I learned this during the first part of the pandemic lockdowns, when preppers were very much in our collective consciousness. *On the Media* featured an interview between Micah Loewinger and Richard Mitchell, author of *Dancing at Armageddon: Survivalism and Chaos in Modern Times* which features ethnographic studies of preppers:

pluralistic.net/2020/03/22/pre…

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Mitchell described how preppers make ready for specific forms of societal collapse, based not on the likelihood of the event itself, but rather, based on how useful they would be in that situation. For example, a water chemist has made extensive preparations for an event in which terrorists poison the water-supply.

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When pressed, he couldn't explain why terrorists would choose his town to target with an attack like this, but basically thought it would be *really cool* if the only person who could save his town was *him*.

This is the "disaster fantasy" that propels the prepper movement, in which a functional, high-tech world of wicked, systemic problems is replaced with a fallen, low-tech society where the problems are all simple.

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A world of simple problems is a world of individual actors, where every struggle is just about what one person can make someone else do, or offer to someone else. It's a perfect world if you've been raised on Thatcher's neoliberal doctrine that "there is no such thing as society," only to find yourself *in a society* in which you can only make real change by participating in collective efforts:

pluralistic.net/2024/11/24/mal…

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All this raises the question of what *rich* preppers are prepping for. If your contribution to society consists of "allocating capital" and/or giving people orders, what, exactly, is the disaster that fulfills your fantasy of a world where your unique skills are the only thing that can save us all? What kind of disaster needs a *boss*?

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In Douglas Rushkoff's 2022 book *Survival of the Richest*, he describes a surreal "futurism" consulting gig in which a bunch of wealthy investor types asked him to help them figure out how to keep their mercenaries in line after "The Event" (the end of the world):

pluralistic.net/2022/09/13/col…

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These guys had the idea that what a fallen civilization needed was bosses, you see, but they were self-aware enough to recognize that the people who survived the apocalypse might not recognize their unique genius and simply fall into line. In order to assert their natural role as leaders after the shit hit the fan, these guys would need an army of heavily armed mercenaries.

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But again, these guys were self-aware enough to recognize that the *mercenaries* might *also* fail to recognize their unique fitness to rule and opt instead to slaughter them and raid their hoarded food, ammo and medical supplies.

So they wanted Rushkoff's advice - should they fit the mercs with bomb-collars that were on a dead-man's switch that would go off if the boss croaked?

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This was such a weird, revealing moment that Rushkoff got a whole book out of exploring the desire of the wealthy to both secede from the rest of us, and keep us all in line.

I was inspired by this and other experiences with people fantasizing about the world's end to take a run at rewriting Edgar Allan Poe's "Masque of the Red Death" as a story about investor/ubermenschen in a luxury bunker at the end of the world (spoiler: it doesn't go well):

pluralistic.net/2020/03/14/mas…

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All of this has been very much on my mind lately because I've been reading Quinn Slobodian's amazing *Hayek's Bastards*, a closely researched history of the merger of the neoliberal wing of the conservative movement with its white nationalist faction, producing a conservativism obsessed with "hard borders, hard-wired human difference, and hard money":

penguin.co.uk/books/472194/hay…

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Hayek's Bastards

After the end of the Cold War, neoliberalism, with its belief in the virtues of markets and competition, seemed to have triumphed.

^{www.penguin.co.uk}

It's a revelatory history, one that argues convincingly that the brooding, violent racism of MAGA isn't so much a break with "Romney conservativism" of the "respectable" Republican Party as it is the attainment of the goals of the party's longstanding dominant tendency.

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"Hard-wired human differences" refers to the "scientific racism" that the likes of Elon Musk pushes, the junk science that insists that there is such a thing as a "race," and that IQ measures something important and immutable, and that different "races" have different IQs, which is why some "races" do well, while others do poorly:

pluralistic.net/2020/08/16/com…

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"Hard-wired human difference" militate for "hard borders," since the teeming billions of racially inferior people in other countries would - given half a chance - come to the "good" countries and turn them into "shithole countries." This is the nonsense that Musk is peddling when he compares Britons to "hobbits" and warns that they about to be overrun by people who will "start raping the kids":

huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/elo…

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Elon Musk Compares Brits To 'Hobbits' – Before Making Outrageous Immigration Claim

"They're lovely people who liked to, you know, smoke their pipe," he claimed.

^{Kate Nicholson (HuffPost UK)}

But because the soft-headed, soft-hearted hobbits keep electing leaders who don't understand this, they'll get "overrun" by the bad "races," who demand welfare handouts, which the state can't afford, triggering "money printing" and Musk's other obsession, national debts:

fortune.com/2025/07/01/trump-s…

(Which is to say, Musk's understanding of money is just as wrongheaded as his understanding of genomics):

pluralistic.net/2020/06/10/com…

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In the disaster fantasy, the failure of hard borders leads to the inevitable consequences of hard-wired human differences, which means that we need "hard money" - gold. The modern right is a linear descendant of the goldbug movement, composed of grifters who made fortunes terrifying racists into buying gold as a hedge against the day when the collapse of the welfare state leads to race war and the dollar's vaporization:

mises.org/library/book/gold-pe…

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Gold, Peace, and Prosperity

This book is a quick read that covers the whole history of monetary destruction, providing information that most people have never heard or thought about. In

^{Mises Institute}

For goldbugs, the coming collapse seems to be one that will demand *coin collectors*. In *Hayek's Bastards*, Slobodian quotes all these goldbug preppers furiously dreaming of a day when a single gold coin will let them buy a whole city block in Manhattan. Somehow, they've conceived of disaster scenario where the most needful of all things is a ductile metal with a few marginal uses in electronics.

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It's a very weird kind of disaster fantasy. One can only assume that the guys figuring out how to assemble an army of bomb-collared mercs will just stroll over to these goldbugs' lesser bunkers and take their precious coins.

The modern goldbug is, of course, a crypto weirdo, and man is that a weird thing to be a prepper about. It will be a very odd apocalypse indeed that takes down all of modern civilization *except* for blockchains.

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I'm on a tour with my new book, the international bestseller *Enshittification*!

Catch me next in #Toronto, #SanDiego and #Seattle!

Full schedule with dates and links at:

pluralistic.net/tour

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