Survivalism, confirmation bias, and the "Obama Boom"

A common topic on survivalist forums is "normalcy bias". This is where people assume that because something has always been a certain way that it will always be so. Survivalists like to whip this one out as the cause of the poor downtrodden sheeple just not getting the "fact" that TEOTW is surely upon us. Never mind that TEOTW hasn't happened yet, that all their predictions of it have been wrong.

Well, I want to add another bias to the mix. Confirmation bias is where a person goes looking for "proof" of the truth of a preconceived opinion. If one only has a hammer, one will see nothing but protruding nails. Survivalists have a BIG problem with confirmation bias imo. They are so convinced that the world is about to end that they grab onto any strand of "proof" they can find. I guess they don't want all the money they've spent on preps to be a total loss.

I have been thinking about confirmation bias lately as the result of two articles on MSNBC. One was about some prognosticator saying that "we are in year six of a 20 year boom". Well, ok, opinions are like assholes, everybody has them and most of them stink like poo. But today, MSNBC directly referenced the "Obama Boom". This wasn't some dude who has smoked too much wacky tobacky blowing hot air, but a news item that pointed out that the improving economy may change people's opinion of Obama.

Anybody remember "2016: Obama's America"? When Obama was first elected, this video popped up, asserting that America would be in a state of near collapse and chaos if Obama got eight years to ruin it. Well, a weird thing happened on the way to TEOTWAWKI: San Francisco has such a tight housing market that sellers are making the sale of their houses contingent on the seller wrapping up a place to move to. Wall Street is on a tear. The numbers of employed persons in the state of Oregon is at an all time high.

The normal response among the far right to this is something along the lines of "who you gonna believe, me and my fellow doomsters or your lying eyes?" Searches for survivalist topics are down two thirds from a December 2012 peak. (Apparently, many thought that a nonexistent prediction from a calendar that is only 50% legible by archaeologists, never mind laypeople, was far scarier than an inexperienced president.) Doomer Michael Snyder (you know him, The Economic Collapse Blog) and many others are starting to look crazy when every piece of good news is met by them sticking their fingers in their ears and screaming "lalala, it's all fake, the numbers are cooked".

This is confirmation bias at work. Having cut their teeth on the near meltdown of global finance in 2008, they are grabbing onto every string of bad news from Greece in order to keep the doom gravy train from derailing. Other than being careful what horse you hitch your cart to (although admittedly people have been expecting Jesus to return for 2000 years), what this says is that some people simply can't accept that maybe the world WON'T end next week. This doesn't mean to stop prepping (although many people have and will, and after all hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and earthquakes do happen) but that you don't need to prep for TEOTW. Even an earthquake is far less demanding to prep for. And as I have noted, a tree falling on your power line or a water pipe bursting in your ceiling is far more likely than a zombie apocalypse.