You are on your own.

The bad news is that disasters, whether from natural or manmade hazards, are occuring more frequently. When a disaster strikes you are not going to be able to rely on the government to get you out of it. In all disasters it tends to be you and your immediate neighbours and co-workers who will be the first responders. Lee Clarke the author of Worst Cases: Terror and Catastrophe in the Popular Imagination states that:

As individuals we have to assume that organizations will fail us. The implications of this approach are enormous. It means that although we should demand more performance and transparency from officials, and the organizations they try to control, we should not buy their promises that they’ll always be there for us. They won’t. It also means that if we really want to prepare for disaster, we need to push resources down to the very local level. People die in the same ways, and in the same places, that they live—their houses, faith-based organizations, workplaces, and so on. In a plane crash, it is the passenger next to you who is the real first responder. If your office catches fire after a terrorist attack, it will be the person in the cubicle next to you who will save you. Command and control of disaster doesn’t work. It never has. We need to disorganize for disaster. Along these lines, I’d like to see an expansion of the idea of “critical infrastructure.” Presently, CI is mainly an engineer’s list: the power grid, energy production, telecommunications, and the like. But in a big flu epidemic undertakers become just as critical, because if you can’t get rid of bodies expeditiously you have a big problem. If a cloud of toxic chemicals drifts toward a major city, first-grade teachers become a critical part of the infrastructure. Disorganizing for disaster means abandoning command-and-control models in favor of networks and community preparation. We need flexibility, not rigidity, when our worlds fall apart.”

The problem with a many of the plans prepared by the authorities is that they are developed in isolation by ‘elite’ experts. They do not take into consideration the general distrust many citizens now have for their governments. This is not surprising for citizens of the US after Katrina. The US government has preferred to see citizens as fearful children who need to be protected rather than useful partners in handling a disaster. Former Green Beret and  Rand terrorism Expert Brian Michael Jenkins puts it like this:

“At home, we in America have spent the past five years scaring the hell out of ourselves. Terrorism is either violence or the threat of violence calculated to create an atmosphere of fear and alarm. As we have seen, terrorism often works. Unfortunately, the unceasing public discussion of America’s vulnerabilities, the alarming alerts that followed 9/11, the proliferation of barricades and bollards, and the media reports of government officials holed up at secret sites have all added to the national anxiety.

Instead of puncturing the terror by educating and engaging the public in its own preparedness and response, Washington consigned citizens to the role of helpless and frightened passengers while it went after the bad guys. What else but fear can explain the readiness of Americans to tolerate tossing aside the very Geneva Convention agreements the United States had fought to implement? What else but fear could have led Americans to even entertain public arguments in favor of torture and against any restrictions on how we might treat those in custody?”

This sort of thing is not unique to the US as the UK editor of The Survival Guide found when he made some enquiries about nuclear safety in the event of a terrorist incident. Rob Edwards who was writing for New Scientist magazine found that the authorities would not even give him information regarding what types of fire extinguisher they were using.

Catastrophic mass casualty events by their nature are going to overwhelm the ability of governments to deal with them. The lesson for communities and citizens is that you are on your own. We all need to take responsibility for our own security. The rich are already opting out of the government system by moving into gated communities and hiring private security companies to protect them. Hebrew University historian Martin Van Creveld describes the current exodus from reliance on government security services below:

““More than anything else, however, the feeling that states are no longer as capable of holding their populations in check as they used to be is the growth of gated communities and a vast private security industry. The former are like medieval cities, presenting fortress-like facades to what their inhabitants obviously feel is the growing disorder outside; the latter has turned into a growth area where fortunes are being made, armed forces raised, weapons acquired, and power accumulated and not seldom projected.”

The rest of us will have to take a more do it yourself approach and develop our personal and community resilience.

Why Prepare?

On August 29 2001 civilization temporarily ended in a major city in the richest country on earth. When the levees were breached by Hurricane Katrina New Orleans the city was inundated. The services that modern urban societies rely upon such as law enforcement, rescue, energy and medical were not available to the average citizen who was dependent upon them. The scenes throughout New Orleans especially at the Superdome and the Convention Center illustrates the fate of those who fail to prepare for disaster and rely on the authorities instead.

 

Hurricane Katrina is an example of what is known as a ‘predictable surprise’. Max Bazerman from the Harvard Business School defines “predictable surprises” as …”occurrences that take most people by surprise despite adequate data to predict them.” President Bush said shortly after the breach that “I don’t think anybody anticipated the breach of the levees.” This was despite the fact that Federal, State and Local Authorities had completed a computer simulations showing that a breach was possible and the National Geographic having made television specials about such a disaster. President Bush along with many residents of the New Orleans area ignored the scientific evidence and prior warnings and operated on the hope that the levee’s would not be breached.

