Don't Totally Dismiss the 'Survivalists'
There are many 'doomers' out there (we spoke to some recently; that seems to be a growing sentiment after two US "special military operations"* in two months - Venezuela in January, then Iran in February). The price of energy is rising fast and the mainstream media - trying to avert anxiety or prevent panic buying - prefers to assume all those oil tankers will soon go safely to all ports - both producing countries (ones that make "goods", e.g. Vietnam, China, Bangladesh) and consuming countries which use a lot of energy for leisure, including unneeded air travel. As if physical damage to facilities can be undone (repaired) overnight and oil/gas delivery operations resumed instantaneously.
At this time we see no prospect or route towards ceasefire (it's a stalemate and Cheeto makes new distractions with "you're fired"), so many fairly rational or well-informed people are preparing for the worst. "Have we safeguarded enough food?" "Are we equipped to deal with social breakdowns?" (Such as the 2011 England riots stirred up by Twitter, now owned by MElon)
One need not be a right-wing fanatic to see unruly people "out there". Yesterday I saw that some local facilities became a bit like caged zoos - basically fencing themselves off to protect themselves from local communities. I never before saw anything like this. It seems like local businesses either suffered anxiety or learned from bitter experience that they need a "gated community"-style setup.
It's even worse in the US, which I visited in the 1990s when gated communities were already normalised. Now they normalise troops in the streets, even inside airports.
'Survivalists' or similar terms are used to describe a particular mindset of people who prepare for some really awful scenarios - more so a violent scenario rather than a pandemic with curfews. Americans probably know other Americans who build bunkers, hoard firearms etc. It seems like a prevalent ideology there, partly inspired by the movie industry (fetishes of post-apocalyptic heroism).
That seems to have spread to Europe over time, more so after a series of major events and worldwide (interconnected) economic downturns. While the media likes to talk about so-called "AI" (slop, chatbots) as the thing that will "doom" society it mostly overlooks the dangers of social breakdown, unrelated to or not connected in any ways to slop, which mostly contributes to climate change and erosion of reliable information.
Social control media, YouTube in particular, is spreading the ideology of "the end is nigh" and many people make such prediction to sell silly products, including fake assets. This has created a boon for scammers that claim to sell (or keep for you) precious metal or scam-'coins' which only exist in someone's imagination or some transient online portal.
That last bit is why the ideology has basically been stigmatised as cranks and nutcases. People who see gloomy things ahead are presumed deranged; they're regularly mocked to discourage others thinking or expressing views similarly. In February, just before the latest war (last day of the month), US debt increased by about 300 billion dollars. One can imagine how big an increase will soon be reported for March. █
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* "On conducting a special military operation" (Russian: О проведении специальной военной операции, romanized: O provedenii spetsialʹnoy voyennoy operatsii). Putin's full-scale invasion is now in its fifth year, so it's a persistent war, not an "operation" (like "epic fury").