The New Yorker article of a couple of years ago (Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich | The New Yorker) is one reason I was thinking about this, but it comes up a lot in liberal circles too: the idea that if the shit hits the global fan (climate change, WW3, Yellowstone supervolcano, zombies, whatever), the richest of the world rich would just go to New Zealand or some underground bunker and live out their lives in contented comfort, completely unbothered in any sense by what’s happening to the rest of the world. The logic is, they already got that rich by exploiting masses of people and making their lives worse for their personal profit; why would they feel anything for others at the end, if they and their own have theirs? And with billions at their disposal, couldn’t they find a safe place from what’s happening to all the rabble, and dangle the prospect of survival in front of a few strongmen to form a personal guard?
Now, I know it might depend on the nature of the End (some scenarios lend themselves more to some hypotheticals than others), but I’d like to ask: what do you think the world’s richest people would actually do if they saw the end of human civilization coming, and how, if at all, would they think of the common man during such a crisis?
The “rich” people would immediately devolve into classes.
Somebody has got to do the labor, and somebody has got to do middle management stuff, while a lucky few remain at the top.
I remember watching “The Kingsman”. The plot basically being: “Kill all poor people”. I don’t think the rich people in that movie thought their cunning plan all the way through.
I suppose great wealth does enable one to quickly use their personal methods of transportation such as helicopters, yachts and private aircraft to escape from their secure isolated compound in one country to their secure isolated compound in another country. This works in the event of a relatively localized national collapse or civil war.
In a true “end of the world” or “total collapse of civilization” scenario, they may encounter a number of problems:
-Much of their vast wealth might become worthless as the banks and governments supporting it collapse
-The staff of pilots, drivers, security guards and other people they will rely on for security, transportation and whatnot may decide that in the absence of a working legal and economic system, there is no reason to follow their wealthy employer and use the weapons, vehicles and supplies at their disposal to chose their own leader.
-Unless they plan to live the rest of their lives in an old missile silo, at some point you have to interact with other people.
Hmm, psychologically, I suspect most would feel some sympathy for those who were doomed, and some might even choose to take as many of their friends and extended family along to whatever safe haven they thought they could find. But on a practical level, even the richest, most altruistic person couldn’t save everybody.
I also think the economics of the situation would be such that all their riches wouldn’t do much to buy their safety. If there’s some scarce commodity that’s necessary to survive, like lead shielding or land in New Zealand, the people who have it aren’t going to give it up, they’re going to use it to survive. What good is money with everyone knowing that in a few months it’ll be worthless?
Gloat in ecstasy over all the suffering and death they have caused, and the proof of their power and “superiority” in having killed literally everyone. Then kill themselves painlessly before suffering themselves.
The OP’s postulating what the 1% would do “if the shit hits the fan” doesn’t take into account the Global Depopulation Conspiracy, in which the super-rich (actually more like the .000001%*) are actively pursuing mass killing through pharma drugs, vaccines, glyphosate, chemtrails and the like.
They don’t need any lower classes to do their bidding. Somehow (AI?) everything will be done for them, and they’ll accumulate even more vast wealth by not selling things to the masses they’ve murdered.
Alarmingly, my dad actually does believe this. He thinks the wealthy have the technology to travel to other planets (there’s a specific name for the technology but I can’t remember it right now). They have been keeping this secret and will kill anyone who finds out and reveals it. They are going to kill almost everyone on earth and then move to another planet. Seriously he believes this.
Why exactly they would do this and who would serve them to keep their creature comforts (food, infrastructure, water, protection, electricity or whatever technology is supposed to be available to them) running is unclear.
Without infrastructure and hordes of working class stiff to keep them in the lifestyle to which the hope to remain accustomed, they’ll eventually starve. Hopefully it will be painful. Can’t eat cash and gold and jewels, and wood won’t power your jet plane. Who is keeping the electricity on?
If you want to lord it over the peasants in the post-apocalyptic wasteland, you need to take steps to ensure that a large population of peasants survives the apocalypse. So you need to make sure that your fallout shelter has large servants’ quarters.
The preppers I have met (none of whom are super-rich) don’t expect to be aristocrats. Their goal is self-sufficiency. They want to be able to survive on their own, or with a small group of friends and family, producing their own food and building their own stuff.
If history is an example, many wealthy people believed the end was coming during the stock market crash of 1929. Lot’s of wealthy people killed themselves, because they saw it all falling away.
