The Prepper Fallacy: Who Needs Society? #061

These transcripts are automatically generated from the video, so they might contain errors.

Hello and welcome back to Every Dawn. We were talking about escaping from freedom and often when you think about escaping from freedom, from the responsibilities of life, and also from what is bad in society, you think about perhaps these adventurers who go to some remote place and practice survival skills, or these people who take their sailboats and sail away. This is a big thing on YouTube—people buy a sailboat and then set off to cross the Pacific. This is the dream of escaping this organized society, of escaping this pressure that we have here in our everyday life by going away and leaving it all behind and getting a better life.

In a sense, this is also behind the prepper movement, this idea that if I am alone and self-sufficient, then I am happy, then I am safe, then I can realize whatever I want. I can realize myself. I can choose the life that I want. But I think it is important to also see that these movements and these people might be mistaken to some extent with what they are doing, because when I escape on a sailboat, I am not actually escaping society and going into a world of freedom. The thing is, if you look carefully, you realize that somebody on a sailboat has a lot less freedom than the people on land.

If you're part of society, you have the freedom to choose a job, you have the freedom to go here or there tonight, you have the freedom to go to a cinema, you have the freedom to work on a YouTube video, you have the freedom to read a book. You can do all kinds of things. You can surf the internet, you can meet friends, you can go out with friends, you can go to a restaurant, you can choose a different job. You can do whatever you like, essentially.

While if you are on a sailboat, your choices are much more limited. On a sailboat, I have only the choice, you know, to go one way or the other way across the sea. I have a choice about where I'm going, the navigation, but this is also a choice I have on land, so that's nothing new. And I don't have any other choices. The rest is necessity. The rest is, you know, I have to do this. I have to put up the sails, I have to put down the sails depending on how the wind blows. I have to steer my boat. I have to make something to eat, and then I have to sleep, and I have to watch for other ships, and I have to find a place to anchor and sleep. And then the next day, I can go and do the same thing again.

So actually, the thing that makes sailboat life so attractive for some is not really the freedom it provides, but the escape from freedom. It takes away your freedom to an extent that takes away the problems that are associated with living in society. And then you just are on the sailboat, and you are supposed to do what's necessary for survival every day and not to think too much about it. And then you don't have freedom, and you feel good because of this lack of freedom.

So I found this thought interesting, right? That we have this sail-away vision that this is something that will set you free, but actually, sailing is not sailing into freedom. It's sailing into a very narrow set of requirements that you have to fulfill every day in order to stay alive. And the same is true of bushcraft and how they call it—you know, all this survival stuff—where you go to a place, and your life is then dictated by the needs of your survival. You don't have choices. You just have to do what's necessary to survive.

And so in a way, this is also true of the prepper movement. I recently saw a video where somebody was saying that society is making all these laws, and this is so—a bad place to live in because society's deciding what he should do. And he would like to be free and go away and be left alone by society and live alone somewhere. And this is a sentiment that many people have, and I can understand this because society is oppressive and can often dictate to you lifestyles that are not what you want for yourself.

But I think what this person does not see and appreciate, and what many of us are also missing when we criticize society, is that society also gives us freedom. It is society that makes it possible for you to have a street to drive your car on. It is society that makes it possible for you to have schools and kindergartens for your children and playgrounds and hospitals and doctors when you're sick and medical insurance if you live in a country where such things exist. And if you, you know, if you have these things, of course not everybody has it, and not all countries have all these luxuries, and of course, there are poor people and there are poorer countries, and there are all sorts of problems. But still, being in a society gives you in principle access to these things while being outside of a society does not.

If you think of raising a child on a sailboat or you know, living outside of society, you would have to, you know, not have all these things. You would not have culture, you would not have books, you would not have easy transport. So what the preppers are doing is actually cheating, right? In a way, they are saying we get our freedom outside of society, but you know, we drive our car still. We drive our rugged, you know, Jeeps or whatever they're driving, and when it breaks, we go to have it repaired by a mechanic because we cannot do it ourselves. Or we have to buy fuel for our car, so the fuel must come from somewhere. Or if we are, you know, advanced preppers, we use solar panels to charge our cars, yes, but the solar panels must also be produced by someone in society. In a wild place in the forest, there are no solar panels, so there is no car. Forget about the car. There are not even pots, there are not even knives. You know, when you do your bushcrafting, you take your fancy knife along in order to cut, you know, twigs and do whatever you want to do there. This knife has been produced not by you but by someone in society who has sold it to you.

So I think we need to appreciate perhaps a little more society and to steer a little against this craze of being independent because being independent does not really work. It works only if in a sense you, it's a, it's only, you know, it's only a thing that I say it's only a vision, it's only a pretend freedom from society. But in reality, as soon as something breaks, I have to go back to society and buy replacement. So we are still dependent on society, and the best life I believe is not to be found outside of society but inside society, but inside a better society. I don't, I don't say that this society is particularly good or whatever your society is, all our societies in a sense suck because they often are governed badly. They take away our freedoms, they force us to live lives that we don't want to live in this way. And of course, we need to improve societies. We need to make them better, we need to make them more human, we need to make them more fun to live in, we need to make them safer for more most people who now live, you know, lives that are unsafe. We need to make them more inclusive. There are all sorts of things that need to be better in societies. But I think leaving society and being alone, you know, being in a place where you don't have police, you don't have repair shops, you don't have any shops, you don't have any technology, you're living like a wild animal in a cave. I don't think that this is really a better situation.

So let's think a little about it today. Perhaps learn to appreciate also what we have. We don't need to always be so critical of what we have and so dismissive of what society gives us. I think we can appreciate that society is actually giving us something valuable, even if sometimes it comes with all sorts of problems that need solving. But um, I, I, I think this solution is not to, you know, leave society behind because of these problems but to try to solve the problems and make a better society in which we can be happy and live better, fulfilling lives.

Thank you, and see you tomorrow.