In many parts of the United States when you call 911, you're lucky if anyone shows up within an hour. It's a couple hours to get to a Wal-Mart or a store. It's difficult to get anyone to drive 40 minutes outside the nearest town and navigate unmarked dirt roads to do basic plumbing or home repairs.
As a result, people have to learn to repair things, make things, use a gun, do first aid, lay shingles, hang drywall, pour concrete, solder pipe, weld, change oil, replace an alternator, lay PVC pipe, etc.
People in the community learn emergency medicine and how to manage a structure or brush fire by volunteering with the local volunteer fire/EMS, because that's the only show in town.
Roads wash out in the rainy season, so 4x4 is an absolute necessity. People learn to gauge sand you can drive through in 2x4, sand you can drive through in 4x4 and sand you just can't drive through by eyeballing it.
I grew up in a very remote part of the California desert and everyone was like that. It's just what you have to do to get by because you keep finding yourself in situations where you need to call on these types of skills, and if you're living out there you have a lot of free time without interruption or distraction to learn the skills. Lots of people moved out from the city, and over the years they picked up a lot of those skills and became extremely self-sufficient.
Although the story and your account are United States centric, I live pretty remote British Columbia, Canada and the same mentality, personalty types exists here as well. As the crow flies, I am less then 300KM to downtown Vancouver yet a trip to the closest town center for supplies is a 10 hour round trip in the truck and that is on a good day. I do not leave the house without chainsaw, firearm and various other sundry gear and items as i may have to sleep in the wilderness overnight or repair my truck on the side of a dirt road.
I do all our property maintenance and repairs etc., even if I could convince a 'professional' to come out this way, the expense would be anywhere from 3X to 10X for the same job in town.
Self reliance and self-sufficiency are not new, trendy traits, it is a necessity for survival that has always been that way and it will probably never change for the people living in this part of the world.
I have family in BC less than 125 Km from Vancouver, but that is still 10 hours and a ferry trip... if the one and only road is open. That is the reality of life in mountains. There is only ever the one road. Even famous places like Whistler: one road.
My nephew lives in a very isolated rural area on the east coast and I think you're overselling the "people in the community learn emergency medicine" part - he has no idea how to handle much more than stopping bleeding for a cut (his answer to any size cut is to slather it with antibiotic ointment, which the doctors then have to scrub out before they can suture) or maybe stabilizing a broken leg enough to move someone to the pickup truck.
Likewise, while he does repair things, I wouldn't say they are done well -- his electrical panel is a mess, I spent a couple weekends trying to help bring things up to code (and I'm not even an electrician), like replacing taped hand-twisted wire splices with junction boxes - the tape was melted on one of them from overheating.
He does own an impressive set of guns, but his car has a hole in it after accidentally shooting it while cleaning a loaded gun, so gun safety is not his strong suit.
He has a 4WD, but it's been a 2WD for the past couple years because he can't afford the parts needed to fix it, he cruises junkyards when he can to try to find what he needs.
His closest neighbor is a half mile away and lives in a glorified shed where the water comes in on a hose and electricity comes from a generator when he can afford to fuel it.
I can believe that there are well trained survival handymen out there who are well equipped to survive on their own, but I doubt that most isolated rural people are that well trained.
He did romanticize the whole situation. The situation he's talking about could easily be the rural south or Appalachia. As someone from one of those areas, let me assure you, the "ruggedness" isn't beautiful, it's because there is a lack of service. And the ruggedness shows on the people and their homes.
I genuinely enjoyed your story about your nephew, but it's bit like telling an anecdote about an incompetent engineer and then saying there isn't a large number of engineers that are good at solving problems.
The funny thing is that I grew up in London, then lived in Cambridge, Heidelberg, Seattle and Philadelphia - 55+ years of thoroughly urban living. 18 months ago I moved to a place where your opening sentence applies broadly.
Yet somehow, I still learned how to do most of the things you list in your second paragraph before I got here.
And I have neighbors here who are completely clueless about most of those things. They survive, in some cases, by cultivating long term relationships with the right people.
I think you have to be careful with the correlation/causatio n issue when making points like this.
Pretty much the same, I can re-wire a house (factory actually though it's been a long time since I trained as an industrial sparks), plaster, do basic joinery, plumbing, tiling, engine/motorcycle maintenance (I do my motorcycle and rebuilt scramblers when I was a kid), weld (not done it for a long time but it'd come back), sheet metal work etc all to a reasonable or better standard.
I've never lived out in the country, always in or on the edges of towns, 80% of anything is been willing to give it a go, the other 20% is been willing to learn from fucking it up the first time.
I genuinely don't understand people who aren't willing to learn this stuff even if they pay someone else to do it down the line (which makes sense sometimes).
I know people my age who can't rewire a plug which is frankly embarrassing.
> A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyse a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. (Time enough for Love - Heinlein)
If I fix the car or computer for the old retired farmer down the road, but then bags and boxes of fresh, homegrown vegetable regularly appear on my porch, then that works out quite nicely, actually.
Last night I was on my way home on a relatively remote stretch in eastern Idaho that's 30 minutes from the nearest EMS and came upon a head on collision that just happened. Several others not involved surrounded the scene pretty quickly and started assessing the injured. I literally finished my Wilderness First Aid certification Saturday afternoon.
