Death by Doctrine
What are the ideologies that harm our individual and collective health?
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Death by Doctrine
"Living off the grid"
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Off the grid.
The masculine version of cottagecore is a bit more extreme. Living off the grid is not great.
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Welcome back to Death by Doctrine. I'm MJ.
SPEAKER_00I'm Holly.
SPEAKER_02So originally we wanted to cover this episode and the last episode's topic, which is cottage core, together in one episode. However, that proved to be rather difficult.
SPEAKER_00It was really unwieldy.
SPEAKER_02Yes. I mean, you were the one that sort of started working on this, so maybe you could talk a little bit more about it. But even though the two ideas are rooted in the same impulse, they manifest completely differently to the point where we couldn't do it in one.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. We'll talk about various things that are different about these, but the primary one is that Cottage Core is more of an aesthetic and off the grid is much more of an active lifestyle. It's not so much people daydreaming about this content or this lifestyle. It's like people are outdoing it. So fundamentally, there's a huge difference in just like how this manifests in our media and our content and how we talk about it. Is one is active and one is a little bit of a daydream.
SPEAKER_02Cottage Core is an aesthetic, which means that you could, in theory, do cottage core as a hobby, right? You could make sourdough on the weekend. You can't really do off-griding as an aesthetic. There is no relaxed version of going off the grid.
SPEAKER_00It's because the words off the grid mean something very literal, right?
SPEAKER_03It's already so intense.
SPEAKER_00Like you could live in like a shack in the woods, but it's not really the same vibe. It can include that, but off the grid is like, in its most essential sense, living disconnected from public utilities. And the debt is just a very functional definition for something.
SPEAKER_02If you live in a shack, you just are a resident of the rural America. You're not really off the grid.
SPEAKER_00Right. You could live in a shack with public utilities, so not a definition essentially.
SPEAKER_02So we did cottage core in the first episode, and now we're doing it's sibling. Cottage core is the feminine coded version of this self-sufficiency ideology. And for this episode, we're covering the masculine version of this idea, off-gridding or going off the grid. And like many things, the masculine ideal is slightly It's more active.
SPEAKER_00That's the annoying thing about how we like gender code things as a society. It's like actually when I was looking at this, I really went in with the idea that I was like cottage core is for girls and off the grid is for boys.
SPEAKER_01Uh-huh.
SPEAKER_00But to be honest, when I'm looking through like popular off-the-grid influencers and people who write about this, there are a lot of women involved.
SPEAKER_01Okay.
SPEAKER_00And I think that's just a very practical thing, right? If you're a household and you're off the grid, like your whole family is probably involved in this in some way. So there are plenty of women being part of off-the-grid influencer spaces and posting in like Facebook groups. And I really think this comes down to the way that men versus women self-police gender expression. Like, cottage core is feminine coded. And what we see across our society is that men will intentionally or otherwise suppress their interest in quote unquote girly activities. Yes. So like it's not that woman wouldn't welcome a guy doing cottage core baking or making cottage core stuff on TikTok. It's like either other men would make fun of them or they're like self-limiting themselves, right? Yeah. It's the same thing with like tomboys in childhood. Yes. Like we're a little bit more accepting of girls who are tomboys uh than we are of boys who want to play with dolls. Yeah. And it's kind of how I see the gender divide here is like it's more acceptable for a woman to go off the grid and like be rugged and be practical than it is for a guy to do anything deemed girly.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, definitely a lot of self-policing in terms of male gender identity. I'm excited to learn more because all the content that I don't want to say come across my feed because I actively tell the algorithm to stop recommending these things, but they sneak in somehow and they're all men. So I'm excited. I'm excited to learn the more inclusive version.
SPEAKER_00I mean, I feel like if you did like an actual statistical analysis, like it probably is male-dominated, but like, you know, I don't feel like it's as stark as cottage core is, which is like you do not see men in cottage core spaces.
SPEAKER_02Hey, maybe I should start cottage core and sort of break that gender divide.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, show men that it's okay to make cinnamon rolls.
SPEAKER_02To bake sourdough. All right. So let's go ahead and get into what this is, which is off-gridding or off-gridders. Or do you have another term for this? What's your term for this?
SPEAKER_00Oh, I was trying to think of this while I was prepping because saying off the grid every single time is a little bit funky.
SPEAKER_03It is, yeah.
SPEAKER_00I'm probably gonna say off-gridders.
SPEAKER_03Okay, that's what we're gonna use.
SPEAKER_00But I don't think they really like self-identify with that term. But like off the grid, going off the grid, living off the grid. As I mentioned, this is like just not being connected to public utilities. So there's some commonality here. This means that these homes are usually in more rural, isolated places, not only because homeowners need space for digging wells and putting up solar panels, but they also likely need to avoid local ordinances, right? Your average suburban community probably isn't that amenable to someone in the neighborhood digging wells into the ground.
SPEAKER_03Someone's gonna come knock.
SPEAKER_00It's like rural for a couple of reasons, both functional and social preference. And some off-the-grid proponents are interested in developing small communities. Like there are off-the-grid communities out there, but that's very few. Like most people pursue a more individual, independent lifestyle. And we'll talk about this a lot that individuality is really crucial to the ethos of a lot of off-the-grid discourse and writing and content.
SPEAKER_02Now, I would imagine the off-grid community, they can't be more than 10 people, right? Like they're not trying to build a town.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. It's a little bit more top-down from what I've seen of these, is like someone will be I'm creating this community of 10 homes or so, and we're gonna have this community garden and we're gonna pool our resources on like solar power, but it's gonna be hard, right, to scale that up without more federal or state legal interventions. So they they aren't necessarily quite small.
SPEAKER_02Okay, so most of these are gonna be individual coded, which is on brand.
SPEAKER_00And plenty of off-the-grid influencers will reference society, whether explicitly or like kind of vaguely, as increasingly unlivable or oppressive.
SPEAKER_02I feel like this theme is gonna come back to haunt us.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's definitely what we're going to come back to again as like, what is the doctrine here that could be damaging?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, they hate modernity.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, if you're truly just like, I want to live in the woods and solar power my house, that is good even. But there are philosophical elements to this movement that we wanted to dig a little bit deeper into.
SPEAKER_02There's definitely a difference between I want to live not in a city. It takes that extra ideological leap.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And I think that where a lot of off-the-grid stuff gets deeper philosophically is that it's not just detaching from the public utility, it's also detaching from society, at least in a civic sense. A lot of off-the-gridders want to reduce their reliance on goods and services on the whole, not just their public utilities. They want to reduce their interactions with the financial economy and they want to generate only what their household will need. So it's a very individualistic approach to living, unlike you know, a modern society or a city environment where we are pooling our resources a lot more.
SPEAKER_02How do you think this differs from homesteading, which is the theme of last episode?
SPEAKER_00I think homesteading operates a little bit more on a kind of an ideal. Like, I don't think that off-gridders are idealistic, like harking back to this dream, right, that doesn't really exist of this time where we had little cute farms and we could make all our own food. I think they have a much more practical and a little bit more cynical approach to these things. You won't actually find a ton of off-the-gridders who like are not realistic about what this is going to take. They know they won't have access to some things in society. They're choosing this. Whereas cottage core and homesteading is a little bit more like peachy, like they're trying to sell you on it. I think off-the-gridders are like, we have to be tough. Like, you can you handle this? I don't know. Like, there's less of that element in their content.
SPEAKER_02I definitely see off-griders having the survival strand in it more than homesteaders. Like the whole point of homesteading is that at the end of the day, whether you achieve it or not, likely not, you're trying to make a home. That's what homesteading is. You're trying to build a family or a community, however you will. You're trying to make a home that's yours. But off-gridder, you're not kind of into the home vibe.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. There's not a lot of cute, soft elements to an off-the-grid house. No. Like looked in their Facebook groups and stuff, and they'll post like inspo pics.
SPEAKER_03Oh, we're back on Facebook.
SPEAKER_00I know. I did delete the app. I'm just using a browser. They will post inspo pics, but they're not like, look at my cute kitchen. It's like, look at this well that I dug, or like, look at my A-frame cabin that I built. It's very like, admire the structure of this versus I'm not like trying to sell you on like this beautiful homey lifestyle.
