Betting Against

We’re a little less than a month into running this site and for me at least still less than a year into talking rather publicly about my interest in these kinds of topics. The most interesting thing to me is that the reactions from people tend to land firmly in one of two categories – either they get very excited because they have also been considering this kind of stuff for a while and perhaps actually doing something in their own right, or they laugh and ask something along the lines of why we would ever consider stuff like this. Sure there are some middle ground people but for the most part that’s true. “Either you are really paranoid or I’m really naive” is a sentiment I’ve gotten more than once. And maybe that’s a fact, because the truth of the matter is as much as I want the future to be sunny and awesome with nothing ever going wrong, I just don’t believe things are going that way,and mostly I just hope things don’t go as badly as I expect them to. Some might say I’m betting against a happy ending.

That’s certainly one way of looking at it, but from my perspective I’m taking steps to ensure a happy ending. In the 34 years I’ve been here the list of things that didn’t work out the way they were supposed to, or the way everyone thought they would, or the way everyone hoped they would… well it’s a little on the long side. In fact even the things that have worked out well were often set into motion by something else not working out so well. And that’s certainly some of the driving force behind my approach to survival/preparedness – if something falls apart, I want to make sure I know how to take those pieces and build something with them. I think most people wait until something happens and then try to figure out what to do, I’m hoping to be a few steps ahead.

Neil Strauss, author of Emergency talks about similar reactions in a recent post on his blog. He writes about doing promo for the book and says:

In about half the radio interviews I’ve done prior to last month, the host has asked, with some disdain, “Prepare for what? What do you think’s going to happen?”

And then, suddenly, when the swine flu panic hit, those same people suddenly started calling and asking if I could do another interview offering their listeners survival tips.

Same thing happened after the California earthquakes last week.

We live in a world that seems to REACT to emergencies, rather than PREPARE for them. Leading to a situation in which the panic can be more dangerous than the disaster itself.

As a society I think we often take that reacting rather than preparing approach. If you follow security topics at all then you will be familiar with Bruce Schneier and this is the crux of his entire message. Frequently our approach to security (terrorism specifically) is to look at the last thing that happened and take steps to prevent it from happening again, rather than accepting that we can’t anticipate what the next thing might be and taking steps to reduce the effects of whatever does end up happening. It’s one thing if you are talking about passwords getting swiped, something else entirely if you are talking about where to get food in a crisis.

It’s also one thing to buy a bunch of gear and yet another to know what to do with it. That’s what I hope we pull off with this site, not only talking about the what but also the how and why. It’s not just about an earthquake that we know is coming, or the same storm we’ve been hit with year after year, it’s about the things we can’t possibly imagine. It’s black swan theory at it’s purest. Trying to have some kind of a leg up on the thing you can’t possibly predict. And sure, maybe there is a bit of paranoia mixed in, but in the highly unlikely situation that nothing ever goes wrong and we all live happily ever after, well, I wish that is what happened every time I was wrong.