In even the most developed inner cities of the US, a 30-minute response time is not unusual. A car crash with injuries, blood on the street, would certainly be top of the 911 priority list other factors like traffic often mean delays.
"In July 2019, it took the NYPD more than 20 minutes on average to respond to all of its 911 calls. This July, it was about 18 minutes."
Highly recommend you keep going with it when time allows. I got my wEMT license a few years back and although it's lapsed now it was a really fun and educating experience. For those who don't have one near them I recommend SOLO school in new england -> https://soloschools.com/
> In many parts of the United States when you call 911, you're lucky if anyone shows up within an hour. It's a couple hours to get to a Wal-Mart or a store. It's difficult to get anyone to drive 40 minutes outside the nearest town and navigate unmarked dirt roads to do basic plumbing or home repairs.
That's pretty far out; I think that's pretty extreme. At least in Idaho/WA IMO (different geography and settlement pattern, prolly). But your point is still valid for the bulk of rural US - you just gotta know how to deal, because the cavalry is a ways out and expensive.
I'm thinking California East of the Sierras. Mono County, Inyo County, San Bernardino County, slivers of Riverside County, and Imperial County.
If you're in Amargosa, Shoshone, Tecopa, Wonder Valley, Lanfair Valley, Kelso, Amboy, Cadiz, Fenner, etc., it's a long way off from anything.
Pop open Gooogle maps and try to find the nearest dispatch location for an ambulance to Fenner, and then put that into perspective with the amount of traffic on the I-40 corridor. CHP can call an airship, but I've seen burn patients sit dying for an hour while waiting for a helicopter to become available for dispatch.
I invite you to visit Northern Michigan! This world exists only 7 hours, by car, north of Chicago, a metro area with something like 9.5 million people. Hardly 'pretty far out' in my opinion. Growing up I had to call EMS a few times for various things, if you're not directly in town or on a tourist road, one can expect some seriously long waits. Washed out 2 track during a light rain isn't exactly something an ambulance move quickly on.
People adapt to their environments, if you have to fix your car in the country, you learn to fix your car. If you have to fix your car in the city, you learn to schmooze the repair guy into giving you a better deal.
We have a homestead in NE WA we are developing, a few weeks ago, for the first time ever, I called 911 because of a potentially dangerous laceration. We have a full first aid kit with plenty of "stop the bleed" stuff but I didn't want to take any chances. So because the bleeding was controlled we waited for the EMTs.
It took 25 minutes for the EMTs to arrive. But that is because the nearest EMT team was not on another call. Otherwise, it could have take 45-60 minutes to get a team from the next nearest town/county.
Later that day on the way home to Seattle we stopped at an urgent care to get stitches for $175.
Though, I am seriously thinking about getting an AED to keep out there.
Another important factor is not just distance geography, but the population density's impact on taxes and funding for Police/EMS/Fire. Maybe from a geo perspective someone can get there faster, but if there are only a couple "someones" and they are already dealing with something else...
Statistically, less people, fewer emergencies, but that's not much comfort when you're the one having a statistically unlikely emergency!
I lived in the Santa Cruz Mountains for a while and had a tolerable commute into San Jose. A 911 call would yield a response no sooner than 30 minutes. So, not very far out at all, but definitely a set of circumstances that encouraged self-reliance.
Can anecdotally confirm. Sometimes it quite annoys me that those personality traits are so embedded in myself though, because it seems to constantly be a headbutting of cultures that so many Americans on the coastal big cities just don't get or approve of, and love to condescendingly talk about that kind of personality as lesser or barbarous in some way.
I love the mountains and freedom they offered me, the lessons they taught me, and the beauty and solitude from an exhausting world they provided. After the war when I became an atheist, I would tell others in the community when they asked me to go to church that the mountains are my church.
All that said, I doubt it will last. There is a huge influx of people (not just retirees, but refugees from the coastal cities) who would be considered rich into mountain communities, driving out the locals by prices and changing the demographic hugely. I keep a close eye on land for sale and land parcels that used to be huge are starting to be divided into 5 acre parcels and sold off... I can already see the distant future of this, turning mountain towns into you have to be rich towns like Aspen, and it makes me very sad.
I can't wait till we have independent space travel, which is when I believe the frontier spirit will be reborn again. Humanity will need it then again! Alas, I probably won't live that long.
>"headbutting of cultures that so many Americans on the coastal big cities just don't get or approve of, and love to condescendingly talk about that kind of personality as lesser or barbarous in some way."
This cultural divide has deep roots in the power struggle that was created when the people who settled the Appalachian's figured out that converting fields of corn into distilled bottles of whisky was far more profitable since it could travel infinitely farther without spoilage along the trade routes.
They were "dirt poor" prior to this because they could generate fresh produce that had a limited scope and value on the market.
That's when the war on stills began and there was a very thorough campaign of misinformation about how "dumb hillbillies" were going to blow themselves up/make everyone blind trying to operate a simple still.
It was really about the potential shift in economic power if that region was able to leverage vast lands for growing and creating highly profitable alcohol that could be sold across the country.
That campaign/lobby was so effective that it still resonates to this day.
