I was born in '73 so much of this was done before I was grown.

I recently read an article in Backwoodsman about a family in OK that had a well and a way of making electricity quite some time back.  They even processed their own hogs.

How did we get from being so self reliant to depending on others for virtually everything we use or own?

They made it all illegal and unprofitable without lawyers and lobbyists.

It's more expensive to raise your own than to just buy it from Walmart.

Plus there's all that work and stuff.

When auto manufacturers realized they would sell more cars if more women were driving.  Women tend to feel a manual transmission is too difficult to learn or just too tedious.  Women could now spend the money faster than man could make it, while away at work.

Greed.

And sloth.......and apathy.

Greed, then sloth, now apathy. Or maybe reversed.

People stilll have wells, they are pretty common, and houses with solar are more and more common. Around here most houses havew some solar, either pannels or water heating or both. As for butchering and gardening I think its a matter of convenience. People find that they can get more porfit with other activities. Is there a food industry agenda? You bet, but I think people themselves gave up on the idea of doing certain less profitable and less convenient activities.
The real great historic robbery was actually fiat currencies but that's a topic for another thread.


Dude, thats just wrong. Women have a right ot drive, study, work, make thier own choices. As for cars, everywhere else outside USA manuals are far more common than auto transmission and women drive just as much. Neither men nor women find manuals too difficult. And the same goes for money and  the way its spent. My wife is a lawyer that chose to become a stay at home mom, she chose family over carrer. when it comes to money she's far more careful about spending and keeping an eye on it than I am. Not all women are the same just like not all guys are equal.
FerFAL

 
"We" moved into city's...we stores..and small suburban lots..with HOAs...and code enforcement. Then some one from that city got tired of the "rat race " and moved out.Then others followed then the rat race followed...


Think of it like the flu.



Plus as said

Lazy.

Why spend time raising stock ...then spend time butchering..packing..etc.

When you can go to chinamart five minutes away..buy 2lbs of pork loin ..and have all day now to do other things......

Don't worry, some of us young folk are trying to bring it back

Society got complex and specialized.
Society moved away from needing a large percentage of the population on the farm
As recently as the Depression, half of the population was still involved in agriculture.
It's down around 2 % now

because its a assload of hard work.

I'm happy not to have to process all my food to survive, unless I want to do it.

when you read about that stuff, you only read and fantasize about the good parts, just like most idiots fantasize about SHTF.

It really sucks.

the birth of the lunch in school and the mother of food assistance by the FedGov post WWII
came from the average recruit being under weight, under developed and bow legged due to malnutrition...
sustenance living isn't what it's cracked up to be.

also those who didn't serve in the war left the farms and move to the city for jobs and war support.
steel, munitions, vehicles, and clothing mills were all pushed to the max for the war effort.

after the war, millions came home with back pay and big ideas..fed by Gov Loans and the fact Europe and Asia were
TOAST, nothing left, no factories, reduced workforce etc and we were up and running so America became a major
manufacturer rather than a agronomic based economy. Cities grew, convienences fed a sudden growth of middle America and inner city
residents never seen before...

in a nutshell..

Having spent the majority of my live working in farming country areas.   There are a lot of folks that grew up farming that want nothing to do with that kind of work and hated it the whole time they grew up until it comes to work bragging rights.    There is a reason why I see a lot of guys farming are 60 or 70 or even older.  They own the place and it's all they ever knew.  The majority of the children went off to do something else.   I think the rate of women leaving farming areas is even greater then the men.

Farming seems to be a business of old men and Hispanic immigrant laborers.

Nailed it!

Around here there are plenty of young guys farming, but the problem is the way that commodity prices have effected land and used machinery values. Back when corn was around $2.00/bu and soybeans were around $5.00/bu, land and used machinery values were low enough that a guy could get into farming. The profit margin was very slim, but if you were good about getting by as cheaply as possible and maybe took a job driving truck when you weren't busy, it could be done.

Now, since commodity prices have gone up and then spiked for awhile, land and machinery values are so high that it's mathematically impossible to make things work. This keeps the young guys from getting into farming unless they inherit everything, and starts to weed out the established guys that run sloppy operations.

I grew up farming, and farmed for a few years as an adult partnered with my Dad. We only got out of it because the farm we were renting was sold before we could get a new rental contract. We were stuck dead in the water and couldn't find another place, so we had to sell out. Right after that was when prices started to go up. Dad passed away shortly after that, and I couldn't see myself paying the higher prices, having witnessed the '80s farm crisis when I was a kid. I knew paying too much for land was a mistake, and elected to stay out if farming because of it.