SPEAKER_02So that's what off-griding is. So where did this philosophy come from?
SPEAKER_00I am gonna take you on a ride with this MJ.
SPEAKER_02I can't wait.
SPEAKER_00There's a lot here, and I had to pick and choose that I was gonna go for. But as you mentioned, off the grid comes from a lot of the same appeals that cottage core holds for us historically. You know, living simply, staving off the complications of society, reacting to like a vague sense of overconsumption or loss of purpose. But while cottage core has long been a fictional escape for wealthier, more urban people, as we talked about, it's a little bit idealistic. Off-the-grid proponents are much more action-oriented. So while certainly a lot of the people who enjoy off the grid content are like fantasizing, like if you're following off-the-gridders, you're not necessarily yourself going to do it. But I think the core of the community are people who actually want to think about the logistics. How do I produce energy? How do I access water? How could I functionally split myself off from modern conveniences in a way that Kottachcore doesn't really touch?
SPEAKER_02That is very interesting because they are so focused on the practical aspect, but I just can't imagine how any of that is practical. Do you know what I mean? Like there's an inherent like paradox there.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Like I think they are in some ways, a lot of off the gridders are like kind of living their truth, right? Like they are doing what they say. But our criticism of the doctrine is going to be more about where that leads us, or like, where does that take us as a human society, which I know they don't necessarily want to be part of, but like you are nonetheless.
SPEAKER_03You don't exist alone, right? Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And we've seen this idea pop up throughout history where I specifically narrowed in here is complicated because even if we're only looking at American history, there's so much off-the-grid-oriented stuff.
SPEAKER_01Really?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Like Western expansion, the pioneer lifestyle. Right. They were learning how to forge homesteads and communities away from the cities that were popping up in the East Coast. I ultimately didn't feel that that was really what modern off-the-griders are going for. Like that was a little bit more of pursuing wealth, pursuing manifest destiny.
SPEAKER_02At the end of the day, they're trying to make a home, which is not what off-griding is.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and ultimately a lot of the time they did make new cities. So, in the Western canon, at least, what I was really drawn to to look at the history of off-the-grid as a philosophy is probably the most famous off-the-grid practitioners there are, the transcendentalists.
SPEAKER_02Okay, that is a term I have not heard since high school history.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. That is not surprising. Okay.
SPEAKER_03Remind me what it is.
SPEAKER_00Transcendentalism, taking you back to high school history, it was one of the first American-born philosophical movements, you know, popped up in the 1800s and made famous spry writers like Henry Thoreau, writer of Unwalden Pond, Margaret Fuller, and Ralph Waldo Emerson.
SPEAKER_02I know their names. I didn't know they were tied up with this.
SPEAKER_00They are in a way. I'll discuss. I'll discuss how. I don't want to denigree at the transcendentalists.
SPEAKER_01Okay, all right.
SPEAKER_00So I'll simplify with their philosophy like a ridiculous amount. Transcendentalists believed in the purity of the individual and individual freedoms.
SPEAKER_01Okay, that tracks.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, they believed in the power and the goodness of nature.
SPEAKER_01Also tracks.
SPEAKER_00And they knew that this was an idealistic worldview. They knew that people weren't going to necessarily achieve like full fulfillment and connection to nature, but they believed people would blossom best when independent, able to reason, and respectful of nature.
SPEAKER_02Okay, this is kind of good.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's exactly what I want you to think about, MJ. Is like it's a complicated philosophy. At the time, the transcendentalists, like there's certainly criticisms of what they were hoping for for society, but they're responding to things like Western expansionism, like they're being critical of that. They're responding to industrialization. Like there's certainly some negative consequences of industrialization at this time.
SPEAKER_01Sure.
SPEAKER_00Ralph Aldo Emerson famously was a proponent of civil disobedience. They believed in like individual rights. Like with that individuality comes this respect for civic freedom and responsibility that we didn't have for all people in the 1840s.
SPEAKER_01Right. Okay.
SPEAKER_00So yes, this philosophy was in many ways quite good.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And do you remember Henry Thoreau? You remember what he did that probably makes him the most famous?
SPEAKER_02Uh yes, but I don't want to embarrass myself. So what did he do?
SPEAKER_00All right, I'm here for you. I actually did take a Thoreau class in college, so I'm fairly prepared.
SPEAKER_03Smarty pants.
SPEAKER_00Thoreau decided to pursue this philosophy quite practically by going off the grid himself. So Thoreau wrote on Walden Pond. Um, he agreed to work some land that his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson owned in exchange for the ability to build a cabin and live a self-sufficient lifestyle on some property near Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts.
SPEAKER_02Okay, Massachusetts. Notoriously cold winters, but okay, continue.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, tough place, but that's the self-sufficiency part.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I guess.
SPEAKER_00Walden is like a really interesting book. It's kind of practical. Um, again, harking back to what off the grid people like to read. It has like manuals on how the cabin was built and how he planned to grow and hunt food and like how he was planning to survive a self-sufficient lifestyle. It's also deeply philosophical. Thoreau is interested in exploring simple living as an experiment, basically. He's hoping to find a sense of enlightenment through it. So I think Walden is definitely a really interesting book. I highly recommend it. There's a lot going on in there. And I think the key ethos I want to relay here is that he believes in self-reliance, but he doesn't necessarily believe in isolation. In reality, Walden Pond is not that far from the town in Concord. Like he wasn't really that far from community.
SPEAKER_02He tricked me.
SPEAKER_00But by intention, like he liked hosting visitors, he liked having community. He wasn't doing this to split off from society. Holly, he's hosting visitors. He was doing that intentionally. This is part of the thing.
SPEAKER_02This is the classic case of I want to detach myself from city life, so I moved into a suburb. Are we dealing with that type of case where they're not actually that detached, even though they want to be?
SPEAKER_00It was actually rural. He built his own cabin, for God's sake. Like he did the work. He was growing food.
SPEAKER_02He was doing that at a time where most people built their own cabin. So I think the context clue is very important.
SPEAKER_00I did not bring Thoreau up to dunk on him. I have deep respect for his work. And like everything you're pointing out, MJ, transcendentalism is not the perfect forebear of what we know as off-the-grid living today. Thoreau was above all else a philosopher. So his time isolating himself in the woods was something he did so we'd have a lot of time to read and write even more deeply.
SPEAKER_02This is a writer's retreat.
SPEAKER_00It was very much like a writer's retreat. I don't get the vibe that that's what a lot of off-the-grid people are interested in with their extra time these days. And for that reason, I don't want to compare him too closely to today's like off-the-grid lifestyle. But we have a few enduring principles that I think really root here, and we can see trace through history, a focus on self-reliance that is absolutely critical to the off-the-grid proponent's worldview.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, no grid.
SPEAKER_00Exactly. A high value on simple living. So finding deep meaning, assigning a lot of value to pairing things back, consuming less, and like finding joys or finding fulfillment in the simple way to live life.
SPEAKER_02Also, we're starting to see some overlap with the cottage core people as well. There's a high value on simple. And now what simple means is complicated. But yes, that is also a value that you can see traced to today.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And I think in varying degrees, like Thoreau didn't see it the same way off the gridders, necessarily see it now, but seeing the state or organized society, like religion was a criticism that transcendentalists had. And they saw the state as a source of corruption and injustice. So they were a little bit more focused on the individual potential because they saw like a lot of the hypocrisy and the corruption that would stem from organized politics and organized religion.
SPEAKER_02We're starting to get closer and closer to where we're trying to go, which is what modern off-griding is. Because I feel like this concept of the state is a source of corruption and injustice is a huge motivation for modern off-the-grid people.
SPEAKER_00It absolutely is. And we pick and choose what we take from history and philosophy all the time. And a lot of off-the-grid proponents today are wrestling with similar ideas as the transcendentalists. Like, is it purer to live closer to nature? Is human society always going to arc toward corruption and strife? Is the way I'm living meaningful to me, or can I pair it back and find more fulfillment in self-reliance?
SPEAKER_02Okay. Not bad questions.
SPEAKER_00The wrinkle to that, as you're pointing out, is that for all the admirable tenants of transcendentalism, it's easy for that to be flattened into all the troubling consequences of focusing on individuality over society.
SPEAKER_02There's a lot of commentary I could say here.
