Ethics-Helping Those Who Cannot or Will Not Prepare

There are some people in this world who do not see or understand the value in being prepared. The people who make up this group represent about 99 percent of this planet’s population. Because such people make up such a large group, it is very dangerous for the people who do prepare to believe that the people who do not prepare will have no affect on us should a crisis present itself.

You may be thinking: “Who cares? They had their chance to prepare, and they didn’t!” Well, life is never that cut and dry. Also, the question is one of ethics, doing what is right. What really is the point of surviving if your going to have to live out your days with people who are moral cretins? Indeed, if that is the world we who prepare will have to inhabit after a crisis, we had better come up with methods to purchase and store lots more ammunition.

So who do you help and who gets priority. In answering this question I look to the Judeo-Christian Ethic.

1. Your first duty is to your spouse and your children. If you are serious about preparedness your spouse and children should already be covered to the extent that your funds will allow.

2. Your parents come in second after your immediate family. Your parents may not have believed in preparedness or they may not have had the money to prepare, but the reason they did not prepare is irrelevant. You have a moral obligation to help them in a crisis. However, what defines “help” is indeed a tricky issue. Also, keep in mind that your duty to your spouse and children DOES take priority over your duty to your parents, per my interpretation of the Judeo-Christian Ethic.

I wrote in an earlier issue of this newsletter that one of the best policies to adopt is to keep your preparedness activities secret. Don’t discuss your preparedness activities with anyone except those people who are in what you might loosely refer to as a “network” of others involved in preparedness in your area, and even then be very careful. Teach your children not to discuss your activities like food storage with other children. In a crisis, the unprepared will come and beat at your door the same way the unbelievers came to the door of Noah’s ark when the rain started.

With that in mind, if your parents live close to you, say 50 miles or less, taking them into your own survival retreat is probably the best course of action, PROVIDED they can keep their mouths shut. If they are inherently more concerned about the survival of their own family over the survival of others (non-family), a quality shared by virtually all rational people, you are probably on safe ground. However, if they are of the type that spout off mindless religious mantras such as “All people are equal in God’s eyes.”, (A TRUE statement when taken in it’s proper context) then you are going to have problems. Simply put, if your parents have the “egalitarian socialist ethic”, and they will tell everyone they talk to about you cache of food and supplies because doing anything else would be “unfair”, you are better off helping them out from a distance, by giving them food, medicine, money, and supplies but NOT bringing them into your survival retreat. Keep in mind however that if they are the type who tell everything they know to everyone, once they realize you have supplies, everyone who has any contact with them will also know you have supplies. So your BEST option for helping in such a situation might be to give them food, medicine, money, and supplies anonymously.

If your parents live a long distance from you, say over 200 miles, giving them any real help in a big crisis is going to be hard. My advice is to plan ahead. If your parents who live far away are not in the habit of being prepared, the Christmas season provides a wonderful opportunity to help them. Potential Christmas gifts in such a situation might include generators, a supply of freeze dried food, emergency medical kits, books on preparedness, water purification equipment, cold weather clothing, propane cylinders and heaters, pump action shotguns with 1000 rounds of ammunition, you get the idea. IMPORTANT: DO NOT BEAT THEM OVER THE HEAD WITH THE PREPAREDNESS SERMON-A MAN CONVINCED AGAINST HIS WILL IS OF THE SAME OPINION STILL.


3. Your siblings, brothers and sisters, come in 3rd place, and all of the warnings and suggestions I gave in the section on parents apply here.

4. Your extended family comes in 4th. This includes aunts, uncles, and cousins. Again, all the warnings and suggestions in the section on parents apply here as well.

It’s doubtful, neigh impossible, for a single member of a family who did prepare, to effectively help all 4 groups without killing their own family in the process. If you can help your parents and siblings, you will be doing far more than most. Always remember who takes priority over who.

Assuming it would actually be possible (it isn’t) to help all family members including extended family, one would now be faced with the question of what type of help, if any, should I give to non-family members who did not prepare? Keep in mind that from this point on what I am discussing is largely theoretical.

If one group came to mind, it would be those non-family members who were not able to prepare themselves because of severe mental or physical disability. If you were to find yourself in a position to help such a person without compromising your family, then help them. Why? Because they are entitled to our help by right? No. Because it is simply the decent thing to do. I would also add that as a student of preparedness, this is the one group of the non-prepared that I would have sympathy for, and more importantly, empathy for, in a crisis.

After those who were not able to prepare because of severe mental or physical disability, it is probably the right thing to put the poor next in line. By poor, I mean those individuals who had no money to prepare because just surviving normal day to day living took all of their money. I AM NOT speaking of individuals who were “poor” because they lost all their money at the casino’s, or on other self-destructive activities.

Excluding those individuals with severe mental or physical disabilities and the poor, essentially everyone else you will deal with in a crisis had some chance and ability to prepare, but chose not to. Maybe they lived in a house that was too big. Maybe they had expensive vehicles. Maybe they had expensive recreational activities. Maybe they were simply stupid, or worse yet, intelligent but purposely ignored the facts.

When dealing with those who could have prepared but chose not to, there is really only one guiding principle: Be a decent human being guided by rational self-interest. Rational self-interest is not an immoral concept, as many people would have you believe. In fact, during and after a crisis, it is perhaps the most ethical position one can take when dealing with those non-family who were unprepared by choice. Why? Because there is no reasonable way one can judge who among this group is more worthy of help. Sure, you COULD judge them by what they say, but their action of non-action, being unprepared when they had the means to be prepared, speaks louder than anything they can or will say.

Remember, I said be a decent human being. Do not exploit the position of such a person, but DO engage in value for value transactions when dealing with those who are non-prepared by choice. If you help them, make sure you get some kind of benefit in return. Benefits are not always concrete things like food and supplies. A benefit might be technical expertise. A benefit might be intelligence. A benefit might be something as simple as the advise from an older person with more real world experience than you. Just make sure you get SOMETHING of value in return for your aid.

When crisis comes, you cannot sacrifice for everyone. If you attempt to do so your preparedness efforts made for your family will amount to nothing. Family comes first.

With this in mind it seems no surprise to me that one of the goals of socialism is to destroy the family unit, and replace the family unit with the state. The Most High God established the family unit as the foundation of society. So if anyone tells you that you should sacrifice the preparedness you made for your family for the good of the unprepared masses, remember whose side such a person is on.