Category Archives: 2023 Grand Finale Tour

Doom Boom

2023 Grand Finale Tour, Capitalism, Decline of the west, Fear

 

Fear was not invented recently in America. Long before people bought condos in missile silos, fear was a profitable business. It has always been there. It always has been profitable.  There were ample fears earlier in the United States too. The Cold War was brimming with fear.  Many thought there were communists under every bed. Many feared nuclear annihilation. Of course, as always, politicians ensured that the most important people had the most protection. That meant, of course, they were protected. As Evan Osnos said,

 

“During the Cold War, Armageddon became a matter for government policymakers. The Federal Civil Defense Administration, created by Harry Truman, issued crisp instructions for surviving a nuclear strike, including “Jump in any handy ditch or gutter” and “Never lose your head.” In 1958, Dwight Eisenhower broke ground on Project Greek Island, a secret shelter, in the mountains of West Virginia, large enough for every member of Congress. Hidden beneath the Greenbrier Resort, in White Sulphur Springs, for more than thirty years, it maintained separate chambers-in-waiting for the House and the Senate. (Congress now plans to shelter at undisclosed locations.) There was also a secret plan to whisk away the Gettysburg Address, from the Library of Congress, and the Declaration of Independence, from the National Archives.”

 

Frankly, I would have felt better if the political leaders were the last to be put into bunkers, so that their conduct would not be overly reckless. In 1961 John F. Kennedy encouraged “every citizen” to help build fall-out shelters.  Thousands of Americans complied. Back home I knew someone a block away who had one in his house. Now that seems crazy.  Few people would have survived a nuclear attack in those shelters. But this advice played on American and Canadian fears. Many people felt better doing something.

This was part of a cherished American tradition of fear mongering–one of the most popular sports in America. Right next to NASCAR racing, wrestling, and NFL football.

Osnos described the American fear movement this way,

 “In 1976, tapping into fear of inflation and the Arab oil embargo, a far-right publisher named Kurt Saxon launched The Survivor, an influential newsletter that celebrated forgotten pioneer skills. (Saxon claimed to have coined the term “survivalist.”) The growing literature on decline and self-protection included “How to Prosper During the Coming Bad Years,” a 1979 best-seller, which advised collecting gold in the form of South African Krugerrands. The “doom boom,” as it became known, expanded under Ronald Reagan. The sociologist Richard G. Mitchell, Jr., a professor emeritus at Oregon State University, who spent twelve years studying survivalism, said, “During the Reagan era, we heard, for the first time in my life, and I’m seventy-four years old, from the highest authorities in the land that government has failed you, the collective institutional ways of solving problems and understanding society are no good. People said, ‘O.K., it’s flawed. What do I do now?’ ”

 

I doubt that anyone ever lost money overestimating American fears.  Doom is always booming.

 

*

Strange Fears

2023 Grand Finale Tour, Capitalism, criminal Justice, Decline of the west, Environmental Apocalypse, Fear, Social democracy

 

All unreasonable fears are strange, but some are stranger than others. Some fear environmental collapse. Not such a strange fear at all.

Some of the people who put down $3 million to purchase a condo in a former missile silo in Kansas have strange fears. In the land of conspiracy theories that should not surprise. Maybe they all do. Evan Osnos interviewed Tyler Allen a real estate developer in Florida who bought a unit in the Kansas silo. He worries about future “social conflict” in America. That really is not so strange a fear.  Allen also thinks that the government will deceive the public, as it has done in the past. He even believes that Ebola was allowed into the country “in order to weaken the population.” Unsurprisingly, he is transfused with fear and conspiracy theories. But I am not putting down $3million. Of course, I can’t put down $3 million, but if I did, I would think that there must be a better way.

Allen claimed that when he started suggesting ideas like this people thought he was crazy, but they don’t anymore. He said, “my credibility has gone through the roof. Ten years ago, this just seemed crazy that all this was going to happen: the social unrest and the cultural divide in the country, the race-baiting and the hate-mongering.”