SPEAKER_00I'm about to take this off a cliff, so I think it's a good time for you to collect your thoughts.
SPEAKER_02Okay. The flattening is what occurs with a lot of these doctrines, because if you focus on the nuance, the romantic image breaks. For example, is it pure to live closer to nature? How close is close enough? Like what is nature? You have to sort of parse out each of those individual terms. And as we know, nuance is the enemy of ideal. That's why a lot of these doctrines they try to flatten it because it also helps them buy into that romantic image that they want to, you know, root their life in.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, there are people who will take the principles of this philosophy, which you don't necessarily have to agree with, but are worth thinking about, and they kind of twist it into something that is harmful to society. And I don't think there's any better example of this than in the work in life of Unobomber Ted Kaczynski.
SPEAKER_02Wow, you're okay, you really took us off the cliff.
SPEAKER_00I told you I was gonna take us off a cliff. And that's because as I was writing this, I was like, okay, I do think that there is real root here in the transcendentalists, but they're kind of like the most positive version of this, right?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, they're actual philosophers.
SPEAKER_00What's the dark flip side? I actually asked my husband as I was writing this part. I was like, is this out of pocket to jump from Thoreau to Ted Kaczynski? And he was like, yes. And I was like, I think I'm gonna make it work though.
SPEAKER_02I want to see how you make this work. There are tons of podcasts and articles and videos, so many things about the unibomber Kaczynski. If you need to take the time to sort of Google him, like do it now.
SPEAKER_00But essentially, yeah, I won't give you his whole thing.
SPEAKER_02He was behind a lot of bombings and he was He did a lot of bad shit.
SPEAKER_00He was not a good man and his philosophy was broken.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, fascinating life story, but still, bad man.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, he is infamous for pursuing a radical anti-industrial philosophy after years of living off the grid in rural Montana.
SPEAKER_02Okay, our first off-gridder. Okay.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, not their best boy, but Kaczynski, he was off the grid. For whatever his motivations or life experiences were that led him to this, he was radically anti-industry to the extent that a lot of his bombing targets were computer store owners, professors who worked on technology at universities. He's really famous for writing a manifesto, threatening the Washington Post to publish his manifesto lest he bombed somebody else. And it was all about the erosion of human freedom and the danger of modern technology. It's like the twisted version of what the transcendentalists were talking about, not to discredit with the work they did by comparing them to the unibomber, who was, I repeat, not a good philosophical thinker.
SPEAKER_02Not at all. His manifesto is infamous in many ways because it's a perfect example of someone who's working with a good idea, but he it's oftentimes a he, not to be too gender, but he sits with that idea in isolation for too long. And have you heard of this thing? If you look at yourself in the mirror for long enough, your face will start to disfigure. This is the philosophical version of that. I could get where the anti-industrial, anti-tech philosophy came from. Like, look at the world we're living in today. AI slob is everywhere. The initial impulse isn't bad, but he sat and stared at it in the mirror for too long.
SPEAKER_00And what was he actually acting on? It wasn't anything that would further his cause. And at the end of the day, it's like, what did he really enjoy more? I think it was likely the bomb threats and the terrorism. Uh, because none of those things, murdering a computer store owner does not slow the stem of technology.
SPEAKER_02No, and you could read in his manifesto where he starts out and you're like, okay. Okay, a little unhinged, but I can see where you're going. And then inevitably their conclusion is always, so I'm gonna do some violence.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. I think that's what we see with a lot of extremists. I think Ty Kaczynski had a more like coherent philosophy for what he was doing than most.
SPEAKER_02Coherent for sure compared to the rest.
SPEAKER_00Most of these guys, and I like you, I iterate, the guys most of the time.
SPEAKER_02Mainly guys, yeah.
SPEAKER_00They don't have a coherent ideology they're working from. No. Their ideology is violence.
SPEAKER_02They inevitably end up with violence, which is why it's a big issue. And we'll get on this in a future Death by Doctrine episode for sure.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, we don't need to dive into it now. I almost went down the rabbit hole.
SPEAKER_02All right, back to offgrading.
SPEAKER_00Why did I bring up Kacinski? Point this out not because I think, oh, if you like off-the-grid stuff, you must be like the Unibomber. No, that would be uncharitable. Notably, the Unibomber didn't create a movement as much as he wanted to. And that's an important distinction. I just think that these contrasts are interesting. It's like the most charitable good faith version of this doctrine, and then the worst iteration of it. What I was interested in exploring with this is like how far can those principles take you in one direction or the other? And that's the conflict that we're going to look at is there are good elements to an off-the-grid ideology or like what we're seeing in this movement, but what are the drawbacks? Like, what are we missing as a society with this? And that's really what I wanted to illustrate. Um, so I will kind of next dive into what are modern off-the-griders actually talking about? So, like, they're not adhering to transcendentalism, right? They're not reading the You know Bomber's Manifesto. Like, what are they actually talking about?
SPEAKER_02Hit us with a modern example. And now, are these people perhaps extensively documenting their off-the-grid lifestyle to the point where you can't really tell whether they're actually off the grid or they're influencers?
SPEAKER_00I mean, yeah, they post on YouTube a lot. Not really off the grid, huh? That's kind of on that's kind of the thing with all of these like going back to simple lifestyle social media movements. It's like a little bit contradictory, right?
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00I'm gonna tell you about a popular off-the-grid influencer account. They're a Canadian family, they live in rural British Columbia.
SPEAKER_02Okay, non-American.
SPEAKER_00Yes, non-American. They're a Canadian family and they post on the account name Gridlessness. Oh, it's about being gridless.
SPEAKER_02We're off to a great start.
SPEAKER_00So, gridlessness, they're primarily a YouTube-based family. So they do have like Instagram and Facebook. Most of their stuff and most of their views are on YouTube, and they're a whole family. So, like as I mentioned, one of the main guys in the account is a guy, but he also posts a lot with his wife and his like teen children and like other people. Like, there's lots of people in this family. And plenty of their content is about just various aspects of optic grid living, about how they supply power to their home, about hunting, about the beauty of their rural Canadian landscape. And like, it is so beautiful. They're like in the mountains in British Columbia, gorgeous.
SPEAKER_02Well, here's the thing, Holly. Nature is often pretty.
SPEAKER_00You know what? Nature is good.
SPEAKER_02And we have to remind ourselves that the beauty of nature and the presence of humans are two completely separate concepts. The same thing with cottage core, right? You can make your kitchen really nice, but aesthetics and actual life living is uh two very different things. So I'm waiting to see where this goes off the rails.
SPEAKER_00Well, here's the last thing that they post about that I think is really interesting. They mint their own silver coins.
SPEAKER_03For what? For who?
SPEAKER_00Let me tell you. So I think gridlessness is really interesting as an example. And the reason I picked them is not because there's anything like super good or bad about them, but they really explain, I think, what we're getting at with this doctrine well. They forefront it a lot in their content, and it's commentary about control and freedom. So one of the reasons that they moved to rural British Columbia to pursue this lifestyle was they talk about just like a vague dissatisfaction with modern living.
SPEAKER_03Sure. A lot of people could relate, yeah.
SPEAKER_00But they get a little bit more specific in their video about printing money. So I will read you a quote from that video.
SPEAKER_03Can't wait.
SPEAKER_00Quote: It's been 13 years, and since then we've taken a huge amount of control over our food, our energy, and just our lifestyle in general. But there is one thing that we still don't have real control over. In fact, the government has total control over our money, and I don't like it. So we're gonna change it. We are officially making our own money, unquote.
SPEAKER_02We are getting close to libertarian self-nation.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_02We're getting close.
SPEAKER_00I gotta tell you, I wrote out this whole thing about the history of private money in developing mate nations. It was too much, and I just felt it was getting us all too off track. It's really interesting.
SPEAKER_02It is interesting. As you probably are thinking, this listeners, the whole point of money is exchanging it. So, in order for money to have value, you need to have multiple parties that is not you to recognize the value of said money for that to occur. My first question to you is very obvious. What is this money for?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, this honestly just feels like a hobby because they happen to have access to silver where they live. Cosplay. They say in the video that they're interested in developing more of a local economy with their far-off neighbors. So they want to start using the silver to exchange for goods and services and kind of detach themselves from using the Canadian dollar. Which is fine. Like if your neighbors agree to that, it's fine. It's not like they're saying they're gonna revolutionize Canadian currency. But there's a lot of issues that can stem from this that we see from history, like the development of script by private companies in the US. Yeah, bad history that would often really limit workers, make local communities who did develop their own like non-federal money like really vulnerable. So there's lots of things here, but they're just talking about like trading with their neighbors effectively. So kind of like recreating society, right? Like starting back at the roots.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, we talked about this in Cottage Core.
