The answer is not a stockpile in a bunker

Everyone has seen the pyramid. Physiological needs at the base, then safety, then love and belonging, then esteem, then self-actualization at the tip. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is one of those diagrams that turns up in cringy corporate slide decks. Ironically, although the hierarchy bears Maslow’s name, the pyramid was not his. It was drawn by a management consultant in 1960, as a way of arguing that you could buy maximum motivation for minimum cost. Maslow never objected to it. But he had already written, in 1943, that the order was not rigid, and that a person is partly satisfied at every level at once.¹

Still, the pyramid is a compelling picture because it aligns with an intuition we already have about emergencies. Under threat, the upper tiers feel like luxuries. Community, purpose, meaning, and mental health are nice things that we do want, but they are really hard to obtain. The easy rationalization goes something like this: “First let’s secure the basic needs, then it will be easier to focus on the rest”.

Prepper culture tends to be almost pathological in its approach to the pyramid. Many preppers translate the pyramid into physical things: water at the bottom, rice and beans next, then a locked door, a rifle, a generator. The hierarchy becomes a plan for stockpiling a bunker, and the typical claim is that when the trouble comes, the person with the best bunker stockpile wins.

The historical record is not very supportive of this.

What actually kills people

In July 1995 a heat wave sat on Chicago for a week and killed 739 people above the expected baseline.²

Nothing at the bottom of Chicago’s “hierarchy of needs” had failed. The taps still ran. The shops had food. The hospitals were open, if overwhelmed. By the standards of any disaster in human history, the base tiers of Chicago’s Maslow hierarchy were in excellent shape, but hundreds of people died anyway.

A case-control study published the following year looked at who died and who did not.³ The strongest predictors of death were living alone, being confined to bed, and not leaving the house daily. The strongest protections were a working air conditioner, access to transportation, and having social contact.

Eric Klinenberg followed this up with what he called a social autopsy of the disaster, and found something stranger.⁴ He compared two neighborhoods with nearly identical poverty rates and nearly identical elderly populations, and found death rates that differed by close to an order of magnitude. His explanation was that one of these neighborhoods still had active street life. Little Village had open shops and enough people out in public that going outside was ordinary and safe. Old people went out to escape the heat in air conditioned shops and restaurants. North Lawndale had lost its big employers and most of its shops, and what was left was vacant lots and a reasonable fear of crime. There, the rational move was to stay inside with the door locked, even as the heat built up.

The real killer during that Chicago heat wave was not scarcity, it was being cut off. A missing air conditioner was survivable if there was somewhere to go. For the people who could not go anywhere, it was survivable if there was someone who would come.

Deliberately engineered morale

One of my favorite National Geographic magazines growing up told the account of the ship Endurance. It was caught and crushed by polar ice, leaving the sailors stranded. But there were actually two ships that ended up in the same predicament within about a year of each other, and there was a massive difference in the outcomes.

The Endurance was beset in January 1915 and completely sunk about ten months later, leaving twenty-eight men on an ice floe. Captain Ernest Shackleton deliberately managed morale. He established daily routines, including shared meals with the seating rotated so cliques could not form, football on the floe, and singsongs. He had troublemakers assigned to his own tent where he could keep an eye on them. When the ship had to be abandoned, he made the men leave behind gold coins and personal possessions, but told ship meteorologist Leonard Hussey to bring his banjo. Shackleton called the banjo “vital mental medicine”. Nineteen months after the ice took their ship, all twenty-eight men were alive to be rescued.⁵

The Karluk was beset in the Beaufort Sea in 1913 and crushed in January 1914. There was no Ernest Shackleton on board. The Karluk’s expedition leader had left the ship months earlier with a hunting party and never returned. What remained was twenty-five people with a competent captain but no intact social order. The captain encouraged the party to set up several separate camps, as he felt that having multiple smaller groups would help keep incompatible people away from each other. In reality, it turned into a nightmare of accusations and conflict. The party argued over supplies and suspected theft. Illness killed some and the bodies went unburied. A gunshot was heard, then a body was found, and no one was sure if it was an accident, murder, or suicide. Eleven of the twenty-five died.⁶

Both expeditions ended up trapped in comparable cold, with comparable stores, but one group had a functioning community and the other did not.

