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Survival+: Structuring Prosperity for Yourself and the Nation by [Charles Hugh Smith]

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Charles Hugh Smith

Zeus Yiamouyiannis

Survival+: Structuring Prosperity for Yourself and the Nation Kindle Edition

by Charles Hugh Smith (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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This indispensable guide to the next twenty years of global turmoil and transformation weaves the full spectrum of disciplines--history, political economy, ecology, energy, marketing, investing, health, and the psychology of happiness--into a uniquely comprehensive understanding that offers every thinking person practical principles for not just surviving but prospering in the difficult decades ahead.

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408 pages
Language

English
Publication date

October 26, 2009
File size

1096 KB
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Charles Hugh Smith writes the www.oftwominds.com blog and is the author of seven novels and five nonfiction books. --This text refers to the paperback edition.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B002UNN7F0
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Createspace (October 26, 2009)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ October 26, 2009
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 1096 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 408 pages
Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 1449563449
Lending ‏ : ‎ Enabled

Best Sellers Rank: #1,223,492 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #49,760 in Business & Investing (Kindle Store)
- #162,933 in Business & Money (Books)

Customer Reviews:
35 ratings

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Charles Hugh Smith
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Charles Hugh Smith is the author of the oftwominds.com blog, #7 in CNBC's top alternative
financial sites, and nine books on our economy and society, including "Why Things Are
Falling Apart and What We Can Do About It," "The Nearly Free University and the Emerging
Economy," "Get a Job, Build a Real Career and Defy a Bewildering Economy" and most recently, "A Radically Beneficial World: Automation, Technology and Creating Jobs for All." His work is published on a number of popular financial websites including Zero Hedge, Financial Sense, and David Stockman’s Contra Corner.
Smith has also written seven novels and has posted a number of book and film commentaries on his website www.oftwominds.com/blog.html
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Zeus Yiamouyiannis
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Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more
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2 star		5%
1 star		4%

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Jeffrey Myers

intense read

Reviewed in the United States on August 20, 2012

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This is not your casual nighttime reading. It reads more like a textbook from college than anything else, so be prepared to concentrate. I found myself slowly reading each page, pausing, then rereading it again. It is so filled with concepts and scenarios to sift through and reflect on, that it can be overwhelming at times. It is by no means a "reference" book that you'll turn to when in an emergency, more like a long term strategy book that you better have memorized before SHTF.

I read it probably a year ago, and off the top of my head the key concepts I remember out of it are the following:

1)All political parties are flawed, including libertarianism (my personal choice), and will lead to an inevitable breakdown of society in one way or the other, sooner or later. In the case of the USA, we are headed there sooner.

2)If you accept 1), then you better get prepared to survive some turbulent times. Striving for self sufficiency will only make you a target, so you are better off finding some like-minded neighbors and building a network of people than have the skills and resources to help you survive. Then you better make yourself useful. Learn a skill that "matters" so you are needed in the above-described network.

5 people found this helpful

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Bob Lamming

Maybe Worth Reading

Reviewed in the United States on December 7, 2011

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The value I extracted from this book required too much sifting and sorting. It could do with a complete revision to about half its considerable length.

I bought it because of a recommendation and because the reviews on amazon were good. Initially I thought I was on to something big, but then I began noticing the inconsistencies, sloppiness and redundancy.

Readers are warned to "be skeptical of any `natural laws' which are being applied to human culture and history" (83), after which they are oriented to our present world through a long discussion of just such "natural laws." E.g., "If we apply the Stick/Slip hypothesis to the global economy then we understand that ... [etc., and] .... If history or the Peter Principle is any guide we will not do this consciously or voluntarily because we are incapable due to incompetence" (87).

A fairly large number of typos suggest the book was carelessly edited.

Utterly banal observations like the following are common: "A free people will want control of their own lives, sustenance and destiny" (322).

General statements of questionable validity abound: "humans tend to fill every available niche to the maximum carrying capacity (123) ... States tend to expand whenever the opportunity presents itself as the spoils of conquest ... outweigh the costs (124)."

Thumbnail comparisons of today with the 13th, 16th and 18th centuries (128) are glib and superficial.

Many of the author's claims just don't strike me as accurate. For instance, regarding the intellectual framework of Elite dominance, "this process of gaining compliance is not a conspiracy; it is a complex mixture of conscious and unconscious realignments of incentives and disincentives (27)."

