Here is something from Brad Hicks on the Muslim ban in the US. It's interesting to see his thinking on what he would do if he saw his Muslim neighbors being taken away.
If it happens, I won't freeze up, because I rehearsed.
Before I get to the main subject of this essay, let me tell you a little bit about myself, in order to provide some context for my remarks. Ask anyone who's seen me anywhere near the scene of a crisis or an alarm, and they'll tell you that I don't freeze up. Other people freeze up; in what seems to them like a tiny fraction of a second, I take action.
It wasn't until I read a lot of Phillip Zimbardo that I realized why that is: other people don't rehearse. I rehearse. I learned, as a tiny little child and victim of non-stop violent bullying, that I had to rehearse, because if I waited to start planning until the violence began, I wasn't going to make it.
Then I lucked into a giant pile of Cold War era nuclear war preparedness pamphlets, which I loved just as science fiction, but they changed something subtle in me. I didn't have to be encouraged to take part in tornado drills or fire drills, not any more, even as early as 3rd grade or so. I knew, from the bottom of my heart, that there are many things that can go wrong. They probably won't go wrong. But if you don't prepare for them, and they do go wrong, you'll screw them up.
Tornadoes have become my go-to example, because I live on one corner of the map marked Tornado Alley. Lots of people that I know ignore tornado alarms, because, they've learned from long experience, they're "always" false alarms. In this town, someone who hears a tornado siren and says, "there probably isn't a tornado and even if there is, it's probably not going to hit me" is almost certainly right. Even when there is a tornado, only at most a few dozen of the city's tens of thousands of homes will be hit. The odds are way in their favor.
But if you wait until the tornado is touching down a few houses away, it's too late for you to take shelter. We actually had a really vivid example of this a few years ago, when a tornado ripped through a broad swath downwind from the airport, wrecking dozens of houses. One guy who was out driving in it nearly died when a building got blown over onto his car. He saw that the tornado was heading for his neighborhood, so he called his girlfriend and yelled at her to get into the basement, right now. When she came to, she had broken legs and a concussion — she'd waited too long, and as she was halfway down the basement stairs, the house fell on her. And because wreckage and downed power lines had closed off her neighborhood to even ambulance traffic, she had to crawl to the nearest hospital. In an interview with the local paper, she counted herself among the lucky ones, and she's right. She counted on nothing bad happening. And suffered for it. And nearly died.
I don't assume that every building I'm in will be hit by a tornado. I will probably never be hit by a tornado. But every building I spend more than a few minutes in, I look for and memorize the route to a basement or a sheltered inner room. I don't assume that my kitchen or my furnace will catch fire. They probably won't. But in every place I've lived for the last twenty five years or more, I've had a fire extinguisher bolted to the wall in the kitchen, and I've memorized at least two routes out of every room. I also always have at least a pair of slippers near me no matter where I am, no matter what I'm doing. And speaking of that last one, I didn't assume, during the Ferguson riot aftermath, that police would chase protesters into my neighborhood and tear gas the whole block. But when they got within a mile of here, I had a bag hanging on the doorknob with my essential medicines and I kept my comfortable walking shoes on at all time.
If you wait until the tornado is about to hit to plan your safety route, you won't make it. If you wait until the fire breaks out to buy a fire extinguisher, the house will burn down; if you also waited until then to plan your escape route, you'll burn with it. If you wait until the riot over-runs your neighborhood to pack your bug-out bag, you won't self-evacuate in time. Those things will probably never happen to you. But if you're prepared and if you rehearse, you can stop worrying about "what if they do?"
So Let's Talk about Trump's Immigration Order
I had a rough weekend, mentally and emotionally. There are two businesses on my block that I know with great confidence are owned by Muslim refugee families. There's another one that I suspect of being Muslim-refugee-owned on my corner. If I'm right, I can see three of them from my usual bus stop. There are another two within half a mile. So is the Islamic Center of St. Louis.
The order banning travel back into the United States by green-card holders, the actual forced deportation of green-card holders who happened to be at airports when the order came down, shocked me to my core. These are legal permanent residents, the most vetted of the vetted. Most of them fled here because they were victims of terrorism; not a few of them were let in because they were our allies against terrorism. Barring them from traveling to the United States is, as multiple courts have reminded the administration over the weekend, flat-out illegal. Not only was that illegal order followed, at least some customs officials are still obeying that illegal order, even in the face of federal court orders to the contrary.
