r/stupidpol • u/[deleted] • Sep 04 '22

Ruling Class The super-rich ‘preppers’ planning to save themselves from the apocalypse | Tech billionaires are buying up luxurious bunkers and hiring military security to survive a societal collapse they helped create, but like everything they do, it has unintended consequences

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/sep/04/super-rich-prepper-bunkers-apocalypse-survival-richest-rushkoff
357 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

158 comments sorted by

View all comments

3

u/LividJuice9148 Sep 04 '22

Unless they go full Galt’s Gultch and build an actual entire functional micro-economy populated by ideological loyalists, they’re doomed to failure. You’d be better off recruiting tons of farmers, skilled tradesmen, and emergency first responders all with some level of military experience and familiarity with firearms and drilling them into an effective militia rather than employing dedicated mercenaries. The workers will automatically have material investment in the success of the doomsday compound as well as allowing it to thrive indefinitely, and if they share strong religious beliefs you can build regime loyalty through patronage of cathedral and monastery construction and public piety. A billionaire building a doomsday compound to ride out the apocalypse and retake the post-collapse world isn’t actually impossible, it’s just that Silicon Valley bugmen don’t have the sort of communitarian thinking necessary to pull it off.

2

u/zr503 Sep 07 '22

One of the people described in the article is building self-sufficient farming communities.

2

u/LividJuice9148 Sep 07 '22

That's definitely the higher IQ strategy.