Liberty Field Guide: Prepping & Resilience, Part 1
In Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, a character is asked how he went bankrupt. His answer: “Two ways. Gradually, and then suddenly.”
That line gets quoted so often in finance circles that it’s practically a bumper sticker. But the people who repeat it rarely sit with what it actually means. The “gradually” part is long, boring, and full of signals that most people rationalize away. The “suddenly” part is when those people get destroyed.
This is the central problem of preparing for hard times: you know something is coming. You don’t know when. And you have finite money, energy, and time.
Go too hard too early, and you burn through resources, alienate your family, and arrive at the crisis exhausted and broke. Go too slow, and you’re the Argentine retiree staring at a frozen bank account wondering how this happened so fast.
Most prepper content skips this entirely. It jumps straight to “what to buy” and “where to bug out” without addressing the harder question: how do you pace a marathon when you don’t know how long the course is?
Gradually
Every major collapse of the last century followed the same pattern. Not an explosion, but an erosion. The foundation cracks for years, sometimes decades, before the floor gives way.
Venezuela was the richest country in Latin America as recently as the 1970s. From 1999 onward, the Chavez and Maduro governments ran double-digit fiscal deficits during an oil boom, expropriated over 1,000 firms, imposed byzantine currency controls, and bled an estimated $300 billion through corruption. Oil production, the country’s lifeblood, fell from roughly 3 million barrels per day to 2.3 million before the crisis even began. All of this happened while the economy was still officially growing.
When global oil prices crashed from $100 to $40 per barrel in 2014, the rotten foundation was exposed. GDP collapsed by roughly 75-80%. 74.3% of the population lost weight, averaging 8.7 kilograms (19 pounds) per person in a single year, a phenomenon Venezuelans bitterly named the “Maduro Diet.” Over 7.7 million people fled the country. (US sanctions after 2017 made things worse, but the crisis was already five years old by then. The rot was homegrown.)
But here’s the part that matters for you: the rot was visible for 15 years before the crisis hit. Expropriation of private business. Currency controls. Spiraling government debt. Crumbling oil infrastructure. Every one of these was a signal. Most people stayed because the economy was still technically growing, oil money was still flowing, and the grocery stores still had food. Until, gradually and then suddenly, they didn’t.
Argentina’s 2001 crisis followed the same arc. Throughout the 1990s, the peso was pegged 1:1 to the US dollar, creating an illusion of stability. The government borrowed heavily. Tax revenues shrank. By late November 2001, people could feel something breaking. Those paying attention began withdrawing dollars from banks and sending them abroad.
On December 1, 2001, the government froze all bank accounts. The “corralito“ limited withdrawals to 250 pesos per week. Banks closed their doors. People pounded on them. Nobody answered.
In January 2002, the government abandoned the dollar peg and forcibly converted all dollar-denominated accounts into pesos. The peso then crashed to roughly $4 per dollar. People who’d had $10,000 in the bank saw their purchasing power evaporate by about 75%, to $2,500.
A U.S. Senate report on the crisis captured the whiplash: in November 2001, “contracts were generally enforced; bank deposits were secure; people were free to buy and sell foreign currency.” By February 2002, “nobody could trust a contract.” Output fell about 20% over three years.
The people who withdrew their money before December 1 kept it. The people who trusted the system lost it. The window between “still fine” and “too late” was measured in weeks.
The Soviet Union tells a longer version of the same story. The ingredients were the same: dwindling domestic oil production, a worsening trade deficit, out-of-control military spending, and mushrooming foreign debt, all accumulating through the 1980s. When the political structure cracked between 1989 and 1991, the economic consequences cascaded for the entire decade. Russia’s GDP fell to 55% of its 1989 level by 1998. Male life expectancy dropped from 64.2 years to under 60. One estimate places the number of premature deaths caused by the Soviet “shock therapy” at 3.4 million.
In every case, the pattern holds: years of visible decay, a triggering event, and then rapid cascading failure that catches most people off guard. The trigger never caused the collapse. It revealed the collapse that had already happened underneath.
Then Suddenly
So why do people wait?
Because the human brain is running software designed for a world where threats were immediate and physical. A saber-toothed cat triggers a response. A 15-year decline in institutional competence does not.
Psychologists call this normalcy bias: the tendency to underestimate the likelihood or impact of a disaster because you assume tomorrow will look like today. A 2001 sociological study by Thomas Drabek found that when told to evacuate, most people check with four or more sources before deciding what to do. 70% of 9/11 survivors talked to others before leaving their buildings. In a situation where every second counted, most people stood around confirming that yes, the building really was on fire.