But because I'm the kind who prepares, because I'm the kind who rehearses, this didn't just shock my conscience. It left me feeling shockingly unprepared. If lawful permanent residence doesn't mean anything to Trump's enforcers, then I could, any time I'm at the bus stop, see Immigration and Customs Enforcement trucks sweep down on one or more of the businesses within half a block of that bus stop and start rounding up families.
And as the god is my witness, I hadn't rehearsed for that. I had no idea what I was going to do. And having read Zimbardo's The Lucifer Effect, specifically the chapter on how humans decide what to do when surprised, I knew what that meant. If I didn't make up my mind what to do and rehearse it, I would freeze up. Then I would look around to see what other people were doing, and other people would be, like me, frozen up. So I would try to remember when I've been in this situation and do what got me rewarded in the past or do the opposite of what got me punished, but I've never been in this exact situation before. If I were normal, what I would do next is "what I'm told" by anybody who looks like an authority figure. (Fortunately, as the Man of Concrete's son, I'm inoculated against that. My dad would actually beat you if you used the "I was following orders" excuse and somebody could have been hurt.) Failing that, I'd try to remember some story of someone who looked like me who was in a similar situation and was the hero and do what they did in the story — but by that time, it'd be too late already. So forget about the next step, actually try to think through the situation and plan a rational response; by that time the ICE trucks with their illegally seized victims would be gone.
It probably isn't going to happen. If it does happen, it's not statistically likely to happen in front of me, I don't spend that much time standing in front of Muslim refugee-owned places. (Maybe I should.) But if it did happen, I was going to screw it up.
What Are the Options, and What Did I Decide?
As someone who has no real dependents, and who long-ago checked off every item on his bucket list, and who is a white middle class old guy, I have a lot of freedom of action and only a couple of constraints: I do not want to do anything that makes it worse for the victims. And I want the people who come after me to be proud of whatever I did. Those principles guided me through the AIDS crisis. They guided me through the Satanic Panic. They'll guide me now.
I could do nothing. I could look away, I could walk away. I'm white, I'm not a Muslim, I'm an old man, I have that privilege.
When I brought up the question in the neighborhood Facebook group, "what are we as a neighborhood going to do," I got 70+ expressions of solidarity and no concrete plans other than "I'm trying to stop it from happening." But we have two people who keep repeating the same administration propaganda line: it's not going to happen, and it's okay that it's going to happen because they might deserve it. Except for the very rare occasional bigot, Tower Grove South loves its refugee neighbors. Looking away, walking away, doing nothing, is siding with the bigots. I can't be proud of that. So I won't do it.
I could try to use force to rescue the family that the feds are attacking. But no matter how I game that out in my head, no matter how my mental rehearsal goes, there is no way that this ends well. Even if I were to inspire enough other people on the street to join me, there's no way the family being rounded up could escape, nowhere for them to hide that the feds wouldn't find them.
And it would probably go worse than that. If I assault federal officers who are, in their deluded or self-preserving minds, engaged in a counter-terrorism sweep, the guns are definitely coming out. I could get shot. Which is no big deal; if that could result in that family's escape, I'd pay that price. But once the guns start going off, the victims could get shot. Kids could get shot. That's a risk I can't take. It's too likely to end in a slaughter. I won't have any part of that on my conscience. I can't be proud of that. So that's not an option.
I could non-violently resist. And that's a tempting option. If I started carrying handcuffs when I go out, I could be ready to handcuff myself to the vehicle, so they'd have to cut me loose before they could drive off. If enough of us blocked the vehicles, we might buy time for reporters or lawyers to show up and shame the feds out of seizing this family. It might work. It probably wouldn't get anybody killed. I'm still thinking about it. But … it's a lonely corner, most of the time, no more than half a dozen people waiting for a bus, usually fewer. Even if they all rushed in with me, even they were all willing to endure "pain compliance techniques" to buy time for the Muslim family, I just don't see it being enough time. If I think it'll work, I'm ready to do it. But I just don't see it working.
I can witness. And dear god, that doesn't seem like enough, but it has helped others. I have a camera phone. I never use Facebook Live; if I were to go FB Live, it would catch at least some attention. When the cops forcibly take my phone away (and the odds are that they will), if I don't smash it, they'll use it to delete the video — but we've seen, in the last year, that when the cops illegally delete FB Live video, Facebook can restore it from backup. I can't shame the feds into refusing an order to expel or incarcerate the innocent Muslims in front of me, at least, I probably can't. But with the video I produce before I get beat up and my phone seized or smashed, maybe you can shame them into not seizing the next family.
