I used to have pretty much this exact plan & theory when I was younger. Every once in awhile I still say that if I end up an old maid I'm going to buy myself a mountain, build my house on top, & keep a rifle to shoot anyone who comes up. LOL
Anyhow, Melonie is "on target" with why this doesn't work. While you may have good intentions for yourself, not everyone shares those good intentions for you. You could save up all sorts of food, but it won't keep people from stealing it. You could save up tons of money, but if a disaster happens & people aren't sure when it will end then they aren't likely to sell anything. Even in the worst case scenarios, sometimes people simply do things to keep themselves alive. Think of the people on the Uruguayan rugby team that had their plane crash in the Andes, which inspired the 1993 Hollywood movie "Alive". They ate the bodies of the dead to survive. The passengers ate "no relatives, no one with injuries that might have become infected", the rest were fair game. People might say they wouldn't do something, but we are still animals at heart... we require certain necessities & we have the ability to move/act to get them fulfilled. Years after the Uruguayan team crash another group encountered the same thing in the Patagonia mountains. After their pilot was killed the people from the plane considered eating him. Probably the only difference between the two groups was temperature, time it took to be rescued, & better technology. The Uruguayan team took 72 days to rescue.
Read more:
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ar...#ixzz1RMjRLJI8
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,366317,00.html
The Times magazine article on the topic of the Rugby team also stated:
"At first relatives of the dead were morally outraged that the bodies had been desecrated by cannibalism. From the viewpoint of Christian ethics, though, it was not certain that the men on the mountainside had sinned by eating the flesh of their dead companions. By and large, Roman Catholic moral theologians agreed that the act was justified under the circumstances. A few perhaps extravagantly, even likened the situation to the central act of the Eucharist, where the faithful consume the body and blood of Christ under the species of bread and wine."
This goes back to the theories of evolution vs creation, but if you believe that we were created by something external (God, Allah, God/Godess, whatever) then you probably would agree that if we weren't meant to be able to survive extreme situations then we wouldn't have the capability to make decisions & to move of free will.
There's also the good old argument that if your family was starving, your children about to die, would you steal for them? I hear countless times people say "yes" to this. Most societies consider theft to be both un-ethical/un-moral, but they will freely admit that they would steal to keep their children alive. If they are willing to steal for their children I doubt that they'd pass up the opportunity to steal food when hungry enough, or blankets/shelter when cold enough. The key word there being "enough", the breaking point for people isn't the same. Some people though are more willing to give into their needs faster, very few people would actually turn down the opportunity at something if they know the other alternative is death. Heck, for that matter look at the "Donner Party"! That was even worse than the Uruguayan team. They were trying to figure out which of the living should die in order for the rest to survive. Patrick Dolan, who first suggested it, was the one that the group first ate from... but he died after two others... so the group did initially try to hold out on eating. They did a lottery, which Dolan lost, but no one could bear to kill him. He was the next to die, apparently of his own accord. The group probably felt that eating his body was okay because Dolan himself had suggesting eating a group member, & he'd lost the lottery. Three people didn't want to eat, 1 of which gave in a few days later. The 2 who chose not to eat the bodies then were the ones that others began considering... & eventually two were shot as meals. It's speculated that some members may have gone as far as digging up the dead to eat off of them. Think about it, the bodies could have easily been diseased! What's ironic about all of this is the fact that the Native Americans had stolen ox from the group & generally harassed them, yet once they discovered that the group was considering cannibalism the Native Americans disappeared!
I think the lesson to learn from all of this when you look back through history is that being over-prepared is far better than being "prepared the following can all make a difference in extreme survival cases:
- Gender: females are often protected by the group
- Age: Between a feeble but healthy senior & a baby people will often opt to take out the older because they're past their prime & they are bigger which is helpful when caring for a group.
- Family size: We tend to be the most protective of our own family so in extreme cases people take from strangers, followed by non-relatives they know, then relatives. A few of the Graves children from the Donner party have talked about taking from their own mother after she had died of natural causes because she was the only option for food.
- Not passive about surviving: those who turned down the flesh of the first could be seen as not caring enough about their own life/survival. If they are around other people who are determined to survive, those other people are going to start figuring that the person is going to die anyway... so they may as well just "take them out" to help themselves sustain, particularly in cases where its giving up the benefit of one for the benefit (living without starving to death) of many.
While we never know what is going to happen it's best to be not just prepared, but over-prepared & show you are protective of what is yours & be willing to protect your own interest! Not only are we responsible for ourselves, but we could end up being responsible for others (even outside our immediate families) in order to survive. People are more likely to steal from someone who has more that could be given (unless there is a higher risk like an alarm going off or being shot), in extreme cases sharing what you have freely (while still protecting what you actually need for personal survival) could help things from turning sour sooner. In other words, having more could simply "buy" you more time where the larger community is able to survive without giving into temptations/needs.
To answer the question though, I used to be more of a naturalist, but now I would consider myself a survivalist. I used to think that if something were to happen, say I was attacked by a bear, that I wouldn't really want to kill it so I wouldn't fight back. Over the years though I have just seen that their is so much evil around & people who don't care about others. I've changed my tune a lot & now believe that if something happens where it's between my life & something/someone else where they attacked me, that tells me that they don't value my life.... & probably not the lives of others. I do value life, therefore between me & the someone/something I would have full intentions of protecting myself to survive.
By the way, I think I have 5 or 6 can openers... if anyone gets desperate enough to steal one, I'm willing to share a few so no extreme measures are needed. 
Oh, & ArmySGT is right, being "self reliant" is totally different than being a survivalist... although I suppose one could TRY to be both. I'm not sure that really could work out though in the "extreme" situations. Maybe a self reliant communal community though?
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