Sarah Hoyt Is Prudent

I owe American Digest for featuring this particular essay in "Notable Quotes", but I have According To Hoyt high in my blog bookmark folder.  That's partly because I keep them in alphabetical order.  Anyway, Mrs. Hoyt talks about building "Galt's Network" in the event of a collapse.  I think she is probably correct about the nature of the collapse that is coming:

What you get instead is an inability to trust the civilization you’ve come to know.  Your “conveniences” will fail, and “conveniences in this case include not just cable TV (actually that might well keep going through it all) but electricity, water, roads.

Despite occasional moments of panic, I have generally felt we would experience deterioration rather than detonation.  At some points the decay may be more rapid and obvious, but overall things will simply get worse economically and in terms of the limitations we are forced to deal with.  Manufacturing, supply chains, and transport will not be broken but will be badly bent.

Here's another thing Mrs. Hoyt is right about:

Yes, the British empire collapsed, but when that Atlas shrugged we were there to take up the burden.  Yes, our ways were different, but we still were ready.  Only the less rational of the progressives expect China to take our place.  And that’s because they don’t GET China.

Nobody is going to come along and bail out the United States.  China is not going to take our place in the world even if they survive a crash in the West, which is unlikely.  We will be left to muddle through on our own.

The inflation/deflation question still looms.  Denninger thinks Bernanke will end QE in the next few months over concerns for his legacy.  Both equities and bonds seem to be reacting as if this were at least a possibility.  Nevertheless, the political class is going to put pressure on the next Fed chair to resume and even accelerate bond-buying because the government will get squeezed by tighter money.

Mrs. Hoyt and her family do not have the luxury of bugging out to an isolated, self-sustaining, defensible retreat in the event of a financial and societal failure. In that she is like many people.  We are going to need a shadow system, a way of communicating, cooperating, and interacting, that bypasses the current failed models from Big Government to Big Data to Big Education.

There is a lot of local structure in place.  Forget the federal government.  Concentrate on correcting ills within your local systems.  If they are too far gone, you may have to consider going elsewhere.

In any case, Mrs. Hoyt's essay is well worth the time it takes to read it.

As you may or may not know, she is a pretty good science fiction writer.  I read one of her (free) books called Draw One In The Dark.  It's not bad, and one of the few science fiction or fantasy novels I've tried recently which didn't get tossed aside in utter boredom or finished "ironically" because it was just too horrible to contemplate not knowing the full extent of the train wreck.  I am clearly not the intended demographic for a novel like this -- I would guess she was aiming at single Christian females under 35 who like to feel empowered.  It's certainly too YA and shape-shifter Jane Austen for me to recommend as a PFD pick, but Mrs. Hoyt's work did keep my attention.

In the same way that her SyFy is not my SyFy, her preps are going to be different from mine, and probably from yours.  She is also correct that some of us put too much emphasis on firearms and other favorite tools as opposed to creative thinking and problem-solving.  It is always good to get a different perspective on things.