Stock market is like a battle field. Bull market is mostly powered by greed. Bear market, on the other hand, is propelled by fear.
To survive and win in a bear market, all you need is a peaceful mind, a longer term view of the market and the world economy and a money management strategy.
In general, human beings has much lower tolerance level to pain than to joy. Psychologically, the pain caused by X$ of loss is much, much higher than the joy of X$ of gain. That's exactly what trigger the severe and panic selling in any bear market. People tend to sell at the worst moment of the market when they can't stand the pain of seeing their losses anymore. They want to get rid off the pain. Sadly, that's how the MMs play their games. And in most of the cases, the same people who have sold at the worst possible time would in turn take another round of pain seeing their holdings bouncing back 10 miles high after they sold it.
It's true that, a bear market is always triggered by bad economic events and some sort of crisis. However, the panic sellings are mostly triggered by the psychological and irrational reaction of the human beings. And it's exactly at each of this panic climax point that, a short term/intermediate term/long term opportunity would arise. That's the time period refered as, dumb money leaving the market and smart money scooping up the bargains.