(Continued from Part 3.)
Levels of Preparedness
Someday, perhaps in the 22nd Century, someone may read this and think it is comical in descriptions of what 500 dollars or 5 million dollars could buy in the first quarter of the 21st Century. This would be much the same as we look at historical books with then-catchy titles. Catherine Owen wrote “Ten Dollars Enough: Keeping House Well on Ten Dollars a Week”. That was a late 19th-century practical instructional book featuring a young couple Harry and Molly and their experiences in budgeting. Their goal back then was to “escape” a boarding house to be able to afford their own home. For those unfamiliar with prices in the 19th Century, ten dollars was a significant amount of money back then. Ten dollars was then readily convertible from $10 in silver dollars or paper currency to a Gold Eagle which as you may recall from my earlier discussions on the Gold Standard would be worth approximately $1,600 today, given the spot price of $3,300 an ounce.
This instruction book written in an informative story format originally started as a weekly installment in a popular women’s magazine and then these installments were later compiled into a book. Translating into today’s values, ten dollars a week back during the gold standard era would be today be more than $80,000 a year, today. For reference, the yearly median U.S. household income is now about $80,000. Back then, there were no Social Security taxes and federal taxation had stopped in the year 1872, so nearly all of their income was available for them to use.
In the 19th Century, some states wrote their “homestead exemptions” with dollars attached to acre figures that now seem quaint. Some states, like Kansas and several others, intelligently used terms denoting “unlimited value” as the dollar has deteriorated in dramatically since it has been delinked from backing of precious metals. Consider the case of the humble candy bar. For decades until 1969, a person could go to a store with a nickel and purchase a real chocolate candy bar. The sizes of this bar actually floated around for many decades depending on the prices of raw ingredients, but for decades this price level stayed the same — all for the price of a nickel.
In the early 1980s, an interesting survival book was written by C.G. Cobb. The “Bad Times Primer” was according to the full title, “A complete guide to survival on a budget.” The book was written with the goal of introducing people to the concept of how to build and stock a retreat. It is now fairly difficult to find copies of this book for sale, but I know an individual who bought it new when it first came out and it was a game changer for him. “Bad Times Primer” gave concrete commentary on how bad it was out there and proposed potential solutions including the suppliers of items. People who bought and stocked retreats back then are light years ahead of individuals starting today as inflation has taken its toll on savings accounts. Reading his book today, I am still impressed by C.G. Cobb’s commentary. Back in the early 1980s when this book was written, C.G. Cobb developed an all-in budget of $290,900. This was a significant amount of money back then. This “budget” included 20 acres of land in a safe area, all property development, food, firearms, and every survival retreat necessity available when it was written. Today, I would estimate that level of preparedness would be well over a million dollars and possibly into several million depending on many factors.
Using the idea of levels of preparedness, I am introducing five different levels of preparedness with specific levels of achievement that are typically unlocked as each level is reached. The five levels are 500 dollars, 5000 dollars, 50,000 dollars, 500,000 dollars, and 5,000,000 dollars.
An aspiring or beginning survivalist will typically either be exposed to survival through family connections or have a gateway survival experience. A gateway survival experience will typically be going through a natural disaster event, surviving to tell the tale, and having the next level of understanding that they can envision a possibility that they could do something better, in a future event. This is the most critical lesson to learn, and what separates humans and animals. Animals operate on instinct and often “learning” is an individually adapted behavioral pattern through repetitive training, not an example of deep knowledge especially something that will be passed down to future generations through learning.
Not all humans are even capable of making hypothetical conjectures and venturing into the realm of abstract thought. This capability is said to begin somewhere around what is known as three figures of intelligence or the 100 IQ level, which is the average. Civilization is difficult and it begins with the process of being able to thinking in an abstract or future based process. If people do not like their situation, intelligent people try to do something about it given the old proverb that “necessity is the mother of invention.” A prepared person reading this article series is likely a long distance ahead of most Americans and much of preparedness involves applying hypothetical conjecture.
Historically, opportunities from business opportunities to military commands were distributed not based on test scores or grades, but on letters of recommendation or family connections. This largely changed in the early 20th Century during the First World War as intelligence tests which were developed as a result of the work of 19th-century researchers on intelligence became a sorting mechanism to be able to quickly distribute opportunities to the best-qualified people most efficiently. During the First World War, a person who scored at a genius level would likely be placed in an intelligence or even in a cryptography section trying to break codes to learn the enemy’s plans to be able to deploy their troops most efficiently rather than as cannon fodder at the front.
The present level of civilization enjoyed is largely due to people who applied scientific progress to raw materials that were fairly available to everyone in human history. The problem often was in utilizing these raw materials. Ancient peoples had little use for rare earth minerals other than for decorative purposes and sand was often a hindrance to transportation rather than a building block of technological process in the form of semiconductor microchips. The basis of the current standard of living is because somebody somewhere asked why and formed a hypothetical conjecture. Without the ability to form hypothetical conjectures, advanced civilization is not possible.
Most individuals reading this are carrying around a cell phone which is powered with an internal battery. That battery is likely a lithium-ion battery, but this level of technology it is descended from the pioneering work of Vermont blacksmith Thomas Davenport who developed the first American DC motor back in the 1830s. Davenport was able to improve upon the work of an English inventor William Sturgeon’s 1832 motor. Consider that the development of the first practical American DC motor did not take place in the laboratory of a physics or chemistry department with experiments on magnets and batteries respectively, but in the humble barn of a blacksmith who was highly curious and interested in forming conjectures. Consider that the oldest university in the country juxtaposed to the work of Thomas Davenport. Harvard even back in the 1840s did not have a large chemistry department. In the 1840s Josiah Parsons Cooke originated the measurement of atomic weights. He was largely self-taught in chemistry and later became a well-known professor.
Thomas Davenport and his wife Emily worked diligently on developing an electric motor from Thomas seeing an initial inspiring idea of electromagnets at an ironworks. T. Davenport’s February 25, 1837 patent for the electric motor lists it as a “application of magnetism and electro-magnetism to propelling machinery.” Many accounts have his wife Emily making a commitment to her husband’s work and being integral in the motor’s construction in developing ideas on insulating the motor’s winding and even in sacrificing her wedding dress made of silk to use as insulation. Thomas Davenport never became successful in his lifetime and most people reading this have never heard of him. Another man named Thomas later stood on the shoulders of Davenport’s scientific research in developing DC motors and generators almost fifty years later. His name was Thomas Edison.
Currently, the prescient prepper must always be trying to figure out what they need to be doing next. History is often a guide to determine where people are on the historical wheel. Almost every survivalist has been born through one of these experiences and the act of surviving and thinking (forming that first conjecture of how things could be improved) is often the catalyst for everything that follows. I have a lot of family connections in survival and retreating dating back generations to the Cuban Missile Crisis where one of my relatives was planning a retreat to a safer area.
Going back several more generations, I can recount the number of times over the last 400 years that my lineal ancestors found safer areas and left before various problems occurred. They fled revolutions, famines, and other problems in Europe. The interesting aspect is that they often left before the problems occurred, seeing these issues on the horizon, not after problems occurred like so many having to flee in a mass exodus of panic-driven people. Many of their relatives who stayed suffered as a result of two centuries of conflict on the European continent especially as Germany was devastated through two World Wars.
(To be continued tomorrow, in Part 5.)
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