(Somewhat Practical Advice from a Very Impractical Source) by Trish Ruebottom
What you have here is not your typical apocalypse survival guide. Typical apocalypse survival guides promise to teach you to “grasp the essentials of wilderness survival… strategies to protect and provide for your loved ones… simple, effective food preservation techniques”, like the post-pandemic Ultimate Preppers Survival Bible from 2023. This is not that kind of survival guide. I do not offer effective techniques for surviving in the wilderness. Nor is this a guidebook like the Zombie Survival Guide from our pre-pandemic days, which offers such witty suggestions as, “1. Organize before they rise! 2. They feel no fear, so why should you? 3. Use your head: cut off theirs”. I have no call-to-arms against encroaching monsters. But I do have some non-obvious takeaways that only an academic could provide.
For the most part, academics are neither dooms day preppers nor zombie enthusiasts. We are not farmers, or carpenters. Most of us don’t even like the outdoors, and our survival skills are primarily theoretical (obviously, there are academics who are more outdoorsy types than the rest of us. I have a friend who studies the genetics of salamanders, and she spends an inordinate amount of time in the forests and jungles of southeast Asia. But for the most part, we prefer to conduct our research indoors). For this reason we are completely overlooked when people are choosing their apocalypse team. But my goal with this article is to prove why this is a huge mistake.
I am a business academic.
And so, perhaps unsurprisingly, my first piece of advice is this: you should ALWAYS have at least one (ok, maybe no more than one) academic on your apocalypse team.
The rest of my advice covers important topics in any apocalypse, such as building shelter, navigating food supplies, resolving conflict, making decisions, and finding companionship. Through each, you will see why it is imperative you have an academic on your team.
Building a Shelter, Academic Style
The first thing needed to survive any apocalypse is a solid, defendable shelter. Most people suggest an underground bunker or an easily camouflaged hut of twigs and leaves.
I, however, make the case for a very different kind of shelter. Ivory towers. Ivory towers are some of the strongest structures ever built, entirely impenetrable, surviving for centuries despite many strident attempts to break down the walls. The Ivory Tower in the Never-Ending Story would have you believe these structures are precarious, secured only by your belief in them; but the actual ivory towers of academia provide a Kafkaesque invincibility, built on bureaucracy and circular thinking, and therefore provide excellent shelter from any apocalypse.
Ivory towers are also incredibly comfortable. There are common areas, group rooms, and individual spaces, interspersed with well-controlled nature. There are rose gardens and cherry trees, and other varieties of nature that is native to nowhere nearby. There are football fields and squash courts, racetracks and pools. Ivory towers have readily available coffee machines and books – actual physical books – that can be used for entertainment in post-internet apocalyptic times, or to fuel fires for warmth and food preparation. In fact, there is technology from the entire history of innovation stored in university basements and humanities classrooms for just this situation. Many offices have been outfitted with couches long enough for a comfortable sleep and most have windows for daydreaming or active recon. In the enclosure of my own ivory tower there is even a nuclear power generator, several greenhouses, and a planetarium. We were planning ahead.
One hardly needs to step foot outside the ivory tower, as it provides all necessities required for a rich and fulfilling life. (The issue of stepping out of the ivory tower is currently one of great debate among academics themselves. It goes under the guise of philosophical arguments – the pros and cons – of “societal impact” and “community engagement”. While some academics venture out into the wilderness, most are content to consider the issue from a purely theoretical perspective.)
You will need an academic on your team to gain entry to these carefully guarded spaces. It is not easy. But academics know the way over the walls and through the red tape, they have the endurance to withstand hours, days, months of nonsensical barriers and labyrinthine pathways. Academics know that if they are patient and quietly long-winded, they can lull guards to sleep and sneak under the rule books into protected areas – spaces rich in resources. But they will only let you in if you are on their team. Academics are very cliquey. Once on the team, you are in for life and will never have to step outside the protected walls.
