If the ultra-rich want to escape from reality — good riddance

I can sometimes get irrationally upset by movies with an incredible premise that is poorly executed. “The Creator,” for example, was nothing but mind-blowing concept art with zero plot or acting.  Watching it made me mad that such beautiful trash was wasted. “Civil War” was so politically neutered, with such wooden characters, that it completely missed an opportunity to expound on the growing tensions in this country or how to navigate them. It was devoid of stakes, context and depth, a complete waste of 109 minutes. But to me, the biggest and most recent missed opportunity was “Leave the World Behind,” a 2023 film financed by Barack and Michelle Obama, no less, that is so out of touch with reality it’s astonishing.

Admittedly taking a few liberties, the plot can be summarized this way: The global elite go on an infinite vacation away from us normies, allowing the world to crumble as people realize that nothing is really holding it together. Writer and director Sam Esmail’s script plays out something like a bad slasher film, without any slashing, as a confused family at a remote rural Airbnb tries to figure out why the internet has gone out. As far as we can tell, the government just disappears — maybe because CEOs, politicians and hedge fund managers are all so essential. Based on the 2020 novel by Rumaan Alam, “Leave the World Behind” is almost like a secular version of the “Left Behind” series, which traumatized me as a kid — only it’s not Christians being sucked up to Heaven while everyone else suffers, it’s billionaires.

Frankly, this is a load of crap in many different ways, but far too many people are taking it seriously. There is something morbidly fascinating about the “super-rich preppers” who are building massive, expensive bunkers in case the manure hits the fan. It’s not fiction either. Plenty of people in the top half of the one percent are contingency-planning for just such a scenario: an escape to New Zealand or the deep woods of upstate New York if climate change, civil unrest, some high-mortality pandemic or whatever else causes the collapse of society, or at least global capitalism can no longer sustain itself. 

Such blueprints and escape schemes are in vogue, and probably for sale near you. I’m not above occasionally Zillow surfing multi-million dollar properties with super-creative names like the “Las Vegas Underground House.” Author Douglas Rushkoff has seen this perverse trend firsthand, and says he’s been courted by elites for advice designing their doomsday bunkers and adapting for a future insulated from the coming collapse.

In his 2022 book, “Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires,” Rushkoff illustrates how this attitude permeates everything from seasteading to space colonies, writing: “Whether on land, on sea, or in outer space, the quest for self-sovereignty is less important as an example of apocalypse preparedness than it is as an exposé of the underlying, Ayn Rand fantasies of the tech elite: the most rational and productive among us escape to pursue their self-interests, empowered to build an independent economy of their own, free from the moral consequences of their actions.”

I can sympathize with the impulse to survive — that’s encoded in our DNA or something — but I can’t get over how misguided this mentality is. Rushkoff puts it succinctly on why the post-apocalyptic fantasies of the Nerd Reich are destined to fail:

“What I came to realize was that these men are actually the losers. The billionaires who called me out to the desert to evaluate their bunker strategies are not the victors of the economic game so much as the victims of its perversely limited rules. More than anything, they have succumbed to a mindset where “winning” means earning enough money to insulate themselves from the damage they are creating by earning money in that way. It’s as if they want to build a car that goes fast enough to escape from its own exhaust.”

I don’t need to waste time getting into the ethics of waving hasta la vista to the masses, nor do I think it’s  worth debating whether or not panic-room lairs would even work. I’m pretty sure those bunkers don’t have a shelf life half as good as advertised. The rich better hope they get what they paid for: After the bombs drop would be a bad time to find out that your oxygen filter was on the fritz or rodents had eaten all your apocalypse bucket slop before you got to it.

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If this is such a good idea, maybe these folks should just do it already. Stop teasing us and go. Last month, Realtor.com featured a profile on what was described as a “$300 million members-only luxury doomsday bunker complete with robotic medical suites, lavish swimming pool, and fine dining restaurants,” which was  “set to revolutionize how the rich and powerful can shelter themselves in an apocalyptic disaster.” If I had billions of dollars,, maybe I’d buy into something like that too. I’ve never been offered enough cash to know if I’m really above selling out. It sounds a lot better than LARPing “Mad Max,” although it also sounds like a version of Neo who crawled back in the Matrix, sniveling like a scared puppy.