Of course, how will people get to their bunkers? The buyers don’t live next door. Tyler lived in Florida. That is a long way from Kansas. Tyler thought he would have 48 hours to make it to Kansas. Most people he believed, when the crisis came, would head to the bars while he headed towards Kansas. I guess they would be watching from “Sports bars.” Of course, if a nuclear bomb hit American, such driving would be difficult. Did you see the images of the highways around New Orleans when the people there were told to evacuate because of impending Hurricane Katrina? We would not want to be in the line-up. Pretty messy!

As I have said, all of this is driven by fears–in particular fears of the very rich. Osnos does not disagree,

“Why do our dystopian urges emerge at certain moments and not others? Doomsday—as a prophecy, a literary genre, and a business opportunity—is never static; it evolves with our anxieties. The earliest Puritan settlers saw in the awe-inspiring bounty of the American wilderness the prospect of both apocalypse and paradise. When, in May of 1780, sudden darkness settled on New England, farmers perceived it as a cataclysm heralding the return of Christ. (In fact, the darkness was caused by enormous wildfires in Ontario.) D. H. Lawrence diagnosed a specific strain of American dread. “Doom! Doom! Doom!” he wrote in 1923. “Something seems to whisper it in the very dark trees of America.”

 

Do these doomsday fears not tell us something important about the über rich? This is what they are bringing about! They have no one to blame but themselves. Can’t they do better? Their own actions are creating these fears. Their own actions could forestall them.

There must be a better way and its not being brought in by forest fires from Ontario.

Things are not likely to be perfect in a Silo

2023 Grand Finale Tour, Capitalism, Decline of the west, Social democracy, Social Justice

 

How can you live in a former missile silo?

One problem is how to get away with the absence of windows. Can you imagine it? According to Osnos,

“The condo walls are fitted with L.E.D. “windows” that show a live video of the prairie above the silo. Owners can opt instead for pine forests or other vistas. One prospective resident from New York City wanted video of Central Park. “All four seasons, day and night,” Menosky said. “She wanted the sounds, the taxis and the honking horns.”

 

To me this sounds like virtual reality–with an emphasis on virtual. Will this be life behind these walls?  Hall has given some thought to how people will live there, but I wonder if he has given enough thought. It is ironic that these vistas are all part of the commons. I thought that was what they wanted to get away from. These are things the super-rich should have helped sustain, but many preferred to enhance their own private wealth instead. Now they want them?

According to Osnos,

“Hall [the developer of the missile silo] said the hardest part of the project was sustaining life underground. He studied how to avoid depression (add more lights), prevent cliques (rotate chores), and simulate life aboveground.”

Frankly I would not be satisfied with simulated life. Would you?  Or is even death preferable? This is particularly poignant when you consider that most (all?) life might outside the bunkers might perish.

Some survivalists have mocked Hall’s plan. They say they won’t pay. They will just attack when the time comes. Hall claimed that he and his “guards” could repel all forces. And if necessary, the guards would return fire. What will Hall to secure the loyalty of the guards. After the apocalypse won’t things start over? What will money be worth? Why won’t the guards switch sides? Who would persuade the hired armed guards to stick with supporting the rich people hunkered down?  Why would they stick with the rich? How long could people survive a siege?

Things are not likely to be perfect in a former missile silo. I know I am deeply skeptical.

 

A Survival Condo Project in Missile Silo

2023 Grand Finale Tour, Capitalism, Decline of the west, Social democracy

 

 

Evan Osnos in his New Yorker article, described the Kansas landscape that Chris and I  drove through on this trip to Arizona.  He drove to a place  called the Survival Condo Project near the town of Concordia and Salina Kansas which we drove through. When he arrived, he was met by a guard dressed in camouflage holding a semiautomatic rifle.  It looked impressive. The condo project was being built inside  an underground missile silo like the one Chris and I had seen a few years ago in Green Valley Arizona. That has been turned into a museum.