SPEAKER_00Yes, this is a whole thing. It's like they're trading stuff with their neighbors, and they're like, Oh, wouldn't it be easier if we had a store of value? And again, they're just like recreating, we're we're going back to basics.
SPEAKER_02This is funny to me because let's say they want to trade with their neighbors and they want a form of currency with their neighbors. What they could do is to take Canadian dollars, take a Sharpie, and just cross out the number and serial number, and that's a form of currency. They could do that, they don't have to mint anything.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, but I think they like making the coins, you know? And I think they were having a lot of fun in the video doing it.
SPEAKER_01All right.
SPEAKER_00Also, they sell the coins that they mint like online. Okay, so they actually are worth something.
SPEAKER_03Okay.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's the way they make money. They sell the coins to their fans. But anyway, this was interesting to me because of the philosophical element, right? Like this talk about control, this talk about government, they want to be even more than just pursuing simple living and enjoying their lifestyle. They're looking for a more fully independent community that doesn't need the local economy, it doesn't need attachment to any parts of modern Canadian society. It's like taking everything back to its studs. And it's going a little further than some person just wanting to do their own thing in the woods. It's like trying to rebuild a community that's more akin to your personal vision. And you almost get the sense that some of these influencers are hoping for a collapse or like hoping for things to continue to fall apart so they can achieve that independence that they crave.
SPEAKER_02It does seem like they want to rule Canada, but because they don't have the ability to actually rule Canada, they recreated Canada in their backyard.
SPEAKER_00Almost. I think ruling is a bit of an overstatement because I don't think these people actually want power. They want independence from everything about power, you know? Interesting. Like they don't want to make the decisions, they don't want to think about other people, they don't want to have all those complications of a society. They want like some more conveniences in their own local community. But I think the explicit thing with off-the-grid stuff when it gets to this extreme is that they don't want to think about societal issues at all. Like they want freedom from thinking about it, which I can empathize with. Um, but we'll dive into a little bit next. There are some issues with this as a philosophy.
SPEAKER_02Now, interesting that you said they are not interested in power. And I fully believe that. I think right now, in their current state, they just want to have a decentralized, uh, I hate to use that term because it's attached to crypto, but they want to have a decentralized, like independent sort of community. But the issue with that is like how they inevitably rebuild society, they will inevitably recreate systems where someone needs to be in power because let's say they want to make their own currency. Okay, can other people with silver make the same currency? No, only you can make valid currency, so you are the head of the mint.
SPEAKER_00That's true. Like, if all of their neighbors were minting silver, like what would the story of value be, right?
SPEAKER_02Exactly. Even if they don't want power now, they will inevitably find themselves in a position where they must either take that power or delegate that power to someone else, which is again what society does.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_02We're back on it, we're back on the remaking society train. Okay, what are the bad things?
SPEAKER_00All right, so the whole societal element of off-the-grid views are deeply troubling to me. And, you know, I'm not somebody who's like gonna be favorable to this philosophy as a person, but just on a philosophical level, a lot of off-the-grid proponents express a deep fear of reliance on the government. And like, I get it in our current state, but they're not really responding to the same things I am. Here's a quote from Off-Grid Survival Magazine.
SPEAKER_03That's a real magazine.
SPEAKER_00It's more like one guy's blog.
SPEAKER_03Oh, okay, or one of those. Okay, got it.
SPEAKER_00I think he might publish an actual periodical, but it's like one guy. Here's a quote from that, which I think is telling. Quote governments are broken, division is at an all-time high. Politicians scream about party loyalty while infrastructure crumbles, bridges fail, power grids falter in heat waves, hospitals overflow. In one part of the country, people die of heat stroke. In another, they freeze because the grid filled again. Nobody is coming to save you, unquote.
SPEAKER_02Classic. This is so reminiscent of Apocalypse is upon us.
SPEAKER_00Yes.
SPEAKER_02Those religious rapture.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, the rapture. They're almost like fetishizing it. They're like, I cannot wait for that to happen.
SPEAKER_02The reason why this is so appealing, because it is a half-truth.
SPEAKER_00Yes. You recognize some of the things they're talking about there, right? Yes.
SPEAKER_02That's why it's so hard to debunk. Half truths are way harder to debunk than full lies because you have to recognize the nuances. Yes, power grids do fail, bridges do collapse, hospitals are overflowing, but the nuance there is lost when you sort of present it like this.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, the civic fear, especially with the quote, division is an all-time high. And we see this line all the time, like, not just from off the gridders, but from all kinds of Americans. And it always drives me up a wall. Because it's like, who is responsible for this division?
SPEAKER_01You.
SPEAKER_00Who is on stage calling for their political opponents to be their enemies? Who's calling for blood right now? Like, it's just this vague, like, ah, things are falling apart. Everyone's so divided. And it's like, we actually do have causes for this that we can identify, but instead they're just like, oh, I wash my hands of it. I have no idea what's going on. That's just my own personal rant, but this drives me crazy.
SPEAKER_02I fully agree with that rant. It's the same thing when Republicans in America have all three branches of the government locked down, and yet they're complaining. Why?
SPEAKER_00They're like, why can't they just come to a decision? I'm like, okay, who's involved? What is the decision at stake? Like, what are the discussions happening or not happening?
SPEAKER_02Like legislative, judicial, and executive.
SPEAKER_00So many people are guilty of this, as you're saying. And it's the lack of specificity on what is driving political issues that means this person is not actually curious about or interested in the solution. They're just like hand-wringing, like, oh, well, things are bad, and I guess I should just wash my hands of it. Like, I shouldn't care because, oh, these politicians are at it again. It's not a solution. It's not like a way forward.
SPEAKER_03That's called escape.
SPEAKER_00And that's exactly what I think this line of off-the-grid philosophy is about. And I think it's one of my biggest bones to pick with this doctrine and the whole doctrine of self-sufficiency in general. It's like washing your hands with societal problems. And while you're doing that, you're often contributing to them.
SPEAKER_02They essentially want all the benefits of society without any of the contribution while complaining about the faults of society at the same time.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. This kind of like the dark side of that in these people's minds specifically, because they want to fearmonger about the things that are falling apart, and they want to also not do any of the work it would take to fix them. Like they don't want to admit that these are things we could work on if we had the civic will.
SPEAKER_02Because if they admit it, that means they are culpable and they don't want to be culpable of anything. So yeah.
SPEAKER_00I'm gonna take uh one of the specific claims on that paragraph, the one about people dying because of the grid failing. That is referring, I think, pretty explicitly to Texas and its grid failure in 2021. And I think this really points to the problem with this kind of individuality of a society element, because yes, the grid failure happened because of a freak weather event, but it was also a failure of the state government to enact large-scale weatherization efforts, to diversify from aging coal and natural gas plants, and to enforce regulation on utility companies. Texans had elected representatives who believed in the power of government, they likely wouldn't have had as bad of a crisis and they would be more prepared for future crises to come. But like these individualized systems, like this lack of a will to do things at a civic level, means we don't have the resources or the willpower to reinforce the things that need to change. The grid doesn't have to fail, but nobody's interested in putting in the effort it would take to fix it.
SPEAKER_02All accidents at the end of the day are product of humans. What I mean is a lot of people will look at car accidents, for example, and just say, oh, you know, that's just the hazards of driving. However, if you look at, for example, the airline industry, we used to have airline crashes very frequently. However, over decades of policies and regulations, we regulated the airline industry to near zero fatality every year, which means it's possible. Like near zero accidents is possible.
SPEAKER_00You will always have freak things happening, but we can mitigate all of those risks because we have a lot of avenues to regulate, to control for things, to create safety barriers.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, they don't want to recognize it.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and that is my whole point with this. If you refuse to engage with the political system that could make our power grid more sustainable, you're writing off people who will suffer from these problems. And you're adopting a mindset where your own family survival is the only thing that matters to you, which I think is incredibly corrosive to our public health and our ability to survive as a society.
