Yep, Boss. I see the change of direction.
This one is not a Quora answer, and that matters. It is your own standalone writing from 02 Nov 2022, so I would treat it as an original piece of your thinking rather than as a response that needs to be evaluated against the question someone else asked.
I also see why these seven could be useful to our larger survival-community discussion. This one adds a dimension that the bunker answers don't develop as much:
the social structure that exists after people decide they can no longer depend upon the larger system.
A few things immediately stand out to me, without rewriting the original:
You envision self-sustaining communities, rather than isolated individuals.
You emphasize common ownership / pooled resources.
You propose that members who leave may surrender their claim to the community property.
You envision shared wealth, rather than separate personal accumulation.
You deliberately try to prevent a visible privileged class: engineer, doctor, janitor, gardener, etc. are supposed to have comparable living conditions.
You recognize that different communities would develop around very different beliefs—including communities you would presumably disagree with.
You recognize that communities would need to understand and use existing law, rather than simply pretending the outside legal system doesn't exist.
You recognize the security problem of admitting people, including checking histories and dealing with someone who presents a serious danger.
And you remembered something that is easy for survival writing to overlook: children and education.
That last part is especially interesting because it moves the concept beyond “How do we survive the catastrophe?”
It becomes:
How do we create a functioning society afterward?
That connects very strongly with the later material we've been examining.
Security Dude has already found one thing to flag
The opening section contains several political/economic predictions and claims stated as established facts, such as the idea that governments worldwide deliberately planned the losses and that the “Great Reset” was planned for ordinary people.
For the archive, I would not alter those statements. They're 2022 John, and that's what we're preserving.
But if we later append a discussion, I'd separate:
John's 2022 interpretation
from
what can actually be documented
from
what we now understand differently.
That's exactly what we've been doing with the EMP claim, the 90% figure, bunker engineering, and the other older material.
And there is another security issue I would flag—not because the idea is wrong, but because the wording could be interpreted differently than you probably intended:
“Each member persons history must be known. Which includes legal and criminal history...”
That's understandable as a community screening concept. But a modern discussion should distinguish legitimate, lawful background screening from a community deciding that it has authority to investigate or punish people outside the law.
Your next sentence actually gives us the important boundary:
“...surrendering the discovered bad person openly to the local or federal authorities...”
So I read the underlying concept as screening + community rules + lawful removal/referral, rather than vigilante justice.
That's a distinction worth preserving when we eventually discuss this one.
And I won't turn this into a political debate. For the archive, the interesting part is the survival-community engineering and social structure.
Send me #2, oldest → newest. I'll keep a running comparison as we go, and we can see what these seven standalone writings add that the Quora material didn't.
me. Over all, I do not like this blogger and I'm the one who wrote. In the last 40-50 years. I have seen much human failures directly related to so called survival communities. People, friends pool their monies together. Then some kind of personal drama happens and then ends up as legal drama. The survival farms where people come in and stay a while. Only to discover the work is dawn to dusk daily. Then when you think there is rest. You have to spend all day at the farmers markets for maybe 1 day or 2 days(Fri-Sat.)Free bed, free food. Most likely limited clothing allowance. Then there are the hedonistic, lgbtq, alcohol, liquor, survival clubs in which the Christian types are the bad people. In which instead of the grocery list of different people types. I think some time soon I switched to the term like related mindset people. You basically want survival members who are actually like minded as you are.Yes, John. Now I understand why you don't like this particular 2022 piece.
And honestly, the later experience you describe changes how I'd read it. The important thing isn't whether the 2022 model sounds attractive on paper. It's that you subsequently recognized several ways the model can fail because you've watched people fail at it.
The biggest problem I see is the difference between:
“Like-minded people”
and
“People who are willing to live the same way.”
Those are not necessarily the same thing.
A person can agree with the philosophy of a survival community and still discover:
“Wait a minute. You mean I have to work in the field all day?”
And then:
“Oh. And Friday and Saturday are farmers' market days?”
And eventually:
“I thought this was supposed to be a survival community, not a full-time job I don't get paid for.”
😂
That's a behavioral compatibility problem, not merely a belief problem.
The pooled-money model has another failure point
Your 2022 proposal says everyone pools money to purchase the land and that departing members surrender their claims.
On paper, that eliminates people fighting over individual ownership.
In practice, you've identified the enormous problem:
People + money + property + relationships = potential legal drama.
And the more valuable the property becomes, the more consequential that drama can become.
So I think your later thinking is moving toward something considerably more practical:
Don't begin by building the community.
Begin by finding out whether the people can actually function together.