This is happening where I live. Previously huge tracks of mountain and forest are slowly being cut up. However, it's the rich newcomers that are selfish with their land. When we were children we had ATVs/dirtbikes and could put in hundred miles a day of riding. Now many trails have gates and no trespassing signs. Used to be a sense of shared commonwealth amongst connected properties. Now, it's the "privatization" of nature and it sucks. I miss the old days.
Also, totally get the condescension you speak of. "Oh. You do your own <plumbing,welding,lawn, automotive,...>! How quaint."
Where do these parcel divisions get recorded exactly? I thought it would be a really fascinating open data source record to capture all the timelines of land being divvied up and sold and when houses get built through some map timelapse videos.
Counter-point: ATVs and dirtbikes are noisy and tear up terrain and don't belong in "nature" aka the private property of people that don't want to hear them or see their tracks.
> Sometimes it quite annoys me that those personality traits are so embedded in myself though, because it seems to constantly be a headbutting of cultures that so many Americans on the coastal big cities just don't get or approve of, and love to condescendingly talk about that kind of personality as lesser or barbarous in some way.
"rugged individualists" always seem to care a lot about how they are viewed by "coastal elites". We'd all be a lot happier if we cared less about how we are viewed by others.
It's not just about caring how I am viewed for no reason, it's that I have to deal with the culutural differences daily both professionally and personally, but mostly professionally. I keep my politics etc to myself in the workplace, but the coastal elites seem to want to shove theirs down everyones throats, even in the workplace, which is very jarring. It's one of the same reasons I fled the bible belt and went to DC for a while (only to find I disliked the east coast), but to see the similarities in dogmatism and tribalism between the bible belt and the coastal elites is... informative.
I keep having this semi-irrational fear that the SV startup I work for will found out I'm not "one of them" and fire me for cultural differences.
It begins to matter more when “coastal elites” don’t just view “rugged individualists” a certain way, but also wish to exert power/influence over them via policy.
> said, I doubt it will last. There is a huge influx of people (not just retirees, but refugees from the coastal cities) who would be considered rich into mountain communities, driving out the locals by prices and changing the demographic hugely. I keep a close eye on land for sale and land parcels that used to be huge are starting to be divided into 5 acre parcels and sold off... I can already see the distant future of this, turning mountain towns into you have to be rich towns like Aspen, and it makes me very sad.
I wouldn't worry too much about a large influx of people, there's more than enough land to accommodate the little influx - there aren't quite so many people who move up into the mountains and those can make a decent community and a healthy local economy. You can even migrate further into the wilderness, yes it sucks that you are forced to but there's a silver lining to all this.
Same here. I moved to eastern Idaho 3 years ago from a lifetime in northern Ohio (born and raised). Oddly I immediately felt more at home here and still do. It just fits me and seems to be the opposite of the industrial / Motor City region of the Midwest. Of course, the coastal elitism that you're referring to is aimed at Midwesterners too, but I think my clash was with the collectivism of the unionized blue collar culture.
One aspect that I can see being particularly troublesome is the "closely guarding their resources and distrusting strangers." I'm sure those traits were developed with good reason, but it can make forming relationships very difficult with the kind of personality that is by nature welcoming and trusting. While I would never describe that mindset as barbaric, it is true that I would like to see societies move toward an ideal where trust and generosity are the norm.
That’s the one constant with population growth. The remote parts of the world won’t be so remote as time goes on.
On your point about space travel, it doesn’t even have to be that far. The moon or mars aren’t that terribly far on conventional rockets. If we could terraform mars for our arrival, though, that would be cool. Maybe this unlocks another explosion of population growth, similar to the industrial revolution and improvements in medicine?
The early settlers of North American were in some sense selected by personality. It must have taken a certain sort of risk-taking personality to give up everything and climb aboard a crowded rickety passenger ship for a month-long journey to a vast and mostly uninhabited land. The people who arrived in America and decided to take it one step further by moving away from the crowded cities of the east into the vast and dangerous interior of the continent must have been a special breed.
You can still see some of these early mountain towns today--some are practically unchanged from what they looked like 100 years ago.
>> the crowded cities of the east into the vast and dangerous interior of the continent must have been a special breed.
The cities were not what we would call safe. If you are living in total poverty inside a city without access to any real services, that empty field doesn't seem so bad. The "free land" thing was also a plus. Rather than risk-takers, they were more akin to desperate opportunists.
You can trace the famines and wars in Europe between 1700 and 1900 by going to any town and finding the "X national historic center" and looking when the town was founded. People didn't just leave their family and friends in Europe for the fun of it. Most left because life was downright deadly back home and so staying was not an option no matter what they went into.
Getting to America was no easy. Families of 5 kids would leave, 2 would die on the way (if you got a cold on board the sailors would throw you overboard to ensure it didn't spread), then a third would be sold as an indentured servant (only slightly better than a slave, and it would only last 7 years - but no way to contact them after the 7 years were up). Then you have to find a place to live...
So I moved to Calgary, AB, Canada around 2000 along with a huge number of other Canadians and people from around the world primarily as economic migrants. The city has changed dramatically since then but I noticed that it attracted a lot of people with a similar pioneer style attitude; you had to be willing to move far away from your family mostly for your job, and the companies here had a very western "DIY" approach as well as something to prove to the more established Eastern "genteel". Some of this is gone now but many people and organizations still display it regularly.
