"Collectivist" Collapse Prepping - Ideas for things to do?

I've noticed that there are two main types of collapse preppers: the collectivist preppers and individualist preppers. The individualist preppers tend to focus on stocking up on food, guns, gold, bitcoin, etc. They plan to become self-sufficient and to break their reliance on society. If you've ever read Masque of the Red Death by Cory Doctorow, you might be aware that this has a number of issues. Stocking up on supplies will make you a much more attractive target for anyone looking to assault others. I think this is fundamentally based on a fantasy of protecting one's own castle, rather than any pragmatic or realistic prediction of how this would pan out. It's enjoyable, for sure, even to me, but I don't think it's realistic. The collectivist preppers, on the other hand, work on developing personal skills that will make them too valuable to kill, sexually assault, or steal from post-collapse. If you have strong medical skills, foraging skills, are physically conditioned, etc. They also focus on forming social connections with their local communities, so they can work together to survive post-collapse. Even if you're attacked by other people, they'll be likely to keep you in good health if you help them with an essential duty to keeping everyone alive and in good health. So that's the main purpose of this thread: I'm interested to hear other "collectivist" prepper skills I c an develop that I haven't mentioned here. Maybe drop any epubs you've actually read that seem useful for this sort of thing. (please don't just use this as a dump thread for survivalist ebooks you haven't read at all...) I'll start a small list of skills/things to do: - Foraging (incl. mushroom and plant identification) - Primitive trapping (learning to make a rabbit trap out of some metal wire, for instance.) - Primitive medicine (incl. sanitary knowledge) - Make friends with your neighbors, even the asshole neighbors. You'll need them.

i think it mainly comes down to having a family or not, if you have mouths to feed youre going to want to shut off from the rest of the world and make sure they're taken care of and safe. whereas if you are a bachelor like myself you're more willing to risk more and probably more interested in adventuring if the scenario ever comes up. someone who can repair shoes or make candles, etc etc does really good here. and honestly if it ever comes to the kind of scenario where you cannot trust anyone due to cannibalism or dark stuff like that, where you would want to be a prepper completely shut off... then there is no hope whatsoever of trying to continue living, its end of the world. whats much more likely and interesting to plan for in my opinion is economic struggles mainly, the psychopaths having been killed off after only a couple months and then small communities of productive people coming together trying to make little bases and rebuild their societies.

I knew some people of the collectivist variety. Last time I saw them they were providing 50% of their own food through gardening, gathering, hunting, fishing and were working on increasing that percentage every year. They were planning to get their own animals, possibly reindeer(!) and had one trained hunting dog. They had no utilities, but did have a well stocked library and a chest full of guns. There were two small children (three now). They had also had a steady stream of visitors though their place was off the beaten path, then off the unbeaten ones as well. This is the key though, visitors. Friends who knew the place and could learn some skills part time in between participating in the normal world. So there would be a base of people who knew were to go when civilization teetered or crumbled who would be useful members of a community and not desperate, useless strays. They had other friends in the nearby who were in various states of gridded and off grid, plus had a history with indigenous people in the area who taught them about wild rice and maple syrup and so on. So that's what the left wing variety of survivalists look like. They do exist but they do not have an instagram for you to look at. The most advanced tech they had was a car.

Idk, seems like eventually collectivist would just loop back to depending on government institutions to use their heft of resource and scale to create contingency plans, reserves and backups. Of course theres probably a prevalent mentality that the government is corrupt and incompetent, but there will remain a thought in the back of your head that you could accomplish more prepping with more people and resources. On other hand no democratic government would survive the pressure of apocalypse disrupting global food and fuel trade making 95% of the world population starve to death.

>>9227 It's all a false dichotomy anyway. Humans are independent/individualist AND codependent/collectivist by nature. It's not a contradiction. There is a time for one and a time for the other, and a lot more time for a balance of the two.

You guys want a pre-industrial village? Collectivist self-sustenance and no government. I wonder if there's any place left in north America where this concept might kick in.

>>9228 >Humans are independent/individualist AND codependent/collectivist by nature. Individuals trading favors and private property for mutual gain is not the same thing as collectivism.

>>9227 >seems like eventually collectivist would just loop back to depending on government institutions Collectivism doesn't work without a state. Unless everyone is a clone then you will have people with different abilities. If you want everyone to get equal gains, or each according to his need, then some people need to put more into the system than take out. So you need a centralized monopoly on violence to force such people to keep sacrificing themselves and prevent them from running away.