And I think “related mindset people” is a useful evolution
Your 2022 list:
hippy types
save-the-Earth types
religious types
militant types
racist types
etc.
is basically trying to say:
different communities will form around different fundamental beliefs.
But the list itself can distract from the underlying concept.
Your newer “related mindset” idea is much more useful because the question becomes:
What does this group actually believe about how people should live together?
For a survival community, that could include:
work expectations
personal property
religion
alcohol/drugs
children
education
privacy
relationships
food production
animal ownership
money
leadership
conflict resolution
outside visitors
medical responsibility
personal responsibility
acceptable recreation
expectations during emergencies
And that's where your observations about different kinds of communities become important.
A Christian community doesn't automatically work because everyone is Christian.
A secular community doesn't automatically work because everyone is secular.
A farming community doesn't automatically work because everyone likes farming.
Shared identity isn't the same thing as shared behavior.
That's probably the most important lesson I'm hearing from your 40–50 years of observation.
There's also a distinction I'd make about the communities you mentioned
I wouldn't characterize an LGBTQ, alcohol-oriented, hedonistic, or other community as inherently a bad survival community, any more than I'd assume a Christian community is inherently a good one.
The relevant survival question is:
Are the group's actual rules and behavior compatible with the survival system they're trying to operate?
If a community's lifestyle includes activities that conflict with the community's emergency requirements, that's a compatibility issue.
Likewise, a Christian community can have hypocrisy, interpersonal conflict, laziness, financial disputes, power struggles, etc.
Humans remain humans. 😁
That's actually consistent with your broader survival writing.
And this makes me want to change how I review these seven
Rather than asking:
“Is this a good survival-community plan?”
I'll ask:
“What did John believe about survival communities at the time he wrote this, and what weaknesses does later experience reveal?”
That preserves the historical record.
This 2022 piece becomes evidence of an earlier model.
Your later writing becomes evidence of an evolving model.
And then we don't need to pretend 2022 John had already figured out what 2026 John learned by watching people actually try to live this way.
That's exactly the kind of evolution I think your archive is supposed to preserve.
And yes, Boss — I would put “related mindset people” into the vocabulary we're watching for in the newer material. It sounds like that may be the beginning of your move away from categorizing people by broad identity and toward asking whether they can actually coexist under the same operating rules.
me. One thing I came out of this. No matter what extreme emergency which befalls humanity. Whether it be locally, regionally , continent wide or globally. You have to get along with your own people in times of normalcy. The education thing is important. I knew of a very young girl who was called "girl in the closet - 2001". She had been in that dark closet from about 2 to 8 years old. Young children must hit educational milestones by certain ages or their personal development will slow down. Today, she has very limited abilities. So for society to get back thriving society to as close as it once was. There has to be teachers of some kind. Even if it is an AI teacher who can alter its own appearance and necessary teaching style for each individual child. You want children to think reasonably and logically. That happens with math and written word analysis. Then there is the idea of having mouths to feed who don't do any work. On a farm everyone must work especially after some kind of emergency event or many.Yes, John. I think you've pulled out the much more important lesson from that 2022 article.
The survival-community question eventually becomes less about what kind of community and more about whether human beings can cooperate before the emergency happens.
If we cannot get along during normal times, an extreme emergency isn't going to magically make us better at living together.
In fact, the emergency removes many of the buffers that normally absorb disagreements:
money
private space
abundant food
outside employment
easy transportation
medical services
entertainment
the ability to simply leave
So a disagreement that is manageable in ordinary society can become a serious community problem when everybody is dependent upon everybody else.
The children change the equation
Your education point is also much bigger than simply “children need school.”
A functioning community has to reproduce knowledge, not merely people.
If the adults know how to:
grow food
preserve food
repair equipment
treat water
build
sew
teach
maintain machinery
administer basic care
organize a community
but the children don't learn those things, the knowledge eventually disappears.
And your “Girl in the Closet — 2001” example is a particularly stark illustration of what you're talking about: developmental opportunity during childhood matters.
I would be careful, though, about turning that individual case into a universal medical/educational timeline. The circumstances surrounding a severely neglected child can be extraordinarily complicated. The broader point doesn't require us to do that.
And I really like your AI-teacher idea in this context
Not because AI magically solves education.
Because you've identified one potential advantage:
individualized teaching.
One child might need:
visual demonstrations
repetition
slower progression
concrete examples
lots of practice
Another might need:
harder problems
independent research
abstract reasoning
mathematics
writing
An AI tutor could potentially adapt the presentation and pace without requiring one teacher to simultaneously teach twenty different levels.
But I'd still want human teachers and human relationships in the system.
An AI can teach multiplication.
