The Rich Have a Plan, but It Doesn’t Include You.

There’s a handful of companies around the world that build bunkers for the super-rich. According to them, demand has shot up anywhere from 300 to 700 percent over the last few years. They attribute the spike to climate change and social unrest, sometimes just straight-up paranoia. Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, has said more than half the billionaires he knows own post-apocalyptic hideouts in places like New Zealand.

It sends a bleak message.

The world’s elite might claim to see a bright future for humanity. In reality, they’re hedging their bets.

After all, they’re not stupid. Just like us, they see a world marked by increasing competition for resources. They see mass shootings on the news practically every week. They see fires and floods engulfing entire cities, turning skies blood red, and transforming parts of the world into dead zones. They’re having casual conversations about it with their families, over dinner. They ask each other, “Who wants to live in all this?”

The simple answer — nobody.

The difference between us and the super rich is that they have an escape plan, and they’re not even trying that hard to keep it a secret. Some of them even brag about it. They like showing off their bunkers.

The irony is that the ones building bunkers are also the ones creating the need for those bunkers in the first place. They’re not just making money through benevolent entrepreneurship. They’ve spent decades draining resources from public schools in order to build a private education network. They’re committing fraud to grab seats at prestigious universities. They’re lobbying our politicians to disenfranchise us.

They’re leveraging every advantage to ensure they don’t have to live in the world they’re ruining. They’re not doing this haphazardly, even if they’re not always that coordinated. They have a vision for civilization.

It just doesn’t include us.

We’re Talking about Luxury Bunkers.

We think of bunkers as shabby little bomb-shelters where, at best, you could keep a couple of crates of food and some bunk beds.

Not these…

They’re basically underground mansions.

A luxury bunker can cost millions. They’re bigger than your house. They come with all kinds of amenities. They come with swimming pools and movie theaters. They come with underground gardens and artificial sunlight. They come with gyms and game rooms, and water purification systems. They come with large food pantries and sports car garages. You can bet they come with gates and security cameras, and arsenals. You could live in one of these things for a year, probably longer if you had a Tesla cybertruck to go on supply runs. It’s the perfect place to wait out an apocalypse, freeing up real estate for when you emerge to restart civilization.

Millionaires and billionaires have already siphoned up so much real estate in New Zealand that the country had to pass a law barring foreigners from buying property there. Now they’re just trying to build fortresses in remote locations pretty much anywhere they can.

It’s a great plan…

Bunkers Belie Billionaire Optimism.

Some people will call you pessimistic for being honest about the state of our society. They’ll say you’re the problem. They’ll ask why you have to be so negative all the time. Well, all you have to do is look at these bunkers to figure out what’s really going on.

The world’s richest, most powerful people most certainly are planning for the end of the world as we know it, even as they bring it about.

They’re just not being very honest.

They’re telling everyone everything’s going to be fine. If that were true, they wouldn’t be building homes inspired by post-apocalyptic cinema.

Would they?

Our last president was a self-proclaimed billionaire. When things got rough, he lied to the public. He told everyone there was a little flu going around, and that there was no need to panic. In private, he basically told his rich buddies to sell off all their stocks and go hide in caves.

That’s exactly what they did.

Everyone Wants a Bunker These Days.

All my friends want private luxury bunkers. It comes up every time we talk about climate change or politics. If not that, then we want a homestead somewhere in the middle of nowhere. This is the new American dream, a dwelling of some kind that’s somewhat sheltered from all the world’s impending chaos and uncertainty.

It’s a selfish fantasy.

In truth, opting out isn’t the answer. That will only speed things up. What we need is more cooperation, not less.

Still, we can dream.

We can fantasize about how nice it must feel to have a few million in liquid cash, plus a secret bunker tucked into a remote mountainside. It would be a huge relief to know that if our attempts to slow down the environment’s destruction failed, at least we would be okay.

We’d all sleep better if we had that.

Alas, we don’t.

We’re stuck with each other. It’s in our interest to figure out a way to live with each other and get along.

You Can’t Run a Society Inside a Bunch of Bunkers.

This time last year, I was talking with my family about barring the windows and buying a gas-powered generator. We didn’t do that, mainly because we couldn’t afford to, and for that I’m grateful.

We were scared last year. Everyone was buying up all the toilet paper and assault rifles they could get their hands on. Then we calmed down and remembered something important.

We all live next to each other.

Society depends on the idea of proximity. The sight and sound of other people nearby remind us that we can’t go around doing whatever we want. Our actions have consequences.

It’s easy to forget this when you live off by yourself. It’s one of the main reasons why rural communities remain so conservative, and urban centers lean liberal. You don’t care about people as much when you don’t have to interact with them on a daily basis.

We’ve seen how empathy drops after a certain income threshold. Once you make a certain amount of money, you don’t care as much about anyone who doesn’t. You can shield yourself. I imagine empathy drops even lower when you isolate yourself from civilization, engaging with it merely through the periscope of press events and fundraisers. Now think about what happens when you add a bunker.

Everything will Be Fine, at Least for Them.

Some people get defensive when they read articles like this. Their instinct is to defend the super rich and accuse their critics of blasting society without offering a solution. Well, the solution is simple from where I’m standing, and we’ve been saying it for a while:

• Tax the rich.
• Regulate corporations.
• Limit the amount of money they can use to sway elections in their favor and rein in corporate lobbyists.
• Close all of the loopholes allowing the super-rich to opt-out of their responsibilities.
• Actually, punish bankers and hedge fund managers when they commit crimes like fraud. Send them to a real prison.

We have to do this. Otherwise, they’ll keep pretending to care while semi-secretly building doomsday bunkers.

The super-rich likes to go on television and social media to promote optimism and positive thinking. Sure, it’s easy to sound upbeat when they’ve got bunkers to shelter them and their loved ones just in case things don’t turn out the way they predict. It’s easy for them to tell everyone to relax, that everything’s going to be fine.

Sure it will, for them.

30 March 2021

the apeiron blog