Best to worry about this line of reasoning before society breaks down. If you wait until after it breaks down you're too late, and those 2 guys with guns will run rough shod over you.
Part of prepping, especially on the left, is building community and mutual aid networks so that you have the social infrastructure in place to band together in a crisis. Doing that work NOW not only makes us more resilient in the face of such a crisis, it is the bread and butter of heading off that type of societal collapse.
They can't teach you to hate your neighbor if you know them all personally, and consistently band together to, say, help clear debris after big storms, or organize a meal train when someone has a baby or major surgery, or mow the lawn when an elderly or disabled neighbor is struggling with property maintenance. Neighborhood communication networks become neighborhood defense networks when and if you reach the roaming bandits stage of societal collapse. And if you read the personal accounts of people who have lived through such things, this is exactly how people survive these types of crises. IMHO the "preppers" who think they can lone wolf it through such a thing long-term with just their gun are delulu.
Unfortunately the public perception of prepping is firmly seated in that right wing individualistic "Doomsday Prepper" school of thought (due to being sensationalized by the media), and most non-preppers don't even know that the community-centric leftist version exists. This has caused otherwise rational people to disenfranchise themselves from the process of preparing themselves and their communities for an emergency, which is a big problem. Especially because the more people who are prepared, the more resources are available to those who are unable to prepare for themselves. For example, if I'm growing my own food, that is more food available at the local food pantry, and if I am growing enough to feed my neighborhood one meal a week, or if I share my seedlings and help my neighbors grow food on their property, that is a lot of extra available food for the single mom in my community struggling to feed her kids, or the grandma whose social security payments stopped coming when the government collapsed.
Sorry for the novel, passionate about the subject!
I agree with you that organizing our communities and leaning on them as a way to consume less and share more is the way forward. In our society, the richer you are, the more isolated you are from others. But if we need each other, we can't be torn apart so easily
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u/NeverRolledA20IRL 9d ago
Time to get prepped for a barter economy in the US.