Can you really ‘prep’ for the breakdown of society?
Think from KERA
KERA
4.7 • 911 Ratings
🗓️ 9 August 2024
⏱️ 46 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
For anywhere from $100 to $3,000 or more, you can get ready for doomsday with a prepper kit. Michael Mills, lecturer in criminology at the University of Kent, joins host Krys Boyd to discuss the phenomenon of preparing for disaster, if this is unique to America or to a political party affiliation, and if stockpiling food and supplies actually does anything to relieve anxiety.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I stumbled across an article not long ago about survivalist entrepreneurs selling luxury underground bunkers to very wealthy people looking for a safe place to ride out a truly catastrophic future event. |
| 0:22.4 | It is interesting to ponder what different sorts of people might consider essential in such |
| 0:26.6 | situations. Are food and water and power enough? Or would you need an underground swimming facility |
| 0:32.0 | in solar-powered movie theater to make survival worth your while? But here's the thing from that |
| 0:37.1 | article I cannot stop |
| 0:38.7 | thinking about. According to a recent analysis of surveys by the Federal Emergency Management |
| 0:44.3 | Administration, 20 million Americans currently identify as doomsday preppers. From KERA in Dallas, |
| 0:53.0 | this is think. I'm Chris Boyd. That's something like 7% of all U.S. |
| 0:57.8 | households devoting not insignificant amounts of time, money, and energy to surviving |
| 1:03.3 | apocalyptic conditions for extended periods of time. I want to know what motivates these folks, |
| 1:09.2 | what kinds of chaos they imagine befalling civilization and what they will need to outlast it, and why in a troubled world, this phenomenon is particularly associated with Americans. |
| 1:20.2 | After a bit of research, I realized Michael Mills would be the ideal person to talk with about all this. |
| 1:25.5 | He is a lecture in criminology at the University of |
| 1:28.3 | Kent, who has done extensive research on the phenomenon of doomsday prepping. Michael, |
| 1:33.6 | welcome to think. Hi, Chris. Thanks for having me. So I live in Texas, which is a part of the |
| 1:39.6 | U.S. where we sometimes have tornadoes and hailstorms and ice storms that knock out power |
| 1:44.0 | or make it |
| 1:44.4 | hard to get out to the store for a couple of days. Therefore, I follow the advice to keep batteries |
| 1:49.2 | in a little bottled water and non-perishable food on hand just in case. Is there a difference, though, |
| 1:54.4 | between emergency preparedness and doomsday prepping? Yeah, absolutely there is. There are several things that mark out |
| 2:03.9 | prepping as a separate social phenomena to kind of more basic emergency readiness. Perhaps the |
| 2:10.8 | main one is the scale in which preparation is involved. So for a typical prepper, and I'll preface a lot of my remarks by saying |
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