I’ve been interested in this whole prepping thing for the past couple of years, and I noticed something: A lot of people seem to look down on it. The words “prepper” and “prepping” sometimes get negative reactions, and it got me wondering–why’s that?
It feels like some people see preppers as paranoid conspiracy theorists or just plain weird. But when you think about it, there are a ton of reasons to prep, like natural disasters (earthquakes, storms) or a bad economy. Prepping doesn’t necessarily equate to being a bunker-dwelling hermit, right?
What do you guys think? Why do you reckon “prepper” and “prepping” get a bad rap? Is it just how the media paints it, or is it something else? Any of you gotten weird looks or comments? How do you deal with it? And do you think folks are seeing preppers differently now with all the stuff going on in the world these days?
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It’s because a lot of preppers are sovereign citizen, conspiracy theory, right wing nut bags. The idea of prepping got really popular right before the turn of the century and again in the run up to 2012. Obviously nothing happened and many of those people prepping for the end of the Mayan calendar or the 2000 apocalypse looked like certified lunatics. Definitely where a lot of the ridicule and stereotypes come from.
In reality, prepping takes many forms and covers a broad spectrum of ideologies. Lately, prepping has been rebranded, especially in leftist circles, as sustainable living or homesteading. In the general public, you’ll probably still get a lot of assumptions that a prepper is a Nazi with a bomb shelter and a million guns. And there are quite a few of those people, to be fair.
In practice, prepping should be more like community resilience, sharing resources, and making as much use as possible of any amount of space you have. Loading up your basement with ten years of MREs and cans of bullets is basically useless. A real prepper stores enough to get through the worst of an emergency but has a plan for continued life in the event the economy completely collapses or something like that.
For example, my wife and I are members of a local farm co-op and have hydroponic gardens in half the corners in almost every room of our house. We have chickens, and our entire front plot of yard is loaded right now with squash, peppers, tomatoes, and more. We give away or trade what we can’t consume ourselves. And believe it or not we live just outside of the center of a small town and have neighbors all alongside and behind. I also own guns, and keep a store of a few months worth of shelf stable goods and have a solid selection of tools. It’s not set up right now, but I have solar power if I need it and the ability to get rain water collection going.
I don’t refer to myself as a prepper because that’s not the primary goal of what we are doing, it just so happens to be a bonus of the marriage between community engagement and self-reliance.
If you want to play a fun game, go on youtube and start searching for basic self-sufficiency stuff. Watch a couple videos about canning food, gardening, first aid, composting, things like that. Then let youtube autoplay and see how long before you end up on a video that uses the phrase “white genocide” unironically.
Oh man, no joke. When we first were trying to figure out chickens that’s exactly what happened. Went from learning how to keep foxes and racoons out of the coop to gold and crypto are going to be the only currency stopping the new world order and the leftists want you to eat bugs so here’s how to make beef jerky at home.
What is up with the far right thinking people are going to force them to eat bugs? Also why are they so squeamish that eating bugs is too icky?
It’s some opinion article that got picked up by Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson. Not only was it an opinion report, but it was largely taken out of context by right wing pundits to get rage clicks.
Also, right wingers are amazingly ignorant of the world and that people in many countries consume insects as a relatively normal part of their diet, and that insects have always been a pretty regular source of protein for our species and previous versions of humans. They’re so obsessed with what “third world countries” do and what what they think makes a “superior” civilization that they can’t see that they’re being rage fucked by their own prejudices.
If you’re preparing to save yourself, you’re preparing to abandon your community.
If you cant grow food, you’re not prepping, you just like guns. It’s okay to like guns. I like guns, they’re fun. But don’t wrap it up in this mad max fantasy of “I’m getting ready to protect my family in the end times” because what you’re getting ready to be is dead of an infection next to a pile of guns.
Up here in the PNW, there are a lot of Christian nationalist/neo-Nazis in the prepping scene. Back in the day the Aryan Nations used to get a decent amount of new recruits by doing lots of prepping workshops.
I’d be a bit more into it if it wasn’t for that. It’s always good to be prepared for a disaster.
Because preppers tend to be Christian Nationalists and anyone that unhinged who is stockpiling weapons is not someone you would want to be around.
I’ve two anecdotes.
- I had a friend who was raised by preppers and basically abused by them as a child in the guise of teaching them to be self-reliant. Abused as in–left outside in the cold without food as a pre-teen child and expected to use survival skills to live through the night. There’s no few “prepper” communities who become prepper because their ideology was too radical for regular people, which means many preppers are weird politically or religiously, and those who get out of those cults obviously have many justifiably harsh things to say about prepping that filter on to the mainstream.
- I’ve another friend, ex-mormon, who is watching their parents piss away their retirement into prepper stuff for an apocalypse that’s never going to come. The prepping is not carried out with thoughtful, measured decisions. It’s peer-pressure from a religious community all hyping each other up. And its preying on seniors, like so many scams do. For obvious reasons, seeing this happen to family and loved ones leaves a bad taste in people’s mouths. So they’re going to talk about what they see is consuming their parents, and that too will filter to people in the mainstream and give prepping a bad rap.
Over time, I’ve more inclined towards a prepping lifestyle–but it’s because I have trauma that makes it hard for me to hold down a 9-5. So when my life already has a habit of ping-ponging between feast and famine, and I can’t seem to kill the reason I ping-pong due to trauma, my work-around is to prep when I have income, and survive on it later when I don’t. I approach it with measured reasons.
In my unique situation, “prepping” is basically a work-around bandaid to my PTSD, and I’m well aware my circumstances are NOT the same as other people’s, and I have no intention of converting others or drawing them into it.
It’s probably a connection to the “survivalist” mentality, which is commonly seen as “buy countless guns, live in the woods, kill anything that gets too close.” Survivalists got a bad rap back in the 90s, and it has stuck around. Of course, there have been a number of groups since then that haven’t helped the image. Think Ammon Bundy and the Montana Freeman who were actually just a bunch of Sov Cits.
My idea of “survivalist” is someone who has the knowledge to live off the land (or whichever situation you’re in) with minimal or only the essential tools. I guess there are some negative connotations to survivalism.
Over the top TV shows have not helped either.
I think you’re running into an issue where the media absolutely loves extremes and this hobby/lifestyle tends to breed them. There are plenty of preppers who absolutely fit the stereotype that most people have of prepping, and any exposure the community gets isn’t going to be given to the nice folks who just have a few jugs of water and a shelf full of canned garden veg in their basement, it’s gonna go to the raging white nationalist who has a minigun and is sure that Jewish people are actually aliens sent here to harvest our thoughts. This creates a feedback loop where prepping means “crazy white nationalists with several guns for each hand”, so crazy white nationalists who like guns pour into the community until they eventually take it over.
I think that you’ll notice the same ideals without the implication of violent right-wing psychopaths if you start investigating homesteading, self-sufficiency, community organization movements, first aid and things like that. We exist, but the word “prepper” is lost to us at the moment.
