This Is Their End Game

I spend too much time wondering what the global oligarchs have in mind for themselves in a world irretrievably altered by climate change, a world destabilized to the point where civilization as we know it is not possible. Since that seems to be where they want us to go, as indicated by the way they are driving us off the climate cliff.

It appears I have not mentioned these ruminations a lot (maybe just this one time a few years ago). There may have been more times, but I don't know what words I used so I'm not finding them.

But that doesn't mean others haven't been thinking similar thoughts. Cory Doctorow, for instance, has a short story called "The Masque of the Red Death" that asks this question (and has a satisfying answer for those who want oligarchs and other smartest-guys-in-the-room to get what they have coming to them).

Doctorow also recently posted a write-up about science fiction author Douglas Rushkoff's new book, Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires.

Four years ago, Rushkoff was invited to speak at a retreat for billionaires. When he got there, he realized they wanted to pick his brain about how they can survive the collapse they are causing. How to locate and make their bunkers, how to ensure their servants stay servile instead of killing them once money is meaningless...

Rushkoff realized that these guys were obsessed with outrunning the end of the world that they were creating through their drive to outrun the end of the world. They were singularly uninterested in preventing the end of the world, or even in surviving it through solidarity and mutual aid. They were committed to the Thatcher Doctrine that "there is no such thing as society" – and they were willing to destroy society to prove that it was true....

Rushkoff's key insight is that the wealthiest, most powerful people in the world understand on a deep level that they way they live has a good chance of causing civilizational collapse, mass die-offs, and terminally poison the only planet in the universe known to be capable of supporting human life.

They understand this, but they've made a virtue of it. Our society, our lives, and our planet are viewed as the booster stage of a rocket – a disposable thruster made to get us into orbit before it is discarded. We might wipe out our planet and civilization, but they can retreat to islands. Or orbit. Or Mars. Or the metaverse.

Rushkoff calls this "The Mindset" that defines rich peppers, where — of course! — the skill sets of oligarchs are just what is required to survive. They tell themselves, Doctorow says,

imaginary stories of the lives of "cavemen" that describe the competition (for women, food, territory, etc) that created the "human nature" that makes it inevitable that they would be so greedy and selfish.

Like all evolutionary psychology, these are just-so stories, unfalsifiable thought-experiments of how the human mind must have been shaped for the Mindset to feel so natural. Like all evo-psych, it's ideology dressed up as science – not "evidence-based policy" so much as "policy-based evidence."

Doctorow ends with this:

The fantasy of escape from the needs of other is a fantasy of escape from empathy – and humanity – itself.