Once a few guys go broke because of the current situation, it'll snowball for awhile and we'll have another "farm crisis", all because too many farmers bought too much high priced land.....again. And then, when it all shakes out and land prices come back down to reasonable levels, I'll look into farming again. So it's not that some of us don't want anything to do with farming, it's that some of us realize that the economics are too shaky.

It's a lot of work to be 100% self reliant. Most would rather spend their time doing other things than homesteading and hunting and farming full time.

Specialization and efficiency.  Interdependence is what allowed society to progress.

We accumulated the wealth of decades of hard work and innovation and became wealthy enough to become lazy, self-centered, and apathetic.

We became the next generation of Kennedys

Now we will reap the whirlwind. Repent, and return to following Gods laws... Become wealthy again...It's a cycle.

So the downfall of western civilization can be traced to women drivers and automatic transmissions?  

Its economics 101 really. Unless you’re on minimum wage or around that kind of income, the simple truth is that you probably earn in a few days enough to buy what would take you all month to produce, and if you want top quality, organic stuff its just a bit more expensive.
It really is counterproductive to center your preparedness plan let alone your life and financial strategy in producing food unless you do so as a successful business. Now, having an orchard that is ½ fun, ½ production makes sense to me. Especially if you get to grow some of your own on your free time, all while having another job that is more profitable. You can have some fresh food to supplement your diet, and you have the knowhow in case you want to bring it to a larger scale. But again, food, even quality food, is not that expensive and most people will find it counterproductive to spend much time producing it themselves rather than generation more wealth by other means.
I try to learn from older folks, the ones that have a lifelong experience. My grandparents and hundreds of thousands of others like them, most were farmers in the old country. Once in America, practically none of them ran to the country, they instead got jobs, then started their own businesses. Nearly all of them had other things in common: They all worked hard for their kids to do well in school and go to college. They all saved money so as to start their own business. Shops, grocery stores, and various small and medium size business. Nearly all of them had a small orchard and some chickens or rabbits in their homes and all of them kept VERY well stocked pantries. These were people that had escaped years of war and misery and knew first-hand what it was like to be hungry.
FerFAL

Human nature is to make things easier for ourselves.

I like Air Conditioning, Gas powered cars, not having to do back breaking work every single day.

Once you have had it, it is very difficult to willingly give it up.

We may be more intelligent than our grandparents, but we are not wiser. There is a big difference.

People moved off the farms to make money in factories. It became cheaper to buy food than butcher and store it. More people live a suburban/urban lifestyle that rural.It started to shift about a hundred years ago.

Its not a bad thing to be able to buy food. It will be a bad thing if there is some kind of collapse though.

That shift from farms to urban areas is what allowed us to make the advances we did.  Farms have become massively more productive per labor hour, so there is no need for a large number of farmers.  Those man hours are better allocated to other things.  Remaining overall agrarian and rural means remaining backward and irrelevant.

I have not bought store-bought meat in probably 20 years..

My cabin, while I have a generator, has no other power source, aside from solar, and is heated by wood that I cut myself.

There are lots and lots of ways to be more self sufficient, but it requires work. Most simply don't want to put forth the effort, or have lived in suburbia or urban areas so long that they simply have no idea how to process an animal from the field to the table, or how to buck up a few cords of wood.

In addition to the above, at the end of WWII business realized they could produce FAR more than the American populace could ever possibly need.  So Madison Ave. was born to encourage the average citizen to buy stuff they didn't need.

Thanks to all for the input.


It still seems to me like we have given away a lot.  Wells are not exactly common here.  Also, if the power goes out most of us are just doing without.  

Seems how we build is a big mistake.  I may be wrong but we are generally more reliant than we should be.  Makes me think of how screwed everyone in New Orleans was during Katrina.  Surely there is a better plan that what was implemented there.

Did you build the solar panels yourself or were they made by someone halfway around the world.
Same for your Iphone and Nikon Camera, or the computer used to post the pictures.
Did you make the money to pay for these from a job that relied on other people?

Sssshhh!!!!  Dude! Dont go there. You'll ruin the self reliance fantasy by mentioning that OTHER 99.999% of stuff in life you need yet dont produce yourself.
FerFAL

As mentioned before is is all about efficiency of specialization, but it hasn't been illustrated for those who didn't got to class on the second day of Econ101. Most people think that if we all put in the same amount of time/effort we all get the same results. That's just not the case. Environmental factors have a huge influence. Florida guys will crush me in Missouri when it comes to citrus production. Washington State beats me in apple production. My crappy rocky soil (if you can call it that) on the side of the hill isn't great for growing about anything.