Normalcy bias explains why thousands stayed in New Orleans as Katrina approached. Why residents of Pompeii watched the ash cloud for hours before trying to leave. And why, in 1933, the majority of Germany’s ~522,000 Jewish citizens decided to stay.
38,000 left in 1933, the year Hitler took power. 23,000 in 1934. 20,000 in 1935. Then the numbers declined further. Most believed the Nazi regime wouldn’t last. Many non-Jews shared this belief. By 1939, approximately 304,000 had emigrated. But roughly 214,000 remained as war began.
The Holocaust Museum’s assessment is haunting in its relevance: “Without the ability to foresee the Holocaust, Jews living in the Third Reich had to constantly assess how much of a threat the regime posed. Nazi policies kept evolving and changing, making it difficult to gauge this danger.”
That’s the problem. Nobody hands you a calendar with the collapse date circled in red. You’re working with incomplete information, evolving conditions, and a brain that actively resists believing things are as bad as they are.
The Two Penalties
You face two possible penalties, and they pull in opposite directions:
Penalty #1: Too fast. You sell the house, max out credit cards on freeze-dried food, move to a cabin in the mountains, and build your life around an apocalypse that doesn’t arrive on schedule. Your savings evaporate. Your spouse leaves. Your kids think you’re insane. You’re living in a state of perpetual adrenaline that the American Psychological Association says causes serious long-term damage to mental and physical health. Research shows prepping behavior is correlated with paranoia, cynicism, and conspiracy mentality. The line between “prudently prepared” and “anxiety disorder with a shopping list” is real, and a lot of people cross it.
The Y2K preppers are the clearest example. People spent fortunes on generators, bunkers, and bulk supplies for a specific date. January 1, 2000 arrived. The lights stayed on. Marriages didn’t survive what the crisis couldn’t test.
Penalty #2: Too slow. You tell yourself you’ll get to it next month. You keep meaning to start a garden, buy some water filters, learn basic first aid. The signals are there, but the grocery stores are still open, the lights are still on, and there’s always something more pressing. Then one day the bank freezes your account, or the supply chain snaps, or the currency you’ve been saving in loses 75% of its value overnight.
Venezuela’s emigration data tells this story in numbers. 1.5 million left between 1999 and 2014, mostly skilled professionals who read the signals and departed with resources, qualifications, and destination countries lined up. Then 3.52 million fled during the acute crisis phase (2018 to 2020), many walking across borders with nothing.
The early leavers sacrificed comfort. The late leavers sacrificed everything.
The Resource Allocation Problem
Most prepper content pretends this tension doesn’t exist. It treats preparation as a shopping list with no budget and no deadline. Buy this. Store that. Dig a well. Get guns. As if everyone has unlimited funds, unlimited time, and unlimited emotional bandwidth.
In reality, preparation is a resource allocation problem with an unknown deadline. You have finite money, finite time, and a spouse who will only tolerate so many buckets of freeze-dried chicken in the garage. The question isn’t “should I prepare?” The question is “how much, how fast, and in what order?”
There’s a useful concept from finance called “real options”: the idea that keeping your options open has measurable value. A company deciding whether to build a factory doesn’t have to commit everything on day one. It buys the land first (cheap, reversible). Does the surveys (moderate cost). Only breaks ground when demand signals justify it (expensive, irreversible). If the market shifts, the company that bought the land walks away with a small loss. The company that built the whole factory goes bankrupt.
Same logic applies here.
Layer 1: Reversible, high-value-regardless. These are preparations that improve your life whether or not collapse comes. Reducing debt. Getting physically fit. Growing a garden. Learning to cook from scratch. Building real relationships with neighbors. These cost little, risk nothing, and pay dividends even in a stable world. They should be first, and they should be ongoing.
Layer 2: Moderate cost, high crisis value. Storable food (properly rotated so nothing expires wasted). Water filtration. Basic medical supplies. Hand tools. Heirloom seeds. A few months of expenses in accessible form. This is the bulk of what “prepping” looks like for most people, and it can be built steadily over years on a normal income.
Layer 3: High-cost, irreversible moves. Relocating. Career changes. Liquidating retirement accounts. Selling property. These carry enormous opportunity costs if the timeline is longer than you expect. They should be reserved for when your personal indicators (more on this in Part 9 of this series) cross a threshold.