SPEAKER_02I don't know if you'll get into this, but here's a bit of trivia about the US power grid. The US has three grids there's the Western Interconnection and the Eastern Interconnection and Texas. Texas grid is on purpose detached from the Western and Eastern grid. Do you know why?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. They specifically decided to be. I know that this is the case, but I actually don't know why. Can you tell me?
SPEAKER_02It's been a while since I watched that John Oliver episode, but the gist of it is something to do with regulation. There was a lot of lobbyings involved, but they wanted to detach themselves so they could do their own thing, and the own thing happened, which is widespread failure.
SPEAKER_00Right. It's like you are independent and on your own when we have widespread failure and like we have limited options to help you.
SPEAKER_02Watch that John Oliver episode, it's really good.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I need to catch up on that. And I think all this talk about power grids is bringing me to my next section of what this doctrine is about, which is the environment.
SPEAKER_02Ooh, okay. We love a good environment section.
SPEAKER_00And I think a lot of OctoGrid proponents value the environment as well. A lot of them see themselves as ego-friendly for good reason. They are early adopters of renewable energy, they're often reducing or recycling their water consumption and they consume fewer goods. Like they do reduce their need to consume and participate in wasteful processes.
SPEAKER_01Sure.
SPEAKER_00And a lot of this is by necessity, right? If you're off the grid, obviously.
SPEAKER_01Can't really do much.
SPEAKER_00Not using as much natural gas. But I think a lot of them do this ideologically as well. Like they put value in generating renewable power and reducing their strain on our resources. And that's all good. Like that's all fine and good on an individual level. And I think the average off-the-grid homeowner probably does have a lower carbon footprint than the average suburbanite. Like it depends a little bit, but I feel confident saying that's probably the case.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, suburbanites are notorious for consuming a lot of things. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. But here's the thing at a societal level, so outside of anyone's like individual choice in this matter, rural and suburban living is mathematically worse for the environment than urban density.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00You know this way better than I do, but I'll share what I have found. I'm drawing a lot from Yale School of the Environment. They published a great essay on this in 2009, and they're comparing that the greenest state in the US, like I think Time magazine called Vermont the greenest state in the US, to the actual greenest place in the US, which is New York City.
SPEAKER_03I read this years back, so don't know the details, but yes.
SPEAKER_00I actually remember reading this before too. I think it was like it's one of those things that you're like, it really shakes a lot of core assumptions you have. Yeah. Like you look at Vermont and you're like, it's literally so green, like fields and forests. Uh-uh. But no, no, no. New Yorkers have the smallest carbon footprint of any American coming in at about 30% of the natural average, at least in 2009 when this was written. So if New York City was a state, it would rank 51st in energy use. So it would literally use less energy than all 50 states.
SPEAKER_02This is a phenomenon that people who are in this space are already well aware of. But I think to the average American, like this might be very counterintuitive.
SPEAKER_00And I think it's kind of pointing to this like individuality versus societal conflict in and off the grid self-sufficiency doctrine, right? Is they're saying, well, everything I'm doing is great for the environment. But if everybody lived with this amount of land use, like if everyone had an anchor in the woods, it would be incredibly inefficient. Every household would draw more power. Like the most efficient use of living space is multifamily housing. We would all need more water. And like realistically, we would likely continue to drive everywhere, right? Like, I don't think that a lot of off-the-grid people are really envisioning a future where we also have transit. You know, the more people flee urbanization, the more sprawl they create. And sprawl is, without a doubt, incredibly bad for the environment.
SPEAKER_02And you can see this very clearly if you're ever on an airplane. And then you look out the window if you're sitting next to a window seat. And as you fly out of a city, because airports are typically in cities, you can see extremely visible transition between the city and the suburb. When you're overlooking a city, you often see a density all sort of concentrated in this one area. And then as you fly over to suburbs, you see oftentimes identical single family homes. It spirals around a hill or something, and then you realize it's covering a lot of space. That space could have been a park, it could have been a natural reserve, it could have been a beautiful piece of nature, but no, it is now houses.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. We can house and like employ and have so many more people living in any space with urbanity, and we can also preserve more nature at the same time. Like those are not in conflict. The whole problem with this argument that I think is hard for people is that they're like, what does that mean for me individually? Like, I don't want to live in a city. And I truly don't place blame on anyone for that. Like I get it's very personal.
SPEAKER_03New York City is kind of tough, not gonna lie.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's not gonna be for everyone. Some people really like living in a more rural setting. So I think an off the gritter is gonna listen to this and say, Well, I'm not responsible for that. I want to live by myself and I'm gonna do my best to live sustainably.
SPEAKER_01Selfish.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I'm not asking you to change to live in a city or live in an apartment. I don't think that's what any proponent of urbanization is really asking of individual people.
SPEAKER_01No, not at all.
SPEAKER_00But that's the inherent issue with this doctrine, right? Is where are we as a society? If someone who adheres to self-sufficiency is detaching themselves from this conversation, where does that leave us? So many people isolate themselves from solving societal-wide problems that would actually improve their lives and the public good. If we had denser, more transit-friendly cities, those who did want to live in the woods not only could, but they'd be enjoying more public benefits from like our improved climate situation, uh, they'd be probably enjoying more land opportunity because there's less sprawl, so there's less competition. And there would be less strain on public grids. Like it would be a win-win for everybody, regardless of your individual choices. But again, they're like not interested in putting in that effort or considering that.
SPEAKER_02This is a good point because, in order for them to live their preferred lifestyle, if you can call it that, they need the rest of us to live this urban density lifestyle. So what they should be saying is hey, I encourage people who are able to do this to do that. They should be more encouraging of this sort of urbanization to allow them to sort of live in their cabin in the woods. But as you can see in the language of that quote unquote magazine that you just quoted, their language is not that. Their language is society is bad, everything is crumbling, all of you suck, I'm gonna live by myself in the woods.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's that libertarian bent. It's like we see this all the time, not just in off the grid stuff. So many Americans reflexively hate cities for no reason. They hate the idea of funding public goods, and all of this hurts our capacity to solve large scale problems. It hastens the very problems that off the grid people are afraid of, creating this doom loop where they warn against impending emergencies, and we also careen. Closer to them because nobody believes in enacting any sort of political or social change. So it doesn't leave us in a good spot.
SPEAKER_02No, not at all. Well, I'm sad again.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's what I have for you today. It's uh got dark. Okay. Honestly, like the Unimomber section wasn't even the most depressing part.
SPEAKER_02And that says a lot. Yeah. So that's what off-griding is. That was a very wonderfully done and thoroughly researched breakdown for this philosophy and the current manifestation of it. Now let's get into the public health aspect of this. Why believing in this ideology is bad for individual health and public health? I really hope everyone can agree that being healthy is a good thing. We're not gonna get into the weird, get into the sticky politics or morals or ethics. We're just gonna look at are you going to live if you do this? And the answer is no. Not to spoil the rest of this section. What are the health effects on the individual level and the societal level of the off-griding ideology? Like cottage core, we can deconstruct this ideology with a very simple question. What land are you living on? Yeah. Because in order for you to live off the grid, you need to have a gridless piece of land to live on. And how do you come across that gridless piece of land? You can't just go there for ethical and legal reasons. That's called squatting. You need to either inherit that land or purchase that land, which means you have money. Maybe not a lot of money, but you have money.
SPEAKER_00Purchasing any sort of property is a big undertaking for both off the grid and on the grid properties.
