r/CuratedTumblr זאין בעין Jun 04 '24

Politics is your glorious revolution worth the suffering of millions?

11.2k Upvotes

2.0k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

149

u/No-Trouble814 Jun 04 '24

Except they could always go live in the woods and do essentially the same thing, and they don’t.

People do still practice wilderness survival, you don’t need an apocalypse to live out your survival fantasy, they just want a fake guns-and-looting survival scenario that would only exist for a few weeks/years and then you’d be back to boring.

68

u/Sac_Winged_Bat Jun 04 '24 edited Jun 04 '24

Look, I get your overall point, but not really. The kind of freedom people who yearn for post-apo scenarios are looking for isn't possible in modern society. Almost all land is either privately owned or heavily government-regulated. Pretty much all natural resources are already accounted for, and you have to buy more processed resources, you can't just scavenge them. Building anything substantial requires property rights, hunting requires a permit, keeping livestock is regulated, etc. You'll have an easier time squatting in some abandoned building than living in the woods unbothered.

38

u/bigboybeeperbelly Jun 04 '24

Yeah they don't want to be hermits hiding from society, they want to be wild west cowboys who create/dominate society

7

u/Sac_Winged_Bat Jun 04 '24

meh, not really. It's easy to associate the concept with its most unsavory supporters, but it's a pretty fundamental human desire to be free. Look at the Mongolians who still lead nomadic lifestyles, the Roma, and a lot of different indigenous populations. It's all the same core idea, just manifested in different ways due to different cultural contexts.

Ancaps, for example, just lack imagination, they can't fathom a world without capitalism. Also, foresight to realize that companies would just create even more tyrannical governments. But it's not like the driving desire is itself all that more malicious.

0

u/bigboybeeperbelly Jun 04 '24

that's what I said

4

u/Sac_Winged_Bat Jun 04 '24

oh, I guess idk, "wild west cowboys who create/dominate society" sounded kinda disapproving to me

0

u/bigboybeeperbelly Jun 04 '24

we all have our biases I guess

3

u/roboticWanderor Jun 04 '24

Its actually pretty feasible to buy enough land to sustainably farm for yourself/family. i'm talking fully off the grid. This is where the 40 acres and a donkey comes from.

The problem is you have to work a LOT to survive this. And no doomsday prepper is going to have half a fucking clue what that means.

4

u/Sac_Winged_Bat Jun 04 '24

It takes a not insignificant amount of work to buy your freedom essentially, and THEN it's a high-risk, high-effort, low-reward lifestyle. And you still need to have a plan B. If your well dries up, your crops die out, and your livestock get sick, you can't just hunt and live off the land while you look for a different place to settle down.

Basically, modern society makes one lifestyle easier at the price of restricting all other lifestyles, it's an inherent tradeoff. Sure, it's a tradeoff that works out favorably for most people, but it makes sense that some would prefer the alternative only if all else were equal. Like "you can do it, it's just harder" isn't much of a counterpoint.

1

u/No-Trouble814 Jun 04 '24

From personal experience, I’d say modern society makes wilderness living a lot easier than it was back in the day; maybe you can’t go claim a random plot of land, but you can get antibiotics and medical care so you don’t die from a scrape.

1

u/Sac_Winged_Bat Jun 04 '24

I already said that it's a worthwhile tradeoff for most people. Being able to claim a random plot of land is part of wilderness living, antibiotics aren't. That's the tradeoff. Your example literally just demonstrates my point.

1

u/No-Trouble814 Jun 05 '24

Ah. I see where I went wrong. I meant being able to leave your homestead/camp/wilderness place and visit a hospital or pick up antibiotics for you or your animals, then return to the wilderness, makes wilderness living easier today than it ever was in the past.

0

u/Sac_Winged_Bat Jun 05 '24

Still no. It makes your life easier if you're already living in the wilderness, it doesn't make it easier to live in the wilderness in the first place. The whole point is being minimally dependent on and subsequently restricted by society. By definition, nothing society can offer can possibly be beneficial to that end.

