 threat. It was basically the flu, they insistently explained, and any suggestion of adjustment or modification of behavior was ridiculous. It was as if they were at the waters edge on the beach, noticed the water receding from the shore a moment ago, and now stare at a tsunami coming at them and think “what a pretty wave”.

Now many of those same folks have become lockdown zealots. The lockdown has become this kind of safety blanket for them, and they react with anger at any suggestion of costs, sustainability or growing cracks. To hell with civil liberties. You cannot criticize what has been obvious overrreach by a bunch of local petty tyrant officials. And if you are concerned about the loss of your job and how you will feed your family, you are selfish. This is taken from a recent post on my NextDoor network:

The worst part of this pandemic is seeing how many of my neighbors will happily sacrifice people they don’t know, because they lack basic empathy unless a situation impacts them directly. It’s disgusting and horrifying. They see no problem with sending all medical staff through a meat grinder of endless months of viral load and lack of PPE, as long as it’s not their spouse or family member. It’s totally cool to let old people, diabetics, asthmatics, and cancer patients die as long as they’re total strangers. I mean, as long as they can wander freely around Target, what’s wrong 2-3% of the US population dead, right?

Clearly fear is pulsating through this. But at the same time it hints at an inability to think simultaneously about multiple threats. This person is clinging desperately to the lockdown as a kind of safety blanket. The problem is this could end up being quite unsafe, including for health care workers (how much PPE do you think we’ll have when the economy collapses?).

And her fear has rapidly translated into anger. We can simultaneously have compassion for people who are scared like her and realize that they are a threat. But compassion should never allow us to look past threat.

Another element of this angry post is an implicit appeal to collectivism. You should be ashamed for worrying about yourself or your needs. And to prove it, here are your needs in shameful straw man terms.

We have seen this as well in the face of massive Covid-19 buying. If you don’t buy what the mob regards as a reasonable or appropriate amount of groceries, toilet paper, etc. you are “hoarding” and selfishly “taking from those who need it”. When reasonably challenged about the logic of this accusation, emotional hysterics quickly follow.

This is society as suicide pact. We face intense emotional pressure from angry and scared people who are trying to form coalitions to strip of us of our most basic human sovereignty: to do what we need to take care of ourselves. This is the peril of collectivism.

These people are dangerous. Some of them are our neighbors. Which means that in a crisis some of our neighbors are downright dangerous to us. In a bad situation, you need to learn how to say “no” even at the cost of a local relationship. Your family and their needs come first, and you need to careful, focused, calculating and frankly ruthless about this. Your child is your first priority, not your emotionally hysterical virtue signalling angry neighbor.

And you really cannot form useful allegiances with these folks. Burrowed in their angry den, they also now cannot see (or maybe insist in being denial about?) the inbound economic tsunami. These are people who are forever scared, emotional and behind the curve. You can’t work with them to identify threats and respond. Regardless of how many talks you enjoyed with them in the cul de sac on trash night before this all began.

Naturally, one implication of this anger is that folks are retreating into familiar trenches. Half of the discussants on NextDoor these days speak of “MAGA maggots who love money but hate other people’s lives” (literal quote) and “libtard assholes who want to destroy the economy probably to help vegetable Joe Biden in November” (another literal quote). In other words, this is devolving into the normal and expected channels of our national dialogue.

Which I think hints at something else I have seen in this. Despite all of the talk of how “everything has changed” and “the world will never be the same”, in fact the pre-existing faultlines of life actually grow stronger as we retreat into fear and anger. So I guess the lesson here is that, at least for a while, SHTF society will be kind of like pre-SHTF society, only more so.

The common thread through all of this is that these folks are the “preachers”. They are scared and externalize. That is how they handle crisis. It is toxic, counterproductive and dangerous.

Its not all bad though. Survival is partly about attitude. And we are also seeing “doers” emerge.

We’ve seen folks do things like take it upon themselves to buy groceries for at risk folks. Or sew masks. Or start humor threads on places like NextDoor. Or coordinate planning for what comes next (more on this in a post to follow).