SPEAKER_02And if you have money, it insulates you from a lot of problems. And this is why you look at those influencers, both cottage core and off-the-grid influencers, understand that they are not actually off the grid. They are making income from their YouTube videos and TikTok videos. So they are very much performing for you, for a lack of a better term. Another question that you can ask is where did you get your generator? Where did you get your solar panels?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, these things are expensive. Installing solar panels is much more affordable now than it has been in years past, but it's expensive. I actually saw this a lot in off-the-grid Facebook groups, is people would comment, they're looking to get started, and they're like, I can afford land, but I can't afford solar panels, the solar panels or like the well or the septic system. Those things are expensive. And like they were talking about how they were having trouble getting a loan for it. Banks aren't gonna give you a loan for your like weird idea to live by yourself. It's not really good collateral for them. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02If you can ask them those questions, you can very quickly see that some of the most vocal proponents of off-grid living have some amount of wealth, and that just puts them at a completely different playing field than the rest of us who don't have the wealth to, you know, buy land. I don't think I'll ever own enough money to buy any land in my lifetime. Yeah, you live in LA, so very difficult to buy land here. Let's put aside those wealthy landowners aside. Let's just look at what off-grid living actually entails. By definition, you're living away from infrastructure as much as you can, which means you're also living away from people, which means you're probably in rural areas. Actually, this might be more extreme than rural areas. You might be in the wilderness, depending on where you settle down.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, your neighbors are deer.
SPEAKER_02You know, deer's nice. Your neighbors might be bears.
SPEAKER_00That's true.
SPEAKER_02You may or may not live alone. This is something that actually you sort of enlightened me that a lot of these are families. So maybe you don't live alone, but you live with a small group of people at best. You probably don't have electricity, you probably don't have internet, which again, why are they YouTubers? But you know, we're not gonna touch that for now. You probably are trying your best not to be involved in society in any ways, which means you probably don't have a bank account.
SPEAKER_00There's a high degree of prepper overlap. I think they are anti-bank people. There's a range of ideologies, Sarah. Like plenty of people do have a bank and want a bank loan and use the internet, but like there's a range, and preppers are definitely part of this.
SPEAKER_02Maybe you have a bank, maybe you don't. Maybe you pay taxes, maybe you don't. If you're really trying to remove yourself from society, maybe you want to scrub yourself from the government databases. And one of the ways to do that is by disappearing. Who knows, right? Maybe you have a social security number, maybe you don't. But the vibe of off-griding seems to be they want to remove themselves from society as much as they can. And a part of that involves the paperwork stuff, including taxes and all sorts of those things.
SPEAKER_00I don't think a lot of these off the gridders love the paperwork involved in modern society.
SPEAKER_02Actually, one of their main tenants. Um, what I'm trying to lead to is if you try to remove yourself as much as possible from society, you probably don't have health insurance.
SPEAKER_00Probably not.
SPEAKER_02Probably not.
SPEAKER_00It's kind of a skewed view because a lot of the stuff I've looked at is influencers, and as we mentioned, like this is their job.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, they're performing.
SPEAKER_00So I don't know, I don't know what kind of work experiences like real off-the-gridders have, but yeah, probably not health insurance-based.
SPEAKER_02Or if you do have health insurance, is one that you have to buy individually, which is more expensive, as we know. And that's socialism. Yeah, in that socialism, indeed. So these are what being off-grided sort of entails at an individual level. How does this impact your health? In the Cottage Core episode, we covered the correlation between living in rural areas and various health outcomes. People in rural areas are more likely to experience diabetes, mental health issues, food insecurities, obesity, cancer, heart disease, injury, and lower life expectancy overall. This also applies to people who live off the grid, perhaps more so because at least the homesteaders are still attached to the grid. That's one thing the cottage core people have going for them. They are, at the end of the day, on the grid. They might be far away from everyone else, but they are on the grid. So you don't even have this. Some off-griders are not just in rural areas, but like I said, they are in borderline wilderness, which is even more extreme and therefore more exposed. Maybe you're like, that's rural areas, people in poverty live in those areas, and I'm not one of those people. Okay, fine. Ignoring all of that, distance to hospitals and other healthcare resources. If you are off the grid, you don't live within an hour of a hospital. I don't think so. I don't think you can.
SPEAKER_00Like wealth can insulate you from a lot, but it can't insulate you from everything. And one of those things is time. And there are definitely things that happen in your life where time is a crucial ingredient.
SPEAKER_02Survey shows around one-third of Americans live in an area with insufficient primary care providers, and those areas with shortages are disproportionately in rural areas. Within the last 20 years, 193 rural hospitals closed, with dozens more transitioning into primary care only with no capacity for inpatient care. What that means is you are unable to be hospitalized, which means probably no emergency care, probably no like long-term life-sustaining care. This number may not seem like a lot. However, unlike hospitals in urban settings where one metropolitan area may have multiple hospitals, for example, Baltimore, Hopkins has multiple, UMBC, which is the University of Maryland, has a lot of hospitals. Mercy is a private hospital.
SPEAKER_00A lot of hospitals.
SPEAKER_02Shock trauma is technically not in Baltimore, but very nearby, one of the best trauma centers. Urban hospitals are very concentrated because they have a larger population to serve. However, rural hospitals are not this. It is very likely that a single rural hospital will cover wide area with little to no alternative or overlapping healthcare resources. So every rural hospital closure hurts a lot more. If Mercy were to close tomorrow, it would not be good for Baltimore. However, Hopkins is five miles away.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, they're very close together. Like it would be inconvenient, but everyone would be okay.
SPEAKER_02Relatively okay. Obviously, things would be bad. Rural hospital, it's not the case. Every closure means potentially thousands of people, or if you want to look at area, potentially an entire chunk of the state would just suddenly lose hospital access if a hospital were to close down.
SPEAKER_00I think this is interesting because all this is so correct and it's important to think about. I do get the sense from the off-the-grid magazine and the content that I was looking at that they are kind of aware of this. Like, I do think, unlike cottage core, I do think off the gridders are like more realistic about what their lifestyle entails, and they're just like, they don't care.
SPEAKER_02So, what do they do about this?
SPEAKER_00Like a lot of them will stock medical supplies, right? So they'll have like the basic things you would need in an emergency. I don't know. It's just kind of this rough and tumble lifestyle where they're kind of priding themselves on sort of self-sufficiency. And I think a lot of them have an awareness of the limits of self-sufficiency and they're like willing to take that gamble, which to me is incredibly frightening. And, you know, if an actual medical emergency happened, I don't know if they'd still be singing that tune. But it is kind of like an interesting element of what I was reading and watching, is like they're prepped for some medical stuff, but obviously they're not doctors. So it's just kind of like this risk that they say that they accept.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, we can talk a little bit about this hoarding medical supply things. You brought this up with discussion about how New York City is actually the greenest quote unquote state in America. Same thing with stockpiling. By stockpiling, which is what you're encouraging everyone in this community to do, stockpile medicine and emergency supplies, by stockpiling, you are rendering each unit of whatever that supply is less valuable because you are hoarding. That is so true. By stockpiling those things instead of having those supplies at a hospital where they could treat multiple people all at once with actual doctors and not you who learned how to sew by looking at a book.
SPEAKER_00They're watching these like zombie apocalypse movies in which every single one there's like a plot line where they have to go to a local hospital and raid it. What are you gonna do? A great personal threat. And they're like, Well, I'll just have all that stuff already.
SPEAKER_02I'm horrified to think someone who's untrained would do with like a chest tube. Like someone who doesn't know where they're doing, put a pin on this and we'll sort of loop back around this, this idea of they don't really care about this. If you're off-grid, you're probably very far from these healthcare resources, which is, I don't think I need to emphasize, detrimental to your health. If you have any sort of emergency, if you have any sort of health conditions, or if you have any sort of a medical need, you would have a hard time reaching those places that can provide those things for you. Any condition that would require regular medical assistance, forget about it. Out of the question, if you need dialysis, you need to live near a dialysis center. Otherwise, your body will fail. And that goes for other medical conditions as well. If you need any emergency or urgent medical needs, even if there is a hospital or emergency department, the distance alone could prove to be deliterous. I need not to explain why delays in seeking medical attention increases the risk of a bad outcome. Stroke, heart attack, accidentally shooting yourself in the foot, which does happen because a lot of these people own firearms. Being off-grid by definition means you're probably not within 30 minutes or even an hour of a hospital, which is the golden time of trauma and stroke and all those things I just discussed. I thought about doing an entire section on firearm because they own firearms.
SPEAKER_00Oh, yeah. Owning firearms greatly increases your statistical risk of accidents. That is just a fact.
SPEAKER_02So, yeah, you're probably gonna be very far away from any of those emergencies. This is not even medical emergency. If your cabin catches on fire, you can't put out a fire with a bucket. You just can't.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's why we invented fire brigades, later known as fire departments. Um, because these things are just more helpful if you have more people involved.