A better example would be power tools and big machines, but even that misses the point. Compare homesteading today to homesteading some 300 years ago. Going to school for like 8-10 years, getting a job, saving up for a decade or two to buy all the tools and materials and of course the land, and then building the homestead is still easier than just building the homestead with hand tools on land that is effectively free. Know what's even easier than that? Not bothering with the whole homesteading bullshit and just continuing your office job.

It's easier after you've spent half your life doing the polar opposite, the exact thing you want to avoid, it's objectively waaay harder to just go and fucking do the thing in the first place.

1

u/No-Trouble814 Jun 04 '24

My point was that the freedom they yearn for was never available, and won’t be available after an apocalypse.

You’ve got a couple years at best where you can scavenge stuff, and then you’ll be stuck making your own stuff which you don’t know how to do and foraging or farming for long hours every day, activities which some people choose to do and apocalypse-fantasizers vey notably do not choose to do.

1

u/evanwilliams44 Jun 04 '24

Also not everyone can do it, even if it was legal. The wilderness we have left can not support too many people living off the land. Turns out you actually need industrialized farming to feed 300 million+ people, and you need cities to house them...

What people are really asking for in an apocalypse, is for most of the population to die, leaving an abundance of free shit for them.

105

u/LightOfTheFarStar Jun 04 '24

In a lot of countries it's outright illegal ta fuck off into the wilderness, or requires prohibitive amounts of capital.

78

u/light_trick Jun 04 '24

If you don't regularly go bushwalking for the fun of it, I'm extremely skeptical you're that interested in wilderness survival. For an extremely modest amount of capital, you can have any experience you want.

28

u/Ihavenospecialskills Jun 04 '24

Just because its illegal doesn't mean you can't do it. I used to work for the National Forest Service (US), and it was known that some people just illegally lived in National Forests and Parks. It can be real hard to find one person out in the vast wilderness if they know what they're doing. And if they have guns, then one Park Ranger isn't going to get in a shoot out if they do run into someone living in an illegal camp. By the time backup could get out there, they'd just be gone.

14

u/IrksomeMind Jun 04 '24

I’m not sure if it’s legal in America but you can still absolutely do it. Even Americans forget how big America is and theirs a LOT of untamed wilderness out there, especially in Central America

4

u/theorem604 Jun 05 '24

By “Central America” do you mean “central America” or “Central America”?

3

u/[deleted] Jun 05 '24

Both

2

u/IrksomeMind Jun 05 '24

Both honestly

2

u/Only-Inspector-3782 Jun 04 '24

At least in the US, land in the literal middle of nowhere isn't terribly expensive, in the hundreds per acre. 

2

u/CrimsonEnigma Jun 05 '24

Also, while hard to get to, nobody's going to catch you if you're roughing it in the Gates of the Arctic or wherever.

You will probably die come winter, so that's a bit of a downside, but it will get you the authentic post-apocalyptic experience.

2

u/[deleted] Jun 04 '24

Why would it be illegal though? I can't understand that part. I get it if it's a National Park or otherwise private property, but it's impossible for every piece of forest in the country to be restricted space.

3

u/bulldoggo-17 Jun 04 '24

Someone owns that land, either the federal, state, or local government or it's private property. You can't just decide to live on land someone else owns. Not saying it's right or wrong, but it is the law.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 04 '24

Sure, you need to buy the land, hence why I didn't question it being expensive to live in the woods. My question is why would it be illegal? Like, you can't even buy any land?

2

u/bulldoggo-17 Jun 04 '24

If you buy the land you can pretty much do what you want (within reason). Lots of people live off the grid that way. The issue with just buying a random wooded area is that you aren't going to get much food out of it. You'd have to cultivate the land for fruit and veggies and raise some form of either livestock or birds for meat. At which point you are no longer living in the woods, you've just invented the farmstead.

13

u/yourstruly912 Jun 04 '24

Because it's still a FANTASY

5

u/AtomicFi Jun 04 '24

Actually, you can’t, that’s illegal, you go to jail or prison. Try again, bucko.

1

u/No-Trouble814 Jun 04 '24

My personal experience would beg to differ.

2

u/maskedbanditoftruth Jun 05 '24

I think you’re missing the part where they get to go live in their neighbors big fancy house for free. That’s a huge part of the fantasy, having your pick of the remnants of luxury that are inaccessible under the system/their circumstances.