Survivalist literature: what to make of it?

Recently I was writing about the book written by Lavoy Finicum. The guy that decided not to go quietly into the night up in that Oregon standoff. I thought his book Only By Blood And Suffering: Regaining Lost Freedom touched on a number of things that seem to crop up in survivalist literature again and again.

I wrote in the other thread the following:

At the heart of Lavoy's writing seems to the be the concept that the interdependent relationships of society—with people relying on the collaboration of many people with specialized skills—not as a strength but as a weakness. He seems to think society itself is doomed because people are no longer jack-of-all-trade rugged individualists.

This is driven home by how his heroes, during their journey, come across helpless people time and time again. A single EMP attack seems to have turned everyone into clueless hordes. No one is organizing or forming plans. They are all just gathering in groups to whine and beg.

As such anyone that didn't have ready access or means to immediately grow or hunt all their own food become "takers" in his tale. Dependency on others made you weak. And dependency on relationships seems to be what he hated. If you were reliant on buying your food from a grocer they you were dependent on that grocer getting the products from a supplier. A supplier that was dependent on getting it from a manufacturer. A manufacturer dependent on getting it from a farmer or rancher.

All those layers of dependency seemed to have frightened Lavoy who saw no way that the interconnected nature of it all made it strong but instead made it all weak. Society itself, as such, is weak.

And he saw the liberal ideals as making things weaker by creating yet more layers of dependency. This is driven home when Jake's son is traversing the Grand Canyon and finds a horde of out of shape park rangers who are wandering about with no plans or ideas on what to do next seemingly with no real knowledge of the park they were rangers in just days before. Despite being people tasked with knowing everything about the park, despite being tasked with managing it they were still "takers". In Lavoy's mind they were just latte sipping liberals who knew nothing about the land outside of it being pretty.

So the whole thing seems to just be tiresome dreck that drives home the point, over and over again, that relationships and relying on others to do their part is bad. And society, as he saw it, was the ultimate interdependent relationship and thus would be doomed to utterly fail as soon as it hit any bump in the road. Which...of course ignores all of history where society powers through huge catastrophes again and again precisely because the organizing powers of society can harness the diverse distributed skills of numerous people.

What do you see at the heart of such written works? Is The Turner Diaries part of it? Or is it just a racist screed masquerading as survivalist literature?

via International Skeptics Forum http://ift.tt/1KIF77e