When the revolution comes, will you be prepared?


Most ordinary people have worries that deal with their own lives and try to take steps to address them. Some worry on a larger scale such as about crime in general or the state of the economy or health care costs. But as Lynn Parramore says there are yet others who worry on a much larger scale, concerned about “financial breakdown, flesh-melting pandemics, magnetic pole shifts, cyber warfare, and Biblical tsunamis”, nuclear winter, asteroid strikes, zombies taking over, etc. that will cause the entire collapse of global civilization and lead to anarchy at best or planetary destruction at worst.

But among the very wealthy, the paranoid one-percenters, the danger that they fear most is that some kind of revolution will result in the masses bringing out the pitchforks against those they feel responsible for the current state of massive inequality.

It’s a good time to be in a fear-based industry. Public comments from some of the planet’s richest people reveal a strain of paranoia about insurrection. At the last annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, observers noticed elites growing more alarmed about the possibility of social unrest. Last year, entrepreneur and venture capitalist Nick Hanauer published an open letter to his “Fellow Zillionaires” in Politico Magazine that summed up the growing worry among the wealthy: “What do I see in our future now? I see pitchforks.”

This matches what Vicino hears. “They’re going to Patagonia, they’re going to remote locations of the world,” he says. “Their reasoning is more to be insulated from a revolution, rebellion, anarchy, or whatever, following an economic collapse.”

But the oligarchs are not standing idly by for the tumbrils to arrive. If you are very wealthy, you don’t have to just hope for the best. Apparently there are people who have created options for dealing with things should the apocalypse in any form arrive suddenly. They are creating plush underground living spaces that are like bunkers and allow people to live in comfort. Parramore was taken to one in a secret location.

When I remove my blindfold, I am standing in a grassy clearing looking at a boxy concrete structure that serves as the entrance to a Cold War–era government communications facility gutted and reborn as Vivos Indiana. This is the Ritz Carlton of doomsday shelters, a hideout where residents can wait out a nuclear winter or a zombie apocalypse in luxury and style while the rest of humanity melts and disintegrates. The living area has 12-and-a-half-foot ceilings, sumptuous black leather couches, wall art featuring cheerful Parisian street scenes, towering faux ferns, and plush carpets. Faith Hill croons from a large-screen TV set in front of three rows of comfy beige reclining chairs. The cupboards are stocked with 60 varieties of freeze-dried and canned foodstuffs; an evening meal might include spaghetti aglio e olio topped with skillet fried steak chunks, a fresh tomato-and-zucchini salad fresh from the hydroponic garden, and decadent turtle brownies. An eight-by-nine bedroom is designed for four people (there are larger units for six) and comes with double-queen bunks clothed in 600-thread-count ivory sheets and duvet covers worthy of a four-star hotel, a comparison highlighted on the Vivos website.

I plop down on a Sealy’s Presidential Pillowtop mattress and decide, yes, a person could sleep here quite soundly while the world burns.

There are pet kennels for furry friends large and small, a gun safe (duh) in which to house weapons, a small gym, medical facilities, and a sound-proofed engine room housing two generators that run on diesel fuel stored in a 30,000 gallon tank—enough for over a year’s supply. Another room contains high-grade filters that scrub incoming air of nuclear, biological, and chemical particles.

Vicino’s properties include the recently launched Vivos Europa One, an invitation-only nuclear blast–proof subterranean complex tucked into a former Cold War munitions storage facility in Germany. It was purchased by Vicino and his partner, a German developer, for $2.25 million and unveiled this past summer. The property, now valued at over a billion dollars and boasting 227,904 square feet of “secure, blast proof living areas” is big enough for 34 “high net-worth families” to inhabit for a full year, says Vicino. They can enjoy swimming pools, a wine cellar, and living quarters they are encouraged to customize with fittings created by their favorite yacht designers. Worried about the collapse of the rule of law? After the end of society, each Vivos properties will be governed by its own bylaws and the various bunkers will have their own tribunals to handle conflicts between wealthy residents, who may well get twitchy during their confinement. An armed security force employed by the company will handle threats from above—presumably the have-nots who want in.

A berth on this subterranean Noah’s Ark will run you $3 to $5 million—about 100 times or more what an adult spot in Vivos Indiana costs.

Incidentally, Robert Vicino, one of the entrepreneurs who is building and marketing these things, enjoys quoting Ayn Rand so one imagines that this is the updated version of Galt’s Gulch for rich people who want to withdraw from the world but not from its creature comforts.

What drives the fears of these people who are called ‘preppers’?

Peter J. Behrens, a psychologist who studies doomsday phenomena, sees grand survival plans as a reflection of social and psychological maladjustment, the place where “paranoia meets narcissism.” In his reckoning, while having enough food for three days and a working flashlight is reasonable disaster preparedness, imagining that you can survive apart from the rest of humanity in elaborate bunkers and retreats is not.

Behrens observes that among the Fords, Rockefellers, and Vanderbilts, a strong Judeo-Christian ethic of giving back at least some of your riches to society led to the erection of libraries, museums, and other institutions. He thinks that not only are today’s wealthy increasingly insulated from the rest of society via gated communities, exclusive clubs, and personal airplanes, but they also do not feel that they owe anything to the rest of us.

