It looks like you're using an Ad Blocker.
Please white-list or disable AboveTopSecret.com in your ad-blocking tool.
Thank you.
Some features of ATS will be disabled while you continue to use an ad-blocker.
But why is the United States apparently full of people ready abandon their comforts and revert to a simpler, more basic lifestyle in the face of hypothetical disaster? David MacLeod, a psychologist with a special interest in disaster psychology, says it's a US phenomenon.
"The Americans are among the most superstitious and religious people - the largest number of Christian fundamentalist believers anywhere," he told Channel 4 News.
"There's something in the US mindset that looks for these kinds of quasi-religious ideas. And the other thing about Americans is that they're very suggestible."
He also thinks that survivalists are prey to a certain kind of pessimism. "People of that mindset are very often, in ordinary terms, anxious. They may be superstitious.
"If they're exposed to such (survivalist) beliefs, they're prone to begin to look at the world very suspiciously. Then these sorts of myths are generated and become a belief system."
It may be that, just as health workers in west Africa have to combat local supertitions as they fight to limit Ebola's spread, so a different set of irrational fears and responses are at play among the citizens of the richest country in the world.
originally posted by: babybunnies
Show me that you can do this when there's a full support system, and I'll believe you can when there is zero support.
originally posted by: ValentineWiggin
I had never really considered that it wasn't something that happened in other countries?
*snickers* Says a lot about our trust in our government to handle any kind of major emergency