The key principle: invest in preparations that have value in both timelines (collapse and no-collapse) before investing in preparations that only pay off in one timeline.
Children of Men, Not Mad Max
In Mad Max, society ends in a spectacular fireball, and the survivors immediately become leather-clad warriors fighting over gasoline in the desert.
That is not how it works.
In Children of Men, the world hasn’t ended. It’s winding down. People still go to work. Trains still run. But the background tells the real story: crumbling buildings, refugee camps, militarized borders, state propaganda, and a population that has simply stopped believing in the future. Critics have read the film’s fertility crisis as an analogy for what Mark Fisher described as “cultural impotence“: a society that produces less and less of value while maintaining the outward appearance of normality.
That’s what real collapse looks like. Not the sudden absence of everything, but the gradual degradation of everything. Supply chains get a little less reliable. Institutions get a little less competent. Currency buys a little less. Infrastructure takes a little longer to repair. Services that used to work stop working as well, then stop working at all.
Dmitry Orlov, who witnessed the Soviet collapse firsthand and wrote Reinventing Collapse comparing it to America’s trajectory, identified an irony: the features that made Soviet life inconvenient in normal times made it survivable in collapse. Soviets had public housing (no mortgages to default on), public transit (no car dependency), and personal kitchen gardens (food independence). When the economy collapsed, they had a floor to land on.
Americans have the opposite setup. Suburban sprawl requires cars. Food comes from supply chains. Housing depends on mortgage payments. Community ties are weak. Everything that makes American life comfortable in good times makes it fragile in bad times. This is by design, though not consciously. The system optimized for convenience and consumption, and the cost of that optimization is independence and resilience.
Next in the series: Part 2, “The Triage List”: What to secure first when you can’t do everything at once.
Sources
1. UNU-WIDER: “Where Do We Stand a Decade After the Collapse of the USSR?” wider.unu.edu
2. Rosefielde (2001): “Premature Deaths: Russia’s Radical Economic Transition in Soviet Perspective”
3. Economics Observatory: “Why Did Venezuela’s Economy Collapse?” (2024) economicsobservatory.com
4. Americas Quarterly: “The Maduro Diet: A Photo Essay from Venezuela” americasquarterly.org
5. ABC Australia: “Venezuelans are slowly starving” (2019) abc.net.au
6. CDP: “Venezuelan Humanitarian and Refugee Crisis” disasterphilanthropy.org
7. N-IUSSP: “Crisis-driven shifts of Venezuelan migration patterns” (2024) niussp.org
8. Wikipedia: “Corralito” en.wikipedia.org
9. BBC: “Argentines recall economic crisis 10 years on” (2011) bbc.com
10. IMF: “Lessons from the Crisis in Argentina” imf.org
11. US Senate JEC: “Argentina’s Economic Crisis: Causes and Cures” jec.senate.gov
12. LandingPad BA: “The 2001 Argentine Economic Crisis” landingpadba.com
13. USHMM: “German Jewish Refugees, 1933 to 1939” encyclopedia.ushmm.org
14. USHMM: “German Jews during the Holocaust, 1939 to 1945” encyclopedia.ushmm.org
15. Sydney Jewish Museum: “Why did Jews not leave Germany?” sydneyjewishmuseum.com.au
16. Wikipedia: “Normalcy Bias” en.wikipedia.org
17. Drabek, Thomas (2001): sociological study of evacuation behavior
18. Fetterman et al. (2019): prepping behavior and personality correlates. Cited in Big Think
19. Adventure-Wiser: “Survival Fatigue: The Prepper Burnout” adventure-wiser.com
20. Britannica: “Hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic” britannica.com
21. Wikipedia: “Hyperinflation in Zimbabwe” en.wikipedia.org
22. Primal Survivor: “SHTF: Survival Tips from Bosnian War Survivors” primalsurvivor.net
23. Dmitry Orlov: Reinventing Collapse / Long Now talk longnow.org
24. “Currency Crises in Post-Soviet Economies,” Research in International Business and Finance (2016)
25. NYT: “Study Looks at Mortality in Post-Soviet Era” (2009)
26. SF Fed: “Learning from Argentina’s Crisis” (2002) frbsf.org
27. Wikipedia: “Economy of Venezuela” en.wikipedia.org
28. Wikipedia: “Venezuelan Refugee Crisis” en.wikipedia.org