Beyond that, we all have know a guy who just seems to be able to fix anything. Probably never needed a bit of training. ""Mechanically inclined" we may call them. They can fix things far faster than us. Inherent abilities play a factor in specialization. It's worth paying him four hours of my production if the same fix would have taken me eight hours. This assumes that I had eight hours of work to do.

So, we have environmental factors and natural abilities that influence production output. The third factor is equipment. You and I both are perfectly even. At the end of the year we both produced identical products in identical quantities and sold them for the same profit. You bought a cow. I bought a chainsaw and paraphernalia. I'll spend five days for all my firewood needs and you'll spend 15. You needed the cow because your wife had another baby and you need the extra food.

Yes, it is simplistic but these changes over multiple years amplify. Next fall I cut all your firewood and I get some of your extra food production. win-win. I take my profits and invest an horse and cart making my wood cutting even more efficient. You had to buy another cow to replace the butchered one and some left over for a goat. Why this year? Well, trading me part of your cow for my firewood made both of us better off. My firewood cutting made me a horse and cart worth of profit and all you could do was a goat and feeding the little mouth another year. We both did better.

Let's scale this back to "self sufficiency." It's time to process some chickens. Given the amount of time to start a fire, boil some water (to defeather), then clean up after that is a fixed cost of time. We will assume that the wood need to flash boil a chicken is the same for one of 20. That takes you (or me) two hours. Boiling and plucking alone takes 15 minutes per bird for this example. I bring my four chickens for you to do and trade you my time to clean out your gutters and compost the material for next spring's garden. That took me 90 minutes. That saved me 90 minutes (2 hours prep, 1 hour work) and save you 30 minutes. we are both better off than if we did the same tasks ourselves. You also had Larry, Daryl, and his other brother Daryl bring their chicken to do for trade...

That pot you used, well, you couldn't make that unless you wanted to mine ore with stick and rock, create a pick axe, mine some more order... You see how this goes. We need trade and specialization. So don't shoot all your neighbors when TEOWAWKI comes.

We're nearly two years in to our new life.  





Simple home that we built ourselves, starting with chickens, big garden this year, maybe a pig and some ducks or turkeys next year. Well, wood heat (not pellets), solar next summer, root cellar in the basement, canning.  It's really pretty easy once you get started, and not much of an adjustment surprisingly.  Our 14 year old daughter is thriving.  We're not going to be off-grid, but close enough to it that the transition would be quick.





I can be done, and done in a way that doesn't feel like roughing it.  Get started.




ETA:  For us, and I think for most people, a reasonable goal is not complete self-sufficiency but rather living more like our grandparents generation.  They gardened, made things, had a little livestock, and lived frugally but well.  They went to the store, bought equipment, and used the grid, but they were worlds more self sufficient than most people these days.
 

Unless you inherited a farm or the financial means to acquire one, most of us are economic slaves once we start having children. Keeping up with the cost of providing for their care and needs is about all most of us can do. Setting aside funds for a truly self sufficient farm has been done by a few that played it very smart, but they were rare, and very hard working. There are more that made it to the hobby farm level, but they are not truly living off their property without some other income source. I am all for it, but not everyone can do that in this day and age. Fact is we also need people who build jets and staff hospitals, it is the current reality.

Just depends on how far into the "live off the land" you are willing to go.

My Grandmother was a subsistence farmer.  A bunch of chickens, pigs, a few cows, large garden, deer, and heated their farm house with wood; even had a wood/elect. cook stove.  Her water came from a spring that was piped to a underground vault that they pumped water out of.  She grazed her cows on the railroad right of way.  She and her partner also had other income from doing odd jobs for others when ever they could get work.  Latter in life SS was a (the?) source of $ to add to their life.  She loved the life living in the middle of nowhere and raising her animals.  She was educated and had been a school teacher in her younger days, but she chose to live a different life.  It was a hard life.  I remember chopping holes in the ice on the pond in the middle of winter and getting water for the animals.  She still had to pay for power, gas, the truck, medical, etc. etc.  My Mother moved resources from our household to my Grandmother...buying extra stuff at the store and taking to out to the farm, etc.

Mel Tappan was one of the "high priests" of the survival movement years ago.  In his writings he said to stock up on some things because it was so much more time efficient to buy them rather than try to make them yourself...shoes, clothes, etc.