I lived in Calgary around 2008 for a while (and have had family there from the 70's until around 2012), and I know the attitude you're talking about.
But I have to say—I saw a lot of posturing that way more than real pioneering mindset. Calgary has been a very developed city for a long time, and no stranger to the exact same comforts and luxuries they associate with the other out east. I didn't encounter the DIY approach you did. Most were contented to take large payouts from the oil industry and its waterfall spending and take that as validation. I grew up with tales from family members who moved there about how adventurous they were and described themselves as "mavericks" while reality was a lot of three-martini lunches in upscale restaurants. I saw more of an enterprising, DIY spirit in people working in the film industry here in Toronto than I did in Calgary. (And that's not me praising Toronto). Being of ... "lower means" in Calgary isn't as fun. Hell, if I hadn't made friends with some bartenders I might not have been able to get out for a few beers as often when it was ~$8-$10 a pint back then. And then there's NE Calgary... of which Fubar† is not an entirely exaggerated depiction in my experience. Then again, that character is pretty much the same as my experience growing up in rural Ontario.
I say that with a kind heart because I met some great people while I lived there, and I miss the place. Calgary is a great town, but I just didn't see what you described there. I saw shadows of it at best—mostly in murals and ornate cowboy hats. Though—I do appreciate the pride in it.
Now, people from outside the city—that's a bit different. One funny story about that: I had a buddy/coworker from Pincher Creek who'd fed himself during college in Lethbridge by hunting a couple of bucks with his friends and getting steaks and sausages made up, and froze them for the year (because I'm pretty sure the only other grocery they bought was bad whiskey and a lot of beer). Smart guy, too. He could have got along anywhere. Maybe he is now. Not sure where he's at.
Moving across the country ain't what it used to be--now pretty much anyone with money for an airplane ticket can do it with little to no risk. Calgary is a very cosmopolitan and modern city today, but I imagine it was pretty wild pre-1900. Alberta is still in its early stages of development, so you can definitely still find pockets of the Western mentality left
Sounds romantic but is it the truth? I understand that immigration was spearheaded by entrepreneurs who published guides to the new land and advertised in the homeland. You can see some of the spirit in foreign graduate students - they follow recommendations and usually have a very good idea what they are getting themselves into.
You better believe the interior was dangerous before railroads and highways and air conditioning, especially the mountains and deserts of the American southwest. It's only comparatively recently that many of these places have been able to support large populations
>> who published guides to the new land and advertised in the homeland.
Most of which were full of lies and criminal exaggerations. That's why "Springfield" is the most popular town name in the US. What else would a new farmer want more than a field with its own water supply?
Don't forget the very first settlers were native american people as we call them today in the us. It's interesting to think about their views of today's self-reliance culture. I don't know what they are.
My recollection of that book is that it doesn't really cover the settling of the west, and is more focused on the earlier arrivals who spread out to cover the land between (say) the Atlantic and the Mississippi.
> The people who arrived in America and decided to take it one step further by moving away from the crowded cities of the east into the vast and dangerous interior of the continent must have been a special breed.
The consequences of this are not always 'positive' as the book Fantasyland argues:
> In this sweeping, eloquent history of America, Kurt Andersen shows that what’s happening in our country today—this post-factual, “fake news” moment we’re all living through—is not something new, but rather the ultimate expression of our national character. America was founded by wishful dreamers, magical thinkers, and true believers, by hucksters and their suckers. Fantasy is deeply embedded in our DNA.
> Over the course of five centuries—from the Salem witch trials to Scientology to the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, from P. T. Barnum to Hollywood and the anything-goes, wild-and-crazy sixties, from conspiracy theories to our fetish for guns and obsession with extraterrestrials—our love of the fantastic has made America exceptional in a way that we've never fully acknowledged. From the start, our ultra-individualism was attached to epic dreams and epic fantasies—every citizen was free to believe absolutely anything, or to pretend to be absolutely anybody. With the gleeful erudition and tell-it-like-it-is ferocity of a Christopher Hitchens, Andersen explores whether the great American experiment in liberty has gone off the rails.
I have read that one of the strong selection factors for the settling of the west was the ability to survive beaver fever (giardiasis). Some have speculated that this may have correlations with personality traits.
It's very frustrating that it's a blanket attitude that doesn't respond to context. There are vanishingly few people in the United States for whom a fixed frontier mindset makes sense, yet many people cling to frontier logic even when they live and spend the vast majority of their time in cities and towns that have modern amenities and professional police, fire, and EMS services. If people aren't flexible enough to adapt their thinking to whatever situation they're in, then we would be so much better off with a fixed, uniform urban mindset than a frontier one. But I think many people's idea of an alternative "urban mindset" is a caricature of effete helplessness, like the Eloi in the Time Machine (or worse and more racist images.)
>The early settlers of North American were in some sense selected by personality. It must have taken a certain sort of risk-taking personality to give up everything and climb aboard a crowded rickety passenger ship for a month-long journey to a vast and mostly uninhabited land.
Many early settlers were criminals. I wonder if that personality selection shines through.
Being a criminal, especially in times when many crimes were punishable by death, it also requires a risk-taking personality, so GP's point still stands.
> However, "openness to experience" is much higher, and the most pronounced personality trait in mountain dwellers.