>>9235 >the only way I can think of to get people to charitably give away resources they can spare is by threatening them with violence >>9233 >people have absolutely no collectivist inclinations at all lol'd, this is your brain on ancrapism.

>>9233 Substitute the word "cooperation" then. Anyone who goes off and tries to be a completely independent survivor dies or ends up losing his marbles like Ted Kaczynski. >>9235 >you will have people with different abilities This is a benefit to any system. I see this thread is about to dissolve into meaningless bickering over semantics and other trivia. Shame, it was an interesting topic.

>>9235 >If you want everyone to get equal gains, or each according to his need, then... That's egalitarianism not collectivism. What OP lists as "collectivist" skills do seem very feminine/leftist though. >>9241 Don't use green text to reword someone's post into a strawman. It makes you look stupid and bad faith. >>9246 >Anyone who goes off and tries to be a completely independent survivor dies or ends up losing his marbles like Ted Kaczynski. I guess what you mean is division of labor exists for a reason. An adult and a kid are alone in a forest. The adult is better at anything the kid can do. He still benefits from the kid doing something simple like collecting sticks while the adult catches rabbits rather than the adult trying to do everything by himself. >Shame, it was an interesting topic. If that was true you would have had more to say about it.

>>9296 >If that was true you would have had more to say about it. I already had, before you even showed up.

>>9222 mushroom identification can be hard and dangerous, you should get a proper guide book and ideally go to a class, absolutely not relying on random chan infographics

obviously I think a big part of what should matter is to know people and have friends and family as close to you as possible. People upon whom you can place some legitimate trust, and in whos abilities and honesty you can rest some faith. In a 'shtf' situation if I meet some random guy who wants to cooperate with me and he tells me he's good at foraging I'm not going to take it on faith, and I'm not going to eat some random mushrooms he digs up and tries to get me to eat without watching him live well off them for a week or two, if I have any other choice. If my resources are scarce, then I'm going to want to be picky about whom I spend them upon, and 'some guy' on his own sterling reccomendation just won't cut it if there are any other options on the table. Making and maintaining connexions that are geographically close to you, and practical to maintain despite a bad situation without reliable internet/phones, with parties who share a mutual respect and are known to have something to offer, is the key to 'collectivist' prepping, before any specific skill. All relevant specific skills are also practiced by individualist preppers and that sort of folk. Also frankly online most of the preppers I see are collectivist in that they're with their families and trust that they can collaborate with family to acheive shared goals. ON THE TOPIC of neighbors I have to say I'm not sure what my end beleif is. I've had good neighbors and I've had bad neighbors, and I'm honestly not convinced its worth it to get to know the bad ones. If you're living in a city surrounded by niggers or something like that, maybe you don't want the neighbors to know what you have in your garage, or really anything about you at all. Be careful whom you befriend that is.

>>9414 >Making and maintaining connexions that are geographically close to you, and practical to maintain despite a bad situation without reliable internet/phones, with parties who share a mutual respect and are known to have something to offer, is the key to 'collectivist' prepping, before any specific skill. Absolutely this. A lot of people don't realize how important it is to have friends. You need at least one true friend in the world to survive. Ideally your family would be true friends but that's not as universal as it should be. >I've had good neighbors and I've had bad neighbors, and I'm honestly not convinced its worth it to get to know the bad ones. It's worth it to have a conversation or two to gauge how bad they are. At the moment I only have one neighbor I'd trust with anything at all, maybe two. The rest are either old people or racist & have a low-degree hatred for me & my kind.

>>9296 >What OP lists as "collectivist" skills do seem very feminine/leftist though. Feminine skills? What skills do you consider to be masculine, then? Hunting isn't a viable option, since 1st world countries' (where I assume the majority lainons resides) already low wildlife numbers are continuing to dwindle (WWF Living Planet Report, 2022), and anyone who can get their hands on a gun or a crossbow will speed up the process. Cows won't be around for long either, that's for sure. Skills currently perceived as masculine (such as carpentry and construction) mean nothing until stable communities (not refugee camps full of office workers and crypto traders, these will last for weeks at best) are established, and those aren't gonna sprout up until natural selection has done its job for at least several months. The skills currently perceived as feminine however, such as tailoring, cooking or foraging can benefit any individual, regardless if he's alone or in a community. TL;DR: Be pragmatic in your skillset, don't bother with meaningless gender norms.