So I'm practicing and rehearsing that. I probably won't need to, just as I probably won't have to dig myself out from under tornado rubble or fight a kitchen fire or flee from a riot on a moment's notice. But if it does happen, I'm ready. So now, after a weekend of fear and fret, I can stop worrying.
And now for something different -- This is a conversation from Facebook about after the Women's March and does the movement need a name? I am sending it because there are some interesting concepts in it about movements and winning and losing.
It's come to my attention that certain corners of Progressiveworld are putting a huge amount of energy into trying to put a name to the anti-Trump resistance movement.
I think this is a terrible idea, and a mistaken waste of valuable time and energy. Giving this upswelling a name would be hugely counterproductive. Right now, people are engaging where they are, how they can, out of whatever identities they claim. This thousand-flowers aspect of it makes us incredibly nimble and diffuse -- and thus hard to predict and target. Over the long run, it will be the source of our durability and resilience, as one set of groups rises to one challenge and then drops back, only to be reinforced by another set of groups emerging to fight the next assault on our liberties.
Naming things puts a handle on them that makes them easier to control. I'm sure a lot of leaders would like this -- but it makes us brittle and finite. It unites people into a single identity, which can be easily targeted and discredited. It encourages people to hand their power off to leaders -- who then fight among themselves for power, diverting precious time, energy, and resources. It makes us easy for the fascists to decapitate. It excludes people who don't identify with whatever stereotype comes to be associated with the movement, making it easier for them to opt out of doing what they're able to do.
I think it's a huge strategic error -- and no further energy should be put into solving a problem that is actually one of our great strengths. We will call ourselves different names at different times and places -- and in many cases, there will be no name at all, just a group that's taken on some battle as its own.
Let that be. Don't limit us by forcing us into the box of a common name. We're so much bigger and more powerful than that.
Natasha Chart Believe in democracy. No one person or group is smarter than everyone else working at the same problem.
David Clow Exactly. This isn't a branding war and using a branding tactic only plays into the hands of the Trump side.
Sara Robinson This is a war within a larger war. The era that began with Reaganism in the 80s must end. For the past 40 years, we've been living with the free-market values that were central to that era's worldview. Branding was one of the ways people gained power in that model, so it's natural that people would reflexively go to that as a way of getting some control now.
But Trump's election was a major political discontinuity -- and one of the things that's breaking is that free-market model. Power will accrue and deploy differently now. Branding, in particular, needs to be discredited: it's the main source of Trump's power, and I think we've now seen the danger of that.
You do not fight a brand like his with a brand of your own. You do it with anti-branding -- with masses of people who are acting out of their own identities, without handing their personal power over to that of a brand.
Guy Saperstein This didn't seem to be a problem for the Tea Party!A
Sara Robinson Two things. One: they DID lose a lot of energy due to in-fighting and schism over ownership of the name. It cost them dearly, in fact, as local activists were stepped on by pro organizers paid for by FW and AFP.
Two: Despite that drain, it still worked out fairly well for them because they're conservative authoritarians, who will reflexively look to leaders. Being progressives, that won't work for us. We tend to destroy our own leaders, not follow them.
Let's not provide targets for both our enemies and our own corps of bomb-throwers. Far better to find our own niches and do what we can within them. We'll get more done, be far more efficient, suffer less burnout, be harder for the enemy to detect and persecute, and lose far less energy to movement politics that way.
Natasha Chart We can't let these guys have a single target. They're very good at demonizing whatever we do.
Natasha Chart Also, when they end up going after individuals and small groups, it makes them look more like the petty tyrants they are.
Craig Belanger Well said, Sara. A brand or catchy name makes it look ad hoc when it's not.
David Thompson Well said. A national identity to Trump resistance will probably coalesce, but it will happen organically if we let it and don't interfere.
James Scaminaci III Modern social movements are held together by their common narratives and shared values and shared experiences. Sara Robinson is correct that we do not need an overarching name. Each movement has its own name. The current progressive movement has several movements within it and spans several segments. It also very geographically diverse. I'm off to a resistance organizing meeting in the reddest part of a red state. And the progressive is much larger than just being anti-Trump. This is largely a Republican agenda, not just Trump's mental eruptions.
