Preppers: The Physical Manifestation Of Survival Instinct

I have long believed that humans have senses they no longer use. Back in the day when our distant ancestors relied on their wits life was simple but very harsh. If you couldn’t hunt you had no meat. If the weather turned against you, foraging became difficult or impossible.

The use of fire altered everything. For the first time early humans could exercise some control over their environment. For the first time they could cook their food, they had heat and the benefits that brings and they had light during the hours of darkness.

Over a period of thousands of years, methods of seed saving and the domestication of animals lead to the first hunter-gatherers staying in one spot, if not for life then until the crops failed though depleting the soil of nutrients. Thus rudimentary farming communities were born. As techniques and a working knowledge of the land improved more and more people settled, preferring the lifestyle to the constant moving of their forefathers. Some still left the settlements to hunt for meat and wild game. Cave paintings and settlement archaeology suggest this was not only to supplement the diet of the community, but because the old ways were hard to let go of in their entirety.

Over tens of thousands of years the senses of the ancestors dulled, many of the key features of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle were no longer applicable to those in settled communities.

Prepping was a way of life to these early communities. With no medical services, no mechanization and no governmental structure as such they had to be self-reliant. They still relied on their wits, but in a different way than those who lived constantly on the edge.

Some of these ingrained actions and reactions are still alive and well in modern man. The flight or fight response, and the urge to eat high calorie fatty foods in order to have enough body fat to survive the winter are two prime examples.

What about survival instinct? That feeling deep down in your gut that something is wrong? It seems to have fallen by the wayside. Continued development and agricultural and industrial revolutions saw a time of plenty ushered in. Food production increased, machinery provided the first mass produced tools and equipment and life expectancy increased.

Villages grew into towns and towns into cities as people congregated in areas of paid work, liking the ease of living close to their place of employment.

Electricity, the modern version of the discovery of fire changed everything again. We became as a species, even more removed from the life or death struggles faced by the ancestors.

We became soft, unable to reconnect with our group past. We stopped knowing the fundamentals of how to survive without the trappings of modern life. The vast majority of the people in what we now call the First World have no clue how to care for themselves. They cannot trap and skin an animal and they can’t grow food effectively. They have no idea about water collection and medicinal plants.

Preppers are people that are in touch with their history. They are not mad or sad people that should be vilified.  They are people who somehow have retained the gut instinct that allowed the human race to grow from a few thousand individuals to the seven billion souls that now occupy the planet. Without that instinct human life could not have survived.

Preppers, as the title suggests, are the physical manifestation of survival instinct.