The protagonists of the show, typically middle-class rural white men—not especially wealthy or highly educated, but comfortable enough to invest significant proportions of their income on fantasies of rugged self-sufficiency in the wake of a great civilizational crackup—are uniformly obsessed with purifying their lives of dependence on others. These men’s critique of modernity, such as it is, is a critique of the extent to which the individual has become weakened and compromised by such dependency.
