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)}