Survival of the Richest

If you have ever wanted to live like a James Bond villain in your own island lair, I have good news for you.

For the low price of several bajillion dollars, you can buy “a maximum security compound in which to ride out the coming plague, solar storm, or electric grid collapse,” whichever apocalyptic event comes first.

OK, maybe you don’t have a spare several million to drop on a high-tech sanctuary from which to survive the “environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, unstoppable virus, or malicious computer hack that takes everything down.”

That just means you don’t love your family, because you are sentencing them to death in the inevitable Armageddon headed our way. 

But don’t worry. Because rich people will be just fine.

Yes, our favorite 1 percent of the population — the uber-wealthy — are striving to insulate “themselves from the very real and present dangers” that in many cases, they helped to create. 

Whether they made their money by destroying the environment or fomenting societal upheaval, billionaires are buying bunkers, hoarding resources and even creating private compounds in New Zealand (proving once again that rich oligarchs may praise right-wing enclaves like Hungary, but they actually want to live in a stable, socially liberal country).

These plutocrats are trying to “break the laws of physics, economics, and morality to… escape from the apocalypse of their own making.”

And they can afford it. Since the pandemic, the top 1% “have captured nearly twice as much new wealth as the rest of the world.”

Of course, there are many Americans who hero-worship the rich, and they are perfectly fine with sacrificing themselves if it means that an affluent buffoon will continue to live in luxury even if society collapses.

That sounds like an exaggeration, but witness how many poor Americans continue to vote Republican despite the GOP’s admission that it wants to destroy any semblance of a social safety net, give more money to billionaires, and allow the rich to “exploit the majority so they can accumulate wealth and move society forward as they wish.” 

A large percentage of Americans struggle to pay their bills, but shriek that any effort to make wealthy narcissists contribute more is “class warfare” or “socialism” or just morally offensive.

When it comes to opulent show-offs, Americans love “the wild philistinism and the bullying and the offhand cruelty, the compulsive self-aggrandizement and the giddy vengeful sadism.. all of it so oafishly performed that it could not possibly be mistaken for anything but what it is.”

The GOP knows this. So they have leaned into promoting crass morons born into wealth as avatars of the American Dream. 

Republicans have long insisted that “democracy and unfettered capitalism always traveled together,” but recently they have “ignored the ‘democracy’ part of that equation and continually doubled down on the idea that the American system means that businesses should be able to do whatever they wished,” while insisting that “any oversight must be Soviet-style communism.”

The result is that Republican legislators will gleefully derail bills to provide free breakfast and lunch for school students because they don’t want kids to get dependent on government. Seriously — this is an actual top GOP priority. Hey, for Republicans, hungry children do not even exist.

So if Republicans get their way, and rich people continue to tear the world down while plotting their escapes, what happens years from now, when only the wealthy can afford to survive?

Well, the truth is that islands are more dependent, not less, on society. So that approach won’t work.

Also, underground bunkers have air filters that break down and require strenuous effort to fix. You really think some pampered blue blood can handle that degree of manual labor?

And when it comes to armed compounds, remember that the hired thugs who protect the wealthy are people too. If the economic system has collapsed and money has no value, do you believe rifle-toting mercenaries are going to protect some rich jerk out of kindness and love?

So no, the wealthy will not survive.

There, don’t you feel better now?