I spent my life working for other people so I wouldn't have to live without in my old age.  Our new home is on the edge of "out there" but has electricity & web-connection.  We have the well and septic system in; the Wife wants to shower and have a warm bathroom.  We hope to catch fish and add wild animals to our diet; however, we are only 10 miles or so away from shopping at the stores.  We'll have a wood stove to help heat the home.  I have no interest in trying to raise animals.  

I enjoy reading about people going "back to the land".  I wish those that try it good luck.

Real work is hard, most people don't like hard work.  

Living of the land is fun to fantasize about, but in reality it can suck, a lot.  Some truly enjoy hard work.  I enjoy it to, but on my terms.  

If I had to do that shit for real then I wouldn't be able to do the fun stuff once in a while, and the hard stuff would no longer be fun!  

Sometimes its nice to take a day off in the recliner with a cold beverage and watch TV.  I like to ride my snowmobile, ATV, and motorcycle for fun, not always out of utility...  

Fishing and hunting when I choose to do it is fun...  If I had to depend on it then well, it probably wouldn't be so much fun.  

My 9 to 5 lets me do things on my terms.

Subsistence farming actually isn't possible unless you start out wealthy. In our world, you will ALWAYS have bills to pay. You will always need to trade for things. Trade has been a thing since the stone age.



So really, short of having tons of money to last you the rest of your life, there are 2 options:



1. Farming for yourself AND profit. Farming for yourself so that you can produce the vast majority of what you need, the extra is for trade.

2. Farming for yourself AND outside income to pay for what you still need. Since you produce a lot of what you need, outside income can be minimized.



Both are VERY possible. Either way, you will NEVER be wealthy. If that is important to you, you will have to find something else.



I own a business. It provides our income, and really, I work minimal hours. That is the ONLY way to "have your cake and eat it too", but the self-sufficient lifestyle becomes more of a hobby. We are working to be able to transition to option #2 if the business ever fails, where even a part time job would give us enough to get by, since we produce most all of our own food. Having your land paid for and no debt makes that possible, which should be the goal of everyone.

There's a survival book somewhere that talks about all that........can't quite put my finger on the title though.

I couldn't tell ya. My Dad passed on something to me when I was a kid that he heard a preacher say. Greed, sloth, and apathy are all part of what happens in a free society. Something about bondage leading to rebellion, which leads to freedom, which gives way to greed, which gives way to laziness, sloth & apathy, which leads back into bondage.

Hard times breed strong people. Strong people bring in good times. Good times breed weak people. Weak people bring in hard times. Rinse, repeat.

 

you start with a nickel, this will add only a nickel to a family's taxes in a year, it will only add a nickel to the price of a product, it will only add a nickel per dollar spent by the school district, it will only add a nickel to the price of your auto tags, there will only be a rise of nickel per gallon of gas, this nickel we propose will add a value that is immeasurable to the price of a box of ammo but will fight crime and illegal firearm use state wide, this nickel tax/user fee on your phone will benefit thousands who now can not afford to buy their own cell phone service, and we all know how important cell phones are to get and retain a job..........this nickel surcharge on your water usage will help the state maintain clean water for generations to come................we are not getting nickel and dimed to death, forget the dime it's the nickels and the social programs that they are spent on  that are killing us.

I always have to chuckle when the bitchy  replies tend to come from the more urban areas like the east coast, where they think a trip to yellowstone, with it's millions of visitors annually is "getting away, and seeing the wilderness".

To answer your  rhetorical questions, I did not print any money, nor build a foundry or forge a barrel, to build the rifle used to kill the big game in the Frank Church Wilderness area either. Oh, yeah, I did not build a covered wagon to travel to my property on the edge of the wilderness area. We do however gather cows/work off of horseback a fair amount each year, as well as end up rescuing God knows how many twits who have no business being in the remote mountains and high desert. Though usually since they read "outside" magazine and are armchair/computer based survivalists, they believe they are well prepared.



There are literally more elk and antelope than there are people here, and less than 1 person per square mile. The trip to a big store like Costco is more than 300 miles round trip, so we tend to do a lot of things ourselves. Of course every year, especially during big game season, we get invaded by fat slobs from other places like VA and CA who throw their trash/beer cans on the ground, cut fences, trespass, shoot signs, ride their 4 wheelers into places where they should not, and generally behave like total assholes. Then they wonder why the local ranchers/farmers and LEOs are not sociable..

Yea,  no where in your post did I see you claim you are 100% self-reliant.

However, I do reject the OP's title, I do not think anything has been stolen. (we have not been robbed)

The knowledge and tools to be more self-reliant are still here. Just depends how far you want to take it.

