If one looked at what I'm doing personally, you'd label me a survivalist. However I'm setting my aspirations much higher. I don't like survivalism - I don't want to see lots of people thinking only about "how to survive". That isn't the right mindset in my opinion. I'd be happier to see more people thinking about "how can we survive and do well". How can we build the sort of world we know we could achieve, even if we must go through collapse in the interim? (and yes, this is very long term thinking - far beyond my lifetime (especially if collapse occurred to a low floor, as I think it would currently without appropriate policies in place).
I largely agree, there are just dilemmas in this that make it hard to know what structures even still exist in a real collapse of things. I mean, policies at large scales are not going to plan for the fall of national governments or their basic structures; they would have no real way to know how to do that. What would remain, I suspect, would be local level structures, and those vary widely -- I think that far beyond just individual survival, having a pre-existing strong support network, and having the knowledge base that can adapt to fostering its members and so on, is honestly all I can think to do to even _get_ to a place, from real collapse, where we don't just survive as individuals, but actually build something better.
I don't see how we set up to do that without having any idea what we're facing, though. If it's mass starvation, which is my great suspicion, it becomes largely a question of organizing with people at local levels to make sure that there is food as possible and that the food is spread fairly, that sort of thing. Central systems would, at the moment, have to plan for what comes after they have no authority, in something like a total collapse scenario; I have no idea how they can do that. If you want to put a floor on suffering absent a strong central authority, that only happens via people organizing on more personal levels, and making sure that things are being dealt with reasonably fairly.
If you want to put a floor on it, I suspect that it takes making sure people have adequate support as possible and making sure that what resources are available can be fairly distributed. But how you go about that beyond a really localized scale, I have no idea, in a real collapse scenario. I mean, that's sort of the 64,000 dollar question when it comes to world peace, no?
I mean, does my plumbing still work, in this crash? Do we have running water? Because if not, my gardening knowledge is useless to both me and my community. And my biology and chemistry background will help us make water safe if we find it, heck, I can even build a still, but we have to find it first. How much we can do out of that depends on what happens from there -- can we get water? Who will get the pumps running, or fix the broken pipes, or deliver water, or will we have to move? Is there power for the pumps? Who is dealing with the grid? Will the city function, as a government? Will it act? And what about toilets? We can organize latrines, but how we do so depends on how many people they serve, and for how long, especially in this heavy clay soil.
We don't know the answer to any of these questions. If there is a local government that functions, it might help if it has policies for such an emergency situation, but that depends on how limited _its_ resources are. If there is still a central government, it depends on how many communities have no water, how many resources _it_ has, and whether it is in a position where they can be mobilized.
I don't think that shrugging is the answer, or sitting around doing nothing, I just think that figuring out what to do in a real, large-scale collapse of things is a little like trying to figure out what to do ahead of time if a meteor hits. I mean, you can have some general preparations for disasters, and you can have solid social networks built that will support each other when other networks fail, but you don't know what is left and what isn't, ahead of time, or what scale of recovery-followed-by-building you face.
I honestly think that knowing the people around you well is what provides the base for all rebuilding. I don't have any idea how one would go about trying to set up for the systems that come after the collapse and recovery from it -- with what structure?
I mean, if current authorities continue to have power, then their policies are somewhat useful things, but in a truly catastrophic failure of authority -- the level of, say, revolution, or of all systems totally overwhelmed by the scale of hunger or disease or general chaos -- it doesn't really matter what actual policies have been placed, it will all have to adapt from a (hopefully) solid base at more local levels, with no idea what's left on the other end to work with. Maybe policies, maybe nothing useful for the reality in front of you.
The specifics all matter immensely.
