We didn’t stop in Kansas, but I am stuck there metaphorically near the silos occupied by the fearful rich. That phenomenon really puzzles me. It calls to mind what the Eagles said, “every form of refuge has its price.”
Antonio Martínez was very rich and wanted a refuge far from cities, but he did not want to be too far off the grid either. As he said, “All these dudes think that one guy alone could somehow withstand the roving mob,” he said. “No, you’re going to need to form a local militia. You just need so many things to actually ride out the apocalypse.” It won’t be simple to “ride out the apocalypse.”
Martínez thinks that Americans are in a difficult position. As he said, “I think people who are particularly attuned to the levers by which society actually works understand that we are skating on really thin cultural ice right now.”
Evan Osnos writing in the New Yorker described these wealthy survivalists this way,
“In private Facebook groups, wealthy survivalists swap tips on gas masks, bunkers, and locations safe from the effects of climate change. One member, the head of an investment firm, told me, “I keep a helicopter gassed up all the time, and I have an underground bunker with an air-filtration system.” He said that his preparations probably put him at the “extreme” end among his peers. But he added, “A lot of my friends do the guns and the motorcycles and the gold coins. That’s not too rare anymore.”
Another wealthy forty-four-year-old managing director at Mayfield Fund, a venture-capital firm, Tim Chang, said this,
“There’s a bunch of us in the Valley. We meet up and have these financial-hacking dinners and talk about backup plans people are doing. It runs the gamut from a lot of people stocking up on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, to figuring out how to get second passports if they need it, to having vacation homes in other countries that could be escape havens… I’ll be candid: I’m stockpiling now on real estate to generate passive income but also to have havens to go to… Oh, my God, if there is a civil war or a giant earthquake that cleaves off part of California, we want to be ready.”
Chang called this a “terror scenario.” That phrase is apt. People like Chang and his cronies live in fear. They are terrified. They fear that soon the gig will be up. Chang also realizes that he will need more than caches of food and gear. He will need weapons to defend himself and his family. To protect his wife and daughter, he said, “I don’t have guns, but I have a lot of other weaponry. I took classes in archery.” Archery that ought to do the trick.
Some of these guys are young yet incredibly rich (even though many also seem incredibly stupid). Welcome to modern America. One of them is Steve Huffman, the thirty-three-year-old co-founder and C.E.O. of Reddit, which was valued at six hundred million dollars. Not bad for a 33-year-old, but he was not happy. He was scared shitless! Osnos says that some of these survivalists are in it for “brogrammer” entertainment. They like the real-world sci-fi with fancy (and expensive gear). Others like Huffman treat it much more seriously. He has been scared ever since the saw the film “Deep Impact” in 1988. That film depicted a comet striking the Atlantic causing a massive tsunami. As Huffman said, “Everybody’s trying to get out, and they’re stuck in traffic. That scene happened to be filmed near my high school. Every time I drove through that stretch of road, I would think, I need to own a motorcycle because everybody else is screwed.”
I remember seeing scenes like that north of New Orleans when people fled the city to avoid the dangers of Hurricane Katrina. The roads were clogged with traffic as people fled in mass.
After that film in 1988 “Huffman has been a frequent attendee at Burning Man, the annual, clothing-optional festival in the Nevada desert, where artists mingle with moguls. He fell in love with one of its core principles, “radical self-reliance,” which he takes to mean “happy to help others, but not wanting to require others.” I would call this radical fear. Paranoia in other words.
It is such fear that breeds conspiracy theories as Richard Hofstaeder pointed out in his class The Paranoid Style in American Politics. That spirit is alive an well. Really not so well.