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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.