The Intentional Collapse

The elite are committed to the end of the world, but we don't have to be.

Photo by Daniel Lincoln on Unsplash

I figure it’s time we take account of what’s going on here. Everyone has different words for it. Last spring I called it the fascist atmosphere, and described it as an almost digital sensibility of yes/no’s and binary notches that don’t allow for all the in-betweenness where life really takes place. Our civilization recognizes the ticks of the clock, but not the duration between those ticks - the actual time where the experience happens.

But I think it’s important I explain what I see as the motivations driving some of the people—yes, human beings for now—engineering what feels like an intentional collapse of our government and society.

I first wrote about this phenomenon in my 2022 book Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires. That was based on a ridiculous encounter I had with five ultra-wealthy dudes, who told me about the bunkers and other preparations they were making for what they called “the event”—the nuclear disaster or climate catastrophe, food shortage, pollution or pandemic—that makes life unlivable. What struck me at the time was that these guys were the richest and most powerful people I had ever met, yet they felt utterly powerless to influence the future. The best they could do was hire a few futurists to predict the future, and then prepare to survive it.

So the object of the game, to them, was to acquire enough money and technology to outrun the impacts of their own businesses and technologies. If they had a social media company whose net effect was to make people crazy and break democracy, then the thing to do is create a fortified island paradise that doesn’t depend on a functioning democracy back at home.

But my reaction was to laugh. I wrote a black comedy. These guys seemed crazy. They were high on their own supply, and using the excuse of a potential global disaster to build out their childhood fantasies of a virtual online clubhouse to which they could upload their brains and have sex with anime characters. I wrote that book so we could laugh at this tiny cohort of Ayn Rand skimming techno-libertarian, transhuman, proto-fascist, misogynists, not take them so seriously just because they could convince Joe Rogan of something, and – most of all – not follow in their footsteps when something like Covid or an economic crisis tempts us to put up the barricades and live behind an Amazon video doorbell. I was trying to show the ridiculousness of attempting to go it alone, and impossibility of genuinely shielding oneself from catastrophic horror. Or, as I asked in the book’s opening episode, “why are the Navy Seals in your security force going to protect you once your bitcoin is worthless?” It’s laughable.

The solution, instead, is to meet our neighbors, reduce our dependence on big corporations, and establish local resiliency. We all get to make it. When we survive together, we thrive together.

And to this day, all I get interviewed about is book’s opening chapter. It seems so preposterous, unbelievable even, that grown up billionaires would be building doomsday bunkers. And I get why that hook is so interesting. But, I’m sorry to say, the book wasn’t about those five billionaires but an entire world view: a belief that only the strongest individuals can and should survive, which is now informing the self-destructive policies of the US government. It is the world view and philosophy driving what seems like authoritarian chaos in America, as well as the logic behind its plan.

Just as the billionaires I met believed there was little they could do about an impending, existential event—some fantasy of an AI-spawned zombie apocalypse—the wealthiest among us genuinely believe that the systems through which our society organizes itself are breaking down. They believe in the inevitability of climate change as much or more than the climate activists working to prevent the worst damage. They don’t even believe in the possibility of remediation. Sure, they pay for propaganda that insists climate change is a hoax, but that’s just to prevent everyone else from catching on. The campaigns give the elite the time they need to make their survival plans, accumulate land, tilt the economy, secure private armies, build the walls…before the masses figure out what’s going on. Just go to a private conference thrown by the one of the conglomerates funding climate change denial propaganda and you’ll see presentations on how rising tides will impact the housing finance markets or how shrinking coastlines will require mass migration inland. They cover same subjects being discussed at a Soros conference, except focused less on mitigation than on perverse economic opportunity. The bankers and insurance companies are more hopeless about potentially averting an ecological breakdown than the most radical environmentalists are.

Or take the protestors of Occupy Wall Street. We were arguing for alternatives to mandatory exponential growth, ways of reining it in while developing more circular economic practices. The folks funding and steering the new far right don’t have such faith in the economy. They see better than anyone how unbridled, extractive corporatism eventually makes a vast majority of people destitute. They know the pyramid they’ve built is going to stop generating wealth. (The only exception are a few AI zillionaires who believe that once human consumers no longer have any money to spend, they will be replaced by AI consumers—autonomous agents will be the new customers, using crypto to purchase the computer cycles and data they need, from the AI companies. First, they come for our jobs. Then, they take on our role as consumers. Theoretically, at least in the minds of the craziest technocrats, it works. For them. I’ll write about that another time.) Either way, the system collapses for the vast majority of people.

Quite simply, the elite are the ones who have lost faith in the system that has served them until now. They think it’s all going to crash—at least economically—and, more importantly, that there just won’t be enough food and shelter and energy and stuff to go around when it does.

Convinced an inevitable collapse is coming—private bunkers aside—their best answer for survival in the chaos is to get as rich as possible, buying up as much land and assets as possible, while also building a military force capable of controlling the hordes of us who won’t have enough food or shelter or medicine. Even if it means enacting policies that hasten the collapse, that’s preferable to losing control over one’s monopoly on the remaining spoils. As long as the edifice is coming down, may as well do controlled demolition.

So they invest in crypto while devaluing the dollar, lower their own taxes while raising taxes on the poor through tariffs. The tariffs simultaneously bankrupt farmers who can’t find a market, and see their land purchased by private equity who can then rehire them as sharecroppers. Put as many people as possible out of work by firing government employees, which leads to a cascade of failures of the businesses they patronize. Cut healthcare and other programs, throwing more people into poverty. Basically, they looked at Naomi Klein’s ”disaster capitalism”—the way that businesses profit off disasters—and realized they may as well create those disasters. As state and local governments go bankrupt, sovereign wealth funds and other investors can buy up the ports, bridges, highways, state parks…privatizing public assets so they can own rather than share what remains. It’s how Putin and the oligarchs who supported him took over Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Except in this case, the collapse will be orchestrated for the purpose.

