An Argument Against Personal Peak-Oil Preparation

Most of those in the peak oil movement, and those not in the movement but who are aware of and "get" the serious implications of peak oil, are concerned with potential deterioration of society and potential anarchy and chaos on the other side of peak oil. It is a common situation that those who become aware of peak oil and understand the seriousness of it want to warn those close to them about the problems ahead. And it just as common that those same people, once rebuffed or labelled as a nut case, draw back and begin to quietly and unobtrusively focus on their own personal preparations. They do this in the belief, usually, that society won't wake up soon enough to prepare sufficiently to avoid the worst of what peak oil will have to offer.
I strongly believe that those personal preparations that people are making, even if they are correct for whatever peak oil scenario eventually unfolds, are not going to ensure their survival any more than making no preparations at all. In fact I strongly believe that the more successful their preparations appear to be in helping them survive the more visible a target they will become for those who have not prepared. Thieves don't invade the homes in poor neighbourhoods, they go up-town where the best pickings are.
That refocussing on personal preparations, that focussing on preparing yourself for survival regardless of what the community around you is or is not doing, is, I would argue, born of the same self-centredness that has broken down the fabric of our society and turned us all into cogs in the machinery of big business and big government. We no longer see ourselves as part of a community but rather simply residents within it. Our neighbours are neighbours by geographic proximity only.
There is a fairly simple split in the peak oil community regarding the method and model that people feel is best for surviving the fallout from peak oil. There is the live-off-the-land, lone-wolf, armed-to-the-hilt survivalist attitude of those who expect to be able to live in the wild by their wits alone, foraging and taking game as their sources of food, and satisfying all of their needs from nature. There is the go-it-alone homesteader attitude of those who think they can have a stand-alone, self-sufficient homestead on which they produce all of their food and satisfy all of their needs, very often assuming a nearby community from which to aquire those things they cannot produce themselves, that being a community, however, to which they feel no allegiance and for and to which they bear no responsibility. That community is there as a service to them.
Then there is the attitude of surviving within a community, a community that is interactive, inter-dependent, where all members contribute to that community and benefit from that community. It is this that is the closest to the normal psyche of the human animal. We are not lone wolves or individualistic wanderers. We are tribal, function best within a larger group, whether that is an extended family, a tribe, a village, a town, a bio-region or something larger (which I do not believe is ultimately workable in a post oil world). We are not all capable (if any are) of personally performing all of the tasks which ultimately are needed to ensure our long-term survival. Being part of a community allows different people to adopt certain skills and specialties in preference to others, specialization.
Community, the smaller the better, is, in my opinion, the only social modality that has long-term probability of survival success in a post-peak/post-oil world. Community is composed of people who know each other intimately and work together to satisfy their collective needs. It is a society of cooperation, not competition. It is a society of stewardship, not ownership. It is a society that collectively satisfies its combined needs, not one of building individual wealth. It is a society utterly foreign to the current North American mindset, a wholesale paradigm shift.