Some people believe they have been inside the ivory tower on their own, paid for parking, strolled the gardens, admired the architecture without the need for an academic guide. This is not true. What they experienced was a mirage, a flimsy veil over an empty parking lot. The real ivory tower stands behind/within/underneath/over the veil. Impenetrable. Penetrating the impenetrable requires a quiet stubbornness that few possess.
Key Takeaway #1: Impenetrability is not always about physically buttressing your compound from the rest of the world. Ivory towers are the ultimate hidden-in-plain-sight camouflage. Sometimes the best shelter is protected by invisible tripwires, obscure instructions, and unfathomable mazes of bureaucracy and intellectualism…
Academic Forms of Conflict Resolution
The second thing that’s needed, before even food, is conflict management. Teams are hard.
Many people assume academics are not team players – we were the outcasts, the introverts, people who never went to the dance and lived with our noses in books. And they would be right. We have no social skills. None. But through years of gruelling, mind-numbing committee work and high-stakes co-authorships with people whose personalities lean toward bland narcissism, we have learned the hard way how to handle conflict. While we are not fit for everyday socializing, our cut-throat no-holds-barred conflict resolution style is the perfect complement to any apocalypse team.
Most apocalypse movies show early, hopeful democratic processes based on logical argumentation and voting that eventually break down into authoritarian rule and anarchy. This is because they mistake logical argumentation for a plausible (if challenging) route to consensus-building. A model for society. But any academic will tell you this is simply naive disregard for human nature. It is not just challenging; it is never the most logical argument that convinces others. True consensus decision-making is about time depletion and relative levels of exhaustion. No uprising required. Academics are well aware that “consensus” does not emerge from mutual agreement and support based on respectful, clear and logical argumentation, and they waste no time on such silly ideals. Consensus is simply a lack of dispute because the other side has given up or died. Many academics are old. Whoever has the most time and energy to waste on non-flowing logic, argumentative obfuscation, and unending turn-taking will ultimately win the “consensus”.
An academic on your team will guide you in the true art of conflict resolution. As an apprentice, you will watch the process unfold in situ. You will feel the heat first rise from opponents as they attempt to wrestle with the illogical, you’ll see flames burning from their eyeballs as they follow your mentor’s words and read the indecipherable scribbles on the page. The scribbles will mean nothing to you or the opponents. But you will feel the energy drain from the room as each member of the team takes a turn adding words to the page, only to see it come back to them in a new form of nonsense.
When you are ready, you will have a chance to lead your own consensus building discussion. You will fail. Over and over again, until you become a hardened shell of a human capable of withstanding the flames of a thousand fires and the ice of an Arctic glacier. Only then will you achieve consensus.
Key Takeaway #2: Assume no one has the social skills for logical and respectful negotiations. Design processes that actually work: 6-hour weekly meetings to discuss written communications, where everyone has contributed in track changes. Such a simple process will slow down heated arguments, allowing logical heads to prevail (or implode trying to work through the tangled track of changes); partial ideas can be more fully fleshed out and unclear thoughts can be clarified when in writing (or they can be reversed in an unending edit war of backtracking and rewrites to be discussed at the next meeting). Either way, all but one will give up, and consensus will have been reached.
An Interdisciplinary Perspective on Navigating Food Supplies
Now that you have shelter and consensus, people on your apocalypse team need to eat. We are all very unprepared for such basics of survival.
Most guides provide one-size-fits-all advice from a single perspective. They give actionable advice such as: stockpile cans of food for the long-term, plant a garden with local vegetables, etcetera, etcetera. An academic will review the existing literature and add important nuance to the advice, providing a plethora of unique and crucial perspectives that must be considered before putting seeds in the ground or cans on a shelf.