I should have started saving money a lot earlier.

Comments

  1. Reginald Selkirk says

    I should have started saving money a lot earlier.

    Oh ho! Your so-called “money” will be worthless once the government which props up its fiat value collapses. You need to fill your basement with gold; and better yet, canned goods which will be worth their weight in gold. Don’t forget a water filter.

  2. Rob Grigjanis says

    It’s fascinating that they would rather have their children inherit a wasteland than use their power and wealth to strive for a sustainable future in which they would still be rich.

  3. Nate Carr (Totes not an imposter D:) says

    But they would be less rich and that is simply unthinkable! Don’t you know they earned their money?

  4. Chiroptera says

    The property, now valued at over a billion dollars and boasting 227,904 square feet of “secure, blast proof living areas” is big enough for 34 “high net-worth families” to inhabit for a full year, says Vicino. They can enjoy swimming pools, a wine cellar, and living quarters they are encouraged to customize with fittings created by their favorite yacht designers.

    Am I the only that smells scam? If the apocalypse were to happen, I suspect that a lot of rich folk would show up only to find an empty and damp, moldy warehouse.

  5. moarscienceplz says

    I should have started saving money a lot earlier.

    Nah, most of the uber wealthy either inherited their wealth, or at least had parents wealthy enough that they had no fears about starting their own companies. Bill Gates attended Harvard and then quit to start MicroSoft. Mark Zuckerberg, same story.
    Your problem, Mano, is that you didn’t choose your parents carefully enough.

  6. laurentweppe says

    It’s fascinating that they would rather have their children inherit a wasteland than use their power and wealth to strive for a sustainable future in which they would still be rich.

    Excessive material comforts tend to turn people into idiots, especially those who are born into it: give a man too many toys, and he’ll eventually devolve into something akin to a schoolyard bully with a tank.

  7. says

    The 1%ers don’t remind me of the French aristocracy, ending with a proud walk up to a guillotine.

    They remind me of the Ceausescus of Romania for both their greed, arrogance and mistreatment of the populace. The Ceausescus stole from the Romanian public and lived in opulence, destroying people’s homes and lives to do it. They bought themselves gold coffins for their burials, expecting to die as extravagantly as they lived, but instead were executed by firing squads and their corpses unceremoniously dumped into shallow graves.

    It wouldn’t surprise me nor sadden me to see the 1%ers come to the same end.

    http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1990-01-01/news/9001010031_1_ceausescus-presidential-palace-apartment-complexes

    Ceausescu Palace Rises As Monument To Greed
    January 01, 1990
    By Joseph A. Reaves, Chicago Tribune.
    BUCHAREST, ROMANIA — Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos had nothing on Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife, Elena.

    […]

    The House of the Republic is more than a house. It is more than a castle, more than a palace; more than Versailles or the Vatican. It is a monument that makes the Great Pyramids pale by comparison.
    In the early 1980s Ceausescu ordered 80,000 to 100,000 people to abandon their homes in downtown Bucharest to make way for construction of the House of the Republic. Some people were given as little as 48 hours` notice to pack their belongings before bulldozers moved in.

    Almost 3 square miles of prime real estate was leveled, and an army of workers was brought in to build a new presidential palace, five new government ministry buildings and block after block of identical swank apartment complexes to house thousands of the Ceausescus` closest friends.

    […]

    Crystal chandeliers of every shape and size, one weighing 5 tons, fight for attention on 40-foot ceilings. A red-haired soldier said the electrical power needed to light one room of the palace would have supplied 350 of the apartments that were razed.

    “They must have paid for everything with gold,“ Antonescu said.

    “Nobody knows in Romania how much gold was extracted from the land since Ceausescu came to power. It must have been (paid for with) the gold.“ Romania has several gold fields in Transylvania.

  8. Sleeper (from Sci-Blogs) says

    Can’t help picture the situation inside these compounds playing out much like the ending of Jim Thompson’s novel ‘The Getaway’.

    Also surely the smart move from the rabble outside wouldn’t be to try and get in but to make sure the people inside can’t get out. Will concrete not be available after the apocalypse?

  9. Pierce R. Butler says

    … pet kennels …, a gun safe …, a small gym, medical facilities, and a sound-proofed engine room …

    But no chapel??? Baby Jesus is gonna smite their asses so hard!

  10. Lassi Hippeläinen says

    Chiroptera #5: “If the apocalypse were to happen, I suspect that a lot of rich folk would show up only to find an empty and damp, moldy warehouse.”
    Or they would find that the security forces have decided they don’t need the rich parasites.

  11. EigenSprocketUK says

    They can enjoy swimming pools…

    Who’s going to clean it, I wonder.

    Faith Hill croons from a large-screen TV

    Well, come the revolution, well soon put a stop to that.
    Anyway, I say sell it to them. It’ll develop a fault within the week. Hopefully one which affects the ability to unlock from the inside.

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