> "Openness is a strong predictor of residential mobility," said Götz. "A willingness to move your life in pursuit of goals such as economic affluence and personal freedom drove many original North American frontier settlers."
> those who left their early mountain home are still consistently less agreeable, conscientious and extravert, although no such effects were observed for neuroticism and openness.
I have difficulty reconciling these statements.
- mountain dwellers have higher openness to experience
- openness to experience is a predictor for residential mobility
- but the people who move away from mountain regions _don't_ have higher openness to experience (but stay disagreeable, unconscientious and introverted)?
I would have expected the selection bias to show up in the other direction: I would expect the people who stay put to have lower openness to experience, and the people who move to have higher openness to experience.
> Now, well into the 21st century, researchers led by the University of Cambridge have detected remnants of the pioneer personality in US populations of once inhospitable mountainous territory, particularly in the Midwest.
As a person who was born and raised in the Midwest[1], just where are these mountainous regions they speak of in the Midwest? There's the black hills[2] and that's pretty much it. I wonder what definition of the Midwest the University of Cambridge is using, cause it sounds like they are talking about the intermountain west[3], not the midwest.
As someone who lives in this "Intermountain West", I've never heard of the "Intermountain West" term before your post. It seems like a term that someone came up with, but it's never caught on.
I've typically heard of us referred to as the Western US (as opposed to the West Coast).
I hadn't heard of the term either until moving to Utah, I noticed quite a few orgs/business with the term intermountain in it, like intermountain healthcare. But when I was living in the midwest we just referred to the mountain region as "out west".
As someone who lives in this "Intermountain West", I've never heard of the "Intermountain West" term before your post
I'm not from the area, but once I started visiting and doing business in Utah, I found it was pretty common. Once I became familiar with it, I noticed it more and more.
I could see it as East of the Sierras in California continuing across the midwest. The economic and cultural differences crossing from the western coastal strip in California to east of the Sierras are mind-boggling.
They could be referring to some like Appalachia too? That does include the bottom of Ohio near the WV / KY / PA borders (where I grew). I'd believe that these rural places could have the "pioneer personality" they're describing.
How about the Ozarks? They may not be the most visually impressive mountains, but I would at least consider the St. Francois Mountains in southern Missouri to be part of the Midwest.
The Ozarks are awesome but I wouldn't consider them mountains just big hills. The St Francois mountains for example are only 1700 feet above sea level. Minnesota also has many points above 2000 feet that are awesome but again I wouldn't consider them Mountains either. There's no official definition of a mountain however so its all in the eye of the beholder.
The Ozarks extend into Arkansas, and I would say that's sort of where the south meets the Midwest. The people from the Ozarks, from my touring of the area in Arkansas, with the strong folk music tradition and the diet, remind me more of Appalachia than out West.
The Appalachian mountains are present in Southeastern Ohio. The hollers don't just magically appear when you cross the river over from Marietta to Parkersburg.
>perhaps everything between California and Oklahoma = Midwest
If you're right and that's the definition some people use, I'm not surprised they're confused. Considering I see most people using "midwest" referring to places like Ohio and Michigan.
I've always preferred "Great Plains" when trying to describe my general location to folks online. You say "I live in the midwest" and everyone seems to assume you're in Ohio or Indiana or thereabouts. Nope, I'm in South Dakota. America's a big place, y'all. The middle of Colorado is where I draw the line - west of there you're not Midwest or Great Plains, you're in The West.
Sounds about right, and I've corrected that same error in Europeans before. That's the kind of error someone with a limited understanding of American history or culture would make. It's an easy mistake to make, looking at a map and knowing the name without knowing about the Northwest Ordinance
It's from a UK institution. I'd be surprised if the average member of that institution could distinguish US cities either. I assure you that people in coastal US cities are fully capable of distinguishing the mountainy place where there's legal weed from the flat place where there's corn. As a former midwesterner though, wouldn't feel confident about assuring you of anything more than that. Except during election season. For like 3 weeks everyone suddenly becomes an expert on Iowa and Ohio.
An old but relevant meme titled "how non-Americans see america":
Besides the fact that the University of Cambridge is in England, the whole story is about distinguishing a personality difference among those who live at higher elevations. Furthermore, the assessment it makes is largely positive.
The issue with stereotypes is the same issue with comparing IQs between subsets of the population: averages do not work when its one individual applying it to another individual. Variance is very high with humans, and the idea that your Uncle Joe thinks his black friend has a big dick because of the stereotype is idiotic.
Certainly prone to those kinds of things, but I think there are interesting questions that can only be answered by this kind of analysis. (For example, it seems plausibly related to why American gun culture is so much stronger and more popular than in other countries, even those with comparably permissive gun ownership laws.)
I'm skepical of putting a scientific veneer over such analysis. If that's the point you'd like to make, go ahead and make it, but leave science out of it.
Urban WEIRD[0] weasels trying to understand normal humans really is something to see. It's as if they're studying some bizarre carnivorous plant or cannibalistic space aliens from the Planet Koozebane.
"Such rugged terrain likely favored those who closely guarded their resources and distrusted strangers, as well as those who engaged in risky explorations to secure food and territory."
I'm pretty sure New Yorkers or San Francisco residents are more likely to distrust strangers and not share than mountain people.
