One need only look at the phenomenon of zombies to understand preppers. I call it the elevator effect - no, not that elevator effect - the fact that we're required to be polite when we're crammed into small spaces and made uncomfortable yet what we really want to do is lash out and call people shitcamels and bash our cars into theirs. "Zombies" make it okay to fantasize about taking a sledgehammer to the masses because you've dehumanized them into "walkers" or whatever while prepping gives you the same leash: "I'm not stockpiling guns and food because I want the opportunity to treat the rest of humanity as NPCs in my first person shooter of the mind. I'm stockpiling guns and food because you never know what sort of behavior will occur when our social barriers break down!"
Having spent several years gazing through the long lens of history, I'm pretty sure the modern prepper movement is kind of unique. I mean, societies certainly crumbled and bad shit happened but when your ruler is Kaiser Wilhelm and you've been a nation just since the fall of the Hapsburgs your benchmark of stability is substantially lower than when, say, your biggest worry is "ZOMG what happens when we leave the gold standard." Most of my prepper buddies point to Argentina's collapse as the modern model for prepperdom, and that was the collapse of a military junta.