>>9418 is america no longer first world? you could very easily live off of eating feral hogs here, there are quite a few. That isn't to say that there would be many once a collapse hit, but it still may be useful. However, I agree with you completely, I think it's silly to describe any useful skills as "feminine".

>>9222 There's definitely a lot of value in the skills you mentioned, and even moreso in forging alliances with your neighbors. However: >skills that will make them too valuable to kill, sexually assault, or steal from post-collapse. Is pure fantasy. You will be made a slave if you cannot defend yourself with force. (this has literally always been true for all of human history btw)

>>9222 I'm getting so tired of you Americans that I wrote a script to filter you out, so I don't have to see your posts. var wordList = ['sexual assault', 'sexual violence', 'harassment', 'groping', 'grope', 'abuse', 'rape', 'consensual']; function detect(wordList, inText) { var found = false; var cc = 0; while(cc<wordList.length) { if(inText.search(wordList[cc].toLowerCase())>=0) { found = true; } cc++; } return found; } var postList = document.getElementsByClassName("body"); var inText = " "; var cc = 0; while(cc<postList.length) { inText = postList[cc].innerHTML; inText = inText.toLowerCase(); if(detect(wordList, inText)==true) { postList[cc].innerHTML = "<b>American found!</b>"; } cc++; }

>>9223 True, but I can add a few details. You would be hard put to find what OP calls an "individualist" prepper under 30. That is because their "prepping" is usually just an excuse for satisfying urges of consumerism. They don't really think that S is going to HTF. And why should they care? They've got a family to feed and a career to attend to, the very career that provides them with so much spending power to begin with. What OP calls a "collectivist" variety of prepper is rarer, and is young, retired, or both. They have more free time to learn skills and attend their hobbies, but only enough cash to spend on basic tools. There is just as little actual collectivism in "collectivist" preppers as in "individualist" ones, despite the fact that planning meeting points and at least discussing the possibility of forming communes would give "collectivist" preppers a higher chance of survival compared to the vast majority of their peers. TL;DR: There are no political affiliations among preppers. Their nature is product of their socioeconomic status.

Personally I think the best idea is gathering your friends to assemble a warband, training together in combat and enslaving useful people when soykaf hits the fans

>>9429 Raiding and pillaging is not an economically viable way to meet your food requirements unless there is a large source of poorly-defended yet fruitful sedentary farmers.

>>9423 I'm curious to know where you are getting all of this information from.

Feel free to call me paranoid, but i think the powers that be want this to happen and then pick of survivors one by one. Think about how much of the world government forces can sustain themselfs, for years perhaps decades. Not to mention all the weapons they have at their disposal, i dont think it will all just go away. It seems more to me we will be slowly sucked into poverty and totalitarianism like we did the last 20 years almost constantly. The control network is tight, i think electricity and internet will be the last things to go, food and energy are already being tossed out the window. Most people will sit in their homes waiting to die. I honestly find it hard to believe that in this day and age there are no groups that are not well prepared to take advantage of such a situation. It just seems hard to believe we will be this fortunate to just have an all out collapse and not some version where parties that have a high advanatage wont dominate right at start.

>>9434 I'll bite. What I wrote there was my general impression I got from reading prepper forums and blogs. Whenever the members mention their age, whether casually or in introduction posts, the range is typically between early 30s to 50s. I figured that prepping was similar to audiophilia in a way: "More food, more gear, more skills that might require more gear". It's a cycle of consumerism. Except in audiophilia, the cycle can be broken upon reaching "endgame", however high the cost of that may be. But in prepping, the hoarding never stops, because food in the doomsday supply has expiration dates, so it must be completely renewed every few years. There's another reason I brought up the audiophile community. Like that of preppers, it's composed of middle adult men. One of the reasons for this is because by this age, said men progress in their careers to the point where disposable income becomes plentiful. Some save it up for a more luxurious retirement, others spend it on hobbies. By this time, however, the men are usually married with kids, so time is one resource they don't have. They can afford the occasional trip to the woods, but it's not enough enough to keep their survival skills maintained properly. So they compensate it by hoarding more supplies. If going on a forest trip takes too much time, they focus on stuff like water filtration or renewable energy out of the comfort of their homes. I can’t really think of any reason for the rarity of young preppers besides the financial inaccessibility of the hobby. I have a few guesses, but they’re all rather presumptious. One such guess is the younger generations’ preoccupation with politics, being convinced by media that their ideological opponents are the real threat, rather than fragile supply chains and national food insecurity. It could just be a tendency that they’ll grow out of, but that's a very uncertain projection.