True. Trump simply tapped into, and fed, a movement that's been brewing for a long time. It's the same white Christian brand of regressive, repressive conservatism liberals been fighting since before the civil war.
I, too, don't think this is a fight we can win by marching under the Democrat banner. The Democrats blew it. Any outrage from The Democratic Party will simply seem like political grandstanding and be met with coordinated resistance.
Beating back this fascism is going to require more energy and genuine grassroots outrage.
Beth Corbin I agree in essence with you Sara, yet I see nothing wrong with referring to ALL of our collective movements as the resistance. Where our movement differs from the Tea Party is that WE are a TRUE grassroots movement. Dick Army and other conservative Republicans not only funded the Tea Party movement, but would clear their government offices to make Tea Party events look bigger! We must work intersectionally, because we are ALL under attack. When one group is singled out, we must all rise up in response.
Sara Robinson Absolutely agreed, Beth. But I think we'll be more effective at having each other's backs if we're not seen as being allied under one central organization, brand, or set of leaders. Today, it's NARAL's turn. Tomorrow, it's BLM's. The next day, the religious freedom orgs will need to step up. And each one of those orgs will perform faster and better if left to its own leadership, without having to clear things through channels. Especially since so much of this resistance (as we are seeing again today at JFK) will have to be extremely local, and extremely nimble.
It will work much better if everyone works on a "you do you" basis. Yes, there will be toe-stepping; that's part of it, and I think that James is right that a shared narrative is far more potent at sorting that stuff out than any leader can be.
Beth CorbinSara, we are actually saying the same thing! I don't want another "governing body" interfering with our grassroots work. Each group, NOW, NARAL, PP, etc, must remain autonomous, accountable only to their boards/members/supporters etc. But in total, we are the resistance!
Sara Robinson Exactly. And will last longer, fight harder, act smarter, and have more fun being so.
Jill Cozzi Naming things is also an easy substitute for actually doing things.
Cheryl Rofer Protests now springing up at major airports. Today it's their turn.
Bill Stewart A name creates a media target. Bad idea.
Pierce Nichols We need to have each other's backs but not take each other's orders.
Cheryl Rofer Here we go: Last Saturday was the Women's March. Tonight was the lawyers' night. Tax March and March for Science coming.
This article has an interesting premise -- I agree with it in general, but not all particulars. We do need to find a way to stop being so divided and demonizing if we are to get out of the fix we are in. If you go to the site, be warned that there's something wrong with posting replies -- about one in four I posted showed up, and they wouldn't let me re-post. But read the article because we really need to do this.
The whole world's eyes are on Washington today, and not in a good way. As Venezuelans, we're looking North with more trepidation than most today, even though — in fairness — the panic over Trump-as-northern-Chávez is premature. A politician is to be judged by what it does in office, not by what he says before he gets there. Beating Chávez historic economic demolition of the richest oil country in the world, during the biggest oil bonanza ever, leaving behind an inflation-ridden, bullet-stricken, hungry, ailing country — is quite an ask. But let's see what happens.
Because in one way, Trump and Chávez are identical: they are masters of Populism.
There's something soothing in all that anger. Though full of hatred, it promises redemption.
The recipe is universal. Find a wound common to many, someone to blame for it and a good story to tell. Mix it all together. Tell the wounded you know how they feel. That you found the bad guys. Label them: the minorities, the politicians, the businessmen. Cartoon them. As vermin, evil masterminds, flavourless hipsters, you name it. Then paint yourself as the saviour. Capture their imagination. Forget about policies and plans, just enrapture them with a good story. One that starts in anger and ends in vengeance. A vengeance they can participate in.
That's how it becomes a movement. There's something soothing in all that anger. Though full of hatred, it promises redemption. Populism can't cure your suffering, but it can do something almost as good — better in some ways: it can build a satisfying narrative around it. A fictionalized account of your misery. A promise to make sense of your hurt. It is them. It's been them all along.
For all those who listen, Populism is built on the irresistible allure of simplicity. The narcotic of the simple answer to an intractable question. The problem is now made simple. The problem is you.
How do I know? Because I grew up as the 'you' Trump is about to turn you into. I was cast in the role of the enemy in the political struggle that followed the arrival of Chávez, and watched in frustration year after year as the Opposition tried and failed to do anything about the catastrophe unfolding all around. Only later did I realize this failure was, in a significant way, self-inflicted.
