Delusions About Survivalists and Preppers

There are some seriously sick people out there who think that the only reason that survivalists and preppers are into preparing is because of paranoid delusions. I think that they are instead projecting their own bias, beliefs, and mental issues onto a benign group of people--the preppers. From the Edmonton Sun:

Motivations for survivalists are as varied as the causes they get behind.

Stephen Kent is a University of Alberta professor specializing in sociology and religion.

"A lot of people can conflate reality with fantasy, with fear and what comes out is a dire picture about the future and the frightened image in what their place in it is," Kent said.

There are subcultures within the subculture of survivalism.

Lack of education, receiving news from only one source, and apocalyptic entertainment all play into fears, added Kent.

"These survivalists run the gamut from sincere but deluded people with personality disorders to people whose childhood experiences have been violent, religiously violent, in terms of God's love," Kent said.

* * *

Predictions about electronic failures in 2000 and the Church of the Triumphant's predictions on soviet missile launches in the 1960s may have fallen flat, but Kent said there are legitimate concerns people should be prepared for.

As dams broke in the Northwest United States in the 1980s flooding the towns settled beneath, communities with higher percentages of Mormons bounced back quicker.

"Good Mormons stock about a year's worth of food," Kent said. "It doesn't pay off often, but it has paid off sometimes."

He said there have been examples where even in a highly-developed society with a well-intentioned government things can go wrong, pointing to the ice storms in Quebec in 1998 that left people without power for weeks. Having food and water in case of disaster is prudent.

"The reality is, all of us are going to experience some personal apocalypticisms at some point," Kent said. "The survivalists just have a very dire fantasies about what theirs is going to be like and hold the belief they can do something about it. A lot of people are much more avoidant or fatalistic about their own demises."

So, on one hand, Kent thinks that it is prudent to have some food and water on hand, but on the other hand, it is delusional and paranoid to have some food and water on hand. C'mon Kent. Make up your mind.

To see who is the crazier, I just went to Google News to see if there are any articles just in the top news stories (not further searching for specific terms or going into sub-catagories) that would support a survivalists/preppers world view. There were a few:

1.  There were several stories concerning the civil war in Syria, including this one from the Associate Press on rebel attacks on Asad strongholds.

2. Evacuations ordered as Colorado fire reaches 8000 acres in size.

3.  Spain requesting 100 billion Euro bailout for its banks.

4.  Thousands fleeing violence after attacks in the Ivory Coast.

5.  "Heavy rain Saturday in southern Escambia County left an unknown number of people homeless, forced over 100 people into shelters, and caused untold millions of dollars in damages." (Full story here).

That was just off the front page of Google News at the time I drafted this post. How many other disasters, big and small, would I find. How about the personal disasters that underlie the unemployment statistics? Or house-fires? Or the death or lengthy illness of a family's breadwinner?

Like anything segment of the population, there are going to be the kooks and crackpots--the outlying extreme on the bell curve. But to take the abnormal as an example of the the "norm" is the basest form of logical error, and intellectual dishonesty.

For more on this topic, here is an article from MyNorthwest.com about a prepper speaking out against the stigma attached to make disaster preparations.