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Whenever society collapses and money no longer means anything, what will happen to all the former billionaires hiding in their bunkers?
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Since money would have no value, what is to stop the security guards of the former rich from just eating them since they would no longer be getting paid anything worth a damn?
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What exactly do bodyguards get paid? It must be chump change compared with the 100s of millions, or billions their clients make.
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Are the bodyguards just dumb, psychopathic slabs of meat that just like violence and don’t think that far ahead?
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What is to stop the security forces from becoming warlords in the wasteland of the future?
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Would it be possible to rebuild civilization, or would Mad Max be it until the dying breath of the last human on Earth?
Governments may collapse, and that would mean the end of government-backed currencies. The only reason a nation’s currency has any value at all is simply because a certain critical mass of individuals share the belief that it does. Once that faith in the system is gone, the natural step in terms of economics is to move to a barter system. The wealthiest people under this arrangement are those who have access or control of the most resources required for living/subsistence, and have the ability to protect those resources from being taken away by others.
This is probably not a factual question, as it involves a good deal of speculation.
[Moderating]
These might be serious questions, but they’re not factual. This forum is for factual questions, hence the name. Moving to IMHO.
I would assume that the billionaires in their bunkers would have laid in large stores of food/luxuries, and part of being security for said billionaire is access to the food/luxuries.
The big question would be why the security guys wouldn’t just shoot the billionaire and claim their stuff as their own. I imagine there’s a certain notion of personal property that everyone would still believe though. At any rate, careful selection of security people for moral uprightness would be paramount.
As far as money goes, I imagine it would be barter in some situations, and back to precious metals in others. I mean, your average post-apocalyptic dirt farmer is going to have to pay in crops for whatever he needs, but your billionaires and wealthy merchants might well transact business in gold/silver/copper/etc… rather than tons of grain/horses/goats/etc…
Loyalty to some dude who used to own a lot of money has got jack shit to do with morality.
Yes, this. Anything we say will be just speculation, and the reality could turn out to be almost anything. It depends on the nature of the collapse, the character of the people who did the preparations for the collapse, the personal loyalties of everyone involved, competition or cooperation between various factions, who can establish physical control over critical infrastructure, and more. And everything is fluid. Arrangements can change in the blink of an eye. You could have a secure warehouse filled with the essentials for re-building society, but it could all go up in smoke if the warehouse gets hit by lighting and catches fire, or any other disaster.
As with most things in our society, billionaires will have a leg up on the rest of us when it comes to survival, but even billionaires are subject to physical law. It doesn’t matter how much you’ve planned if the people you thought were loyal to you decide to behead you.
IMO:
- If they can’t pay people off in food, alcohol, cigarettes or other goods, then their heads will be mounted on sticks outside the bunkers.
- See #1
- See #1
- Yes, pretty much. And after the apocalypse they will do your bidding for a can of baked beans.
- Their stupidity, and lack of cunning. Also their propensity to follow the leader, not BE a leader
- Very much depends on how much remains of the natural resources. One theory has it that easy to obtain coal resources were required to develop equipment to mine for deeper coal, which gave more resources to develop equipment to drill for oil, which gave more resources to develop equipment for solar, wind and nuclear… so in the absence of easy to obtain coal, civilization as we know it would be very difficult/slow to achieve.
They’ve thought about that. In an article in The Guardian, Douglas Rushkoff, author of a book called Survival of the Richest, described a meeting he attended of extremely wealthy “preppers.”
Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system, and asked: “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?” The event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, solar storm, unstoppable virus, or malicious computer hack that takes everything down.
This single question occupied us for the rest of the hour. They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from raiders as well as angry mobs. One had already secured a dozen Navy Seals to make their way to his compound if he gave them the right cue. But how would he pay the guards once even his crypto was worthless? What would stop the guards from eventually choosing their own leader?
The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers – if that technology could be developed “in time”.
I had similar thoughts after watching certain scenes in the Netflix movie Leave the World Behind.
Unless you plan to stay close to home all the time surely you’re just building a bunker for the convenience of whoever happens to be closest that knows about it or can deduce its presence? I mean, you don’t really “own” the bunker any more than anyone else if civilization has collapsed, and you probably don’t have a lot of bargaining chips anymore. I could easily imagine your staff closing the bunker door behind them as soon as they see the mushroom cloud in the distance. And you being vaporized in said mushroom cloud in whatever ex-boardroom you happened to be in.