The facility housed nuclear warheads from 1961 to 1965–a mere 5 years. After that the site was decommissioned and a bigger and better silo was built somewhere else. I think that site is still secret as this one had been.  The  developers were building 15 luxury condos there because the site had been built with walls so thick it was supposed to survive a nuclear attack by the Russians. The site was originally built in response to a perceived threat from the Soviet Union that was engaged in a long-standing “cold war” with the United States and its allies. The developers are led by Larry Hall the CEO of the new project. As Osnos said, “Hall has erected a defense against the fears of a new era. “It’s true relaxation for the ultra-wealthy,” he said. “They can come out here, they know there are armed guards outside. The kids can run around.”

Wow is that the best the super-rich can do? Is there not more to life than being ensconced in a concrete cocoon? Presumably its better than getting incinerated in the nuclear attack. To me that sounds horribly limited. Maybe being super-rich is not all it’s cracked up to be.

Hall developed the property for which he paid $300,000 by spending another $20,000,000 for renovations. With that he created 12 private apartments that he sold for $3 million each in the case of full floor units and $1.5 in the case of half floor units. He sold them all except for one that he decided to keep for himself.

The silos in which the apartments are located are solid.  They were built by the Army Corp of Engineers to withstand a nuclear strike.  The inside has enough food and fuel for 5 years off the grid. Of course, it will require that people raise tilapia in fish tanks and hydroponic vegetables under grow lamps and supposedly renewable power that could function indefinitely, according to Hall. I am not sure how he would accomplish that.

In a crisis more drastic measures can be expected. According to Hall,

“In a crisis, his swat-team-style trucks (“the Pit-Bull VX, armored up to fifty-caliber”) will pick up any owner within four hundred miles. Residents with private planes can land in Salina, about thirty miles away. In his view, the Army Corps did the hardest work by choosing the location. “They looked at height above sea level, the seismology of an area, how close it is to large population centers.”

 

If owners of planes can’t fly them in they will need to make arrangements for a pilot and family members of the pilot. Where would they go after flying in? That does not mean that each prepper has an individual bunker. After all, hardened bunkers are expensive and complicated to construct. The complex looked and felt like a ski condo that did not have any windows. What kind of ski condo is that? But it had a central area with pool table, stone fireplace, a kitchen, and leather couches. No TVs of course. No poor people will stick around to man the TV stations.

What will life be like without poor people to do all the manual work needed to keep the place going.  Why will the people hired by Hall as security and to do necessary tasks  continue to work for the group? How will they be paid? Where will money come from? Why won’t they just take over and kick out the rich people whose wealth will no longer have any meaning? I have a lot of questions about this project.

It sounds to me like a crazy scheme for rich people that makes no sense except to the paranoid rich. Would you invest in it?

This might be the real grand finale.

 

Over valuing private goods and undervaluing public goods

2023 Grand Finale Tour, Capitalism, Decline of the west, Social democracy, Social Justice

 

 

For a long time, it has been my opinion that people under value pubic goods and over value private goods. For example, good schools, hospitals, libraries, parks and many others are really important and valuable.  One of the problems with some rich people, like those who bought condos in the missile silos of Salina Kansas, was that most of these privileged people no longer recognize the benefits–the mutual benefits–provided by the commons. They have either forgotten how important they are or they never realized it.  They really believe only private goods count. Only private goods are really good. Public goods are irrelevant.  Robert Johnson who Osnos interviewed for his  New Yorker article realized  this was not the case. He said,

“If we had a more equal distribution of income, and much more money and energy going into public school systems, parks and recreation, the arts, and health care, it could take an awful lot of sting out of society. We’ve largely dismantled those things.”