People are revealing themselves in this crisis. They did so pretty quickly. Survival is going to partly be about identifying and differentiating the preachers and the doers. Form alliances with doers and ignore preachers.

Let the right ones in.

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Decoupling

These articles and others like them that have been making the rounds have been spinning around my head in recent weeks:

We Need Hard Decoupling

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/defense-national-security/cheap-manufacturing-be-damned-sentiment-builds-for-moving-u-s-companies-out-of-china

In short, decoupling basically means in practice a shift away from international supply chains. These chains emerged in part because outsourcing to foreign nations has some advantages: cost savings, technology transfer, etc. But there are obvious risks involved.

In terms of international economics, decoupling is not exactly a new idea, or at least new in terms of the timespan of the Covid-19 crisis:

Decoupling: A Permanent Change Is Underway

However, the disruptions from Covid-19 have made clear exactly how vulnerable we are. It seems likely there is going to be a new urgency to the notion of decoupling. Whether that translates into actual decoupling remains to be seen, but some degree of decoupling may already have been happening so there may be some momentum.

For our purposes decoupling is a more immediate and personal concept. In some sense prepping is an act in anticipation of forced decoupling. You might not get supplies you need, for instance, so you have stores of them. You may not be able to rely on public security services, so you have to think about your own defense. And so on.

It is possible that this instinct to be ready for personal decoupling will be strengthened by this crisis. More folks probably will start looking to reduce their reliance on society, at least in terms of reliance on continuously functioning social structures. They will build up their stores of food, ammo, key pieces of equipment, medicine, etc. Some will start looking for property with survival in mind. And this is a good thing: we will be a more de-centralized society where fewer folks will operate under the assumption of constant support from larger social structures.

Above all, folks will probably start thinking more and more as units decoupled from, and not necessarily aligned with, society. This won’t just manifest itself through prepping: the next few months will probably accelerate an already present trend toward isolated lives based on a bespoke virtual existence. Bearing witness to the way that their fellow Americans have reacted to the crisis, many are probably now concluding that they cannot count on at least some of their neighbors to be smart in tough times: we have also witnessed an epidemic of denial, statistical illiteracy, arrogance, etc.

This reaction is natural, but may also be the wrong move. First, the more atomized and dysfunctional our society, the more likely we are to face some types of crises that would put preps to the test.

Second, the lone wolf model of prepping is a risky. Yes, it allows for faster, more streamlined decisionmaking. The appeal of this is obvious: who wants to spend time convincing the obstinate in times of emergency? The only catch here is what if you are the one that is wrong or not quite right? What if there is some consideration you missed? Sometimes dialogue leads to better decisions. There are clearly limits to this, but a small group of reasonable folks aligned in their goals often delivers better decisions that balance risks better.

Yes, you can develop skills for many things you need to survive. But small groups allow for some degree of specialization. The truth is, some people’s minds are better bent toward thinking about health and medicine. Some are just better at cooking, or sewing, or shooting, or hunting, or just telling stories by the fire that, believe me, might be your psychological salvation on the darkest nights.

This is why I have rule 6 for my personal preps:

6. Community

Yes, a lot of big, long standing vulnerabilities in our society are being revealed now. But don’t go to the other extreme, throwing the baby out with the bathwater in the process.

Its not just about feeling good about yourself. Its also a safer bet in lots of circumstances.

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Covid-19 and society

This evening the local news had a special on covid-19. An economist opined that this could cause a recession. On the other hand, if there was some good news, such as a fall in cases in Italy, it could rally people’s spirits and make them think everything was going to be alright. I got stuck on the thought of people’s “spirits” and how they shaped personal trajectories thus far in this story.

Though I have prepped for a decade, this has been the first really big crisis I have experienced as a prepper. We’ve had weather threats and stuff like that, but those were all at best local threats. This is the first really big disruption I have seen. Put differently, this is the first dry run for something even remotely approaching SHTF.