SPEAKER_02If there's a natural disaster that hit your cabin or whatever, if there's a hurricane that came through or a snowstorm, you can't really rely on emergency services because you are off the grid. There is no emergency services, so you have to tough that out yourself. There's no regular dental care, there's no regular eye care, meaning problems are likely to be caught way later. If it is caught at all than it would have been.
SPEAKER_00And you're not putting fluoride in your water supply.
SPEAKER_02No, I doubt you're fluoridating your own water. Oh, maybe they are. Who knows? Maybe they're practical and they fluoridate their own water. Who knows?
SPEAKER_00I don't know. Yeah, maybe there's maybe they're serious about this.
SPEAKER_02And this is especially true for diseases like cancer, where early screening and diagnostics can be the difference between a good prognosis or months left to live. Holly, I just came back from the dentist.
SPEAKER_00Oh, good.
SPEAKER_02It was good, but I have one of the most painful cleaning because I haven't done a cleaning in one and a half years because I was moving last year. And you know, when you move to a new city, you sort of delay finding a dentist. So I haven't gotten a cleaning in one and a half years, which means I missed three cleanings. I did cry when the hygienist was cleaning my teeth. It was that painful.
SPEAKER_00I really need to go to the dentist. This is scaring me.
SPEAKER_02I can't imagine if I went five years without going to the dentist or ten years without going to the dentist. What would happen to my teeth? And I brush regularly and I floss once a day. Like, teeth is more important than most people think because this is not just about cavities. This is about gum disease. This is about potential abscesses, which could kill you if it's bad enough. Eye care as well. Your yearly eye exam is not just for adjusting your eyesight. Not eye sight, you can't adjust your eyesight. Your early eye exam is not just adjusting your eyewear, but they're also screening for eye conditions like glaucoma and cataracts. You remember the puff of air test that they do on you?
SPEAKER_00Oh, yeah. I yeah, get that every year. Never get used to it, but I get it.
SPEAKER_02Quite frightening, but they do that for a reason. They do that to catch any sort of those eye issues early so that you don't have to live with potential blindness, for example, 10 years down the line.
SPEAKER_00That would be really tough in an off-the-grid setting.
SPEAKER_02Unsurprisingly, having less frequent dental and eye checkup is correlated with negative outcomes like higher incidence of cavities. All of these should be self-explanatory. I don't think I need to pull up any stats. Now, you're off-grading. You are self-sustainable. It's really hard to grow your own food. It's arguably harder to hunt your own food. From what I can observe, the off-griders, uh perhaps due to gender ideologies, and we could talk about this a little bit, they are more likely to advocate for utilizing what exists in the wild, like hunting and gathering, than agriculture. They're not gardening. Or at least the off-griders that shove their way onto my feed, they're not gardening.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's not the content that does really well, I think. I think realistically, like the ones who are actually trying to live off the grid do garden. But it's not really at a scale that's going to give you a lot of leeway should crops fail or things happen, which is the inherent risk.
SPEAKER_02I don't know. The content that I see is very much hunting and gathering because I feel like that fits their aesthetic a little bit more because it's more about survival and living off the land. And when you garden, you're sort of you know, it's more feminine.
SPEAKER_00Boring, curly YouTube video that doesn't do well in the algorithm.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, no, you want to hunt deer. But that comes with its own set of risk. Eating wild game has risk. Foraging also has risk because some mushrooms look very similar to the mushrooms that you're not supposed to eat. Proximity to nature is not always good. That beautiful shot of British Columbia, Canada was probably shot from a distance.
SPEAKER_00You zoom in and you see all the ticks.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Hunting in the wild means you're more exposed to certain infectious diseases, tick-borne diseases, as we say, but countless other exist. This is not also limited to wild animal. If you choose to raise animals for food, they're also a potential reservoir for diseases. Not only that, hunting is kind of dangerous for yourself as well. We talk about firearm uses. There's a lot of hunting accidents that happen. And what happens when you get an injury? Where do you go? Nowhere, because you're off the grid. Now, if you're off the grid, do you have running water and sewage?
SPEAKER_00Uh, the septic situation is something that was really on my mind while I was reading this.
SPEAKER_02Did you find out anything?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, a big part of the logistics that an off the gridder has to do is like, what are they gonna do with their waste? So they have to create some sort of sustainable septic system, which can be done, but it's expensive and complicated. So some of them will do kind of like an outhouse and they'll they'll compost their waste. Some people use like gray water cycling systems, and like these are all things that can be good, but I just feel like with so many DIYers in this space, it is so tenuous to me. Because like no one's checking to make sure you're doing it well.
SPEAKER_02How would they? You're off the grid. So you need to come up with a solution for your waste. If you want to build like a self-sustaining septic system, my question is how are you gonna afford it? And if you can afford it, you have money. It just keeps going back to this. Like, it seems like you have money if you can build your own septic system for the more scrappy off-griders. You mentioned the outhouse situation. There's a reason why we got rid of the outhouse as soon as we have indoor plumbing, because the outhouses are linked to many, many uh infectious diseases.
SPEAKER_00Like we did as a society manage for a long time without our current modern plumbing systems, and of course, many people around the world still do, but those do carry more inherent risks, and like we still see the outcomes of it. Human waste is toxic.
SPEAKER_02There's also isolation and mental health. Contrary to what people believe, humans are social creatures. Do not confuse the stress of modernity with a need for isolation. There is a reason solidary confinement is a form of punishment, and some would say cruel and unusual punishment because there's something psychological about it that really hurts people. We shouldn't be doing this in general.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. As we say this, these are all things that MJ and I do not believe should be happening and are bad, to be clear.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. And you can sort of see this isolation and mental health effects in simply suicide rates. Suicide rates are much higher in rural areas than urban ones, particularly firearm-related suicide rates. We do have, at least right now, Social Security and other similar functioning retirement assistants like retirement accounts 401k, Roth IRA, whatever that means, to assist with people as they age. If you are off-gridders, you may be physically fit to do this now. But what happens when you're 60? What happens when you're 70? What's your plan for this when you're at that age?
SPEAKER_00A lot of off-the-grid stuff is really physical, and they acknowledge that. They're like, you know, you're gonna have to get used to like moving water around physically and treating it and boiling it. You're going to have to be used to doing more around food production. And even if you are lucky and you survive any health crises or don't have to deal with them, age will come. And it makes sense to have a plan for that, which I don't necessarily know if all of these lifestyles do.
SPEAKER_02Do they talk about this? Do they talk about like aging in the off-grid space?
SPEAKER_00I'm sure that this is a conversation. I have not personally seen it. I do think a lot, as I mentioned, a lot of popular off-grids are in family units. So I'm sure there's some element of like the family will take care of each other. But of course, that's putting a lot of weight on your kids to make the same exact decisions that you did.
SPEAKER_02Also, your kids grow old too. Yeah. Where are they gonna find their spouses?
SPEAKER_00They have to go to the city and trap some poor girl in a Hallmark movie and bring her back.
SPEAKER_02Oh no, don't do that. This is more with the cottage core episode because cottage core people like to romanticize the leisure aspect of cottage core. Off-griders are, as you mentioned, Holly, very tuned into the practical aspect. So they are aware that it is constant work. That doesn't make it better.
SPEAKER_00Right. It's still a criticism. There are still things you should think about. I understand you may think about them and accept the risk, but if we're talking about what effect does this doctrine have on our society, these are all extremely valid conversations to be having. What's that saying?
SPEAKER_02You could lead a hungry horse. No.
SPEAKER_00You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink.
SPEAKER_02Let's say these people say, I am choosing this myself. I accept the risk. I don't care I'm not near an emergency room. I don't mind that I might have an accident and just languish in my cabin. I accept these risks. However, this doctrine also has societal level impacts that goes beyond what you are doing in your little cabin in the woods. First, completely inefficient and unsustainable use of land. We will have famine if everyone tries to do this, which is obviously bad for our collective health. Remember the carbon footprint stuff? Uh it was all the rage about like 20, 10, 20 years ago. Turns out it was a fossil fuel industry propaganda because they wanted to shift the responsibility of carbon emission onto individuals.
