It’s weird that so many preppers aspire to be farmers.
Prolonged periods of violence and civil disorder tend not to be great for farmers.
Farms are highly illiquid, vulnerable to even ordinary economic shocks. The scale and space requirements to support a family on a farm income (even within an integrated and functional economy) make security cooperation difficult.
Having your livelihood and life savings tied up in a particular plot of land makes it very difficult to respond rationally to new conditions. Farmers tend to stay scattered and isolated long after they should evacuate (either out of the country, or at least to a redoubt where they have friends.)
It happened throughout the 20th century, and continues in places like South Africa: urban professionals liquidate their assets and move out of harm’s way, while farmers stay behind, alone, and get boiled alive in the bathtub. They’re not only vulnerable, but especially vulnerable in times of conflict.
Historically, the people who have done well (and even made fortunes) under conditions of political volatility are providers of security and intelligence.
During the Yugoslav Wars, the Post-Soviet Collapse, or any other recent low-grade civil conflict, if you weren’t running a paramilitary group, the next best thing to be was a guy who could get clean travel papers and foreign currency, or who knew when something valuable was scheduled to fall off the back of a truck.
Security and intelligence are the most critical functions of a complex society that fail when civil order breaks down.
The problem in a conflict zone is rarely that there actually isn’t enough food to go around (or diapers, or cigarettes, or antibiotics, or what-have-you) — it’s that nobody knows where to find them, or what to buy them with, or how to protect what they have.
This means that there’s immense value in knowing who has needs, who has resources, what places are safe — and then facilitating the movement of people and resources back and forth between safe and unsafe places.
Becoming a credible provider of security in a crisis is extremely ticklish even to talk about (and anyway I’m the wrong guy to ask) — but it’s basically risk-free to become an intelligence provider: you just make lots of interesting friends who know lots of interesting things, and help people solve problems.
The job is functionally identical to political organizing or sales — or, put another way, political organizing and sales are subdomains of human intelligence work.
The only difference is the kind of people you’re looking for, the categories of information you want them to give you, and what you want to influence them to do.
And, unlike most Doomsday Prepping, this kind of work is valuable whether the world ends or not.
There’s definitely a place for plotting out the fields of fire from your upstairs windows, and stocking up on potassium iodide, and learning what kind of edible bark grows on your local trees.
But that kind of planning has a very binary payoff: either you need it or you don’t. As long as the lights stay on and you have to go to work in the morning, all your explicit doomsday preparation sits useless in your garage: a very expensive form of insurance, for a very specific long-tail risk.
Furthermore, getting too ready can be a liability in itself when you live under ubiquitous technical surveillance, potentially attracting the attention of the authorities or (other) hostile actors. As we often say at EXIT: “you do not want to be early to the party.”
We like “dual purpose” preparedness — things that are good to have no matter what happens. Across the spectrum of possible futures, from the most optimistic to the most catastrophic, there is no situation in which it is not useful to have a network of smart, capable, well-informed friends.
And it’s pretty easy to get started.
You start by mapping out who you know, and who you need to know.
Our friend
’s book, The Area Intelligence Handbook, lays out a framework for getting to know your community, and recording what you learn, as a preparedness activity.In sales, this is called a CRM (customer relationship management) system — basically, just a big database, where each entry is a “lead” (for our purposes, “someone you need to talk to”), and you record their contact information, how you met them, why you want to get to know them, their needs and interests, their birthday, other people they could introduce you to, etc.
There are professional solutions for this if you want to get advanced, but for an amateur network map, a basic spreadsheet is good enough, as long as it’s secure.
The point is to start thinking deliberately about who you know, what they want, and what they have to offer, and writing down what you’ve learned. Then, start thinking about who you should get to know.
It’s pretty obvious, but most people don’t think about it: if your family or community is ever in serious trouble, you will wish you had at least some warm contact with your neighbors. You should know who is on your city council, schoolboard and PTA. You should know someone in law enforcement, someone at the power company, the public works department, the hospital, the HOA, the churches, etc.
Having a relationship with a good mechanic can meet an existential need in a crisis — but it’s also just really useful to know a good mechanic (and to be able to refer a good mechanic.) Most of the contacts you make as part of your area study are like that.
It’s a bit like the “bigger better” game, in which you start with a single paperclip, and trade up for something “bigger or better”.
Kyle MacDonald, a blogger in Canada, traded his way up from one red paperclip to a two-story house in Saskatchewan over one year (and then, of course, leveraged his success into a book deal, motivational speaking gigs, etc.)
The trick to the game was that, with the early trades, the items were so trivial (a pen, a doorknob, etc.) that nobody really cared about the valuation — and once he got into high-value items (a vacation, a snowmobile, concert tickets), people were willing to take unequal trades just to be part of the story.
But the same tricks work for networking — in fact, they work better, because you can exchange the same useful information for new information over and over with different people.
