Saxon's Survival Hour #172: The Key to Survival

Today's excerpt begins on page 24 of The Survivor Volume 1.

THE KEY TO SURVIVAL

GRANDDADS WONDERFUL BOOK OF CHEMISTRY may be the key to the survival of the best elements of our society.

Many will survive because of weapons.
The armed predators will finally waste themselves.
But the armed protectors will guard the right people and things of value still left after the crash.

The self-reliant new peasantry will provide many bases and communities from which new, decentralized societies will spring up out of the ruins.

But the lay chemist, the amateur with imagination and idealism, will give the others the reasons for bearing up under the struggle.
The chemist will not need to be armed, nor will he or she need to be physically strong or even physically whole.
The only qualification will be a good mind and the motivation to create something good out of practically nothing.

Such a one will be treasured by any survival community.
A set of formularies and a box of simple lab equipment, mostly homemade, will be the Open Sesame to the Survival Community of your choice.

Survival through a knowledge of Nineteenth Century chemistry will put the chemist in a relatively non competitive position among survivalists.
This is because so few people understand how easy it is to acquire a working knowledge of productive kitchen chemistry.

To most people, a chemist is a wierdo with a big brain filled with ten years of college indoctrination.
He has a lab, paid for by a mindless corporation.
He works on the fifteenth of 200 processes in a chain leading to a final product he doesn't really understand.

There are many such as this but a whole roomfull of them would be inferior to a lady survivalist who knows how to follow the directions in a cookbook.
And our lady survivalist would probably not know how to cook if she had been brought up with the idea that a cook had to be a Master Chef trained in Paris from childhood.

It's these images of exclusiveness that keep intelligent people from tackling unfamiliar fields.
How many kids would learn to tear down a car and put it together again if their only image of auto mechanics were Ford Motor Company engineers?

GRANDDAD'S WONDERFUL BOOK OF CHEMISTRY gives the laugh to the image of the corporate chemist with his head full of higher math and mysterious chemical symbols.
A lot of its most practical knowledge was contributed by tradespeople who could hardly read.
They renamed chemicals whose names they didn't know or couldn’t spell.
Some of their descriptions of processes can only be understood by a half-wit, they are so uncomplicated.
(Most professional chemists are so warped by higher education they can't grasp simple concepts, beliebing there must be something more to a process, lest their education had been in vain.
They can't believe practical chemistry can be so logical and simple).

Thus, a chemistry major out of M.I.T. might be confused by GRANDDAD'S WONDERFUL BOOK OF CHEMISTRY.

And a layman who thinks chemistry is reserved for graduates of M.I.T. would likewise be confused by the book.
But it is not the book which is at fault, but the attitudes of these two types, which bar them from the field of kitchen chemistry.

It's true that many of the terms used in the book are unfamiliar.
But that is because they were used maybe hundreds of years ago by alchemists and amateur chemists working alone.
They made up names for compounds for which others would make up different names, although the compound was the same stuff.

Because of this, GRANDDAD'S WONDERFUL BOOK OF CHEMISTRY has 91 pages of definitions of vague and obsolete terms so an old formula can be updated into modern terms in minutes.

Kurt Saxon thought civilization would have collapsed by now.
He spent the majority of his life collecting knowledge of home based business.
His goal was for all his readers to survive at a more comfortable level than those that were less provident.

He knew the importance of communicating at a level folks could understand.
Most of what he has compiled for our benefit can be easily understood by everybody.

He also includes a subtle sense of humor.

You can find the majority of his life's work here.

Hear him read his stories.

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