"These traits may have distilled over time into an individualism characterized by toughness and self-reliance that lies at the heart of the American frontier ethos"
Yeah, or the fact that the guy who lives in the mountains can't call the building superintendent to change his lightbulb might have something to do with them having slightly more self reliance. I didn't grow up in the mountains, but I did grow up poor: it has much the same effect.
I grew up in a mountainous area of the US, and can confirm the presence of these personality traits, although it's hard for me to evaluate if they are more or less prevalent than in the coastal city where I now live (hello, mobility!). It's so hard to see into the lives of others, especially of enough of them to get a representative sample.
For those interested in the history of the European settlement of the US, I would suggest the book Albion's Seed:
The relevant part of the book is about the Scots-Irish settlers who came from the Borderlands. Those "Borderers," or Rievers, are historically combative, individualistic, and distrustful of government. They settled large parts of Appalachia, and from there they helped to clear the forests of the midwest and mine the Rockies. Think Daniel Boone. Think Alamo. They like to think they are independent and they like to fight.
The repercussions on US politics are huge.
It's hard to tell from the article through the link what the authors are asserting. While the conditions in the mountains may cultivate certain characteristics, they also attract certain populations. So this could be as simple as: mountain people settle in the mountains.
Readit News
As a result, people have to learn to repair things, make things, use a gun, do first aid, lay shingles, hang drywall, pour concrete, solder pipe, weld, change oil, replace an alternator, lay PVC pipe, etc.
People in the community learn emergency medicine and how to manage a structure or brush fire by volunteering with the local volunteer fire/EMS, because that's the only show in town.
Roads wash out in the rainy season, so 4x4 is an absolute necessity. People learn to gauge sand you can drive through in 2x4, sand you can drive through in 4x4 and sand you just can't drive through by eyeballing it.
I grew up in a very remote part of the California desert and everyone was like that. It's just what you have to do to get by because you keep finding yourself in situations where you need to call on these types of skills, and if you're living out there you have a lot of free time without interruption or distraction to learn the skills. Lots of people moved out from the city, and over the years they picked up a lot of those skills and became extremely self-sufficient.
I do all our property maintenance and repairs etc., even if I could convince a 'professional' to come out this way, the expense would be anywhere from 3X to 10X for the same job in town.
Self reliance and self-sufficiency are not new, trendy traits, it is a necessity for survival that has always been that way and it will probably never change for the people living in this part of the world.
Likewise, while he does repair things, I wouldn't say they are done well -- his electrical panel is a mess, I spent a couple weekends trying to help bring things up to code (and I'm not even an electrician), like replacing taped hand-twisted wire splices with junction boxes - the tape was melted on one of them from overheating.
He does own an impressive set of guns, but his car has a hole in it after accidentally shooting it while cleaning a loaded gun, so gun safety is not his strong suit.
He has a 4WD, but it's been a 2WD for the past couple years because he can't afford the parts needed to fix it, he cruises junkyards when he can to try to find what he needs.
His closest neighbor is a half mile away and lives in a glorified shed where the water comes in on a hose and electricity comes from a generator when he can afford to fuel it.
I can believe that there are well trained survival handymen out there who are well equipped to survive on their own, but I doubt that most isolated rural people are that well trained.
Yet somehow, I still learned how to do most of the things you list in your second paragraph before I got here.
And I have neighbors here who are completely clueless about most of those things. They survive, in some cases, by cultivating long term relationships with the right people.
I think you have to be careful with the correlation/causatio n issue when making points like this.
I've never lived out in the country, always in or on the edges of towns, 80% of anything is been willing to give it a go, the other 20% is been willing to learn from fucking it up the first time.
I genuinely don't understand people who aren't willing to learn this stuff even if they pay someone else to do it down the line (which makes sense sometimes).
I know people my age who can't rewire a plug which is frankly embarrassing.
> A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyse a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. (Time enough for Love - Heinlein)
This is also a survival skill. There's no necessity to cultivate this in a middle-class urban environment when you can just call somebody.
In even the most developed inner cities of the US, a 30-minute response time is not unusual. A car crash with injuries, blood on the street, would certainly be top of the 911 priority list other factors like traffic often mean delays.
"In July 2019, it took the NYPD more than 20 minutes on average to respond to all of its 911 calls. This July, it was about 18 minutes."
https://www.ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/news/2020/08/25/nypd-re...
Pretty normal stuff out in the sticks.
https://www.bbc.com/future/gallery/20180810-villas-las-estre...
Your link talks about Antarctica, not Alaska.
But it is a fascinating story, thank you for bringing it up!
That's pretty far out; I think that's pretty extreme. At least in Idaho/WA IMO (different geography and settlement pattern, prolly). But your point is still valid for the bulk of rural US - you just gotta know how to deal, because the cavalry is a ways out and expensive.
If you're in Amargosa, Shoshone, Tecopa, Wonder Valley, Lanfair Valley, Kelso, Amboy, Cadiz, Fenner, etc., it's a long way off from anything.
Pop open Gooogle maps and try to find the nearest dispatch location for an ambulance to Fenner, and then put that into perspective with the amount of traffic on the I-40 corridor. CHP can call an airship, but I've seen burn patients sit dying for an hour while waiting for a helicopter to become available for dispatch.