Community knowledge saves lives

On 26 December 2004, the island of Simeulue was hit by a massive tsunami originating from a 9.1 magnitude earthquake. Roughly 78k people lived on the island. Although the tsunami killed an estimated 228k people across 14 countries, the death toll on Simeulue is estimated at 44.⁷

The reason has a name: smong. It is an oral tradition originating from a tsunami that had hit the island almost a hundred years previously in 1907. That history was passed down in stories and songs told to children. Everyone knew that if there was an earthquake, and the sea pulls back, then you run for the hills. When the ground shook that morning the people saved themselves without needing any official chain of command or instruction.

But there was a chain of instruction. It was built out of generational links that passed down a particular story to the children and grandchildren. There was no other warning to be had. No tsunami warning system existed anywhere in the Indian Ocean that morning, and the one that exists now was built because of that day.⁸

Neat models are where errors hide

The examples I’ve shared so far would seem to suggest an inverted pyramid, with the highest tiers of Maslow’s hierarchy actually being the tiers that help you survive, but that’s too neat of a story, and neat is usually where errors hide.

Between 1944 and 1945, Ancel Keys ran thirty-six conscientious objectors through six months at roughly half their normal caloric intake.⁹ They lost about a quarter of their body weight. What collapsed was more than just their bodies. They became obsessive about food, apathetic, irritable, depressed. They withdrew from each other. They lost interest in their friends, and in the humanitarian relief work they had volunteered for in the first place. One of them cut off three of his own fingers.

So the lowest tiers of Maslow’s hierarchy definitely interact with the higher tiers. Starvation dismantles the upper tiers with great efficiency. I see the different tiers of the pyramid as more of a loop. Every level is helping maintain every other one. A person with food and no people loses the will to eat it. A person with people and no food eventually stops being able to be a friend.

Another caveat: there is a theme, popularized by Viktor Frankl, that says that survivors are the ones who have meaning.¹⁰ Frankl tells the story of Nazi concentration camps, and those that found the strength to survive. Unfortunately, the camps, famines, and evil guards did not only kill the insufficiently purposeful. They killed indiscriminately, and no amount of resolve could skew those odds. Most of the people who died had no option but to die.

So it’s not always possible to save your own life. But it is important to remember that in the situations where survival is genuinely achievable, the thing that decides who makes it is often more social and psychological than material.

The bunker is a bet on other people

Here is the part that should worry anyone whose plan is to go off-grid and hide in a bunker, or who lives near someone who has that plan.

Disaster researchers have been documenting the same finding for over half a century. Mass panic is rare. Looting in domestic disasters is rare. The dominant response of ordinary people to catastrophe is immediate, improvised cooperation, and the actual first responders are almost always neighbors digging with their hands, well before any agency arrives.¹¹

Actually, one of the most dangerous things about disasters is “elite panic”.¹²

In San Francisco in 1906 the troops shot suspected looters and dynamited firebreaks, actually spreading a fire they were meant to stop.¹³

I remember firsthand in 2005 there were countless breathless media stories about mass atrocities occurring in the Superdome after the New Orleans flood. What many don’t realize is that the worst of those stories did not survive investigation. What is verifiably true is that police in a neighboring town blocked a bridge to turn evacuees back, and New Orleans officers shot people at Danziger Bridge.¹⁴

In many ways a bunker is obscene. A bunker is not just a container of goods. It is a wager (often made by wealthy, elite individuals) that a specific anthropological prediction will come true: that when the systems fail, everyone outside the door becomes a threat.

The evidence says that prediction is usually wrong. Worse, thinking this way is what does the damage, and ordinary people who succumb to this line of thinking can end up becoming a problem, even if they aren’t wealthy and elite or wearing a uniform.