 

It is difficult to discern why the privileged are so fearful. What do these ultra-wealthy people have to fear? If money does not buy happiness, surely it buys security. If one thought that, one would be wrong. As Osnos reported,

“As public institutions deteriorate, élite anxiety has emerged as a gauge of our national predicament. “Why do people who are envied for being so powerful appear to be so afraid?” Johnson asked. “What does that really tell us about our system?” He added, “It’s a very odd thing. You’re basically seeing that the people who’ve been the best at reading the tea leaves—the ones with the most resources, because that’s how they made their money—are now the ones most preparing to pull the rip cord and jump out of the plane.”

In other words if people valued the common good as much as they valued their own private good, there might be a lot less anxiety.  When the über rich are so fearful it really make you wonder about the stability of the system. Do they know something the rest of us don’t know? Or it that guilt poisons their perception? Or do they just not understand what is important?

Sometimes the most. important things we have are the things that we share.

 

 

A Deeper Crisis

2023 Grand Finale Tour, Capitalism, Decline of the west, Social democracy, Social Justice

It is also interesting how the privileged classes have selected things to worry about.  As Evan Osnos reported in his New Yorker article:

 

“Élite anxiety cuts across political lines. Even financiers who supported Trump for President, hoping that he would cut taxes and regulations, have been unnerved at the ways his insurgent campaign seems to have hastened a collapse of respect for established institutions. Dugger said, “The media is under attack now. They wonder, Is the court system next? Do we go from ‘fake news’ to ‘fake evidence’? For people whose existence depends on enforceable contracts, this is life or death.”

 

It is also interesting how the privileged classes have selected things to worry about.  As Osnos reported

 

“Robert A. Johnson was another person that Osnos interviewed.  He saw the fear of his peers as “the symptom of a deeper crisis.”[2]  I agree with that. I too see the fear as a manifestation of fundamental unease about their place in modern society. They are unmoored and their wealth, which often is extreme wealth, is not able to fill the void. Johnson was the manager of a hedge fund. He was also the head of a think tank. He called himself “an accidental student of civic anxiety.”From my own career, I would just talk to people. More and more were saying, ‘you’ve got to have a private plane. You have to assure that the pilot’s family will be taken care of, too. They have to be on the plane.’ ”

 Johnson saw the fear of his peers as “the symptom of a deeper crisis.”  I agree with that. I too see the fear experienced by the über wealthy as a manifestation of fundamental unease about their place in modern society like those who bought condos in a concrete missile silo in Kansa. They are unmoored and their wealth, which these days often is extreme wealth, is not able to fill the void. Johnson was the manager of a hedge fund. He was also the head of a think tank. He called himself “an accidental student of civic anxiety. More and more wealthy people were telling. him, ‘you’ve got to have a private plane. You have to assure that the pilot’s family will be taken care of, too. They have to be on the plane.’ ” Escaping the apocalypse is not easy.

Osnos analyzed this situation this way,

“By January, 2015, Johnson was sounding the alarm: the tensions produced by acute income inequality were becoming so pronounced that some of the world’s wealthiest people were taking steps to protect themselves. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Johnson told the audience, “I know hedge-fund managers all over the world who are buying airstrips and farms in places like New Zealand because they think they need a getaway.”

Johnson is like some other wealthy people that have not entirely lost their sense of empathy or their sense of justice. Osnos described their situation this way,

“Johnson wishes that the wealthy would adopt a greater “spirit of stewardship,” an openness to policy change that could include, for instance, a more aggressive tax on inheritance. “Twenty-five hedge-fund managers make more money than all of the kindergarten teachers in America combined,” he said. “Being one of those twenty-five doesn’t feel good. I think they’ve developed a heightened sensitivity.” The gap is widening further. In December, the National Bureau of Economic Research published a new analysis, by the economists Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman, which found that half of American adults have been “completely shut off from economic growth since the 1970s.” Approximately a hundred and seventeen million people earn, on average, the same income that they did in 1980, while the typical income for the top one per cent has nearly tripled. That gap is comparable to the gap between average incomes in the U.S. and the Democratic Republic of Congo, the authors wrote.”