But, looking back at history, I don't know when man has ever been totally self-reliant.
I thought maybe as a caveman, but even then, I think they tended to live in groups.

Well, living in groups makes mating a bit easier

 

True,
but I was also thinking about hunting, division of labors, etc.

Absolutely. Assembly line style of working is extremely efficient. Henry Ford was just the first to use it to produce factory goods, but it has been used since the beginning of time. Let the guy who is a great shot have the stick, let the other guys herd the critter into the corner. Let the one who has a gift for gutting do that while the others do something else, etc. Trade your buffalo meat for something another tribe has a lot of for a change in flavor.

 

Trade always exists. The difference is HAVING to trade to survive and WANTING to trade to make your life easier/better. Our great grandparents survived the great depression because they could do shit, unlike 99% of Americans today.


Modern America is The Matrix almost perfectly. Almost everybody is a part of it, cannot survive without it, yet is completely unaware they are in it. They live, eat, breath, die by the matrix. And once you leave the matrix, you can NEVER go back to it, just exist within and outside of it in secrecy.

I understand that our grandparents could do stuff that most of us choose not to do.

I simply reject the notion that we have somehow been robbed of the skills or the ability.

The knowledge/ability to do the things that our grandparents did has not been taken or even lost,  the information still exists.

In fact, it's actually easier to obtain the knowledge now than it was in our grandparents day.

One simply has to choose to look up the information and then apply it.

I there there are two large contributors for me anyway.

Necessity - when my family used to work very hard all the time to get by, it was because they had to, and not because they wanted to.  They couldn't go to the store and buy everything like I can.  It wasn't available, or was too expensive, or they didn't have the money.   Thus, a lot of innovation and hard work was the way to get by.  

Distractions - there are so many things to learn about today that my family in the past didn't have the opportunity to study or experience.  My dad was the first to be able to do so, and I to a much larger extent, my kids the same.  Also, things like television/computers/internet/phones are great distractions, besides their power to convey great knowledge.

Don't give up hope.  There are lots of people that still have some skills of self reliance.  Learn some, teach your family, let them teach theirs.  That is how it is passed on.

This and a way of at least storing the water that comes into our homes is the type of thing I think should be the norm.  I don't understand why it is not.  I can remember many politicians advocating better methods than we are currently using but none of them seem to come to a reality.

Where did I ever mention them not having a right to drive?  Where did I say that women can not learn to drive a manual; I stated that they prefer not to learn how to drive a manual trans.  I know they can drive manual because I've taught a few; hell, even turned around and lost a race or two to them as well.  We had a system in place that worked and is still around today; why the addition?  I would gladly accept for the Handicapped, I'm sorry, Physically-challenged; that's simply not the truth behind its creation. Again forgive me, I can't speak for the inventor's actual intentions, but I can for the manufacturers implementation and it had nothing to do with helping the Physically-challenged who could not otherwise operate 3 pedals independently of one another or 1 independently and 2 simultaneously with one foot.  Yes, a Fool and their money are often parted; regardless of sex. Which of the sexes is the world more consumer marketed toward; just look and listen, its not a new trend.  Even if the product is designed as a universal product, food/grocery, essential  health care, home care products; who is the initial target in those advertising ads? While credit was issued to people prior to WW2 did it come in the form of a easily carried card?

The OP asked when we as society lost that independent spirit; I simply answered with my opinion of when the final nail went into building the coffin.  Mass fairly fast transit was available prior to the car; railway and steam come to mind.  Women's colleges were around long before the car.  The Industrial Revolution took off before the car.  Prior to WW2 we had no interstate system for fast distribution to every Little Town U.S.A.   Has it not been proven that for the most part a manual transmission will be capable of better gas mileage?  Would the roads not be a little safer if you actually had to work at driving, forcing one to actually pay attention a little more?  This whole text and driving issue wouldn't be quite the problem it is.  I truly hope this does continue to detract from the thread, was only adding my opinion; granted its wording is crass in retrospect.

To any actual women members or browsers I may have offended; I'm sorry!  To all you Sissies who got "armored knight" butt hurt for lack of reading comprehension; you either have the option of the ignore button, pm me or bringing on the wrath of the ACRCY/ATORSHIP I signed up for here

I would say yes and no. The practice and fine details are all but gone. Having theoretical knowledge is FAR different than working skill. There are books and the internet yes. Like I always say about those survival seed vaults. If that is your SHTF plan, you are going to starve to death. You know that in theory that a seed goes in the ground, you water it, weed it, and harvest it. Then you preserve it, somehow. How do you break virgin ground? How to you manage weeds? There is only so much that a book can tell you.