Anyway, if you’re a moneyed packrat with a ticket out of here, please don’t hesitate. Occupy Mars or the high-tech version of your mom’s basement. Bring your Savannah cats and Gucci bags with you. I think all us peasants will do well enough without you. Without the stewards of capitalism, would the world come to an end? It’s a gamble many of us would be willing to take.

After all, back in the real world of right now,, the rich are the biggest reason this planet is getting burnt to a crisp. Not only do the affluent suck up far more natural resources than people in other income brackets, they belch out disproportionate levels of greenhouse gas emissions that cook the globe faster. One 2023 Oxfam report found that the richest 1% emit as much planet-heating pollution as two-thirds of humanity, which in 2019, translated to about 1.3 million excess deaths from heat. The 1.5º C threshold established by the Paris climate accords wasn’t just some arbitrary metric. As we exceed this boundary — which seems to have happened in 2024 with no end in sight — that will translate into tangible, measurable death on a scale difficult to reckon with.

As Earth cooks, more viruses spring up. The feedback loop of climate change and pandemics is well-established. Viruses need reservoirs in the form of animals (often bats) and as we destroy the habitats that allow wild creatures to survive, their pathogens make the jump to humans. We’ve seen this with viruses including Ebola, Nipah, SARS-1, MERS and SARS-CoV-2. We are in the process of this happening with bird flu. Other diseases are likely on the horizon.

Maybe oligarchs like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel don’t understand that they’re leading us off a cliff. Or maybe they do, and they just think they can escape in time. I’d like to propose that they stop reading Ray Bradbury’s “The Martian Chronicles” and read Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” instead, in which a nobleman’s masquerade ball held during a brutal plague is interrupted by the Grim Reaper. Because despite what Silicon Valley vampires who hope to beat death want to believe, there’s no escape.

That won’t stop them from trying. But what are they really trying to build? In his book, Rushkoff recalls Timothy Leary telling him that these tech bros “want to recreate the womb”: 

“As Leary the psychologist saw it, the boys building our digital future were developing technology to simulate the ideal woman — the one their mothers could never be. Unlike their human mothers, a predictive algorithm could anticipate their every need in advance and deliver it directly, removing every trace of friction and longing. These guys would be able to float in their virtual bubbles — what the Media Lab called “artificial ecology” — and never have to face the messy, harsh reality demanded of people living in a real world with women and people of color and even those with differing views.”

I say let them have it and leave the rest of us out of it. One final question deserves our attention: If the rich are so good at designing impervious automated homes, why can’t they build a better world for all of us? I don’t actually believe that extreme wealth makes people heartless or evil, although it may thrive on such tendencies. The real answer is that the ultra-rich elites don’t know what the hell they’re doing. They couldn’t make a better world if they tried. News flash: They don’t actually run this place. Ultimately, nature rules humanity, not the other way around. We can’t escape from that. Even our technology is natural, in the truest sense: It’s entirely based on resources drawn from our environment, and operates according  to the laws of physics.

The rich can’t escape, though they can certainly try, and may kill themselves and many of the rest of us in the process. As Just Stop Oil activist Roger Hallam, who is serving a prison sentence for his climate activism, told Salon’s Matthew Rozsa, “This is not a “rich versus the poor” thing. Ultimately, it is the rich committing suicide, killing us first, and then killing themselves. …  We don't need to talk about the climate, we don't need to talk about change. What we need to talk about is power and criminality and evil. What we're talking about is a death project.”

When spiritual teacher Ram Dass interviewed Allen Ginsberg in the 1980s, they discussed how the invention of television had conditioned people to be less empathetic, experiencing things vicariously. In our own time VR goggles and AI girlfriends make this problem even more acute.  In that conversation, Ginsberg observed that “dehumanization is a funny kind of enlightenment.” Maybe the ultra-rich are actually on the path to higher understanding. Who am I to say?

But Ginsberg cautioned that dehumanization “didn't propose a compassion or tenderness or mutual involvement or Buddha nature as an alternative. It proposed a complete annihilating void and nothingness.”

In the underground chambers where the ultra-rich think they can escape their sins,  there’s one truth that  echoes more clearly than their misguided attempt at self-preservation: It isn’t true gods that hide underground — it’s worms.