I keep wondering, wouldn’t anyone prefer to be quite wealthy a happy world than super wealthy in an awful one? If they had the choice? You could still lord over people and build libraries and walk around like gods. Only your legions of workers and consumers would be happy and singing your praises. You could make parades like Macy’s did.

But they don’t actually think that’s possible.

So any policy to bring people up from the bottom, in their eyes, only distributes and wastes the funds and assets the elite need to insure their own safety. Because they’re going to need whole islands, walled kingdoms, massive security forces, nuclear power plants, robot soldiers, and computing power and neural implants so they can build virtual worlds in which to live if the planet itself becomes too toxic.

I doubt they have anything against creating technologies cheap enough for everyone to get their minds into the cloud, too; but that’s not the object of the game, here. Besides, to them all this radical Democratic Socialist talk of making sure everyone gets enough food to eat or access to medical care is just unrealistic. There’s not going to be enough to go around so instead of caring for the poor, we just cut them off. Instead of providing aid to impoverished parts off the world, let them go down in famine, disease, or conflict. And treat the underprivileged in our own country the very same way—all while convincing them that immigrants are the problem and we only need to restore our nation’s ethnic and religious purity to make it through.

And if people complain or resist, send the army into their cities to quell the unrest. Create arguments to keep women out of the military, for fear that they may not follow orders with the aggressive zeal of ICE squads. And make sure there’s no black soldiers, who may be more likely to see themselves in the people they’re supposed to shoot down. (That’s what the new regulation requiring people to shave is all about. Pseudo Folliculitis Barbae.) You don’t want women and people of color in your domestic urban assault units.

Right now, such invasions are justified as sweeps of illegal immigrants or mitigation of non-existent crime waves. But—as we’ve been told—this is also training for the urban warfare to come. They are saying that part out loud. On TV. In their Project 2025. In the book they’ve endorsed, UnHumans about how communists are not fully human.

Why would they say that part out loud? Because they’re selling a philosophy that only the strong and saved deserve to be among the survivors. They’ve leveraged the general sense of social justice overreach (DEI) to advance their notion of Darwinian survival as the natural order of things. The cheetah eats the gazelle. ICE patrols round up Mexican children.

They just have to maintain the illusion that joining in the might-makes-right revolution will benefit even the poor whites. Take a couple of trillion from healthcare in order to pay them $50,000 signing bonuses to conduct authorized pogroms of hispanic neighborhoods. Keep even 30% of people believing this will all work in their favor—at least long enough to suck out the remaining wealth and then subject them to the same treatment. Except maybe for those who have remained loyal.

Whether or not this comes to pass, here’s the icky part right now: When even a sane, compassionate person hears all this and wraps their head around the idea that our government is selling itself off because it leaders believe the governed world is imploding, one can’t help but ask: so what can I do to protect myself and my family? Do I move to Canada? Try to earn a lot of money? How much money would I need to be on the “safe” side of things? Is that even possible? Do stocks go up when the dollar crashes, or do bonds? Gold? Bitcoin? How about a second passport? Is it too late to join a remote permaculture community?

Or worse: people wonder what they have posted online. Will the AI’s find your 2011 retweet of someone deemed “anti-capitalist”—one of the groups now officially named as part of the radical democrat plot to promote terror? I don’t like thinking that way, and neither should you.

I know, I know. You’re waiting for the good part. My “Team Human” alternative. Okay. Here it comes.

Our job as members of Team Human is not to succumb to the zero-sum mentality of the wealthy. Instead of seeing our reality as unfixable and requiring self-interested retreat, we see the potential bounty of being in this thing together. They’re the ones who have given up on prosperity. They are living the nightmare. They are the pessimistic downers, who lack faith in the regenerative capacity of people, cultures, the planet, and life itself.

They may be the rich, but they are not the strong. They are the weak. The ones who see forecasts of climate change or the collapse of capitalism under its own extractive weight, and think there’s no way out other than an escape hatch built for one.

We must instead be the ones who see such forecasts as challenges to rise the occasion. How can we prevent another two degrees of warming? How can we restore the topsoil through crop rotation and no-till agriculture to sustainably feed the world? How do we preserve the rainforest so it can continue to deliver its bounty of as-yet undiscovered medicines? How do we increase our capacity to welcome, instead of deport, the millions of climate refugees to come? Instead of making zombie movies to help us dehumanize the masses at the gates, we create stories to help people remember that the sign of an advanced civilization is how well they treat the stranger. (This was God’s test of Lot in the Bible, and the reason he and his family were spared the destruction of Sodom. He welcomed the stranger. I wish more people would actually read the Bible.)

That’s how to survive the apocalypse—because an “apocalypse” really just means revelation, or unveiling. Not an ending. We see that this whole obsession with winning the endgame is really just our fear of death. It’s a fantasy of immortality (another tech billionaire fixation). And it’s what prevents us from enjoying this heaven into which we’ve been born, and the bounty it offers us. We’re in Eden, people, and we better start acting like it.

Instead of hitting tit for tat, or running away, or strategizing for the end, we refuse to see the world as ending. Instead of buying into the elite’s nightmare and accepting their limited vision of how things could be, we embrace the stranger, share our food with them, and together build the reality we all know is possible, and even probable.

Rather than confronting those who hate you as their enemy, just do the opposite of what they do. Don’t hate them, or you become them. Instead, meet their hate with love. Counter their selfishness by sharing. Instead of building walls to keep out the others, open doorways that welcome them home.

We can do this. So no more doom and gloom. That’s their game.