Algiers Point is a New Orleans neighborhood on high ground that never flooded. Its houses were fine, its streets were dry, and the National Guard made its ferry landing an official evacuation site. People who had lost everything walked there to catch a bus out. More than a dozen armed residents barricaded their streets with downed trees and ran patrols to keep outsiders away. One of them shot three Black men who were walking through. He was convicted of a federal hate crime and sentenced to ten years.¹⁵

Nothing at the bottom of that neighborhood’s pyramid had failed. What failed was the assumption about who was coming up the street.

Someone who arrives at a crisis with a stockpile, a rifle, and the settled idea that his neighbors are a mob has not prepared to survive it. He has decided in advance what the people around him are going to turn out to be, and Algiers Point is what that decision looks like when it is wrong.

Don’t forget about lead times

Maslow’s hierarchy is a decent description of what a whole life contains. It is a terrible project plan.

Read as a sequence of operations, it tells you to buy rice now and work on friendships later.

Read as a general description, it says that a person consists of a body and a state of health and a set of relationships and a role and a reason, all at once, continuously, and that removing any one of those makes the whole thing fragile no matter how wide the underlying layers are.

Also, look at which layers you can actually acquire on demand. Twelve months of calories can be in your garage in a few days for the price of a gaming PC.¹⁶ You cannot buy a neighbor who will check whether you are still breathing. You cannot stockpile the trust that lets six households share supplies with each other. You cannot pick up an essential skill when all your time is being spent on survival. You might struggle to find a reason to keep going if you don’t already have one before the hard times hit.

The supplies are the component with the shortest lead time. The things people treat as optional have lead times measured in years. So the ordering, if you insist on one, probably runs exactly the opposite way from Maslow’s hierarchy:

• A reason for living, specific enough to picture. Not money, something real.
• People you can name, within walking distance, with actual reciprocity already in flight, spread across enough households so that no one carries too much load.
• Health, the boring kind. Sleep, fitness, teeth, and mental health. Being unwell in a crisis is not just suffering, it is degraded judgment.
• Skills that help yourself and others. Growing something, fixing an engine, closing a wound, and running a meeting full of frightened people who disagree with each other.¹⁷
• Then the water and the rice. Genuinely, do it. It is cheap and it is real. Just do it last, and do it knowing that is the easiest part of prepping.

Conclusion

Last year I wrote about optimism bias, the idea that bad things only happen to other people. There is another bias on the pessimist’s side, equally comfortable and equally false, which says that when collapse comes, everyone else becomes the enemy and the answer is a locked door. Both of these biased delusions are ways of getting yourself off the hook. One tells you to do nothing because nothing will happen. The other tells you that you can do it alone, and that there is no need to help others.

What the record actually shows is that a group of frightened, hungry, underqualified people who keep talking to each other can survive better and survive for longer than seems reasonable.

The bottom of the pyramid is a purchase. Everything above it is a practice. The purchase can be completed in a weekend. The things that are difficult, which take a long time, are the things that are most effective at saving you.

Postscript: Notes & Influences Behind the Writing

The title - The title is an homage to “The answer is not a hut in the woods”, one of my favorite pieces of media ever. It is a 46 min biographical story, told by Exurb1a, about being a writer, experiencing creative burnout, and the attempt to escape one’s problems via isolation, only the discover that what you needed all along was companions. I’ve rewatched this video at least once a year since it was released. Someday I hope to write as well as he does.

Reddit - I don’t know if anyone else’s Reddit algorithm is like mine, but I see a lot of r/collapse and r/prepperintel these days. There is useful info in there, but also a lot of people who seem to have completely the wrong idea about how to survive a disaster. I actually wonder whether misinfo on the topic of disaster preparedness and community resilience is purposeful. I think there’s a lot of money to be made selling solutions, but maybe the most effective protections can’t be bought.

Adjacent work - Around the same time that I started thinking about writing this piece, I also wrote some snippets that became “What the Soft Animal Wants”. That piece is more poetic and sentimental, while this one is more based on historical references, but both pieces are basically advocating for the same thing: there is more strength in numbers and cooperation.