SPEAKER_00I'd get that criticism and I think it makes sense. But I also think that people tend to like hark to that argument because it's hard to accept the individual responsibility. It's like both sides to me, because it's like, yeah, like we are not individually the producers of the biggest problems, but like we can't shut down the oil companies today or people would freeze in their homes. We do all have to make some like changes as a people in what we consume and how we live. Those aren't things we can do as individuals, but they're things we have to be willing to do and like try to enact at the political level. So it's like that one's always like in between for me. It's like, yeah, they're making, they're producing oil, but it's not going nowhere. Like, we do need to change some things too.
SPEAKER_02I feel very similarly. On one hand, I recognize the industry propaganda of all this, but on the other hand, I did think it was a very helpful tool to help people recognize that their impact goes way beyond their particular action that day. Let's use that as an example. Let's say you're off-grading and you want to forage for berries for food. Luckily, you find a bunch of berry bushes that provide enough berries to sustain you for an entire week. A week is not your life. That's one week. Berries need time to grow back.
SPEAKER_00The way I eat berries, it'd be a couple days for me.
SPEAKER_02Holly loves her berries. I do. Let's say you pick it all. It doesn't grow back immediately. So you probably can't pick it all at once. You're also competing with other animals who may also love berries. Like a bear loves berries just as much as Holly does. Oh.
SPEAKER_00So we're talking about rotating agriculture, a societal innovation that we had to arrive at.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, you have to also you know worry about seasonal changes. So you need multiple sources of food. Maybe this week you have berries, but next week you need to look for something else. In other words, without engaging in agriculture and animal husbandry, the amount of land required to simply sustain one individual would be acres upon acres. Because things take time to grow back, and you can't just eat that berry bush forever because berries don't grow instantly. And that sort of brings me to the issue with the economy of scale. And this ties in with your uh the New York City is a green estate piece. A lot of people will look at a factory farm and recognize its horror, inhumaneness, and environmental impact. I get it, that is a problem. However, the issue with factory Farms is the factory part. It's not the big farm part.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Again, like the counterintuitive thing because of the mythology that we build around these things. But like we would not have a more sustainable food system if we had like a whole bunch of small farmers. It would benefit the small farmers, but it would have impacts on our food security. The problem is a lot of the methods and the lack of regulation, but the large farm part is actually like for the size of the population that we want to sustain, a public positive with all the changes that we do need to make.
SPEAKER_02Now, keeping that in mind, that's just for food. It is more efficient for all the food to be made in one place and distributed. Same thing with electricity. It's much better for there to be one big generator generating electricity and a system of wires that send out that electricity than for everyone to own a gas-powered generator.
SPEAKER_00You don't say.
SPEAKER_02Think of that for everything. The economy of scale is unfortunately something that is undeniable when it comes to the efficiency of land. That's sort of the main argument. The other argument is if a lot of people subscribe to this ideology, there is an inefficient distribution and possibly impossible delivery of public goods and services. Looking at emergency responses in general, the lack of density means emergency response time will be massively inflated. And it's just a lot harder, logistically speaking, to organize any sort of public goods and services to serve the community. Let's say you're a governing body, you want to take care of all your constituents. However, some of your constituents live in the mountains. And if you are an ethical person, you would try to make sure that public service reached them. Obviously, you could do the unethical thing and just be like, ah, screw them. We're just going to focus on this area that we can reach, which some politicians do do, and that's bad, and we shouldn't encourage this. But that's that you're a good politician and you're like, I want to make sure our services reach everybody. That means they need to make suboptimal decisions about where they place their fire stations, where they place their EMTs, where they place their hospitals in a suboptimal way because they want to reach you, who lives two hours away in the mountains. So by you living in two hours away, yeah, they are intentionally making suboptimal allocations.
SPEAKER_00And depending on which parts of this doctrine you adhere to, you might also be actively voting against that interest and making these resources harder to collect.
SPEAKER_02The same politician that will go, I don't care about reaching those people because they don't want me to reach them. That type of politician is also the type to just say, maybe we don't need hospitals in general.
SPEAKER_00Right. It's again like not to pick on Texas, but it's that same element that says, like, hey, we have these communities that are susceptible to flood risks. Oh, we have money we could spend on strengthening that and going, eh, we don't need it. And then, like, of course, we need to help people in these emergencies, but we've turned down the very resources that can help us do that.
SPEAKER_03It's like it's a vicious cycle.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's not conducive to the society that we live in. At the end of the day, you can posture all you want about self-sufficiency, but most people in these emergency situations want to be saved.
SPEAKER_02You might be happy living in the mountains without any public services, but you know who needs that public services? The rest of us. So stop voting for the politicians that's trying to take that away from everyone.
SPEAKER_00I mean, they might not vote, but that's also the problem. It's like they're, especially if you're like a prepper or if they're anticipating an apocalypse, right? It's like they're we're all imagining that we're the protagonists of the story. Like they're gonna survive. Yeah. What happens is like if you're out of luck, you're out of luck. And you're creating a system where you're very susceptible to that, whether you want to admit it or not.
SPEAKER_02Even if you're okay with those people making terrible decisions about themselves and reducing their own lifespan, their decision impacts the rest of us. And that's why this doctrine is kind of scary, because no man is an island. So we need to not buy into the idea that you could take care of yourself, because one, you can't. Two, in the process of you unable to take care of yourself, you are making it harder for the rest of us. So that was off-griding.
SPEAKER_00And I think my takeaway as we trace the roots of this and how it shows up is not that I am against like any individual living this lifestyle. I think there are lots of admirable things about it. But the whole point of this series is like, what is toxic about this at a societal level? What is actually, in some ways that we might not even think of intuitively, detrimental to the public project that we're building? And to me, homesteading and cottage corn off the grid is such a juicy way to explore this because they're not all bad and people are doing them not in an ill-attentioned way a lot of the time, but there are nuggets here. There are ideals that we see show up in a lot of spaces, in at least American discourse, that are deeply detrimental to our public project, to us as a society. If more people were convinced to pursue these or adopted kind of these libertarian or individualistic mindsets, this is part of the problem that we're facing when we're seeing our public systems fall apart, is not enough people believing that there is inherent good in fixing these things.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. To have social safety nets and these public goods, they are made possible by the collective contributions of everyone in the form of taxes. And these safety nets are critical for public health and well-being. Medicaid alone is providing healthcare for millions of Americans who are unable to afford basic health insurance. However, for these collective projects to work, we need to buy into the idea that we need to help each other. We need to contribute together to a common cause, and that common cause is the collective well-being of society. But if you have people who are actively rejecting that, who thinks that by living off the land by themselves, that they are doing something that's more virtuous and they're escaping like a corruption of society. If you have people that believe that, then these social safety necks are just gonna get weaker and weaker. And when it gets weaker, it starts the vicious cycle of people thinking that, oh, this doesn't work. And you're just gonna get more people to pull back from this collective project. I will end on this. The solution to these public services are bad should be let's make them better and not I will do it myself in the wild. Because you cannot do it yourself without incurring a lot of risk.
SPEAKER_00The solution is not to detach, it's not to say, F you, I've got mine. Me and my family will be okay in the zombie apocalypse.
SPEAKER_03You won't.
SPEAKER_00How do we encourage people to embrace there are solutions? We can do things. I don't know. It's probably the toughest conversation of our days. Like, how do you get someone to believe that it's worth the effort to come together and actually focus on solutions?
SPEAKER_02How many of those off-grids do you think actually buy into the I'm okay with all the risk?
SPEAKER_00I mean, I think it's a posture, right? I'm sure to some degree that is true. I do know people who like, I mean, not well, but I do know people who like I don't go to the doctor. And it's not necessarily that they think there's no risk to that, but I think it's an element. But I think when push comes to shove, like if you're truly in an emergency, like if you had a natural disaster and FEMA is not funded, right? They would talk about being abandoned. And it's kind of the circular doom loop of like, well, why is FEMA not funded? We can't help you if we don't have the resources. It's yes, a vicious cycle, yes.
SPEAKER_02Thank you so much for listening to Death by Doctrine. If you like the show, please tell everyone you know about the show. That is the best thing that you can do to help us. I have other podcasts as well, including Everything is Public Health, and public health is for everyone. For more information and all updates, please visit everything ispublichealth.com. Thank you so much for listening, and we will see you next time.
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