>>9437 Is it possible this is just that forums full of 40-50 year olds mostly attract 40-50 year olds, and the 20-30 year olds are all off on some other platforms, maybe not even calling themselves preppers even if motivated by the same fears to similar works? Personally in my irl circle of friends basically everyone is a bit of a prepper. How can you justify not keeping at bare minimum a month or two of food on hand, especially after the corona lockdowns ? How can you justify not stockpiling a bit of water and filtering equipment and other handy odds and ends ? Things happen, seems reasonable to be mildly worried about what would happen if suddenly things start going to soykef.

>>9227 That's why every collectivist prepper group would need an individualist prepper leader. Sounds counter-intuitive, but that's the necessary balance for a larger ammount of people surviving without so much suffering and fear.

>>9222 There's not enough trust to make a group of strangers operate coherently. Tribalism is the most natural form of collectivism, as all the members are bound by blood, and thus compatible at a biological level. The founders are necessarily individualistic, as are subsequent leaders at some level. >I'll start a small list of skills/things to do: > - Foraging (incl. mushroom and plant identification) > - Primitive trapping (learning to make a rabbit trap out of some metal wire, for instance.) Ironically, these are all things an individualist prepper would know. Most of the "wild edibles" recommended in books do not seem very palatable nor economical to forage. Those were probably the criteria used to determine whether to cultivate edibles in the past. Other important skills could include learning a craft, preferably ones that are most valuable for one's situation. >Make friends with your neighbors, even the asshole neighbors Disagree, competency makes assholes tolerable, but pussy is most effective for building a tribe.

Just join a local "mutual aid" group where you live then you have your connections. They exist all over the place.

>>9222 >Stocking up on supplies will make you a much more attractive target for anyone looking to assault others. Rule number one of prepping: look gray. Rule number two of prepping: LOOK! GRAY! >I think this is fundamentally based on a fantasy Yes it is. We are supposed to walk from A to B, sit on a chair 8 hours a day pushing paper and only enjoying entertainment that is within strict morale limits while our countries are going USSR. This drive everyone insane. Yes, the world will completely collapse in two weeks and then the zombies will eat everyone. Have a bob. >The collectivist preppers, on the other hand, work on developing personal skills that will make them too valuable to sexually assault And what is that skill? Self acid attack? >Too valuable to kill History show the nomad raiders never gave the smallest soykaf about that. They will take what they can without any thought about the consequences and then move to greener pastures. Only sedentary raiders practice slavery. >Too valuable to steal Anon, you either go hobo or you are valuable enough to steal. If you have skills and are productive, the entire world will take from you, collapse or not. >They also focus on forming social connections with their local communities This is the only good idea in prepping, individualist or collectivist. Join a militia. Practice your shooting and learn how to make IED and suicide drones. I recommend studying the Russia of the 90's and the countries that had a default of payment like Greece would have if they didn't had the EU to wash them under money, Venezuela maybe.

>>11382 >picrel Not accurate, as the accumulation of problems makes collapses an exponential process.

