The year that is ending leaves us wondering about a world that in turn can end at any moment. Are you prepared for Armageddon? Let them know that Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk already are, the owner of Billionaires have been betting on the end of the world for years and we have found out thanks to one of the books that have left their mark on 2023: The Survival of the Richest, by Douglas Rushkoff (Captain Swing).
There is no reason to be so surprised really, because we have always known it. Humans pursue their survival, individually or collectively, and shelters from catastrophe are not just a thing of the Cold War, although it was then that the concept became popular, one way of putting it. The very rich have also been buying land in New Zealand for decades and bunkers have been built – and marketed – in practically all countries. Even the upper-middle classes can get half an apartment (yes, half) in the basement of an anti-missile silo; You know, some will see the end of time eating cans of sardines and others in a jacuzzi.
They say that in the former Soviet Union they wanted to expel a Jew from the country and they gave him a globe to indicate where he wanted to go. After studying it carefully, the man said: Don’t you have another balloon?
A planet B could be the solution to all the catastrophes that are announced, but as in the joke? There isn’t, and the tycoons seem to have realized it. Douglas Rushkoff (New York, 1961), writer and specialist in media and technology, explains in his book how he traveled to a place in the middle of the desert after receiving an invitation from “a group mysteriously described as ‘ultra-rich stakeholders’” . What did they want? Answers to questions such as what is the greatest threat, climate change or biological warfare, or how long we can survive without external help.
And, more importantly, how to guarantee the loyalty of their security forces when a hungry mob wanted access to their well-prepared shelters and the money to pay them was no longer worth it. In short: those ultra-rich were waiting for the great catastrophe, the Event, and sought to ensure their survival. They had already realized that there is no planet B, but they are not the only ones who have seen it.
The writer Isaac Rosa (Seville, 1974) won the Biblioteca Breve 2022 prize with Lugar Seguro, published by Seix Barral, an ironic novel and seen as seen more than anticipatory: the protagonist, Segismundo García, has detected a business niche and is dedicated to sell low-cost bunkers, survival within reach of all budgets; His father had made his fortune with dental clinics “for everyone,” so why not do the same with salvation.
We asked Rosa if we are scared societies, more than our predecessors. “The paradox is that, in theory, we are safer societies than ever in history, with more means, resources, knowledge and technology; However, we live with other forms of insecurity, personal and collective, a feeling of uncertainty and vulnerability, of being at the mercy of we don’t know what, of always being on the verge of losing control over our lives.”
The philosopher Marina Garcés (Barcelona, ??1973) questions herself/us about insecurities and a future “that is nothing like the one we had been promised” in the recent The Time of Promise, in Anagrama. We have come up against “the limits of the planet,” she explains in the essay, we experience overlapping crises “through which the limits of the economic system, social systems, political representation, and physical and mental health are manifested. The time of unlimited promise thus becomes the time of continuous threat.” The emergence of AI is a good representation of this not only emotional fluctuation between promise and threat, but without guidance “uncertainty is experienced as an irreversible succession of events without control.” We are, in short, “a consciousness that is shipwrecked between catastrophic imaginaries and dangerous desires for salvation,” she says in the book.
The cover of Safe Place refers to one of the final images of the fashionable film, Leave the World Behind: the first shows a smiling family on a picnic while on the other side of a river or sea we see the mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion, in The second, a girl also watches from the other shore as New York is destroyed in a series of explosions; The film took Netflix by storm in the middle of the pre-Christmas season of light and color, which says a lot about how we feel.
The dystopian genre has been on the rise for many years. Set now in the immediate future, because you don’t have to look far to see the consequences of, for example, global warming, they range from the Black Mirror series to novels like the one that gives its name to the Netflix hit. Leaving the World Behind, by the American Rumaan Alam, was published in 2020, coinciding with covid-19, although it had been written before (in Spain it was published by Salamandra in 2021). Since the pandemic, perspectives and fears have increased, as has the business niche.
In an interview with The New York Times, John W. Hoopes, an anthropologist who studies myths such as the end of the world predicted for 2012, described the preparationist offer as “hypermasculine fantasy” and “survival pornography”: “fear sells.” even better than sex; “If you can scare people, you can sell them all kinds of things, and that includes bunkers,” he concluded. A narrative of fear supported by a cultural production that, according to its detractors, reinforces the dominant message or, as the journalist and writer Caroline Zielinski pointed out in The Guardian, “it does not constitute escapist entertainment, but on the contrary, a kind of fable (cautonary tale ) of what can happen if we do not take action.”
Perhaps that is why Douglas Rushkoff’s book has struck a nerve, by pointing out the very rich as responsible for a real situation of obvious and imminent danger while they seek an individual solution for themselves and their millions. In fact, many bunkers are located in the United States in former silos and anti-atomic shelters from the 1950s and 1960s, designed for communities and now privatized. “The neoliberal narrative turns ‘every man for himself’ into ‘every man for himself’,” explains Isaac Rosa, who highlights that the combination of “social processes of recent decades, with social inequality and precariousness, which is much more than work, is vital, and radical individualism, the lack of elements of community security, distrust of others”, together with the narrative of the catastrophe, have caused fear and loneliness to be “two dominant emotions today, which They leave us alone and make us anxiously seek security, at whatever price, economic and social and political renunciations.”
Perhaps we have to think, like Rosa, that there is no individual salvation: “even if we ever needed a bunker, we would have a better chance of surviving in a collective one, where we could count on the help and knowledge of others, than in a private one, where only “We would have ourselves.” We return to Marina Garcés: “if the future is dark it is because the present is opaque.”
