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The Unfolding Disaster

There is another category of crisis that can be forecast in a sense, and that is the “unfolding disaster”.

Some crises don’t just strike out of the blue one day; they begin and gather steam. Keeping an eye on national and global news, we can spot events that are clearly going to worsen and spread. We won’t be able to predict the exact day of the turning point or the milestones as they unfold, but it becomes obvious that something bad is dead ahead and there’s no getting out of it. Others may be in denial and frozen up by normalcy bias, but the studious prepper sees what is happening.

Hurricanes are a good example. We watch the news. We see one forming in the ocean. We know it might come our way, or it might not. We get ready for a hurricane, implementing the more disruptive protective measures only once it looks like it’s going to go through the neighborhood. When we first see the news, we might check our water and gasoline supply, and by the time it’s about to come ashore we’ve nailed the plywood over our windows. The closer it gets, the clearer the danger becomes.

Another example of this is our now-collapsing national economy. Simple mathematics says that accumulating enormous debts can’t go on forever. (“If something cannot go on forever, it will stop,” Herbert Stein’s Law) Some trends are unsustainable. Some can continue for far longer than anyone ever dreamed possible.

Sooner or later, so it seems, a turning point will be reached beyond which our economy will cease to function. That will be bad. We can see it coming. We just don’t really know when. However, the closer it gets, the clearer the danger will become, and the more specific our protective measures will be.

It doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to see that undermining Constitutional government, the rule of law, and Biblical morality will eventually turn our country into a third-world powder keg of crises and breakdowns, ending in martial law or Civil War, unless of course some Black Swan event (or divine intervention) turns things in an unforeseen direction.

You and I know well that our country cannot murder 50,000,000+ babies, approve and promote sodomite rights and perversions (LGBTQXYZ… whatever…), and endanger Israel, empower and support their enemies, and attempt to divide the land and Jerusalem without incurring some divine judgment. This is an unfolding disaster and something bad is plainly coming.

The Sudden Disaster

Just this week I saw a headline that said if there were to be a huge solar EMP, we Earthlings might have as little as 12 hours’ notice to brace for impact.It makes me wonder how long a warning message might wend its way through the bowels of our federal bureaucracies before depositing a tepid warning before the American people? Regardless, I check on solar activity regularly and get email alerts. So, if something pops off, I’ve got a huge head start on the sheeple, time to circle the wagons, gas everything up, and gather the family.

This is a special case of the unfolding disaster. It’s one where you can see the avalanche has been triggered and you know you have just seconds before the snow arrives. It’s a Black Swan whose impact is delayed enough to give you a useful amount of time. The prepper here has a critical advantage: We learn something has popped off and, unlike most of the American population, we leap into knowledgeable, focused, functional action. We don’t freeze. We don’t panic. We don’t flail or stampede or pout. We have a plan for situations like this, and we coolly put that plan into action.

You’ve seen photos of refugees wading through floodwater, balancing a case of beer on something that floats or carrying off a pillowcase full of photos and memorabilia. That’s not going to be us!

To make use of the short interval provided by this type of incident, we need to keep a “weather eye” on the events of the day. We need to have most of our preps ready and done (so we’re generally ready for whatever may come). We need to have a clear, written step-by-step plan that everyone involved knows about. The more chaotic the situation, the more structured your plan must be.

What We CAN Do

1. We can identify general “high threat” periods, when the likelihood of a disaster or crisis seems higher to us, based on observable factors. (These may be still highly subjective.) National holidays are good examples. We can take additional precautions during that time, and take the opportunity to review our preparations.
2. We can identify the unfolding disaster– the slow-motion calamity that has already begun and is gathering steam. The closer it gets, the more detail can be seen (a photography metaphor!), and the better we’ll be able to prepare for the impact.
3. We can identify the sudden disaster when something has snapped and is rapidly triggering other problems, giving us critical minutes or hours to respond ahead of the panicked masses.

We can not predict the future. Black Swans can take us by surprise. But, still, we have some hopeful and helpful strategies.

Is there anything else we can do? Yes. Definitely, yes!

“Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths.” – Proverbs 3:5-6

“In all thy ways acknowledge Him…” (Proverbs 3:5-6) means consulting God, including God, inviting God into every decision and every part of our lives as each day unfolds, “practicing the presence of God” as advocated by Brother Lawrence.

The corresponding promise of God is that when we include God in our day, not just once a day but in “all (our) ways”, He will “direct our path”. Think of it; the only person who actually knows in detail what is going to happen today, tomorrow, next month, and next year is offering to guide us through the maze of choices and challenges ahead. His providential hand will even anticipate our inevitable failures, bad choices, and shortcomings as He guides us from behind the scenes, if we will trust Him completely.

It doesn’t mean that nothing hard or bad will happen. We might still suffer and struggle, but God will be with us and guide us, and He will use it for good.

