Gunner Quinn
Editor’s Introductory Note: This young man is prayerfully seeking a wife. He is offering an after-marriage gift of up to $50,000 to whoever introduces him to his bride with $18,000 after their marriage and another $16,000 to the individual who provided the introduction after the first two births of healthy children born to him and his wife, for a total potential gift of $50,000. For further details, see this link to his article posted on February 24th, 2025: My Quest For a Wife.
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(Continued from Part 3.)
Welcome to the Grimy Age
In this future time after the “golden age” (let us call it the grimy age), you are at your retreat and a biker is holding a knife to your young daughter’s throat demanding capitulation of your force to his renegade motorcycle gang (less fuel used, more efficient for raiding): what are you going to do? You have very few good options, but you first need to know that a loved one getting captured and held hostage is often the first act of surrender of a position. Most people are not experts in hostage negotiation tactics, have never even been trained in real fighting, and frankly are not warriors. Few people are as Heraclitus stated: “Out of every one hundred men, ten shouldn’t even be there, 80 are just targets, nine are the real fighters, and we are lucky to have them, for they make the battle. Ah, but the one, one is a warrior, and he will bring the others back.”
It helps to have someone providing overwatch, but people who get into these situations lack forethought, so I doubt someone is going to alert your group of riders coming in (to get non-combatants to safe positions and get your force ready for action) and enforce Rule 308 from an overhead position as that situation likely would never develop with planning and some accurate marksmanship. You win 100 percent of the battles where you never need to engage as the enemy is expending his resources often getting deeper and deeper into your territory (lessons were taught to the French and Germans in Russia in 1812 and 1941). It is often better to be as inconspicuous as possible as any engagement can be costly.
It is unfortunate that these situations will someday exist as more and more desperate people try to fill their bellies and embrace Machiavellian ethics as the rule of law collapses. Since people desire an answer, I will tell you that most individuals will go for the easiest “solution” like the temporary promise of safety with a hug from your crying child with most likely your throats being slit anyway. Dangerous men are not stupid and to leave witnesses behind is foolhardy at best or worse angry people in your rear position. As the old saying goes, “they can’t hang you twice.” I doubt that this situation would occur to anyone in my retreat group as we trained for it extensively.
First, don’t get captured. In this grimy scenario, men need to be on the outer edges and women and children in the inner ring of protection. Second, it would be difficult in such a scenario to be in your right mind as you would have to be in an unclear state to surrender your arms (except for military units who are expecting “honorable” terms) to renegades and expect a positive result. There is no honor among renegades or criminals. There is no honor among military units either at the farthest edges of desperation: A German capturing a British soldier in France in 1940 is very different than a German fighting for the Fatherland in late 1944 after getting a letter that the recent raid on his hometown courtesy of the Eighth Air Force killed his family.
We are Christian people. The worst case for us is that we die and go to heaven. If you are a believer, you will be united with other believers in heaven. Surrendering and expecting safety from someone who would have dishonor to hold a child at knifepoint is likely not someone to negotiate with.
Desperate people are no one to negotiate with ever because usually it is a quick exit off the stage for the people who are on the weakest end of the negotiation. Zapata, the early 20th Century revolutionary, is often credited with the concept of “I’d rather die on my feet, than live on my knees,” but like all concepts it usually goes back to antiquity with the Greek answer to Shakespeare the tragedian Aeschylus writing, “For it would be better to die once and for all than to suffer pain for all one’s life.” Usually in these situations “no quarter” is the unwritten rule, but most people have trouble reading between the lines spoken by desperate men when the thin veneer of civilization has been removed.
The patriot Samuel Adams had a warning for those who were not with the cause and what will their fate would be under circumstances where people were making a decision on which way to go toward freedom or perpetual obsequious servitude to the Crown: “If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.”
A theme common in prepper literature is bartering. As a third-generation prepper, if I am bartering, I have failed in some way to secure what my family physically needs. Right now, everything is available. It probably will be going on sale during a golden or gilded age as people sell their hard goods buying soft goods and experiences. My family has for decades trying to get people prepared spiritually, financially, and physically, but few people listen. The world is a great siren call of distraction even for Christians. The world promises ease when we are called for service and sacrifice. We are not “all work and no play” and have many enjoyable activities among our family and friends including regular vacations. Because we are so prepared, we do not have to think “doom and gloom.” If something happens, our lifestyle is not much interrupted if at all. Other people are thrown into chaos and we just make a few minor adjustments such as throw a few electrical switches and everything is back to normal.
One of the primary attributes men are called for is to be protectors and providers. Let us continue with the grimy scenario. Instead of your daughter and your family and friends getting killed by the renegade bikers, you added to your collection: It is a shame that they did not perform better maintenance on their firearms (looking a gift horse in the mouth is rarely advisable) and some nice bikes too (a little gasoline resistant epoxy sometimes is what a “ventilated” fuel tank needs to resume its duties). Since law and order is resuming at an “Old West” frontier justice level, people are now more engaged in commerce. There are a few problems that will be encountered. Every time you leave your retreat, you are exposed to a number of dangers (I suggest reading Mr. Rawles’ novel Patriots to understand a few of these scenarios).
If you own a large enough retreat, you potentially could stay there until it becomes safe to travel or “civilization” returns (often signaled by the tax bill for “government services”). A prepared retreat owner is not going to be concerned about trading questionable products with desperate people: he will have everything in stock on his own shelves. It takes years and a commitment, but it is doable. I have noticed a slippage in overall quality especially quality control of products in the post-2020 period along with an increase in price and decrease in package size of consumer products.
One of the most common themes is the universal value of gold. I have through this essay and previous ones buttressed the concept of gold as a premier currency by my comparisons to fiat dollars. I will have some thoughts that some in the community may see as shocking. Gold has been a valuable commodity over thousands of years, but I personally cannot see prepared individuals exchanging anything close to the value that others will think gold will have in a grimy scenario.
If you read my recent six-part article on farming, you will see how incredibly difficult it is to reliably extract calories from the ground. Humans need calories in order to survive. Some expensive restaurants put decorative gold foil on desserts, but gold has no calories being inert usually passing through the digestive system without causing any problems. While a vault full of gold may have some use in a modern society with the “music” playing, it has very little use in a grimy society to a retreat owner who has everything. Food is “replaceable” as some seeds will often be able to be turned into more “seeds,” but most survival items are incrediblly difficult to replace in this scenario.
There will be no awards for “left latest, but still survived” or “barely survived” in a survival scenario. The key to most things in life is to be the earliest especially to leave the earliest. Most people know the name of Alexander Graham Bell even though he has been dead for over a hundred years (1922), but few people remember the name of Elisha Gray more likely to ask “Elisha who?” than: “Oh, the inventor who filed a patent for the telephone just two hours after Bell on February 14, 1876.”
(To be continued in Part 5.)
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