And so, some advice:
1. Don't forget who the enemy is.
Populism can only survive amid polarization. It works through caricature, through the unending vilification of a cartoonish enemy. Pro tip: you're the enemy. Yes, you, with the Starbucks cup. Trump needs you to be the enemy just like all religions need a demon. As a scapegoat. "But facts!", you'll say, missing the point entirely.
What makes me the enemy, you may ask? In their mind it's very simple: if you're not among the victims, you're among the culprits. In your case, you're that modern bogeyman called the liberal urbanite hipster who thinks all cultures and religions are valid and equally worthy, who thinks of the working-class disparagingly. You are, in short, 'a citizen of nowhere' whose utopia is a massive, world-wide kumbaya with carrot chips, no church, and no soul either.
It's silly, I know. Especially because you do care. As did I, a teenage CIA agent bent on feeding the serfs at my feudal estate with dog food. However, as long as you don´t recognize the problem is not the message, but the messenger, you will be wasting your time.
Your focus has to be on erase the cartoon you've been drawn into. Scrambling it. Undermining it.
2. Show no contempt.
Your organizing principle is simple: don't feed polarization, disarm it.
This means leaving the theater of injured decency behind.
The Venezuelan Opposition struggled for years to get this. It wouldn't stop pontificating about how stupid it all is. Not only to their international friends, but also to the Chavista electoral base itself.
"Really, this guy? Are you nuts? You must be nuts." We'd say.
I heard variations on this so many times growing up that my political awakening was set off by the tectonic realization that Chávez, however evil, was not actually a stupid man.
The subtext was clear: Look, children — he will destroy the country. He's blatantly siding with the bad guys: Fidel, Putin, the white supremacists or the guerrilla. Besides, he's clearly not that smart. He's threatening to destroy the economy, too. He clearly has no respect for democracy. For the intelligentsia. We, who work hard and know how to do business. We, who've researched this, thought about this, grasped this. In history, in economics, in diplomacy, in accounting. Now, learn this word. Repeat after me: fascism.
I heard variations on this so many times growing up that my political awakening was set off by the tectonic realization that Chávez, however evil, was not actually a stupid man.
"Don't listen to them, folks", says the populist. "Stop letting them think they can school and fool you. The only true fact is that the enemies are few and that they lie. Let's show them they're the ones who are wrong. They're the ones who are stupid. They're scared! Or, worse, fearing justice! They think only about themselves. Turn off the TV. Listen to me."
You've just lost the first battle. Instead of fighting polarization, you've played into it.
In which case, try again, seriously, because by all means…
3. Don't try to force him out.
Our Opposition tried every single trick in the book. Coup d'etat? Check. Ruinous oil strike? Check. Inviting international intervention? You guessed it. Want to know how they did that last one, by the way? By removing themselves from the ballot in a parliamentary election. Yes, they just handed Chavismo full congressional power as some sort of 'diplomatic statement'. Honest to God.
But we failed. Because we lost sight that a hissy-fit is not a strategy.
Look, they were desperate. If anything, history has proven they were right to be desperate. If any of those plans had gone well, bear with me for a second, Venezuela wouldn't be in the shitshow it is in right now. Lives would have been saved. Many more improved.
But we failed. Because we lost sight that a hissy-fit is not a strategy. The people on the other side, and crucially Independents, will rebel against you if you look like you're losing your mind. Worst of all, you will have proved yourself to be the very thing you're claiming to be fighting against: an enemy of democracy. And all the while you're just giving the Populist and his followers enough rhetorical fuel to rightly call you a saboteur, an unpatriotic schemer, for years to come.
To a big chunk of the population, the Venezuelan opposition is still that spoiled, unpatriotic, schemer. It's taken many furious years for its politicians to wash away those stains. It sapped the opposition's effectiveness for the years when we'd need it most.
All non-democratic channels are counter-productive: you lower your message, and give the Populist rhetorical fuel.
4. Find a counter-argument. (No, not the one you think.)
Don't waste your time trying to prove that this ism is better than that ism. Ditch all the big words. Why? Because, again, the problem is not the message but the messenger. It's not that Trump supporters are too stupid to see right from wrong, it's that you're much more valuable to them as an enemy than as a compatriot.
The problem is tribal. Your challenge is to prove that you belong in the same tribe as them: that you are American in exactly the same way they are.
It's way easier to get this wrong than to get this right, and the chances are the people getting it wrong will drown out those getting it right.
