The Withdrawal of Consent from Above

Survival of the Richest: Why some of America’s wealthiest people are prepping for disaster,” is the title of a recent article in the New Yorker by Evan Osnos. Here is the theme.¹

Survivalism, the practice of preparing for a crackup of civilization, tends to evoke a certain picture: the woodsman in the tinfoil hat, the hysteric with the hoard of beans, the religious doomsayer. But in recent years survivalism has expanded to more affluent quarters, taking root in Silicon Valley and New York City, among technology executives, hedge-fund managers, and others in their economic cohort.²

Among the extraordinarily rich people who have made preparations for the collapse, not necessarily of Western civilization but of the United States, are such luminaries as Steve Huffman of Reddit, Antonio Garcia Martinez of Facebook, Tim Chang of the Mayfield Fund, Marvin Liao of Yahoo, Roy Bahat of Bloomberg Beta, and Yishan Wong, of Facebook and Reddit (there are many more, who remain unnamed). All of these folks are mentioned or discussed in Osnos’s article. They all possess fortunes of hundreds of millions or billions of dollars.

Early in the article, Osnos quotes Garcia Martinez, who has bought five wooded acres on an island in the Pacific Northwest and has supplied it with generators, solar panels, and thousands of rounds of ammunition. Garcia Martinez explains his reasoning: “When society loses a healthy founding myth, it descends into chaos … All these dudes think that one guy alone could somehow withstand the roving mob. No, you’re going to need to form a local militia. You just need so many things to ride out the apocalypse … I think people who are particularly attuned to the levers by which society actually works understand that we are skating on thin ice right now.”³

One ultra-rich condominium complex described in the article is located underground in a decommissioned nuclear missile silo in Kansas. Buying property outside of the United States—New Zealand seems to be a favorite locale—is another, more subtle way that some among the ultra-rich seem to be preparing for an oncoming collapse of the political and legal institutions of the United States.

Many of these recent converts to survivalism discuss the possibility of natural disasters, such as giant earthquakes beyond the capacity of government to cope, as reasons for their precautionary measures. Many also, and, ironically, given their role in creating and vastly expanding the reach of the digital dimension of life, mention the intensifying interdependence of logistical and power networks and their vulnerability to collapse, such as happened with the October 2016 attack on the “internet of things,”⁴ as possible disasters that would result in a need for them to withdraw into their citadels. But it seems from the article as though, underlying their worries about economic and logistical collapse, is a deeper worry about the dysfunctionality of the American political system, and especially the intensification of inequality caused by neoliberal policies with no responses from a gridlocked national government, and consequently the rising risk of deep civil unrest and the possibility of attacks on the rich as underwriting their reasons for making survivalist preparations.

Osnos cites a recent analysis from the National Bureau of Economic Research authored by the economists Thomas Pikety, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman, which found that approximately a hundred and seventeen million Americans earn on average what they earned in 1980, which the income for the top one percent during the same period has tripled. Not mentioned in Osnos’s article, is the gap, not in income, but in wealth in the United States. A Congressional Budget Office analysis in 2014 noted the following: “The net wealth of many people in the lowest 20 percent is negative because of debt. By 2014 the wealth gap deepened. In 2007, the top 20 percent wealthiest possessed 80 percent of all financial assets. In 2007, the richest 1 percent of the American population owned 35 percent of the country’s total wealth, and the next 19 percent owned 51 percent.”⁵ Since there have been no serious shifts in policy since...