SLEEP A BIT LONGER
APOCALYPSE AND THE STUPIDITY OF BILLIONAIRES
We are all waiting for Armageddon. It’s true. As I began writing this, a song by Willy Mason called “If It’s The End” began to play from my shuffle. See? It’s everywhere. See that little Heerman’s gull flying across the water? It’s there, wondering where they will nest in the coming years. It’s right there as you turn on your heater. You think about it sometimes, just for a moment, then quickly shove it off. Why think of such a terrible things when you only have a few decades to live at all? But we’re waiting for it, wondering if it’ll come in our lifetime or our children’s—that is if we can afford or decide to have them. But let’s not think of it now. Let’s sleep in a little bit longer.
As journalist John Lanchester wrote, “I don’t think I can be the only person who finds in myself a strong degree of psychological resistance to the whole subject of climate change. I just don’t want to think about it…I suspect we’re reluctant to think about it because we’re worried that if we start we will have no choice but to think about nothing else.” This was in his 2007 essay “Warmer, Warmer.” That was fifteen years ago. Maybe it is time to wake up. But to what?
We are all plagued by that question, at least those of us with time or willingness to wonder. What is there to be done? Nothing? Well, that kind of nihilism is never true. It’s almost as fatalistically naive as saying everything will sort itself out in the end. In both counts, what the fuck do you mean?
However, the fatalistic tendencies seem to be growing in scale all around us, perhaps even reaching those of us who could literally do something about the climate.
For most this fear of uncertainty makes sense: sure I can ride my bike, or eat vegan, or only buy my clothes at thrift stores, or wild harvest my food, or burn down my house and run into the hills and become one with the coyotes of the ridge line—but it means so little to the whole as to be nothing at all. All of these kinds of contributions, as Lanchester put it, create a false sense of contribution, “There is a serious risk that these activities will come to seem an end in themselves, a meaningful contribution to the fight against climate change. They aren’t.” It’s simple why—we need to stop using fossil fuels and the only way to truly succeed at that is to stop it at the systems level. It’s that simple, that complex.
To you and I this makes sense, right? We live our lives, making what money we can to survive or perhaps thrive in wherever place we are, and hopefully can give what we can to a cause such as conservation to make ourselves feel better because, truly, that’s all we can do. That, and don’t fly as much. But what else is there to do?
However, this feeling of being frozen in the face climate change is not just for those of us with little power: billionaires, according to author of Survival of the Richest, Douglas Rushkoff, feel just the same sense of inevitability of Armageddon. Yet their response is not to use their sums of money to help save humanity, but rather to insulate themselves from the catastrophes to come.
As Rushkoff said in a recent essay in The Guardian, “Their extreme wealth and privilege served only to make them obsessed with insulating themselves from the very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is about only one thing: escape from the rest of us.”
Yet billionaires could quite literally do something about this coming calamity. They hold so much wealth and influence in our world that, as Rushkoff pointed out in a recent interview on the podcast The Grey Area, they believe themselves sovereign citizens, as powerful as nations. And they are not far off in their self judgement. But they chose to do nothing to help us because, it seems, we are just the rest of us, inconsequential to these Goliaths of industry and power, neglecting the fact that on some level we had our unwitting part to play in putting them where they are today.
Their aim is not for community. They are not, as Rushkoff calls himself, humanists. They don’t think of the world morally, and if they do, they believe that morals are very simple things. As Mike Goggen said in an interview for the podcast Cover Story, “sometimes the world really is black and white.” And therein lies the problem. They are winners, we are losers. The world of the internet that these people helped create seem to have a difficulty with a central truth of our world, that nothing can be simply defined. Not even an atom, let alone the concept of zero itself.
So, if the billionaires are not trying to help stop this catastrophe from occurring, which one admits to Rushkoff as taking about the same amount of time and wealth to stop from happening, what are they doing with their wealth? They are building bunkers.
That’s not surprising. However, Rushkoff has pointed out in this essay and recent talks that they are doing this out of a delusional sense of self preservation. They believe the money the world has given them is so powerful that it will cocoon them from any consequence at the supposed end of the world. But they don’t seem to understand that no one will protect them if society collapses. The mindset, the nearly sociopathic way of existing that made these people so wealthy, is also the main reason and way that these people will die quickly in the apocalypse. You have to be a true asshole to make that kind of money because, put simply, the kind of decisions and justifications you have to make (as in “I’m okay with forcing child labor to work cobalt mines”) are so immoral as to be abhorrent in an end times scenario where all that we have left is each other as people. And these billionaires have only shown how little they care for us. They will, if Armageddon occurs, will be treated in kind. They are living in their own delusion, their own dreamland of nightmares where they are the winners. But this is not a dream, and the end of societies has never be an orderly affair, especially for those who controlled that world.
As the world’s end begins, these idiots only ensure their fate with the rest of us by doing nothing truly tangible to stop it.