The way we are living now – I mean my wife and I – is an experiment. By that I mean that it is way off-course compared to the way we’ve lived most of the last twenty years, and it is not completely harmonious with our beliefs and worldview. Most of you know that before 2021 we lived off-grid, on a small homestead. No electricity or running water other than a small 300-watt solar array at my office down by the creek so I could charge and use my laptop and a few tools. Our solar arrangement was smaller than that used in many RVs.
We’ve done everything you can imagine when it comes to preparedness, survival, homesteading, and self-sustenance. Other than salt, (which you can’t make if you don’t have an ocean or a salt mine,) we’ve made just about everything you can imagine from scratch. We didn’t just make bread from store-bought “scratch,” but we made the scratch. We grew our grains, harvested them by hand, threshed the wheat, ground the grains, and made the bread. Then we even grew second and third-generation crops from the seed and made our bread from that. We made butter, sausage, wine, beer, whiskey, cheese, every condiment you can imagine, and a host of other things all from “scratch.” We grew enough food, including crops and animals, without modern equipment, to survive – which is even harder than you can imagine, especially without electricity or running water.
That was life.
Now we live downtown. On purpose. We get our electricity and other utilities fed to us through pipes and wires. I’ve written books about why this is not the ideal living situation for people like us. But I am learning things.
As a writer, I found that I lacked information about how other people live, and because of that, I lacked empathy for the difficulties and stresses of this other life. I still think most of it is ridiculous, political, and self-destructive, but now I understand how crushing modern life is for most people. The feeling that you are running from a monster that wants to destroy you (and is destroying you) and staying just a bit ahead of it. Modern life is brutal, even for the people who are doing well financially. It’s a daily mind siege. Bills, debt, uncertainty.
And now, inadvertently, I have people feeling negative, when that wasn’t my intention… so let’s turn this around.
Most people live the way they live for a couple of very apparent reasons. 1. It’s the way they’ve been taught, and all the other skills are either lost, hard to learn in the current cultural context, ridiculed by mainstream worldlings, and very expensive in terms of total investment. 2. They have no idea what humans and human society have lost as far as the knowledge and ability to survive without the superstructure of the technocracy that supports this artificial life. In other words, they don’t know what they don’t know. 3. Becoming a cog in a big machine is “easier” in the short run and appeals to the softer and weaker elements of our nature.
A rudimentary study and understanding of the History of Civilization would cure most people of their ignorance. And this is where you should start. You see, you are standing on a scaffold, very high in the air, that is called “civilization.” The mass-man, right now, even as you read this, is taking an axe to the foundations of that civilization. And it’s not just one axe. It is a million axes, and they are busy at work destroying the foundations that everyone stands on. They are destroying the cultural landmarks, removing history, bulldozing the pillars, blasting any basis for logic and reason, and eradicating the meaning of words.
As you watch something happening, the destroyers are telling you that what you are seeing is not what you are seeing. It is the opposite.
100 years after the collapse of the Roman Empire, goats grazed in the Coliseum and goatherds looked up at the massive edifice and the aqueducts and the rubble of a destroyed civilization and they couldn’t even imagine what sort of men could have built it. They gathered bricks and rubble and built huts from the cold. Fire and rocks reasserted themselves as the basic elements of life.
The antidote for demoralization and destruction is knowledge. Not just knowledge of history, which we need to re-learn, but knowledge of how to do things.
Go now. Bake a cake. Make some cookies. Build a fire. Construct a shed. Then, as you engage in every single ingredient, step, element, etc., ask yourself. How did my great-great-great grandparents do this without store, without pre-made ingredients, and without tools except those they had made?
Go now. Read Tolstoy’s War and Peace and then read Solzhenitsyn (The Gulag Archipelago) and see what happens when a great civilization is destroyed and the Bolsheviks take their place.
Go now. Rent Doctor Zhivago tonight and watch it on your television. Note the very rapid pace of societal devolution and destruction. The love story and the personal drama are the entertainment, the backdrop of a civilization that had prospered for hundreds of years coming apart is the meat of the story.
Go now. Watch The Killing Fields, or read my book God In The Storm if you want to see a true story of the destroyers taking over very rapidly and the death and genocide that follows.
This post isn’t political, it’s human.
It is the political thing today to look at the other side of the pretend uniparty divide and say “everyone who doesn’t agree with me is stupid.” The blues hate the reds and the reds hate the blues and it is the Crips and Bloods only with smartphones and people online who pick out their clothes.
When society collapses, the horde of ignorant, starving people who don’t know the first thing about survival won’t ask for your voter ID.
Learn something today.
Michael Bunker
