Survival skillset #5: Knowledge Base

This is part 5 of a continuing series on survival skills, the beginning of which can be found here.

Knowing how to survive

What do you think will be the most valuable tool in your arsenal for emergency preparedness? Lots of guns? A huge stockpile of food? A secure compound out in the wilderness? All of those will be important, for sure. And pricey. But believe it or not, the most important is also the only one that happens to be free. It will never spoil or go bad, requires no physical storage space, weighs nothing at all, and best of all it is not at risk of being stolen or destroyed by people or events.

I am, of course, talking about knowledge. The things you know and the abilities you have to do things will be even more invaluable as a collapse prepper than they would be for a traditional one. Because there will be no Google to ask your questions, no Wikipedia to consult for background, and no YouTube to watch for a quick how-to video. The only real answers you are going to have to all your questions are going to come from you and those who are out there with you.

Yes, it is true that we preppers horde books, maps, and flash drives full of information, but all those are subject to being lost or destroyed. But what is in your head is safe. And while knowledge on paper is great, nothing beats good old-fashioned first-hand experience.

Knowledge is something that money can’t really buy, at least not quickly. Only time and experience can provide you with this incredibly valuable resource. Knowledge will give you the power to trade or barter needed supplies by providing some service to others. When you are relying on goods for barter, you will eventually run short. On the other hand, your knowledge, skills, and experience are limited only by the time you have available to offer them in trade.

Building your own knowledge base as broad as possible will make you less dependent on the skills and information of others and that allows you to be more resilient and self-reliant. Self-reliance will enable you to better weather the coming collapse and the turbulent times leading up to it, as well as lessen the impact that social, economic, and environmental factors have on your ability to survive and thrive afterward.

Consume Everything

When I talk about knowledge base as a skill, what I am referring to is not just specifics of information, although that certainly plays a part. What I mean more is increasing the depth, range, and breadth of your knowledge concerning many things. Everything, in fact.

Some of it is simple stuff. Take, for example, knowing your city and surrounding region well. That can be somewhat replaced by maps and books about what is where, but that is a secondary type of knowledge. Reading about a place or seeing a map is one thing, but having been there in person, having spent time navigating the route, and exploring the area when you arrived, there is really no replacement for that. It is the same thing for knowledge of processes. Think about something as simple as changing a tire on a car. For someone who has no knowledge of the tools involved, or the workings of the wheel mechanism, even a simple task such as this can take pages of material and pictures to explain. But for someone who has been there and done that, the process is almost unconscious. You just possess a general “knowing” of what you have to do and why, and there is no need to think about it further.

So, when it comes to the knowledge base skillset, it is actually rather simple. Consume every bit of information and experience that you can. Have you changed a tire before? If not, well, go out and try it. Watch the videos, read the material, and then go do it. Even if you don’t need to. The entire point of such an exercise is that, when the day comes that you do need to, you may not have the extra time to fumble around with the car’s manual.

Consume all the information and experiences you can, while you can. Go exploring and try out all your book-learned survival skills. Read stories about how people did things before the Industrial Revolution, like making cloth or building cabins. And be active with it. Whenever you come up against something you don’t really know how to do or only have the information but not actual experience, make the decision to actively go do it. Can’t drive a stick? Go do it. Never fished in a river? Go do it. Got a deep cut on your leg while pruning some trees? Break out your shiny new emergency medical tools and fix it.

Sources are all around you. Even the shows you are watching on Netflix can have valuable information that should be retained. Often, it is just a matter of making that conscious decision to pay a little extra attention to what you are already doing, whether that is hiking trails near your home or reading an old Western novel.

Most of my other articles on the various survival skillsets will give you an idea of the things you need to know about and have practice with before the SHTF. But here, I mostly mean gaining a feel for it all. Knowing how to get across town from one side to the other is good, but there is nothing like the knowledge that comes from long experience that allows you to “feel” the best route during specific times of day, familiarity with the shortcuts, and alternate route information that can help you if the regular ways become blocked or slow. Anyone can figure out how to navigate across a city from the east side to the west with just a general direction sense, but no one will be able to do it faster and more efficiently than the cab or delivery driver who has been on every street many times.

That is what the knowledge base skillset is about, it is not just knowing, but becoming familiar with the processes and developing the “feel” and instinct borne of experience with the task.

Unconventional Wisdom

Something else to add to your collection of knowledge would be many of the things that you actually won’t use very often, if at all, in your daily life. Things like picking locks, building earthbag houses, rappelling down walls, or making butter out of milk. These things you will have to seek out on purpose as they are not usually the types of things that you will encounter in day-to-day activities. Unless you are an Amish cat burglar.

There are a lot of things that you are probably never going to have the need or opportunity to use or learn in your normal, modern, and civilized life, but that is no excuse not to learn them.

Don’t let the brief length of this article fool you, the knowledge base skillset is quite an important one. There just isn’t much more to say than that. Try to look for new things to learn all the time. And whenever you are going about your day and come up against something you don’t know how to do, make a point to learn how as soon as you can. You never know what you will need to know later.