As a thougt exercise, I spent around half a day looking at all preppers material I could get my hands on.

Preppers are people who are "preparing" for an impending catastrophe, either man or nature-made. They have that concept of "get home", "bug out" and "bug in" which is basically when the disaster hit, you have to get home to your family, and then either you shelter in place or your go out to a safer place, usually self-reliant.

While there were obvious nutjobs out there, especially the gun-loving ones, from what I can gather a majority of them were content with a sense of community, and also a sense of preparation, control.

My hypothesis is that in those troubled times, as a mere citizen you can feel powerless about the whole global situation, and lack a sense of purpose + control. That whole preparation movement obviously provide with those, with a powerful rethoric and some no-nonsense principles, usually coming from the military.

I can see why it is compelling to some people. I got some concepts out of that deep dive. Yet, the initial reasoning seem flawed at best in my opinion - if history is of any help, during soviet era collapse cooperation was the norm, same with roman empire fall.

Interesting times.

Let's build.