If you are the fortunate beneficiary of such largesse, it is difficult to believe that that such extreme inequality is justified. It takes a special kind hubris. Or perhaps blindness. The result is fear that some day that injustice might be rectified.

Apocalypse Insurance

2023 Grand Finale Tour, Decline of the west, Social democracy

 

There are different types of apocalypse insurance. Pascal said you should bet on Christianity. Many of the über rich, like those who purchased condos in a former Titan missile silo near Salina Kansas, believe that money can buy you anything. Everything is for sale. After all, if your own soul has been sold, everything must be for sale.

 

No one knows exactly how many wealthy Americans have bought into the fear that the west is headed towards a Russian style revolution event, but the numbers are not insignificant. Many of them see New Zealand as a refuge. It is far enough out there to satisfy them. Evan Osnos, writing about this phenomenon for the New Yorker, asked Steve Huffman the 33-year-old founder of Reddit to estimate what share of fellow Silicon Valley billionaires have acquired some level of “apocalypse insurance,” in the form of a hideaway in the U.S. or abroad.  He guessed 50%. That is pretty good chunk of the wealthy.

One of the things that scares survivalists and also that scares me is Artificial intelligence.  “The fears vary, but many worry that, as artificial intelligence takes away a growing share of jobs, there will be a backlash against Silicon Valley, America’s second-highest concentration of wealth.”  Many of them, like Huffman asked “Is the country going to turn against the wealthy? Is it going to turn against technological innovation? Is it going to turn into civil disorder?”

There is something inherently barbarous about ultra  rich people taking such extreme measures to protect themselves from hazards that their own reckless disregard for benefits to other classes has wrought. Max Levchin, a founder of Paypal and of Affirm, a lending start-up, admitted this to Osnos, when he acknowledged,

“It’s one of the few things about Silicon Valley that I actively dislike—the sense that we are superior giants who move the needle and, even if it’s our own failure, must be spared.”

It shows the deep injustice of their wealth and the deep justice of their fears! If only these multi-millionaires and worse spent some of their money helping others, or even if they moderated the exploitation of workers and the system in their own favor, and spent less time worrying about how they can survive the impending troubles a solution to the problems might actually be found. That is perhaps the saddest thing about this profoundly sad movement.

Levchin told Osnos that he prefers to shut down cocktail party discussions on the subject by asking people instead,

“So you’re worried about the pitchforks. How much money have you donated to your local homeless shelter?’ This connects the most, in my mind, to the realities of the income gap. All the other forms of fear that people bring up are artificial.”

In his view, this is the time to invest in solutions, not escape.

“At the moment, we’re actually at a relatively benign point of the economy. When the economy heads south, you will have a bunch of people that are in really bad shape. What do we expect then?”

We can try to escape or we can try to solve the problems we face. Which makes more sense?  When the wealthy and powerful are overcome by fears, this a  pretty good sign of decline. Or even collapse.

Investing in Escape or Solutions?

2023 Grand Finale Tour, Decline of the west, Social democracy

 

Well now that I have concluded a 10 day meander through the films nominated for the Best Picture, it is time to meander back to the issue I was dealing with. That was the startling fact that very wealthy people have been buying up condo units in an old Titam missile silo near Salina Kansas which Chris and drove near to on our trip to Arizona. I have been more than puzzled by this extraordinary phenomenon. I have mused that I thought the fears of the wealthy had a connection to guilt.  Guilt breeds paranoia. Evan Onos wrote a fascinating article about this phenomenon in the New Yorker magazine which I have been drawing on.

 

While most captains of industry are unable to see anything that is not in their own immediate advantage, a few, a rare few, do recognize that there are vulnerable people out there who have been screwed by the system and many of them may seeks “solutions” to their problems that may involve insurrection, as far-fetched as that may sound to some of us. As Robert H. Dugger, a lobbyist for the financial industry told Evan Osnos, “Anyone who’s in this community knows people who are worried that America is heading toward something like the Russian Revolution.”  When you hear that you must conclude the guilt is oozing out of control.