In Venezuela, we fell into the abstraction trap in a bad way. We wrote again and again about principles, about the separation of powers, about civil liberties, about the role of the military in politics, about corruption and economic policy. But it took our leaders ten years to figure out they needed to actually go to the slums and to the countryside. And not for a speech, or a rally, but for game of dominoes or to dance salsa – to show they were Venezuelans too, that they had tumbao and could hit a baseball, could tell a joke that landed. That they could break the tribal divide, come down off the billboards and show they were real. And no, this is not populism by other means. It is the only way of establishing your standing. It's deciding not to live in an echo chamber. To press pause on the siren song of polarization.
You will not find that pause button in the cities or the university's campuses. You will find it precisely where you're not expected.
Only then will your message land.
There's no point sugar coating: the road ahead is tough and the pitfalls are many. It's way easier to get this wrong than to get this right, and the chances are the people getting it wrong will drown out those getting it right.
But if you want to be part of the solution, the road ahead is clear: Recognize you're the enemy they need; show concern, not contempt, for the wounds of those that brought Trump to power; by all means be patient with democracy and struggle relentlessly to free yourself from the shackles of the caricature the populists have drawn of you.
It's a tall order. But the alternative is worse. Believe me, I know: I'm from Venezuela.
This New Yorker article was sent to me by a reader. It is very long, but good. However, my advice is don't read just part of it -- all or nothing. It's about very rich people who think our civilization may be falling apart and they are preparing for that. I've seen better reactions in the communities who are working on local sustainability. I liked the guy in this article who said to help people instead of flee from them. Apparently the New Yorker still proofreads -- a refreshing change from the internet.
An armed guard stands at the entrance of the Survival Condo Project, a former missile silo north of Wichita, Kansas, that has been converted into luxury apartments for people worried about the crackup of civilization.Photograph by Dan Winters for The New Yorker
Steve Huffman, the thirty-three-year-old co-founder and C.E.O. of Reddit, which is valued at six hundred million dollars, was nearsighted until November, 2015, when he arranged to have laser eye surgery. He underwent the procedure not for the sake of convenience or appearance but, rather, for a reason he doesn't usually talk much about: he hopes that it will improve his odds of surviving a disaster, whether natural or man-made. "If the world ends—and not even if the world ends, but if we have trouble—getting contacts or glasses is going to be a huge pain in the ass," he told me recently. "Without them, I'm fucked."
Huffman, who lives in San Francisco, has large blue eyes, thick, sandy hair, and an air of restless curiosity; at the University of Virginia, he was a competitive ballroom dancer, who hacked his roommate's Web site as a prank. He is less focussed on a specific threat—a quake on the San Andreas, a pandemic, a dirty bomb—than he is on the aftermath, "the temporary collapse of our government and structures," as he puts it. "I own a couple of motorcycles. I have a bunch of guns and ammo. Food. I figure that, with that, I can hole up in my house for some amount of time."
Survivalism, the practice of preparing for a crackup of civilization, tends to evoke a certain picture: the woodsman in the tinfoil hat, the hysteric with the hoard of beans, the religious doomsayer. But in recent years survivalism has expanded to more affluent quarters, taking root in Silicon Valley and New York City, among technology executives, hedge-fund managers, and others in their economic cohort.
Last spring, as the Presidential campaign exposed increasingly toxic divisions in America, Antonio GarcÃa MartÃnez, a forty-year-old former Facebook product manager living in San Francisco, bought five wooded acres on an island in the Pacific Northwest and brought in generators, solar panels, and thousands of rounds of ammunition. "When society loses a healthy founding myth, it descends into chaos," he told me. The author of "Chaos Monkeys," an acerbic Silicon Valley memoir, GarcÃa MartÃnez wanted a refuge that would be far from cities but not entirely isolated. "All these dudes think that one guy alone could somehow withstand the roving mob," he said. "No, you're going to need to form a local militia. You just need so many things to actually ride out the apocalypse." Once he started telling peers in the Bay Area about his "little island project," they came "out of the woodwork" to describe their own preparations, he said. "I think people who are particularly attuned to the levers by which society actually works understand that we are skating on really thin cultural ice right now."
In private Facebook groups, wealthy survivalists swap tips on gas masks, bunkers, and locations safe from the effects of climate change. One member, the head of an investment firm, told me, "I keep a helicopter gassed up all the time, and I have an underground bunker with an air-filtration system." He said that his preparations probably put him at the "extreme" end among his peers. But he added, "A lot of my friends do the guns and the motorcycles and the gold coins. That's not too rare anymore."