>>11384 the frog doesn't explode after being boiled

>>9222 Glad I'm not the only one who's thought about this. The pathology of "lone-wolf"/"castle" style preppers is interesting, and seems to have a lot of overlap with conspiricism and other paranoid atomist/"individualist" ideas. I think it's related to the pathology that leads supposed libertarians to become fascists/authoritarians, an insecurity and paranoia of the "other", etc. But I've observed from actual "social collapse events" like the earthquakes in Haiti, cartels in Mexico, even the Holodomor, that what decided your likelihood of survival wasn't what you had, but who you knew. Gathering knowledge will make you valuable to any party, especially knowledge like communications tech, agriculture, foraging, hunting/trapping, medicine, fishing, etc, etc. When you think about what makes successful human societies, it's a bunch of people with all sorts of different skills who cooperate together. No amount of money, bullets, or individual knowledge will help you when you're stranded under rubble or surrounded by all the people you hurt. Society is people, so where there are people cooperating there can be society. Thus in a "societal" collapse, having your own "backup society" will help you and all the people in it to weather the storm together and come out the other side better than before. You know the story of Ken McElroy? The "individualist" preppers are McElroy, the "collectivist" preppers are all the townsfolk that decided to do something about McElroy. Violence and aggression only helped McElroy get what they wanted in the short term, but eventually they were overpowered. And in prisons, the lone wolves are the ones who are killed the most often, having a gang to come do your defense guarantees a level of security you don't have otherwise. You can't bully/violence your way to prosperity. The "individualist" approach is founded on a fundamental misuderstanding of how society, people, and civilizations work. One more example: The paranoid and violence-obsessed pathology of "individualist" like the researcher of the Sex Raft led them to believe that at sea the entire boat would devolve into violence. Instead, mutual aid, cooperation, and relaitonship building led the entire crew to become very close and life-long friends. We're individuals, but what makes homo sapiens so successful is their gregarious and cooperative nature. Of course, you don't need a state to do any of that. Look at any farming community or commune and you'll see that people are made to support each other and grow together. The whole "individualism/collectivism" is a false dichotomy. You don't need a "great leader" or a "state" or any of that soykaf to do that. Doesn't take a genius to realize that taking care of each other (like storing grain together, sharing food, etc) leaves everyone better off. >>9241 >>9246 It is a shame. At least it started out nice. Sad to see that some lains are stuck in reactionary modes of thinking. I'm starting to believe none of these people have actually worked in a group in their life... >>9418 It's funny how a lot of these people are trying to live some childish fantasy of being a "mans man survivor man" when no one cares how "gay" you look if you're the one bringing food home at the end of the day. They'd rather rigidly conform to gender nonsense than develop useful skills like cooking and hygiene.

>>11678 Are you saying I should become a Navy SEAL? Also, I generated these photos of exploding frogs almost a year ago.

If civilization collapses, more or less like the bronze age collapse or the collapse of the Roman empire, the main factors in survival, whether done individually or as a group, are going to be access to natural resources like water, game, and fuel, as well as being in a position to hide and defend as necessary. That makes location the most important thing. You'd want to head to a relatively uninhabited wooded area near a lake or river, where you'd have game, fish, wood fuel and building material, and a few tools and weapons. People survived comfortably as hunter-gatheres for much longer than they have in "civilization." They had a better diet and larger brains, and were arguably better off. They had about the same amount of sedentary time. And the massive reduction in world human population would give the biosphere a chance to recover, and humanity a chance for a fresh start.

>>11382 >look gray Most people who have to understand this better are the same one who buy from the 5.11 grey man product line, and only end up looking like tryhards or glowies. >>11681 This is one of the biggest memes, unironically. There are entire YouTube channels dedicated to teaching people hardcore SEAL survival, but fail to recognize that SEALs only exist because of the support of the worlds strongest military and huge amounts of it's GDP going to keeping them funded. Imo the best option would be get educated in structural engineering with a focus on infrastructure, then study medicine and become a doctor focusing on emergency or outdoor medicine, then in your spare time work on community ourteach projects like neighborhood gardens and childrens programs with a focus on teaching the outdoors or trade skills like scouting, this will also introduce you to local flora and fauna while strengthening connections within your community because you will establish a good reputation with their parents who also have skills they can contribute to your survival plan. You don't guns and millions of rounds of ammunition if you have a community that is willing to protect you. Distribute your defense by becoming an indispensable member of society. At worst, you become a brain slave for society, but you would literally be holding the community up.

>>11686 Most people don't care or can't think past "blicky go BRRRR" when it comes to prepping, meaning that trying to collectivize any sort of survival seems improbable in clownworld. One can really only trust the people they've grown up with in a tight community or have fought with. Special operations already has a framework where those issues are more or less sorted out. >the best option would be to develop skills Yes, except nobody actually respects those skills in clownworld. It seems at least the military would be willing pay individuals to develop those skills, while treating their service members at least better a hobo, which appears to be the predominant state of man if things continue.

>>11688 In clownworld, you would just develop those skills and then sell a course or act as a consultant for preppers. >For just $499 you can learn all of my survival secrets and get access to an elite community of highly trained Lains, follow the link in the description at lainchan.org normally a $2000 value. /lpg/ Lain Prepper General when?

>>11690 >dealing with normal people yuck

>>11682 >That makes location the most important thing. ...after having a large number of people who you can trust with your life and who can and are willing to use violence if necessary. Those are the most important things. Everything else will be solved in due time. > You'd want to head to a relatively uninhabited wooded area near a lake or river, where you'd have [many many thigs] I assume you are an American? Here in Europe forests are small and with more people than animal. you are never more than one km away from a road. I can not imagine millions of people moving to the forest, we would have someone every 100m.