Now, before proceeding, let’s characterize this event. It is the biggest thing that has happened to many of us, but there have been some saving graces. It happened slowly enough that anyone who was paying attention had the time to make at least adequate preparations for, say, bugging in to ride it out (whether they have the resources to do so is admittedly a different story). Moreover, this is a crisis that has not so far impacted vital systems: the lights are still on, the gas pumps are still running, the store shelves are still more or less stocked, etc.

This has been a comparatively forgiving event, at least compared with some plausible and serious alternatives (such as the grid going down, a virus that had a higher “Rho naught” combined with much higher mortality and morbidity, etc.).

One of the major lessons I am going to take from this experience is how badly so many folks process risk. The won’t see obvious threats approaching and then will react in a fashion that does nothing (angry Tweets really make a difference!) or, in a smaller and more intimate social unit where they might have more influence, is actually counterproductive. On an intellectual level I already understood this, but it somehow looms much larger in my thinking after watching the past few weeks.

The vast majority of people I encountered did not see the Covid-19 tsunami coming, even as they were obviously in its shadow. Really, their falure to pay attention was just incredible and could only be explained beyond a certain point by denial. And now when they have finally acknowledged this great, awful wave..

Anger. The dominate gear for many is anger. They are angry and want someone to pay. Some blame China. Some drove ever deeper into the labyrinth of “Orange Man Bad”.

Some of the angry are simply panicking. Some are disappearing into blame game escapism. Many instant public health experts explain that this is only happening because we don’t have enough test kits. The shortage of test kits has been really lamentable, but no, this was going to happen regardless because we were never going to detect most of the cases in time due to the nature of this virus. This morning I heard someone on YouTube explain slightly caustically that Italy is in trouble because they did not have total surveillance immediately: you see, as he so plainly explains, a nation needs to detect all with cough, fever, myalgia, aches, etc. and quarantine them and they need to do that before the health system even notices cases. Lets not focus on complication, such as that there is literally no way to do this in a Western democracy.

Others suddenly and angrily push “solutions” that are just punches in the air. And they can never understand why they those solutions haven’t been implemented yesterday (back when they were personally still in denial, that is). Some argue that we need immediately to test everyone and that will solve the problem, but that would likely put us in an entirely different crisis as we drowned in a sea of false positives. Others argue that we need to adopt China’s “get tough” measures. Mind you many of these folks split their time between this demand and insisting that Trump is a dictator, but what I think all sensible people can agree on is that Chinese solutions probably wouldn’t work in the U.S. You’ve got that who nagging problem of a different society with different political and institutional structures, culture, history, laws, etc.

Then you have a final, and rather amazing group: those who still think there is no problem, even as they feel the first mist of the tsunami upon their cheeks.

The problem with people who process risk poorly is that they are a liability when difficult, evidence-based decisions need to be made. Emotion and psychology enter too deeply in their process, and that more often than not leads us to do stupid things that enhance risk.

A lot of lone wolf preppers are probably nodding in approval at this point. They plan to rely on no one but themselves. This has the advantage of insulating yourself from dependency on people who make poor risk choices. But there are probably instances where all of us make poor decisions and one of the great things about a social unit is that it provides a check on our errors and excesses. Moreover, socieities cast a broader net in terms of information gathering. And society is really critical to things like specialization, emotional support, defense, etc.

A core assumption behind lone wolf prepping is that you can make better decisions than others (or, alternatively, better at making them in isolation) and execute them better on your own. The first assumption is questionable. At a minimum lone individuals are probably generally at an information disadvangtage. Per the second, while there is probably some speed advantage to being alone, the Rambo myth is just that: in the tactical arena individuals rarely if ever defeat teams. There is no reason to believe that gathering resources, performing tasks, etc. would be any different.

So where does that leave us? As preppers we need to build a social network for mutual support in a massive disruption. But we clearly have to be a little selective about who we choose. A lot of folks are a liability in bad times. This happens to perfectly encapsulate my person rules 6 and 7:

6. Community

7. Let the right ones in

Lone wolves will probably not make it. But neither will a society of clowns. Strike the balance between the two.