“And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose. ” (Romans 8:28) and

“Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us. For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8:37-39)

Certainly we must do what is wise; we must do our part to anticipate what seems likely, what seems needed, but we also seek and trust the hand of God more than own wisdom. (“…lean not on your own understanding…”) Its humility time; God knows best!

He wants us to de-stress, to focus on Him, to rest, to find our calm center of the storm in Him. We can be prepared and should be working diligently toward becoming better prepared, but it must happen at the same time we are trusting God. If you’ve never yet begun a relationship with Jesus, now’s the time! He loved you enough to die your death on the cross so that you could be reconciled to God. Trust him! Read Colossians 1:19-22 and John 3:16.

Preparations do not protect. Practically everything we’ve collected can disappear in a house fire or a brazen theft. A decade of prepping can be undone in a heartbeat, literally. A dozen things could steal our health without warning. We do have our part to do. We are responsible to make reasonable and wise preparations, and to build resilience into our lives. However, we cannot and should not depend on those provisions.

The only sane approach is this: trust God, and be prepared. They’re not mutually exclusive, you know. Believe me; keeping our eyes on Jesus is the harder of the two tasks, and it is the most important. We can have all the stuff, skills, and community, but if our minds and marriages and relationship with God fall apart we will be forfeiting the most valuable survival asset of all!

So diligently make your preparations, build resiliency, and flexibility and depth to your resources. The times are bad. There’s no denying that, and September bears watching, but how will it affect you? No one knows! However, there is One who does know, and He is making you an amazing offer– to guide you through.

You’d be crazy to pass up an offer like that! Trust God. Be Prepared. We can do both.

“…for we have no might against this great company that cometh against us; neither know we what to do: but our eyes are upon thee.” – 2 Chronicles 20:12

Have you heard? There’s a lot of speculation lately that we might see downright apocalyptic events in mid-to-late September. I have to admit; it’s an impressive list of events, prophecies, and trends, and I’ve been encouraging my family and friends to top off their preparations in anticipation of what might happen. My “threat level” assessment is high.

However, this is also an opportunity to revisit this whole idea of “projecting” trends and “forecasting” events, so that we are not tripped up or misled by the limitations of that process. Rather, we should focus on what truly is important, especially if we think something dramatic really is about to happen. Let’s take a look.

Disasters are, by very definition, events that catastrophically impact one or more of the four basic categories of provision– security, shelter, water, and food. We are highly motivated to predict them. Depending on the event, it could be critical to have an hour’s notice, a day’s notice, or a year’s heads-up that something very bad is about to happen.

Regardless, no matter how much we study and analyze, our ability to actually “foresee” the future is pretty much zero. We can’t see even one second into the future, much less one week or one year. I’ve been prepping for 15+ years, and in those years I have seen many very disturbing predictions come and go, most of them based on patterns of events, or convergences of events, or trends, or political threats and warnings.

NONE of those things came to pass, thank God! (So, I’ve had many more years to be prepared for the huge crises that I’m p-r-e-t-t-y sure are coming, I just don’t know when.) Well, what went wrong?

The Black Swan

Why aren’t we more successful in predicting disasters or crises in the U.S.? How is it that “Black Swans” (the term popularized by Nassim Taleb in his book and articles) keep catching us by surprise?

1. The Dilution Effect

A trend may look influential, but for it to affect our country is a huge undertaking.

• There are more than 360,000,000 people in the U.S., with every language and culture under heaven represented.
• The U.S. covers 379,000,000 square miles.
• It boasts a $15+ trillion GDP in an incredibly diverse variety of businesses and industries.

2. The Law of Unforeseen Consequences

The Law of Unforeseen Consequences is produced by factors such as:

• Systems of systems. There is a high level of complexity in our world these days. (“Engineers will tell you complexity increases as the square of the subsystems involved…” – Ol’ Remus)
• Chaotic connections, where connections between industries, persons, economies, and organizations are disproportionate, exponential, or synergistic, irregular, or modified by factors we are unaware of. Alternatively, connections we expected from a convergence don’t happen because there actually isn’t any overlap. Unexpected dependencies, leverage points.
• A seemingly small event that triggers a cascade, or branching cascade, of numerous low-probability events whose connections may have been completely unknown, resulting in an unforeseen high-impact net effect. Invisible connections we aren’t aware of that trigger unexpected events.
• Events that unfold faster than we anticipated or even thought possible.
• Some trends cannot be extrapolated because they only look like trends, but may actually be truly random events, or only a small part of a more complex, longer-term process (as in longer than a human lifespan).
• Illusion of control, where persons, leaders, and organizations fall for the deception that “control” is possible when it often is not.
• Transformative, game-changing inventions that alter the balance, timing, or direction of a trend in positive or negative ways. These include “sci-fi”-type inventions that have actually been fielded or are about to be fielded. We don’t know what we don’t know.
• High-impact, low-frequency risks that were either accidentally overlooked or dismissed without consideration because they did not fit into our tidy model or expectations.