I wasn’t talking about loyalty though. I meant literal people who are averse to stealing and believe in personal property rights, as well as loyal.
I mean, it would seem to me that loyalty could be transactional, especially with hired guns, but if you can find people who are highly religious or something, they’d be less inclined to steal, set themselves up as warlords, etc… if you hired them as your guards. People who don’t think “I could just shoot him and walk off with all that stuff.”, but who rather think “That’s not mine, and I agreed to be his guard, so that’s what I’m going to do.”
Although I would imagine that a smart billionaire planning for the post-apocalypse would actually plan for it, beyond just setting up a bunker and hoarding supplies. By that, I mean that he’d actually have a plan for how he and his people would thrive, and everyone would have a predetermined position/job in this plan. I imagine further that it would be probably kind of academic until they’re faced with the realities of post-apocalypse life, and suddenly being a guard/farmhand/whatever of the compound that has the last hot showers, booze, cigarettes, etc… becomes a lot more appealing than scrounging in the ruins and brutally fighting other scavengers over a bar of soap or can of vienna sausages.
Then you’ll have found the biggest scumbags. Religion and morality do not correlate positively.
It’s already happened numerous times in history.
Fall of the Roman Empire. I recall reading once that the farthest anyone in the Western World could retrace their family was about the year 700. Likely because the period before that was simply too chaotic for too long. So in a period of extended chaos, where the chaos does end at some point and more order is restored, the longer it goes on, the less it will matter who was who and who had what before all that. Maybe some of the same people or the descendants had a connection, but it may not matter all that much.
Well, The Golden Rule is- is whoever has the gold makes the rules.
I suspect this would change to Lead (Pb) is the rule. It would happen in weeks IMHO.
The problem with these questions is that there is no path to a collapse of civilization that allows billionaires to hole up in bunkers. Besides, any decent bunker wouldn’t need to have squads of mercenaries to defend it.
Civilization is robust and tough. It’s vastly bigger than a few billionaires. Anything that was huge enough to take it down would last longer than the bunkers. Nor would there be anywhere for the billionaires to go if they opened their bunkers. Look at Gaza and extrapolate that to the entire world. What would billionaires do in such a future?
I know I’m fighting the hypothetical. Don’t care. These questions are nothing more than how many billionaires can dance on the head of a pin. Answer: none.
The Spanish phrase is “¿plomo o plata?” meaning “silver or lead?”
i.e. “Will you take a bribe, or shall I shoot you?”
So this post on my thread on “accelerationism” (and the fact it’s bs) talks about this:
As I mention on that thread, there is zero chance of the elite security of the billionaires staying as lackeys after the collapse. Sure they will have a big pile of MREs, clean water, Twinkies, bourbon, and whatever else counts as currency post collapse. But who is gonna end up in charge of that? The heavily armed guy with loads of military experience or his employer who made a bunch of cash in the 90s by knowing about search engine optimisation?
Most of the premises in the OP are wrong. There will always be fungible items that can be used for barter or even currency.
Gold and Silver have been used for trade for hundreds, or thousands, of years, and that is not going to change in some future society. They have value beyond their currency status.
Food stores can be currency, as can anything else. I have several bricks of .22 shells. Even in a peacefull transition those will be money.
The whole idea that security guards are somehow blind minions of the rich is laughable. You pay them, they come to work, you can’t pay them the are gone. They may just go home and take care of their own family issues anyway, even if you can pay them. And if you have no currency to pay them, you have no employees.
The whole OP reads like someone that reads too many comic books or watches too many Marvel Universe movies.
It seems to me that if you want to be wealthy after the apocalypse, your bunker needs to have a stockpile of seeds and farming tools. Your entourage should have more farmers than soldiers.
What happens if the entourage next door has more soldiers?
Many others have answered your first five questions quite succinctly. I’ll just give my opinion on number six.
Since I first saw “The Road Warrior” in 1981, I have strongly suspected that civilization will eventually collapse into something similar. Nothing that has happened in these 43 years has shaken that belief, no sudden “Star Trek”-like enlightenment or beating our swords into plowshares. The events of recent years, the ever-increasing mindless violence and blind hatred, have simply bolstered my belief that we are up the creek without a paddle.
As I am pushing 72, I hope to be gone before all this happens, but seeing how things are going right now, I may not get my wish.