Not easy reading for an empathic person, but I decided to have a gander at Rushkoff’s book, Survivial of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires.
Firstly, the title makes it out to be fantasies of all tech billionaires, which it is not. Secondly, the title makes it look like apocalyptic prepping is a tech billionaire niche, even though his own interviews are with politicians and hedge fund investors.
Also, the book does not recognize that the prepping is happening within individual families all around the world and in the US. This idea that there can be a self-created Shangri-La where one can escape the turmoil and collapse of global and local systems is not particular to the super rich.
I mention this because his premise is that the tech billionaires are the ones destroying the world, leading to the destabilization of the ecosystem, etc.
This is a notion held by the majority of folks who espouse the idea of eating or killing or beheading the rich.
What we are dealing with is not an us vs them scenario. And we are not facing an innately human flaw of greed that perpetuates generation after generation and culture after culture.
What we are dealing with is an economic system and human nature, and what the environment of the system in place allows and inspires humans to become.
There is absolutely no difference between the billionaire prepping for apocalypse and building a bunker isolated from the world’s woes, and a person in the poor south of the United States building their own underground shelter, stocked with guns and ammo and lots of dried beans.
In fact, there are far more of these non-billionaires doing this type of prepping than there are billionaires in existence, by far.
What should be focused on is not the rich, or the people, or the prepping. The focus should be on sustainability and ensuring local access to locally grown agriculture, which should include a culture that is moving steadily toward home gardens and community grown agriculture on plots of land within cities and towns and surrounding cities and towns.
What bothers me about seeing the constant calls for killing rich people as a means of coping with the rich and poor divide, is that I’m acutely aware that environments create people. If any person were born into privilege or found themselves in opportunity where thriving was possible, they would thrive and rise to the top economically.
This means that each of us is susceptible to taking advantage of economic advantage.
So the answer isn’t to kill those of us who find themselves born into this position, but to create a world where that position doesn’t exist. Otherwise, we just simply repeat this same chapter again and again, from the French Revolution, to the Russian Revolution, to whatever revolution is next.
It will always be a world of rich and poor divide until we create a world that does not allow for rich and poor divides. And the answer to this is not communism or socialism or any of the isms already created.
There are many fore-thinkers bringing up new ideas of ways to create an equal and equitable world, where poverty simply does not exist, and everyone thrives. Alternatives to Capitalism: Proposals for a Democratic Economy, by Erik Olin and Robin Hahnel is a book that explores these ideas.
It’s far more beneficial to explore ideas and potential systems that benefit everyone rather than blaming and threatening the lives of the few who are rich because they’ve followed the dictates of the system they were born into.
Everyone is guided by the need to survive. And we can all survive and thrive together in an evolved world with evolved and novel systems that relinquish the age old and repeated us vs them, rich vs poor ideologies.
Could it be possible to be rid of rich people and poor people without falling into the traps of dystopian society? I think so. And so do many others.
Perhaps a good place to start is to look into these matters with a simple Google search and see what you find. Or you can simply ponder what a perfect world would look like, and see if you can imagine and envision how such a world would operate, sustain, and be.
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