(c) Andrew Wyeth (1957), "Brown Swiss" It's easy to mock preppers - that is, people who buy off-grid rural land, a stock of imperishable food, and guns, while honing skills in expectation of the harsh and pre-modern world soon to come - but it's plausible that they're actually providing a public good: redundancy , for the species, against certain awful tail risks . Let's begin by inventing a distinction: call the ideology "survivalism" and the practice described above "prepping". People often point to creepy far-right tendencies among survivalists (e.g. anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, violent libertarianism, Red Dawn paranoia) and speak as if this were an argument against prepping. No matter how self-interested or politically unsavory the practice supposedly is: competent, geographically spread-out prepping could still help ensure that future generations come to be. "The species", in some sense, and also maybe modern ...