You Can't Survive Anything If You Can't Triage
It is not selfishness to make your own subsistence your first priority in all things
About 1000 years or so ago, Europeans got so good at animal husbandry, agriculture and food storage there would be very few situations where they would experience hunger or famine again if left to their own devices. They replaced their original rock huts with mudthatch and sod construction and they began to include tunnels in their homes almost instinctively. This made them very hardy against invaders, storms, diseases and all sorts of social upheaval. They also proved excellent at working together well and fighting together well as a group. They were prone to dwell on the near future and anticipate things that might happen and take steps to be ready should those things manifest in the world as well as their imaginations. It all sounds simple enough but when the same traits appear in millions of people like attention to detail, conscientiousness, executive agency and a regular devotion to excellence in their trades, the synergy that can emerge is pretty spectacular when they all work together for their own shared good.
Imagine a future based reference that fosters preparation at all times plus we know who our fathers are through lineage and don’t have sex with our sisters. The comparative advantage begins to accumulate very rapidly and constructively. I believe they are right about “white privilege.” Our genes give us extraordinary advantages in all things because of the subtle balance in our makeup that is just right like Goldilocks porridge. Even now when our gene pool is increasingly looking like an amateur whorehouse with chimpanzees manning the front desk phones in reception.
A strange blend of Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal people plus other genes not yet truly codified in their makeup, they had one quality that really stood out … they thought like preppers all the time. They had fear of hunger and fear of cold because they could visualize the future. When modern people tell you these things are pathologies they’ve got it ass-backwards. There is nothing more abnormal than to find these things lacking in people of European descent. It is a central feature of their makeup. Even with abundance, the European could enter the dream state and see some sequence of events that might leave him starving. It’s a super power that they almost certainly get from the Neanderthals … who had the ability to dream with their eyes open and generate theta waves while awake. I have a theory as to why they developed this ability and it’s just a theory. The reality shows the parts of their brain involved in dreaming in the hippocampus and parietal cortex were very highly developed. The Neanderthals are often described as a shamanic race. In all my reading I cannot think of a more appropriate way to categorize them as a race. The imagery of the guy with the wolf head mask and the flute trying to conjure up visions of far off places and escape his earthly limits in the deep recesses of his own mind while he dances slowly around the campfire and chants or sings is likely a good guess about them as a people. Bet that much of their desire to come unhooked in time was driven by a need to see the future and know what to prepare for before their wagon linked up with the present again.
You can only make fun of Neanderthal nature and their time hopping quantum ride through dreams up until that moment when you are forced to take your first bite of one of Klaus Schwab’s cricket and mealworm sandwiches. Then it gets real and you know in your heart the Neanderthals had the right idea. You should hope that the hour never gets that late for you because if you see it coming, you need to prepare for it. You should be so lucky as your Neanderthal ancestors to see which way the wind is blowing and suddenly not be in the path of a tornado when it hits because you saw it’s trajectory in your mind. It is not hyperbole to call them the ultimate survivors of the ages, the lone creature who passed through the Grand Minimum and Snowball Earth. You don’t perform miracles like that rapping and shopping for gold hubcaps.
Nowadays this will almost certainly entail triage. You’re only one man or woman and you have to keep a day job, commute to work or attend to your remote job, leaving you a few hours a day to prepare and exercise. If you’ve ever tried to do it all in a day you know how hard it is to bag, pack, label and store food. It’s also very easy to rush and lose control of your inventory in no time. A couple of months and you’ve got food stacked everywhere and you don’t know what it is, when it will expire and what to eat next. I am struggling to make VAULT-SYS very helpful in this regard but you’ll have to be the judge of that when I release it. You have to triage your time. Focus on the things that yield maximum benefit for the work you put in.
The guy across the street who has two meth head brothers? Forget it, you can’t help them. Plan to defend your food against them. Triage.
The good looking single mother next door who you know will be more than happy to take care of you sexually if you can feed her four kids by Leroy? Triage. Don’t even start, her bad judgement in picking mates by having sex first and worrying about mate devotion later proves she’s a loser. Lock her out if you’re smart. Triage. She’s a bad decision that will lead you to trouble. Don’t let’em ruin you with pity, I been there done that. If you fold they will think you are a schmuck and start planning to knock you over the head and throw you out of your own retreat.
I know you think Tex cruel but I’ve lived through a couple emergencies myself and spent a lot of time in that dream state dancing around the fire. The instant you put anybody first ahead of your own survival you are risking your own survival and theirs too if they turn out to be extremely poor choices for charity. Triage. Lock’em out. When these things happen you have to be cruel in most cases. You help everyone who rattles your door you will be starving yourself in a week.
What about the Ivy League doctor who points out if you take him and his children and wife he’ll be happy to provide you or other loved ones with medical care? That’s a tricky one. Very tough. What kind of guy is this? Any doubts about him or his integrity you could be literally ruining yourself by accepting him. In many cases, Triage him.
You only provide for yourself and people so close to you they are kin or even better. Any of that soppy stuff you may not last a week. A lot of the best preppers in the world will be flat out robbed, dead or stripped bare when the SHTF because they also tried to keep their humanity and decided they’d help everybody. Your survival may count on your ability to triage the people, the situation and your priorities both before and after it all starts to fall apart. Be a cruel bastard, I only say it in the hopes you won’t open the door for the biker gang who ask if they can borrow a cup of sugar and some oregano. You’ll have to stand strong when the time comes. You may have to stay locked down when they use children as human shields and threaten to hurt them if you don’t open up or give them what they want. Shoot’em, screw’em. You got to look out for yourself or how do you hope to possibly assist anybody?
These are only sample scenarios. Believe it in reality you may have to navigate much more complex waters than these. Before and after it gets dicey.
Keep your faith strong in God and take me with a grain of salt.
Regards, Tex
P.S. I forgot to add a credit to Robert Heinlein who wrote a brilliant essay on this subject in one of his books I can’t remember the name of just yet. I didn’t want anybody to think I had plagiarized his stuff but I definitely had a lot of it in mind when I wrote this. The essence of Heinlein’s essay was the same : try to help everybody and its lights out for you. Recognize it will be a very different social setting.
Where I live, feeding the bears is banned. Wild bears are beautiful, timid creatures that just want to be left alone… but feed them, and man stops looking like the apex predator and starts looking a whole lot like what he smells like, which is just another piece of meat.
Cleve, I believe the Thal is the pre-fall Edenic man, Sapiens is the new, post-fall form God gave to mankind. This seems especially true when you think about how God punishes Eve through the pains of child-birth, which matches going from the wider Thal waist to the narrower Sapiens one.
The dream-like state you describe is fascinating. In fact, you find it often in various occult stuff. The idea is that pre-fall, God gave provision to man and took care of him without the pains of toil, by influencing reality through mental vizualisation and belief. Think about that "Tuning" from DARK CITY, and about the Biblical verses which speak of praying, and believing that a mountain will move, and it shall do so. When a person with Aspergers hyper-focus and mentally visualize something, they rock back and forth. When Jews are deep in their studies of the Talmud, they also rock back and forth, therefore I believe both Thals and Melons have a predisposition to it.