Tim Chang, a forty-four-year-old managing director at Mayfield Fund, a venture-capital firm, told me, "There's a bunch of us in the Valley. We meet up and have these financial-hacking dinners and talk about backup plans people are doing. It runs the gamut from a lot of people stocking up on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, to figuring out how to get second passports if they need it, to having vacation homes in other countries that could be escape havens." He said, "I'll be candid: I'm stockpiling now on real estate to generate passive income but also to have havens to go to." He and his wife, who is in technology, keep a set of bags packed for themselves and their four-year-old daughter. He told me, "I kind of have this terror scenario: 'Oh, my God, if there is a civil war or a giant earthquake that cleaves off part of California, we want to be ready.' "
When Marvin Liao, a former Yahoo executive who is now a partner at 500 Startups, a venture-capital firm, considered his preparations, he decided that his caches of water and food were not enough. "What if someone comes and takes this?" he asked me. To protect his wife and daughter, he said, "I don't have guns, but I have a lot of other weaponry. I took classes in archery."
"I released a lot of emotion with my drumming, but I still need to have a tantrum."
For some, it's just "brogrammer" entertainment, a kind of real-world sci-fi, with gear; for others, like Huffman, it's been a concern for years. "Ever since I saw the movie 'Deep Impact,' " he said. The film, released in 1998, depicts a comet striking the Atlantic, and a race to escape the tsunami. "Everybody's trying to get out, and they're stuck in traffic. That scene happened to be filmed near my high school. Every time I drove through that stretch of road, I would think, I need to own a motorcycle because everybody else is screwed."
Huffman has been a frequent attendee at Burning Man, the annual, clothing-optional festival in the Nevada desert, where artists mingle with moguls. He fell in love with one of its core principles, "radical self-reliance," which he takes to mean "happy to help others, but not wanting to require others." (Among survivalists, or "preppers," as some call themselves, fema, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, stands for "Foolishly Expecting Meaningful Aid.") Huffman has calculated that, in the event of a disaster, he would seek out some form of community: "Being around other people is a good thing. I also have this somewhat egotistical view that I'm a pretty good leader. I will probably be in charge, or at least not a slave, when push comes to shove."
Over the years, Huffman has become increasingly concerned about basic American political stability and the risk of large-scale unrest. He said, "Some sort of institutional collapse, then you just lose shipping—that sort of stuff." (Prepper blogs call such a scenario W.R.O.L., "without rule of law.") Huffman has come to believe that contemporary life rests on a fragile consensus. "I think, to some degree, we all collectively take it on faith that our country works, that our currency is valuable, the peaceful transfer of power—that all of these things that we hold dear work because we believe they work. While I do believe they're quite resilient, and we've been through a lot, certainly we're going to go through a lot more."
In building Reddit, a community of thousands of discussion threads, into one of the most frequently visited sites in the world, Huffman has grown aware of the way that technology alters our relations with one another, for better and for worse. He has witnessed how social media can magnify public fear. "It's easier for people to panic when they're together," he said, pointing out that "the Internet has made it easier for people to be together," yet it also alerts people to emerging risks. Long before the financial crisis became front-page news, early signs appeared in user comments on Reddit. "People were starting to whisper about mortgages. They were worried about student debt. They were worried about debt in general. There was a lot of, 'This is too good to be true. This doesn't smell right.' " He added, "There's probably some false positives in there as well, but, in general, I think we're a pretty good gauge of public sentiment. When we're talking about a faith-based collapse, you're going to start to see the chips in the foundation on social media first."
Those impulses are not as contradictory as they seem. Technology rewards the ability to imagine wildly different futures, Roy Bahat, the head of Bloomberg Beta, a San Francisco-based venture-capital firm, told me. "When you do that, it's pretty common that you take things ad infinitum, and that leads you to utopias and dystopias," he said. It can inspire radical optimism—such as the cryonics movement, which calls for freezing bodies at death in the hope that science will one day revive them—or bleak scenarios. Tim Chang, the venture capitalist who keeps his bags packed, told me, "My current state of mind is oscillating between optimism and sheer terror."