While there is truth in the second clause, conspiracy cannot be so easily dismissed; it's part of the mixture. The public's consciousness is subverted with diabolical art and precision, as Smith himself recognizes in his frequent allusions to such phenomena as "ginned up deceptively packaged quantifications" (170), "the self esteem industry" (231), and "the mass marketing/propaganda system" (229).

I was a bit put off by respectful appeals to the authority of Karl Marx (e.g., 141); also by the listing of a book by Noam Chomsky, a former hero that I've come to see in a very different light; and the listing of a book by the neoconservative Ben Wattenberg. Several usages of the term "common purpose" (e.g., 213, 214) made me wonder if the phrasing was merely accidental or whether this book is informed by and/or surreptitiously dispensing a politically correct totalitarian subversiveness. Do a google search on "common purpose" if you don't know what I'm referring to.

I lost count of how many times the word "ontological" appears. Even after looking it up in the dictionary, I'm still not sure what it means. How does this word add anything essential in a phrase like, "capitalism's ontological drive to deploy capital and knowledge" (279)? Smith seems to be aware of this problem, for at one point he actually explains what the word means in parentheses: "superficial and ontologically (that is, inherently) misleading quantitative traps" (278). This smacks of inflated diction, as does a term like "cognitive bias" (171). How is this any different from just plain "bias"?

The sloppily circular wording in a phrase like the following is the footprint of a mind that lacks keenness and isn't fully engaged in what it's formulating: "Solutions and responses are dynamically evolving in response to changing circumstances and feedbacks" (286). Doesn't this guy have an editor?

Note the repetition, almost word for word, in the space of less than twenty lines: "Even if it [sic] a single tomato vine in a pot, everyone must gain the experience of nurturing, harvesting [etc.] .... Even if it [sic] a single tomato harvested from a single vine in a single pot on the deck of an apartment, then the experience is necessary [etc.]" (320).

Or this, in a paragraph of only six lines: "The responsibility for educating our young does not fall on some distant amorphous bureaucracy, but on parents and the community .... the ... education of the young people is still the responsibility of the parents and community at large" (370).

I would not put up with writing like this in a freshman research essay. Clearly, we are not dealing here with a mind (or a book) of the first order.

Despite these obvious and very annoying flaws, however, I did find a good bit of value in Survival Plus.

It includes a fair sprinkling of valid observations - "the entire college degree industry is largely a skillset trap" (171); good advice - "Place your money in credit unions or small local banks which actually recycle the money into your own community" (339); and instances of pithy wording - "a politically potent entertainment of divisive finger-pointing and rancor which works to create superficially appealing `us and them' ideologies" (105).

Smith's critique in Chapter 5 of the "splendid isolation" strategy for confronting social collapse is engaging and correct.

His extended discussion of the interplay of social classes - Plutocracy, State technocratic elites, the productive (or middle) elements, and the bread-and-circus-placated dependents at the bottom - furthered my understanding of what we are living through in these times.

Thus, under pressure to support the burgeoning demands of parasites above and below, members of the productive class have three choices: (1) to work ever harder for the material comforts they esteem - a recipe for heart attack; (2) to try and reform the system - with the cards stacked impossibly against them; or (3) to opt out - the beauty of which is that it's non-confrontational, it's perfectly legal, and it starves the beast. By the end of Chapter 21, I was feeling pleasantly vindicated, since I understood this intuitively long ago and have lived accordingly.

Later chapters develop the principles and methods of constructively opting out. One almost welcomes the challenge, despite the immense hardships it will entail, as starving and flushing out the cancer of corruption can only be of benefit in the end. Smith calls for a reset to our original Constitution, passes on some insightful guidelines from one of his correspondents, and underscores that only a fully engaged citizenry can make the "Great Transformation" a lasting success.

There are two areas, however, to which I think Smith gives insufficient emphasis in his macro-analysis.

First, we are in the late stages of a whole raft of mathematically exponential crescendos - with population growth, drying up of cheap energy sources, expansion of money and credit, loss of forests, fisheries, farmland and so forth all coming to a head at once. Chris Martenson's website has a 3-hour "Crash Course" video seminar that explains these aspects of the present crisis much more crisply and professionally than Charles Hugh Smith's book is written.

