When I was a kid, my mother hoarded food against the possibility of a nuclear apocalypse. That an attack could be so imminent was a source of real terror – as was the fact that all we'd have to eat afterwards was condensed milk and tinned salmon. (Someone told me that when her grandmother moved, they found 82 cans of salmon. I don't know how this became the go-to food for chiliasts and survivalists, but I have an idea: it's because it is pink.)

Once you're an adult, your parents' behaviour ceases to frighten you. I remember a moment in 2002 when the water my mother had stockpiled for the Y2K meltdown was past its sell-by date, but luckily she had another 200 litres set aside for world war three (after 9/11), so she was going to use her millennium water for washing. And we had this big family row (against which possibility she had secreted a torch and a weapon in each room) about whether or not she was mad, or my sister and I were just politically unaware. It's not "awareness" to think that the world is about to end, we said. That's not what people mean when they put "current affairs" on their CV under hobbies.

So here is one spectrum on which we can place hoarding behaviour – paranoia to good sense – although exactly where depends, of course, on what's going on in the world. Having condensed milk is only ridiculous because a nuclear war didn't happen. It's natural that a person who remembers a world war would think catastrophe closer to hand than a person whose most memorable disaster is that time it got really windy in 1987.

It did strike me in 2008 that it might be time to start stockpiling rice. Nobody was saying the phrase "end of fiat money" back then (they are now), but Gordon Brown had that look on his face like he was only holding it together by stabbing himself under the table with a fork. However, someone pointed out to me that there was no point trying to raise yourself above everybody else: if you'd amassed enough supplies to last longer than a week you'd most likely be stormed and looted, so you'd be in the same position as the rest except lonely, and with a broken front door.

In this case, hoarding behaviour sits on a different spectrum: between legitimate self-reliance and unhelpful self-interest. In theory, you should be able to steer a course between the two by taking direction from the government; to accompany the Civil Contingencies Act 2004, a booklet about preparing for emergencies recommended food and bottled water for several days. But they had their sights on a terrorist threat – as did George Bush when, in 2003, he expressly warned Americans to keep enough food and water to be able to stay in the house for three days.

In such situations, of course, where the threat is external and the government and people are on the same side, certain questions don't come up. Scale – three days or three months? – isn't a problem because you simply take instruction. Community – is there any point hoarding by household? Won't that mean instant civil war? – isn't a problem because you're all taking the same instructions.

The situation at the moment, though, is unlike that unease of the early noughties (and people were definitely uneasy; if you look back at the news features, they are full of regular families making escape plans for the dirty bomb). Today it feels more like an amplified version of the fuel protests of 2000 and 2005: simultaneously, there is a growing distrust of the government (previously because of the punitive tax rates on oil; now for all the obvious reasons starting with the word "Osborne" and ending with "in this together, my arse") but also, more worryingly, the sense that they aren't actually in control.

And this is how you get from discussions about the end of money to the phenomenon of panic buying – not because anybody believes the effects of a currency collapse can be mitigated if you have a really good supply of carbohydrates and wind-up radios; rather, because once you don't trust the government, you're immediately alienated. There's no soft gradation where you stop believing in central government but still trust your local council. It's a trip switch: one minute you're a member of society, the next you're a Mormon – only without the consolation of afterlife (Mormons, for comparison, are instructed to keep three months' worth of supplies; it makes you wonder how long they think this apocalypse is going to take).

I far prefer the image of an evil George Osborne, stamping on the skulls of children and the public sector, to that of a totally inept one, charging blithely into a fiscal contraction that everybody told him wouldn't work, not troubling to understand why not until the mistakes had been made. Both were on view on Tuesday. The first George might be able to pull us clear of the euro wreckage through sheer self-interest; the second George couldn't pull us clear of an iceberg when he had the whole rest of the sea at his mercy.

Because I'm an optimist, and it takes more than an autumn statement to change that, I am not stockpiling. But I would still like to note for the record that, at some points in history, just because Mormons and my mum do it, doesn't mean it's crazy.