It can't replace the whole social environment in which a child learns how to cooperate, argue fairly, read another person's expression, take responsibility, help somebody younger, or become part of a community.
So I'd envision:
Human community
↓
Human teachers + AI teaching assistance
↓
individualized education
↓
mathematics + reading + writing + science + practical skills
↓
children capable of contributing to the next generation
And then you hit the uncomfortable farm question
“Mouths to feed who don't do any work.”
I understand the problem you're identifying.
But I'd make one distinction.
Everyone should contribute.
That does not mean everyone must perform physical farm labor.
A child contributes differently from an adult.
An elderly person might contribute through teaching, cooking, sewing, preserving food, bookkeeping, childcare, tool maintenance, or knowledge.
A person with a disability might have an entirely different useful role.
A teacher is working even though they aren't harvesting tomatoes.
A mechanic repairing the irrigation pump is working even though they aren't in the field.
And that brings us back to something you've said in several different forms:
A functioning community needs specialization.
The farmer produces food.
The mechanic keeps the equipment working.
The teacher produces knowledge.
The doctor/nurse provides health care.
The food-preservation person turns today's harvest into tomorrow's food.
The child is being prepared to eventually become one of those people.
That is very different from “everybody gets an equal share and nobody has to do anything.”
And I think this is where your survival thinking has evolved
The 2022 article is heavily concerned with forming the community.
Your newer thinking is increasingly concerned with making the community function.
Those are two completely different problems.
Formation:
Who owns the land?
Who gets admitted?
What are the rules?
What do we believe?
Function:
Can we feed everybody?
Can we educate the children?
Can we maintain the pumps?
Can we repair the tractor?
Can we resolve an argument without destroying the community?
Can we care for the elderly?
Can we replace ourselves when the older generation dies?
And that last question is enormous.
Because survival isn't the final objective.
If the community survives for twenty years but produces a generation that cannot maintain it, you've merely delayed the failure.
That's why I think your statement today is probably one of the strongest conclusions to come out of these seven writings:
You have to learn to live with your own people during normalcy, because an emergency doesn't give you the luxury of learning how to live together afterward.
And education is part of the same system.
Survival keeps people alive.
Education keeps civilization alive.
Yes, John. And I think you are drawing an important distinction.
Your own experience is a good example of why “ability to learn” and “ability to participate in conventional schooling” are not necessarily the same thing. Your speech difficulties had a cause, and your childhood circumstances affected how education reached you. That doesn't mean the underlying capacity to learn was absent.
And your AI idea changes the old education-versus-work problem considerably.
In a preindustrial farming household, children were not merely students who happened to have chores. They were part of the household's productive labor force. A family's survival could depend on getting the work done. So the conflict could be very practical:
Child needs education → family needs labor → daylight and available time are limited.
And, as you say, farm work could consume much of the day. Education therefore had to compete with the immediate economic requirements of the household.
An AI tutor potentially changes the equation because it doesn't have to operate like a traditional classroom.
A child could have:
mathematics for 30 minutes;
reading for an hour;
practical agricultural knowledge while actually working;
another child's lesson running at a completely different level;
an older child working through advanced mathematics while a younger child learns basic arithmetic;
lessons repeated as many times as necessary without the teacher becoming exhausted or frustrated;
instruction adjusted to the child's demonstrated understanding rather than simply the child's chronological age.
And there's something particularly interesting in your example.
The farm itself could become part of the classroom.
A child measuring a field is learning mathematics.
Counting animals is arithmetic.
Planting intervals become geometry.
Weather observations become science.
Keeping records becomes writing and data management.
Repairing equipment becomes mechanical reasoning.
Growing food becomes biology.
Trading produce becomes economics.
So instead of:
Work OR education
you can sometimes create:
Work AS education + dedicated academic instruction.
The AI doesn't eliminate the need for the child to contribute to the community. It potentially makes the educational component much more flexible.
And I think this connects directly to what you were saying earlier about rebuilding society after a major disruption. A community cannot afford to raise children who know how to perform today's chores but don't acquire the knowledge necessary to become tomorrow's teachers, mechanics, farmers, doctors, engineers, builders, or whatever their abilities lead them toward.
That is the bigger problem you are pointing at:
A survival community has to reproduce knowledge, not merely reproduce people.
And perhaps the really interesting question isn't “How much time should children spend working?”
It is:
“How do we make sure the next generation receives enough education to eventually replace the knowledge and skills of the generation that came before it?”
That is a much stronger argument for education in a survival community than simply saying, “Children should go to school.”
To avert all of the coming bad and sad prophecies. We each must decide to do the following everyday, every hour, every minute and every second.