Second, there's the little matter of the police-state tyranny that's taken deep root all around us, which is actually integrated and global in scope. If this development doesn't make your blood run cold, you haven't been paying attention, and you're ignoring the last hundred years or so of history.

Smith is right that we shouldn't succumb to either complacency, at one extreme, or fatalism at the other. Decent, engaged, productive folks ought to be in this game to win. Though I don't know how you reconcile this with the extremely dire prospects humanity is facing, Smith's book glosses too lightly over these twin realities.

Overall, Survival Plus has a lot of useful content, but it's intermingled with way too much that's unsound, incomplete, poorly executed and superfluous.

So ... two stars or three? That was a tough call.

The book is itself a simulacrum - one of Smith's most frequently used terms for identifying the fraudulence our culture is choking on. The book is a counterfeit, a pretense, a shadow of what it attempts and really ought to be.

In the end I followed an age-old principle, focusing on the positive, and gave it a three.

50 people found this helpful

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Amazon Customer

A must read for every concerned citizen

Reviewed in the United States on January 12, 2010

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Charles Hugh Smith is one of the leading independent thinkers and writers of our time. For a sample of his work you can go to [...] and read through his blog. He has a very unique way of taking the theoretical and distilling it down to the practical and he is able to do this over a very broad conceptual landscape, to include things such as macro and micro economics, national and local politics, agribusiness and local farming, big healthcare and holistic healing, historical analysis and current events, etc...

I do not know of a better book to read if one is trying to make sense out of the many different macro and micro forces that are in motion in our current troubled times. While many of the mainstream pundits offer up confusing, conflicting, and nonsensical explanations for what is happening in our economy and culture, Charles offers a true voice of reason and a compelling narrative for what is going wrong now, what the future is likely to look like, and what one can do to live the best possible life under those conditions.

3 people found this helpful

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awnold

When Charles talks I listen.

Reviewed in the United States on December 1, 2009

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Charles was talking about the current economic collapse years before it happened. He has an uncanny way of summarizing huge forces that are at work (economic, social, etc) and drawing conclusions that are clear to a point that they seem like common sense. Reading his blog over the years has been time well spent. This book is a summary of the conclusions he has arrived at, given the topics he as covered over the years. Perhaps this book gives us an accurate look at the future, I wouldn't pay any heed to others attempting a feat like this other than CHS. He is constantly proved right again and again as time marches on and things play out. When he talks I listen.

17 people found this helpful

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M. Schoch

One Book that should be required reading

Reviewed in the United States on December 13, 2012

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This book is the best and most insightful book I read on this topic. Well structures, many good examples of what is wrong and how it got to that point. Have recommended this book to friend and family. It made lasting impression and have plans to read it again as there is so much in this book that you generally don’t find in books of this nature. If You don’t care about the different concepts that explain how we got into this mess, then this book might not be the best joice.

Reviewed in the United States on January 27, 2010

Verified Purchase

Dense, but accurate.

One mans' observations of where we are, how we got here, & how an individual might react accordingly.

I would have liked it at 2/3 the size, & more of a cut to the chase writing style,, but I'd recommend it for everyone.

He's an independent writer. Support free speech & buy his book.

You might not agree with him, but I'd love to see an argument to try to prove him wrong.

Go on, buy it now & learn about the reality you may not be aware of.

7 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

S. Coombes

New ideas

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 7, 2010

Verified Purchase

Charles Hugh Smith writes a good blog. This is more of the same but organised into a book.

I found it very thought-provoking and well-written.

J

Too much repetition. The Book could have been summed up to 20 pages maximum!!

Reviewed in Germany on January 18, 2022

Verified Purchase

As one reviewer stated: “ The book is a counterfeit, a pretense, a shadow of what it attempts and really ought to be”
I fully agree with this review and to be honest it was torture reading 100 of pages stating the same thing over and over again.
The state is corrupt and the elite is corrupting the state/government and the world as we know it is going to end.
These are things that should be obvious to any critical mind, now writing over 300 pages to tell us just that was frustrating for me to read, hoping with each page that I will learn something new. Grrr.

Anyway some of the solutions offered on the very last pages of the book do make sense and one could really jump straight to page 242 and skip all the pages before.

I had high hopes but really disappointed in this book.

As stated: “ The book is a counterfeit, a pretense, a shadow of what it attempts and really ought to be”

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