People adapt to their environments, if you have to fix your car in the country, you learn to fix your car. If you have to fix your car in the city, you learn to schmooze the repair guy into giving you a better deal.
It took 25 minutes for the EMTs to arrive. But that is because the nearest EMT team was not on another call. Otherwise, it could have take 45-60 minutes to get a team from the next nearest town/county.
Later that day on the way home to Seattle we stopped at an urgent care to get stitches for $175.
Though, I am seriously thinking about getting an AED to keep out there.
Statistically, less people, fewer emergencies, but that's not much comfort when you're the one having a statistically unlikely emergency!
And not necessarily only rural parts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPNK0VspQ0M
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I love the mountains and freedom they offered me, the lessons they taught me, and the beauty and solitude from an exhausting world they provided. After the war when I became an atheist, I would tell others in the community when they asked me to go to church that the mountains are my church.
All that said, I doubt it will last. There is a huge influx of people (not just retirees, but refugees from the coastal cities) who would be considered rich into mountain communities, driving out the locals by prices and changing the demographic hugely. I keep a close eye on land for sale and land parcels that used to be huge are starting to be divided into 5 acre parcels and sold off... I can already see the distant future of this, turning mountain towns into you have to be rich towns like Aspen, and it makes me very sad.
I can't wait till we have independent space travel, which is when I believe the frontier spirit will be reborn again. Humanity will need it then again! Alas, I probably won't live that long.
This cultural divide has deep roots in the power struggle that was created when the people who settled the Appalachian's figured out that converting fields of corn into distilled bottles of whisky was far more profitable since it could travel infinitely farther without spoilage along the trade routes.
They were "dirt poor" prior to this because they could generate fresh produce that had a limited scope and value on the market.
That's when the war on stills began and there was a very thorough campaign of misinformation about how "dumb hillbillies" were going to blow themselves up/make everyone blind trying to operate a simple still.
It was really about the potential shift in economic power if that region was able to leverage vast lands for growing and creating highly profitable alcohol that could be sold across the country.
That campaign/lobby was so effective that it still resonates to this day.
Also, totally get the condescension you speak of. "Oh. You do your own <plumbing,welding,lawn, automotive,...>! How quaint."
"rugged individualists" always seem to care a lot about how they are viewed by "coastal elites". We'd all be a lot happier if we cared less about how we are viewed by others.
I keep having this semi-irrational fear that the SV startup I work for will found out I'm not "one of them" and fire me for cultural differences.
I wouldn't worry too much about a large influx of people, there's more than enough land to accommodate the little influx - there aren't quite so many people who move up into the mountains and those can make a decent community and a healthy local economy. You can even migrate further into the wilderness, yes it sucks that you are forced to but there's a silver lining to all this.
On your point about space travel, it doesn’t even have to be that far. The moon or mars aren’t that terribly far on conventional rockets. If we could terraform mars for our arrival, though, that would be cool. Maybe this unlocks another explosion of population growth, similar to the industrial revolution and improvements in medicine?
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You can still see some of these early mountain towns today--some are practically unchanged from what they looked like 100 years ago.
The cities were not what we would call safe. If you are living in total poverty inside a city without access to any real services, that empty field doesn't seem so bad. The "free land" thing was also a plus. Rather than risk-takers, they were more akin to desperate opportunists.
[0]: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/oysters-new-york-city-...
Getting to America was no easy. Families of 5 kids would leave, 2 would die on the way (if you got a cold on board the sailors would throw you overboard to ensure it didn't spread), then a third would be sold as an indentured servant (only slightly better than a slave, and it would only last 7 years - but no way to contact them after the 7 years were up). Then you have to find a place to live...
Curious, do you have a source for this?
But I have to say—I saw a lot of posturing that way more than real pioneering mindset. Calgary has been a very developed city for a long time, and no stranger to the exact same comforts and luxuries they associate with the other out east. I didn't encounter the DIY approach you did. Most were contented to take large payouts from the oil industry and its waterfall spending and take that as validation. I grew up with tales from family members who moved there about how adventurous they were and described themselves as "mavericks" while reality was a lot of three-martini lunches in upscale restaurants. I saw more of an enterprising, DIY spirit in people working in the film industry here in Toronto than I did in Calgary. (And that's not me praising Toronto). Being of ... "lower means" in Calgary isn't as fun. Hell, if I hadn't made friends with some bartenders I might not have been able to get out for a few beers as often when it was ~$8-$10 a pint back then. And then there's NE Calgary... of which Fubar† is not an entirely exaggerated depiction in my experience. Then again, that character is pretty much the same as my experience growing up in rural Ontario.
I say that with a kind heart because I met some great people while I lived there, and I miss the place. Calgary is a great town, but I just didn't see what you described there. I saw shadows of it at best—mostly in murals and ornate cowboy hats. Though—I do appreciate the pride in it.
Now, people from outside the city—that's a bit different. One funny story about that: I had a buddy/coworker from Pincher Creek who'd fed himself during college in Lethbridge by hunting a couple of bucks with his friends and getting steaks and sausages made up, and froze them for the year (because I'm pretty sure the only other grocery they bought was bad whiskey and a lot of beer). Smart guy, too. He could have got along anywhere. Maybe he is now. Not sure where he's at.
