Surviving 2012 and Beyond

Terence McKenna hoped that by the end of history we’ll have become street smart in the ways of demonic materialism as we return home to the family farm in eden.

My hope is that we’re able to make this journey before natural and/or artificial disasters make it more a matter of survival than lifestyle.

What Terence referred to as the eschaton, classic Survivalists call TEOTWAWKI, an acronym for “The End of the World as We Know it”.

Whether or not we have two and half years, or thousands of years to prepare for cataclysm, what matters more than prophecy or prediction is being prepared for disaster today.

Disasters range from high probability and small scale of impact, such as an injury or job loss causing a personal or family level collapse, to low probability and large scale of impact such as a geographic pole shift causing a global collapse of civilization.

Modern survivalism promotes acknowledgement of many threats, rather than attachment to any single event. In the case of Y2K, people panicked and rushed to stock up and fortify in a frenzy, and when it proved a non-event, most of that fear dissipated, people sold off their preps and rejoined the rat race almost overnight.

In the dominant culture, we now lack what most of our great grandparents had, an understanding that shit can hit the fan at any time. That’s the nature of reality, of planet earth, and now more than ever, the global industrial economy.

For most of human history our ancestors were localized and self-reliant out of necessity and hence had much less of an illusion of government provisioned safety.

We no longer live in resilient nomadic foraging bands, or settled horticultural tribes in which disaster, emergency, and survival preparedness was intrinsic to human-ecology.

Domestication, civilization, urbanization, industrialization, suburbanization, digitalization, etc. have both seduced and enslaved us to the matrix, the less a part of local ecology we are the more vulnerable we are to disasters of all kinds.

In an obscure Dalai Lama lecture series I once heard, there was a time delay between his words and the translation. I wondered what thought in his mind caused this uncharacteristic roaring belly laugh. Seconds later it was articulated in English that he found a bit of cynical humor in expressing the fact that many in the industrial world would surely die if the electrical grid collapsed.

The critique of our precariousness and unsustainability is shared by people of all walks of life. While the green left has popularized many robust eco-memes, it still has much to learn from the classic survivalist community.

Modern survivalism (as I've learned about via survival podcast) is what I feel to be a vital alchemical synthesis of radical hippie and radical redneck thought and practice.

A modern survivalist mindset, doesn’t mean you’re a paranoid, xenophobic, back woods, ex-military hick in a snarling dog patrolled, barricaded bunker, filled with bullets, beans, and band-aids. Nor does it mean you’re a long haired, post-60s acid head drop out in Humboldt county growing organic fruits and veggies among other things in a remote off-the-grid homestead with a pacifist aversion to defensibility.

It means you seek to reclaim the wisdom of our elders and live with a healthy sense of awareness, precaution, and preparedness and a healthy skepticism and disdain for the incompetence if not malice of the establishment.

You can be anyone, anywhere and simply choose to be more like the ant that works hard in times of plenty to ensure security in times of scarcity, than like the grasshopper who carelessly frolics in the summer sun unwilling to accept the harsh reality of the coming winter.

Modern survivalists emphasize the need for all preparedness efforts to be designed in such as way as to improve quality of life, whether or not a disaster strikes. A practical example, again using the case study of Y2k, would be to start growing and storing your own food, thereby investing in your health, your soil, your family, your future, etc. rather than spending tons of money on flavorless emergency food kits, that you may never need.

Approached in this manner preparedness is a rewarding lifestyle as every inch of independence that you reclaim provides a new dimension of physical, mental, and spiritual freedom from the death culture.

It encourages folks to realize that we’ve become dangerously dependent, not just on THE system, but on a complex tangled web of SYSTEMS. Pick your metaphor, house of cards, sand castle, dominos. The sad truth is that from the moment our recent ancestors stopped composting, planting, saving seeds, pumping wells, healing with herbs, hand building shelters, hand making clothes, tools, etc. we put our lives completely in the hands of government and corporations.

Luckily it’s not too late to reorient our minds, life-styles, and communities towards independent, localized, ecological sustainability that doesn’t bank on a new super-energy source, a new genetically modified food crop, a new pharmaceutical drug, or a new advanced weapon to stabilize and harmonize the future of humanity and the planet.

Even on the 2012 timeline, which I’m admittedly a fanatic adherent to, we can still do a lot. Some solutions are big and fast, some are small and slow. With the right coordination of people power and capital, I believe we can popularize preparedness and permaculture and crash land out of history on a bed of lush organic food forests inhabited by egalitarian neo-tribal shamanistic goddess worshipping villagers, rather than crash land on a jagged desert of toxic festering landfills crawling with rabid zombie cannibals and road warrior barbarians ruled by ex-paramilitary and gangster mobs.

The political-ecological landscape of the future will be determined by our efforts to prepare now.

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