3. Limitations of Humanity

The limitations of humanity include the following:

• Fickle human nature in wide variations (some not immediately obvious) in upbringing, education, mood, experiences, resistance to change, tradition, et cetera. Even bad people disagree with each other, resist cooperating, and have their own agendas. There are no perfect conspiracies.
• Bureaucratic inertia that slows, delays, and resists directives from above simply as a function of the bureaucracy’s size and (lack of streamlined) organization.
• Our unfortunate dependence on statistics (or public opinion polls) without understanding or realization of how easily statistics can be manipulated or skewed. Probability assessments vary from person to person and are more subjective than we’d like to believe.
• It’s human nature to generally focus on the wrong threats and incorrectly assess personal and national risks. Part of this is due to poor mathematical and statistical education these days (as evidenced by the popularity of gambling). This is like the preppers who buy all the awesome firearm toys but who have no reliable way to purify water, underestimating the damage and disruption that simple waterborne illness can cause in an emergency situation.
• Propaganda from insiders with ulterior motives or undisclosed incentives who present themselves as authorities. (They’re forgetting “No statement should be believed because it is made by an authority.” – Robert Heinlein) We naturally want to trust others, but the others can lie. If you haven’t read the little book How Do You Kill 11 Million People?, you really need to buy this book. (Hint: You lie. Lies are that powerful.)
• We get gamed or stampeded into making choices we otherwise wouldn’t, because of psychological manipulation in the press and advertising. They have it down to a science. Never underestimate human stupidity, or malice.
• Linguistic imprecision between people discussing issues or making decisions, disagreement among experts, elements that are in fact unmeasurable– these and more make predicting the future foggy if not completely impossible!

4. Our Incomplete Understanding of Physical Processes

Our incomplete understanding, especially about the initial conditions and physical processes of weather, tectonics, volcanism, ecosystem dynamics, solar processes, human mass psychology, economics and more, prevent us from having the ability to forecast future behavior. Yes, even after all these years, science doesn’t know everything. What disasters/crises do we think are impossible? Are they really impossible? (“All things are possible until they are proved impossible – and even the impossible may only be so, as of now.” – Pearl S. Buck)

5. The Unseen Hand of Satan and Those Participating in His Conspiratorial Multi-generational Plotting

I’m sorry, but there really is an evil plan to destroy the world. The plan encompasses diverse persons and organizations, many of whom are completely unaware they are being co-opted in a demonic conspiracy, unaware of the invisible connections coordinating their actions.

6. The Unseen Hand of Our Sovereign God

Our sovereign God will have the last say and always gets His way. Remember that. Few are the prepper novels, disaster movies, and survival reality shows that ever include or anticipate that God has a plan for our individual lives and the course of human history. I call it the “God Factor”; it’s an idea we espoused during our college Risk board game marathons that referred to the unpredictable, uncontrollable, unstoppable intervention of the only living, sovereign, almighty Creator God of the Bible.

Evil people will make their little plans with grandiose expectations for world government, a world economy, and the suppression of human freedom. They can plan all they want, but God gets the last word. (We should never fear the machinations of the world, no matter how dark the day.) This is vital to remember.

So, sure, we try hard to get a glimpse of what’s coming, but it seems we can only recognize “precursor events” in retrospect. (Hindsight is 20/20.) To our frustration, mankind gets blindsided again and again.

These “precursor” events and apparently significant “convergences” are happening all the time in our highly complex, mobile, and violent world. Coincidences happen. What they mean is the big question. After many years of seeing coincidences and convergences come and go, some of them quite dramatic, I can say they clearly don’t always imply disaster is imminent!

However, instead of accurately foretelling a disaster’s character and timing, we’ve been able to do something nearly as useful! By playing out the scenarios for the myriad different disasters, we have come to an encouraging and useful conclusion: the preparations for one scenario have a lot of overlap with the preparations for other disasters. Being prepared for the factors that overlap gives us a good foundation for virtually any foreseeable event. This is the basic premise behind prepping.

The Basic Premise Behind Prepping

Prepping is simply a practical, wise response to the uncertainties and contingencies of life. We can imagine which scenarios are possible or even likely (i.e., the “Wheel of Doom”). Also, we can accumulate supplies and knowledge to cover those. We are prepping based on extrapolations of our current knowledge, trends, historical record, and our knowledge of basic human needs. Unless we receive a divine heads up, we’re not going to know about an impending Black Swan, but we can use the general principles of prepping to be reasonably prepared.

Short of having an angel with a flaming sword suddenly appear at the foot of our bed and deliver a prophetic message from God (and there may actually be some authentic divine warnings relevant to this very September that I mentioned), we have huge limitations on knowing what’s going to happen next.

Read on about the disaster and what we can do in Part 2.