Harper\'s Magazine - 03.2020

LETTER FROM SALUDA 51

Maybe on both sides this secret
death wish is born of an error, the
conflation of society and the social
fabric, which are in fact separate
phenomena: society is made of the
institutions that work together to
ease human life; the social fabric is
the beautiful anarchic bedrock of
community and goodwill between
human strangers. It is true that soci-
ety is in deep trouble, but the social
fabric is innate and strong, and this
should be taken into consideration
when preparing for a possible disas-
ter. I was making the same mistake
as people who had a vision of the
world turned 180 degrees from my
own. I was discounting the social
fabric. All along, I had been making
my survival preparations in a state
of isolated intellectualization. I
didn’t trust myself to make a pathetic
little fire in front of other humans
who knew how to do so better than
I did. Faced with preppers who
didn’t look or talk like me, I had be-
come suspicious and afraid. My sur-
vivalism before Prepper Camp was
revealed to be a paltry thing; it did
not come from a community or out
of a larger collective effort.
In the months after Prepper
Camp, I have come to believe that
liberals need to begin preparing in
earnest for disaster situations. Lib-
ertarians and radical conservatives
seem to own disaster preparedness,
but liberals and progressives, equally
made of tender, breakable flesh and
bone, are just as much subject to
the whims of nature. We need to
use our knowledge, to apply to di-
saster preparations an understand-
ing of science and fact; we need to
develop real and actionable surviv-
alism so that regular people can be
as useful as possible in catastrophic
situations. Everyday citizens should
be taking classes in emergency
health care. They should learn to
store food and forage and make
shelters. Every household should
have stocks of food that will last
for at least two weeks, the means
to find water, an escape plan, a
bug-out bag.
Individual action is good. Even
better would be to counter individ-
ual self- obsession, to override the
pervasive libertarian impulse to

concentrate solely on the needs and

desires of the self. Americans need

to wake up to the necessity of im-

mediate, powerful collective action.

Self- reliance works only in stable

civilizations, in which angry indi-

vidualists like those I met at Prep-

per Camp have the leisure to con-

centrate on their own needs, to

pretend that the concerns of the

larger world simply don’t exist. I am

here to tell you that we absolutely

need the right-wing preppers’ de-

cades of deep thought, their anxiet-

ies transformed into the everyday

mastery of survival. Beyond learn-

ing from their mastery, we need to

find a way to pull the loudest, an-

griest, most militant individualists

into the collective, to make them

understand the necessity of the

common good.

We have pushed ourselves beyond

the point in the human narrative

when we can worry only about our-

selves. We have fucked ourselves

into a massive die-off, killing half

the world’s species. California is on

fire, Australia is on fire; we are al-

ready suffering, with displaced popu-

lations and major failures to the

electrical grid. Doomsday is here

now. We need to act collectively, we

need to act fast, if all humans—lib-

ertarian or progressive or the hapless

masses of the unprepared—are go-

ing to have a chance to survive this

warming world. Q

“One helluva team of

writers has produced a

book you’ll be dipping

into for years.”

— JIM BOUTON, AUTHOR OF BALL FOUR

RULES OF THE GAME

THE BEST SPORTS

WRITING FROM

HARPER’S MAGAZINE

PREFACE BY ROY BLOUNT JR.

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Harper’s Magazine uncovers

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This collection includes some

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EDITED BY MATTHEW STEVENSON

AND MICHAEL MARTIN

PUBLISHED BY FRANKLIN SQUARE PRESS

DISTRIBUTED BY MIDPOINT TRADE BOOKS,

A DIVISION OF IPG

March Index Sources

1,2 72Point Inc (NYC); 3–5 One Earth Future

(Broomfield, Colo.); 6–9 Pew Research Center

(Washington); 10 Gabriel Zucman, University

of California, Berkeley; 11,12 The Eviction Lab

(Princeton, N.J.); 13,14 Nicole Smith,

Georgetown University (Washington); 15,16

Raynor Group (West Hempstead, N.Y.); 17

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

(Atlanta); 18 Faidon Magkos, University of

Copenhagen (Denmark); 19,20 International

Energy Agency (Paris); 21 National Retail

Federation (Washington); 22 Optoro

(Washington); 23 UBS (London); 24 The

Nature Conservancy (Arlington, Va.); 25,26

Middlemore Hospital (Auckland, New Zealand);

27 Haider J. Warraich, VA Boston Healthcare

System; 28 Washington Post; 29–31 Institute for

Diversity and Ethics in Sport (Orlando, Fla.);

32,33 Marc Lerchenmueller, University of

Mannheim (Germany); 34,35 Ipsos (Chicago);

36,37 Bill Adair, Duke University (Durham,

N.C.); 38,39 Gallup (Atlanta).