Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Survival Porn

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
-Robert A. Heinlein, from Time Enough for Love: "Notebooks of Lazarus Long"

You must intelligently train, equip yourself for, and practice your medical, electronics, on and off-road driving, long range bicycling, cooking, fieldcraft, armed and unarmed combat, loaded hiking, carpentry, navigation, boating, food preservation, butchering, cycling, farming, veterinary, water finding, cooking, hunting, fishing, leadership, metal smithing, mechanical repair and fabrication, engineering and other critical survival skills. Being a real survivor has nothing to do with hobby shooting, wide-eyed fanatics, or overweight dude commandos, it is about living your life with the calm confidence that you are walking in the path that the Lord has set out for you while taking reasonable precautions to protect the life you have been given as well as being a vital asset to your family and community.

I am all for becoming a well-rounded person as Heinlein suggests, but as the latter quote shows you can go hog wild.

The global economy was built around the fact that people will get succeed more by doing the things that they are best at. That is called the division of labor, Adam Smith talked about it a lot, he's worth reading.

Quite a bit of the survival blogs out there on the Web spend an enormous amount of time talking about what they would do in all kinds of increasingly bizarre survival scenarios. Like how to survive your plane exploding at 30,000 feet(2 people are on record having done that just that) or if a gamma-ray jet hits the planet or some other highly exotic and unlikely event.

At some point it just devolves into survival porn, it distracts from the real day-to-day things we deal with often: a cut finger, someone having a heart attack or stroke or a car crash. Even a cut finger can become a life-threatening issue if not dealt with correctly. It isn't as though those things can't happen, they have happened somewhere already, but they are very rare and as I said before once you are ready for a just a few emergencies you will be ready for almost all the others.