From a sociological perspective: Are there religious and social food requirements for those on the team? How will we come together to prepare the food as a family? What rituals will we follow and what are the significance of these events? From a humanities perspective: What stories can we tell about the food? And what do the themes underlying these stories tell us about our current preoccupations? There’s also psychological considerations, historical insights, and engineering views. There’s my own personal business perspective, an anti-capitalist viewpoint on the limits of entrepreneurship for those who are marginalized, and how this impacts food decisions.
This is only a few of the possible perspectives. There are many, many more critical perspectives that academics will bring to the table … all crucial to consider before going willy nilly with the carrot seeds.
Key Takeaway #3: Only one perspective is relevant for developing a sustainable food supply, but all perspectives are needed for a rich and rewarding life.
Non-Linear Decision-Making
Once these basics are taken care of, the team needs to develop more sophisticated processes for decision-making.
While regular people often carry out simple everyday decision-making quickly and without second-guessing (“the lawn is very long, therefore I should cut it”), academics call into question the effectiveness of this lived simplicity. Academics bring extensive experience in regression analyses and structural equation modelling to account for a plethora of factors – mediators and moderators – that underpin every decision.
These important mediators and moderators help explain the unending number of possible outcomes. The seemingly easy decision to cut the grass is actually – unknowingly – mediated by a number of cognitive and material considerations, moderated by complex emotional factors, and situated in a multi-level context involving additional meso- and macro-level variables that only an academic can isolate and measure. You may think that you understand your own thought process, and that your emotions could never be parsed into individual dimensions and quantified on a scale, of say, 1-7. But you would be wrong. Proper experimental design is critical in uncovering the unending complexity of everyday life.
How could we possibly know if we should cut the grass without controlling for extraneous variables and understanding the difference between causation and simple correlation? Even then we will never know with 100% certainty. All we can do is hope the results fall within a 95% confidence interval…
Key Takeaway #4: What we should do depends on A LOT of things, and we can only ever be 95% certain. It’s probably safer not to cut the grass until we’ve run a few more studies.
Professorial Companionship around the Campfire
If the last apocalypse taught us anything, it is that apocalypsi are boring. For much of the time, there is simply nothing to do. We can only plant so many carrots, repair our shelter so many times, and explore new territory so often – and we have to be prepared for the almost inconceivable idea that we might not have the internet next time around. To the best of my knowledge, the dangers of boredom are not covered in any other guidebook, and this is a serious oversight.
Now, let’s say you have absolutely nothing to do but stare out the window. Your butt cheeks are going numb, your eyes glazed over hours ago, and you have a cramp in your calf from lack of use. This level of nothingness might not make you think, “I sure do wish there was an academic around right now”. I get it. We don’t have a reputation for being the most entertaining group (see point #2: academics are not fit for everyday socializing). But in the ultimate boredom of an apocalypse, you will want an academic on your team. In fact, I believe the people who will struggle the most in the next apocalypse will be those who used to be the life of the party, those who aren’t entertained by, for example, a lecture on “Nanomaterial impact on plant morphology, physiology and productivity” (a riveting analysis of how minerals alter plant growth by Bawirth, Bamsaoud & Alnaddaf, 2023) or “Digital finance and regional economic resilience: Theoretical framework and empirical test” (an illustration of the benefits of economic globalization fuelled by technology written by Yu, Li & Dai, 2023).
Most people will never survive the boredom of the next apocalypse. Academics, on the other hand, are the people most aptly suited to the newer pace of life afforded – insisted upon – by an apocalypse. We are built for it, having been broken down during our early doctoral studies and rebuilt in a body that can withstand the ultimate torture of boredom. We have been training for this our whole careers. And we will lead by example.
Key Takeaway #5: The survivors of the apocalypse will not be the strongest, nor the bravest. They will not be the ones who are most physically fit. The survivors of the next apocalypse will be the ones who can withstand the most boredom.
And that is it. The clearest articulation of academic advice for the next apocalypse. There is a lot to consider I know. But if you take nothing else from this guide, take this one thing: everyone needs an academic on their apocalypse team.