It would be very hard to kill off the human race because they are a planet wide species that can live virtually anywhere and eat a plethora of different foods. Humans are extremely adaptive because of their intelligence level and the science they’ve created to aid them. Couple that fact with the fact that the earth would do well to lose 75% of the human race, and you have a scenario where allowing a planet-wide disaster to create a better world is theoretically a consideration.
That movie should be a required to be stocked into any rich man’s apocalypse get away. Preferably the only movie.
They didn’t think the world was ending, they realized that they were no longer wealthy, and couldn’t handle that. Wealthy people weren’t killing themselves, people with a wealth of worthless paper were killing themselves.
Anything that takes out 75% of the human race will also take out a substantial bit more of the rest of the world. Think we have ecological damage now?
Genocide to create a better world has been a dream of many a fascist, but, while many have tried, none have succeeded. They pretty much just end up being murderers.
There was no wave of suicides at the time of the crash (suicides actually were lower in NYC, home of the stock exchange, during October and November).
The national suicide rate did rise somewhat between 1929 and 1932, the worst of the depression by some statistics. But I haven’t seen that the increase was due to the rich offing themselves.
Exactly. While in the case of a Yellowstone super-eruption, some 1%ers might be able to hop onto their Learjets and fly to S. America or elsewhere relatively unaffected by the eruption, in most acute SHTF scenarios, their wealth isn’t going to be too helpful, unless they’ve already been using it to prepare in some fashion for their situation. In other words, unless Bill Gates built a bunker beforehand, being a billionaire isn’t going to be terribly helpful when the not-quite-extinction level asteroid impacts.
In longer-term cataclysms, like climate change, their wealth will definitely be helpful- they can afford to buy estates in North Dakota or Canada or wherever it won’t be super-hot, while the rest of us can’t.
In a true end of the world scenario (meteor strike, supervolcano, etc), the global economy would collapse and the labor market would collapse. Without those things, wealth are meaningless. If I were standing in antarctica with a billion prussian franks, it wouldn’t mean I had any power. Money is only valuable if the economy is alive and there is a labor force willing to trade labor for currency.
In a softer end of the world scenario (massive virus, post world war, climate change, etc) their wealth would protect them.
If you used your wealth ahead of time to prep for the end of days (stocking up on food, water, solar systems, bunkers, etc) then it will help though.
There was a fake documentary aired in 1977 called “Alternative 3” that was basically this. The elite on Earth realized in 50 years time the Earth’s environment would collapse due to climate change and so started to secretly colonize Mars with scientists and other brilliant minds to form the first bases, to be followed by the rich and government officials. The documentary was basically “exposing” it via interviews with a former NASA astronaut who claimed to have seen technology far in advance of the Apollo program that was already being used to land on Mars well before the official Moon landings.
The line for the top 1% is above 719k USD rounded up aas of 2017. There’s a fair number of major sport starters (not stars) and high B-list to low A-list Hollywood stars that qualify in any given year. There’s a lot of turnover year to year as a result. It’s not uncommon for those types of public figures to run into financial trouble when they drop back out of the 1% because they have spent hand over fist while the money was coming in.
The 1% aren’t all scrooge McDuck types with vast wealth to fall back on. Many would be well and truly screwed even in a scenario where vast sums of money could buy safety. They just don’t have the vast sums once the income stops.
I see some very smart ones already planning ahead by buying land in rural areas and building and stockpiling bunkers ahead of time. They wont need staff, they have family.
There was an article a while back where several rich people have already built themselves a doomsday city and several families have gone together and bought parts of it. I think it could hold a few hundred people and has everything needed to stay underground for several years. If it all went down many are trained pilots and have private planes and could easily fly there.
Even if one has such a compound and the means for it to be self sufficient indefinitely, I still kind of wonder what they would do and feel.
Avoiding a war or economic collapse, sure, you’re just like any other expat, except you have a lot more resources to pick up your life in a more stable country.
If it’s surviving an extinction level event, it’s almost kind of like what’s the point? I mean even if you are living in the front of the Snowpiercer train, is the goal to just be comfortable until you die of old age in relative isolation, staring out the window at the crappy remains of the world?
If it’s somewhere in the middle, then what? Live the rest of your life under a siege mentality, defending your compound against the angry hoards trying to take your shit?
Oh yeah. They will work great when cousin Dipshit used to having maids wait on him hand and foot has to start cooking his own meals and rotating in on chores like sweeping the helipad.
