I’ll buy that. It makes me wonder about those moments in history when the social barriers did precipitously crumble. Among the masses consumed by panic and doubt, there must have stood some preppers, feeling like it was Christmas morning.
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.