† the films
Sounds romantic but is it the truth? I understand that immigration was spearheaded by entrepreneurs who published guides to the new land and advertised in the homeland. You can see some of the spirit in foreign graduate students - they follow recommendations and usually have a very good idea what they are getting themselves into.
Most of which were full of lies and criminal exaggerations. That's why "Springfield" is the most popular town name in the US. What else would a new farmer want more than a field with its own water supply?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albion%27s_Seed
The consequences of this are not always 'positive' as the book Fantasyland argues:
> In this sweeping, eloquent history of America, Kurt Andersen shows that what’s happening in our country today—this post-factual, “fake news” moment we’re all living through—is not something new, but rather the ultimate expression of our national character. America was founded by wishful dreamers, magical thinkers, and true believers, by hucksters and their suckers. Fantasy is deeply embedded in our DNA.
> Over the course of five centuries—from the Salem witch trials to Scientology to the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, from P. T. Barnum to Hollywood and the anything-goes, wild-and-crazy sixties, from conspiracy theories to our fetish for guns and obsession with extraterrestrials—our love of the fantastic has made America exceptional in a way that we've never fully acknowledged. From the start, our ultra-individualism was attached to epic dreams and epic fantasies—every citizen was free to believe absolutely anything, or to pretend to be absolutely anybody. With the gleeful erudition and tell-it-like-it-is ferocity of a Christopher Hitchens, Andersen explores whether the great American experiment in liberty has gone off the rails.
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35171984-fantasyland
An hour-long talk by the author:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRqDzEOJImw
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Andersen
Many early settlers were criminals. I wonder if that personality selection shines through.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_transportation#Transport...
> "Openness is a strong predictor of residential mobility," said Götz. "A willingness to move your life in pursuit of goals such as economic affluence and personal freedom drove many original North American frontier settlers."
> those who left their early mountain home are still consistently less agreeable, conscientious and extravert, although no such effects were observed for neuroticism and openness.
I have difficulty reconciling these statements.
- mountain dwellers have higher openness to experience
- openness to experience is a predictor for residential mobility
- but the people who move away from mountain regions _don't_ have higher openness to experience (but stay disagreeable, unconscientious and introverted)?
I would have expected the selection bias to show up in the other direction: I would expect the people who stay put to have lower openness to experience, and the people who move to have higher openness to experience.
They can't afford to take more risks.
Not sure if you'd expect liberal people to seed the place and conservative genetics to evolve.
Or conservative genetics to seed the place and stay strong.
As a person who was born and raised in the Midwest[1], just where are these mountainous regions they speak of in the Midwest? There's the black hills[2] and that's pretty much it. I wonder what definition of the Midwest the University of Cambridge is using, cause it sounds like they are talking about the intermountain west[3], not the midwest.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midwestern_United_States
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Hills
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intermountain_West
I've typically heard of us referred to as the Western US (as opposed to the West Coast).
I'm not from the area, but once I started visiting and doing business in Utah, I found it was pretty common. Once I became familiar with it, I noticed it more and more.
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If you're right and that's the definition some people use, I'm not surprised they're confused. Considering I see most people using "midwest" referring to places like Ohio and Michigan.
I've always preferred "Great Plains" when trying to describe my general location to folks online. You say "I live in the midwest" and everyone seems to assume you're in Ohio or Indiana or thereabouts. Nope, I'm in South Dakota. America's a big place, y'all. The middle of Colorado is where I draw the line - west of there you're not Midwest or Great Plains, you're in The West.
See also: Almost every single BBC News report ever filed.
I'm sure we're not worth distinguishing. Outside of the cities, we're all just barbarian backwaters.
An old but relevant meme titled "how non-Americans see america":
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/051/807/26e...
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Maybe kind of interesting, but extremely prone to misinterpetation, over-generalization, and potentially prejudice.
http://www.spsp.org/news-center/blog/stereotype-accuracy-res...
Conclusions should take additional care, but populations are different in important ways.
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I agree -- they might be onto something here, but you have to be careful or your reasoning can be misled.
"Such rugged terrain likely favored those who closely guarded their resources and distrusted strangers, as well as those who engaged in risky explorations to secure food and territory."
I'm pretty sure New Yorkers or San Francisco residents are more likely to distrust strangers and not share than mountain people.
"These traits may have distilled over time into an individualism characterized by toughness and self-reliance that lies at the heart of the American frontier ethos"
Yeah, or the fact that the guy who lives in the mountains can't call the building superintendent to change his lightbulb might have something to do with them having slightly more self reliance. I didn't grow up in the mountains, but I did grow up poor: it has much the same effect.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychology#WEIRD_bias
For those interested in the history of the European settlement of the US, I would suggest the book Albion's Seed:
https://b-ok.cc/book/1242050/e88335
The relevant part of the book is about the Scots-Irish settlers who came from the Borderlands. Those "Borderers," or Rievers, are historically combative, individualistic, and distrustful of government. They settled large parts of Appalachia, and from there they helped to clear the forests of the midwest and mine the Rockies. Think Daniel Boone. Think Alamo. They like to think they are independent and they like to fight.
The repercussions on US politics are huge.
It's hard to tell from the article through the link what the authors are asserting. While the conditions in the mountains may cultivate certain characteristics, they also attract certain populations. So this could be as simple as: mountain people settle in the mountains.