It is a cute rhetorical issue until you are having to deal with situations like that in real life in a crisis.
Say for example the crisis happens, and the institute the mark of the beast system yet earlier on, it was fashionable for you and you remnant of patriots to get face tatoos, to have a high profile, to be known, and when trying to bug out, you get stranded in a town that is run by the collaborators. There is no hiding it, they know who you are, you know who they are, and they know it is to their financial advantage not to sell to you at any price, they don't want your silver, nobody takes cash, but they only want interbank beast system credits, and if the chip your right wrist is a fake, they don't want to do business with you.
We can moralize and argue rhetoric for weeks, but if you are in charge of a convoy of refugees running low on supplies and everyone is being a prick to you, you either take decisive action or someone else will, or you will be seeing your people surrendering family by family because they want to eat.
At some point, the choice gets made to exercise loyalty to the people who supported you, or someone else will purchase their loyalty. At first you made very reasonable offers for the supplies, but were rebuffed. You need the supplies, you made very fair offers, and they got unreasonable, and there is a crisis going on. That's called the parlay. If the parlay fails, then the choices get simpler, use force or fail to survive. Any governing body of any sort is going to recognize that, and in honest intent, it would be when survival is at stake, not some prick going out and playing Sheriff of Nottingham on some made up emergency. What can and will happen when government abdicates responsibility is that someone else will eventually assert authority in that power vacuum.
We don't want to have to broadcast how those things go, but our main focus is to maintain a level of moral superiority to our enemies, not moral superiority to Mother Theresa.
Nobody would need to ask me twice to pitch in for the good of the community, and to be entirely honest, I expect the same of others I am in community with, and if someone wants to be stubborn and unreasonable, then I have a conference with my people do the checkup from the neck up, make sure everyone agrees that we were being reasonable, and then take a very realistic and sober look at priorities for survival. We will NOT be starving on the side of the road somewhere while the supplies exist within reach, period. Not while I am in charge of much of anything. If someone is expecting me to miss meals over their belief system, realistically, I would expect to see that coming long enough beforehand to bail from such a dysfunctional group or situation.
Some of us have bee dealing with exactly that as we work to get the enclaves built and starting to come to the realities of dealing with extremely selfish and dysfunctional people who probably would be a detriment anyway. Nobody is just chomping at the bit waiting to hoist the Jolly Roger and go shooting and looting over these issues, but everyone needs to make some very sober and realistic choices as far ahead of time to understand how this works, and a lot of those choices in the preservation of wealth in a crisis means making alliances and purchasing loyalty for security, not emotional friendship.
On a day to day basis, I am always going to be the most honest and ethical guy around, as long as everyone is reasonable. Get unreasonable with me, then the game changes and the rules change.
When those rules change, we need to understand that some people will be emotionally and therefor psychologically and therefore fiscally incapable of dealing with the circumstances of those rule changes.
Security in SHTF, or any time for that matter, takes resources and manpower that are usually not nearly as important in easy times, since in the easy times, people don't even like to have to pay for insurance until after there has been a loss of some sort, and they can go for decades like that, getting used to taking some risks and being lucky. Succeeding in a business environment where being stubborn and demanding works well, but that's under circumstances where most people have several choices and nobody with any real power to retaliate is going to be particularly desperate to make things go their way.
What that successful person may be in denial of is that when that system is destabilized, so is the previous set of rules concerning what has worked for security and insurance, and what things are worth if and when they are delivered to market under the new rules. If you are looking at government which is above the law in the best of times, then in the worst of times, it is realistic to expect that people with anything worth taking are going to have to navigate a landscape of authorities and brigands and make the deals and alliances where they can.
that's part of why I have been moving most of my bulk survival supplies to a location where there is real security, a combination of passive security and active security, but most importantly, the right kinds of people. I am also looking at sufficient distance between that location and where I normally live that the parasites are not to follow and any cost to benefit analysis calculated by looters will come to the conclusion that the risks associated with an attack will outweigh any profit.
Anyone with something to protect ought to be thinking the exact same way, forming and maintaining those alternative communities for the purpose of survival and making an honorable reputation among such communities that if they are in need, doors will be opened, but the flip side has to be a willingness to open doors to the right kinds of people who will reciprocate loyalty.