 

Government leaders and people generally are faced with cognitive barriers that prevent them from heeding the warnings that are given to them and taking preparedness seriously. People tend to have positive illusions tending to think good things will always occur and discounting the possibility of disasters. As a society we are not good at investing now when the rewards are unclear. People are often blamed for making a particular decision but not for failing to make one. This leads to a preference for indecision. Finally people are so caught up in daily tasks that they fail to look at the big picture.

 

Despite governmental failure some private individuals and businesses continued to operate during the storm and its aftermath. One individual blogged of his experience in keeping an online business functioning throughout the storm. Michael Barnett was a former US Special Forces operative who had created a detailed business continuity plan that would allow his critical business to operate in such a contingency. More importantly he actually invested time and resources into implementing the plan.

 

The lessons we can take from Hurricane Katrina are:

1. Individuals must overcome their cognitive barriers in order to perceive the likelihood and consequences of the threat. They must not follow popular opinion but instead rely upon facts and evidence.

2. Independent action to mitigate, avoid, or prepare for the threat is the only prudent course to follow because the majority of people will rarely recognize or take any action until it is too late.

3. You cannot rely on the authorities, the mainstream media or other official sources during a large scale crisis. Through action or inaction they are often part of the problem.

4. The earlier one recognizes the threat and begins to prepare for it the better the chance that you can come through unscathed.

 

Today there are many cornucopian’s who believe that there is nothing to worry about and that the end of history has arrived. Market forces will solve all of societies energy and environmental problems. Things are getting better. Nothing to worry about!

 

On the other hand if you are looking at this site it is likely that you are concerned about the seemingly unsurmountable global environmental, energy and economic problems that seem to point towards The Coming Anarchy, The Long Emergency, or Collapse. Thomas Homer-Dixon notes five converging “tectonic stresses” which potentially threaten planetary civilization. They are:

• energy stress, especially from increasing scarcity of conventional oil;
• economic stress from greater global economic instability and widening income gaps between rich and poor;
• demographic stress from differentials in population growth rates between rich and poor societies and from expansion of megacities in poor societies;
• environmental stress from worsening damage to land, water forests, and fisheries; and,
• climate stress from changes in the composition of Earth’s atmosphere.

Homer-Dixon notes that, “Of the five, energy stress plays a particularly important role, because energy is humankind’s master resource. When energy is scarce and costly, everything a society tries to do — including growing its food, obtaining enough fresh water, transmitting and processing information, and defending itself — becomes far harder.
The effect of the five stresses is multiplied by the rising connectivity and speed of our societies and by the escalating power of small groups to destroy things and people, including, potentially, whole cities.

Homer-Dixon argues that these stresses and multipliers are potentially a lethal mixture. Together, they greatly increase the risk of a cascading collapse of systems vital to our wellbeing — a phenomenon he calls “synchronous failure.”

The probability that oil production has peaked (peak oil) will inhibit governmental abilities to deal with the converging ‘tectonic stresses’ and may lead to civilizational collapse. One of the greatest dangers during a collapse would be that when societies fall apart “the worst are full of passionate intensity.” Soldiers and police, particularly married men who see the state of the civilian population, may desert in such “moments of contingency.” Being skilled in the use of arms, they will present a serious threat. Think of how many New Orleans police deserted in “normal times.”

The problem with a lot of people who look at the possibility of civilizational collapse is that they don’t want to look at the public order issue. Make no mistake a civilization collapse would not be fun. Having said the above, you are not going to survive as a single family unit with a hoard of bullets and beans holding off the “mutant zombie bikers.” People who survive will do so as part of a community.

So where should you begin your preparation? I don’t agree with everything on this list but Insurgent American’s 35-Point Practical Guide for Action is a good place to start. In The Wake presents A Collective Manual for Outliving Civilization which is downloadable as a .pdf. Matt Savinar’s site Life After the Oil Crash has a good section on preparation. That should get you started.

 

Revolutionary salutations from the Felix Dzherzhinsky Workers Defence Collective!

    Revolutionary salutations from the Felix Dzherzhinsky Workers Defence Collective. The purpose of the collective is to assist all of our comrades in achieving personal and community resilience in the 21st Century.

The title of the blog originates in the Scottish writer Ian Macleod’s science fiction novel The Star Fraction. Macleod was a Trotskyist back in the 1980’s but these days is more of a Libertarian anarcho-capitalist. In the book Macleod imagines a near future Balkanized anarcho-captialist Britain. In this future Moh Kohn works as a security mercenary for a private military contractor ironically named The Felix Dzerzhinsky Workers Defence Collective. A good review of the book “Anarchies, States, and Utopias: The science fiction of Ken MacLeod”, can be found on the Reason magazine website. For the record the historical Felix Dzerzhinsky was a truly evil man.

Some of the topics I plan to cover include open source intelligence, business continuity, disaster and emergency management, personal security, and environmental issues .

Once a week I will also keep my readers up to date on steps that can be taken to deal with the imminent threat of a zombie invasion. It is well documented in the press that governments, businesses and individuals are poorly prepared for zombie invasions. Business continuity issues in particular have been overlooked.