Like trading for a paperclip, it starts with very minor transactions — small talk.
Most people enjoy talking about themselves, their job, and what’s going on in their world, for its own sake. They’ll like you a little bit just for asking, and they’ll like you a lot for remembering details later.
You should, of course, identify essential targets to get to know, based on your own priorities, but you should learn at least a little bit about everyone you encounter regularly. Many people have unexpected resources, but everyone has interests and needs, and eliciting that information at scale is a $500 billion industry.
To get beyond small talk, to people’s more guarded needs and resources, you’ll need to offer something more yourself — but the more conversations you have, the more you’ll have to offer.
It also helps, as Kyle MacDonald learned, to have a story.
If you’re on a field trip with your kids to the police station, you can ask all sorts of questions in a natural way. If you present yourself as a “business student”, you can often weasel your way into conversations with CEOs that are more valuable than a degree. If you buy a cow, you have a reason to talk to the butcher, the veterinarian, the clerk at the feed store, the auctioneer, etc.
Hang around the farmer’s market. Join the volunteer fire department. Become a regular at the corner store or coffee shop, and get to know the cashier’s name. Attend your local GOP (and DNC) meetings.
Get a couple cool guys together to meet for lunch once a month. If you’ve got three guys who will show up every time, you’ve got an institution.
If you do enough of this kind of thing (consciously initiating conversations with the intent to match needs with resources) inevitably you’ll start to solve real problems for people. Maybe you’ll introduce them to a new friend or girlfriend, or help them find a job. Maybe you’ll connect them with a local farmer who sells raw milk and eggs, or a good accountant or attorney.
And if you solve enough problems, people will start to think of you as a guy who knows people and solves problems — and, like the high end of the “bigger better” game, people will eventually start volunteering needs and resources just to be part of what you’re doing.
Recently, my daughter asked me to give her a “spy mission”.
So I told her to go learn the names of every kid in her Sunday school class, along with one interesting fact about each one, and pick one that she could do something nice for.
She, of course, thought this was extremely lame — but everyone I have met with experience in human intelligence describes it in essentially those terms: you make a lot of acquaintances, you identify needs and resources, and you look for ways to be well-liked and valued and useful to a lot of people.
I explained to my daughter that real life “spy missions” can be pretty dark: frequently the purpose of befriending and gaining influence with people is to undermine and extort them.
Getting to know people to help them looks a lot like (pretty much exactly like) getting to know people to hurt them — so, in order to get beyond the casual information that people don’t care about and give away for free, you have to develop a reputation for good will and discretion, which means you have to play a long series of iterated games.
But having a lot of friends and knowing a lot about them — remembering their birthdays, knowing what they want and appreciate, and thinking of ways they can help each other — can allow an ordinary person to do a lot of good.
So the EXIT guys are creating a Community Engagement group, to do this kind of building.
We’re meeting biweekly, starting on 10/7, to work on our area studies, plan local work parties, hackathons, and cocktail hours, and hand out spy missions.
The goal of all this is to build the networks of friendship and influence that will allow good people to organize on human terms, and pick up the slack as managerial systems decline.
And unlike other forms of preparedness, it does not matter how slowly or rapidly the decline takes place — or even if it somehow reverses. It is always a good time to make friends.
Spy mission #1: Get the name of the cashier at your local gas station, and find out when the White Monster shipments come in.
If you want to get involved, join us at exitgroup.us.
EXIT News
Tuesday night full group calls
Last week (9/23), we heard from Greg Treat on Building a Great House. Recording will be available to subscribers next week.
Next week (9/30), we will have a member Q&A with Jeremy Carl, author of Unprotected Class and nominee for Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs. Call will not be recorded.
On 10/7, we will have a member Q&A with Josh Lisec, co-author (with Jack Posobiec) of Unhumans.
Meetups
9/27: Austin. Cocktail hour invite below the paywall for subscribers.
10/10: Nashville. Cocktail hour invite below the paywall for subscribers.
10/17-10/18: Canyoneering trip in Zion National Park. Contact Devin or check #utah channel for details.
10/25: Oklahoma City. Cocktail hour invite below the paywall for subscribers.
11/8: Old Glory Club’s Weaving Event in Portland. I will be speaking.
Civic Engagement
One of our men in Nashville organized a Catholic trash pickup and was invited to be a regional chair of the Nashville GOP. You can just do things.
PNW guys had a mayoral candidate speak at their recent meetup.
Several guys are attending GOP meetings in Utah County, Austin, Dallas, Nashville, Pittsburgh.
Congrats to RockSand for crushing the Summer Fitness Challenge. Lost 10 lb bodyweight, 3% body fat, and completed a Tier 3 fitness test.
Cocktail hour invites below the paywall for Austin (9/27), Nashville (10/10), and Oklahoma City (10/25). EXIT cocktail hours are a great way to get to know the guys in your local area and figure out if the group is right for you.
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