 

Many of the über  rich think, as the aristocracy of France did before the French Revolution that the poor can eat grass. Others fear revolution that might upset their privileges. Dugger said,  “People know the only real answer is, fix the problem,” he said. “It’s a reason most of them give a lot of money to good causes.” At the same time, though, they invest in the mechanics of escape.” Investing in justice is just something that does not come naturally to the super-rich. It is the last thing they think of. Escape is something that leaps to mind.

Elite fantasies of escape are often exactly that–fantasies. There are all kinds of logistical problems. Many of the wealthy cannot see these problems. They assume there must be a way for them to escape. Can’t money solve all problems? After all they deserve that escape. They have earned that right to escape. So at least they think. Why do they have all this money if they can’t use it to escape. That is the only form of justice many of them understand.

Dugger told Osnos about a lavish dinner in New York City after 9/11 and the bursting of the dot-com bubble, “A group of centi-millionaires and a couple of billionaires were working through end-of-America scenarios and talking about what they’d do. Most said they’ll fire up their planes and take their families to Western ranches or homes in other countries.” One of the guests was skeptical, Dugger said. “He leaned forward and asked, ‘Are you taking your pilot’s family, too? And what about the maintenance guys? If revolutionaries are kicking in doors, how many of the people in your life will you have to take with you?’ The questioning continued. In the end, most agreed they couldn’t run.” You can run, but you can’t hide.

It is also interesting how the privileged classes have selected things to worry about.  As Osnos reported,

“Élite anxiety cuts across political lines. Even financiers who supported Trump for President, hoping that he would cut taxes and regulations, have been unnerved at the ways his insurgent campaign seems to have hastened a collapse of respect for established institutions. Dugger said, “The media is under attack now. They wonder, Is the court system next? Do we go from ‘fake news’ to ‘fake evidence’? For people whose existence depends on enforceable contracts, this is life or death.”

 

All of this shows that guilt can lead to paranoia.  If you fear that the tables will turn, no ideas are too far out there.

 

Riding out the Apocalypse

2023 Grand Finale Tour, Decline of the west, Fear

 

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.

 

Turning the Tables

2023 Grand Finale Tour, Decline of the west

 

It felt a bit strange driving our car through Kansas where the super rich have built their shelter from the storm in an old Titan missile silo.  About 9 years ago we had toured a Titan silo converted into a museum in Green Valley Arizona. During the cold war the US had 2 secret silo sites. One in Salem Kansa and the other in Green Valley. What made the super-rich think it made sense to buy a condo in a missile silo? What kind of a life would they have there?

I think many of the super-rich fear what Quentin Tarantino emphasizes in many of his films–i.e. the turning of the tables. In many of his films a very evil man tortures an innocent man and later in the film the tables are turned and the innocent man gets the chance to impose revenge for the injustice. I think that is exactly what many rich Americans feel deep in their corroded souls. A guilty conscience can generate a lot of fear.

In America many rich people have wealth beyond any imagination. And the greater the wealth the deeper the unconscious belief that such wealth is not justified and that justice might be served sometime soon.

In 2016 a toxic Presidential election campaign revealed these fears starkly.  Fearful people voted for Trump who promised to build a wall to keep them safe from “rapists and murderers.”  They feared the carnage Trump warned about.  Americans zealously bought that up.

Antonio Martínez a rich 40-year-old former Facebook manager bought 5 wooded acres on an island in the Pacific Northwest, and then bought generators, solar panels, and thousands of rounds of ammunition. He was preparing for the inevitable. His explanation was that “When society loses a healthy founding myth, it descends into chaos” That makes some sense, but what do you do about? Buy a luxury shelter in a concrete silo?

I interpret such a loss of confidence as a sign of civilizational collapse. iIs that a prelude to the grand finale?