In recent years, survivalism has been edging deeper into mainstream culture. In 2012, National Geographic Channel launched "Doomsday Preppers," a reality show featuring a series of Americans bracing for what they called S.H.T.F. (when the "shit hits the fan"). The première drew more than four million viewers, and, by the end of the first season, it was the most popular show in the channel's history. A survey commissioned by National Geographic found that forty per cent of Americans believed that stocking up on supplies or building a bomb shelter was a wiser investment than a 401(k). Online, the prepper discussions run from folksy ("A Mom's Guide to Preparing for Civil Unrest") to grim ("How to Eat a Pine Tree to Survive").
The reëlection of Barack Obama was a boon for the prepping industry. Conservative devotees, who accused Obama of stoking racial tensions, restricting gun rights, and expanding the national debt, loaded up on the types of freeze-dried cottage cheese and beef stroganoff promoted by commentators like Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity. A network of "readiness" trade shows attracted conventioneers with classes on suturing (practiced on a pig trotter) and photo opportunities with survivalist stars from the TV show "Naked and Afraid."
The living room of an apartment at the Survival Condo Project.Photograph by Dan Winters for The New Yorker
The fears were different in Silicon Valley. Around the same time that Huffman, on Reddit, was watching the advance of the financial crisis, Justin Kan heard the first inklings of survivalism among his peers. Kan co-founded Twitch, a gaming network that was later sold to Amazon for nearly a billion dollars. "Some of my friends were, like, 'The breakdown of society is imminent. We should stockpile food,' " he said. "I tried to. But then we got a couple of bags of rice and five cans of tomatoes. We would have been dead if there was actually a real problem." I asked Kan what his prepping friends had in common. "Lots of money and resources," he said. "What are the other things I can worry about and prepare for? It's like insurance."
Yishan Wong, an early Facebook employee, was the C.E.O. of Reddit from 2012 to 2014. He, too, had eye surgery for survival purposes, eliminating his dependence, as he put it, "on a nonsustainable external aid for perfect vision." In an e-mail, Wong told me, "Most people just assume improbable events don't happen, but technical people tend to view risk very mathematically." He continued, "The tech preppers do not necessarily think a collapse is likely. They consider it a remote event, but one with a very severe downside, so, given how much money they have, spending a fraction of their net worth to hedge against this . . . is a logical thing to do."
How many wealthy Americans are really making preparations for a catastrophe? It's hard to know exactly; a lot of people don't like to talk about it. ("Anonymity is priceless," one hedge-fund manager told me, declining an interview.) Sometimes the topic emerges in unexpected ways. Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn and a prominent investor, recalls telling a friend that he was thinking of visiting New Zealand. "Oh, are you going to get apocalypse insurance?" the friend asked. "I'm, like, Huh?" Hoffman told me. New Zealand, he discovered, is a favored refuge in the event of a cataclysm. Hoffman said, "Saying you're 'buying a house in New Zealand' is kind of a wink, wink, say no more. Once you've done the Masonic handshake, they'll be, like, 'Oh, you know, I have a broker who sells old ICBM silos, and they're nuclear-hardened, and they kind of look like they would be interesting to live in.' "
I asked Hoffman to estimate what share of fellow Silicon Valley billionaires have acquired some level of "apocalypse insurance," in the form of a hideaway in the U.S. or abroad. "I would guess fifty-plus per cent," he said, "but that's parallel with the decision to buy a vacation home. Human motivation is complex, and I think people can say, 'I now have a safety blanket for this thing that scares me.' " The fears vary, but many worry that, as artificial intelligence takes away a growing share of jobs, there will be a backlash against Silicon Valley, America's second-highest concentration of wealth. (Southwestern Connecticut is first.) "I've heard this theme from a bunch of people," Hoffman said. "Is the country going to turn against the wealthy? Is it going to turn against technological innovation? Is it going to turn into civil disorder?"
The C.E.O. of another large tech company told me, "It's still not at the point where industry insiders would turn to each other with a straight face and ask what their plans are for some apocalyptic event." He went on, "But, having said that, I actually think it's logically rational and appropriately conservative." He noted the vulnerabilities exposed by the Russian cyberattack on the Democratic National Committee, and also by a large-scale hack on October 21st, which disrupted the Internet in North America and Western Europe. "Our food supply is dependent on G.P.S., logistics, and weather forecasting," he said, "and those systems are generally dependent on the Internet, and the Internet is dependent on D.N.S."—the system that manages domain names. "Go risk factor by risk factor by risk factor, acknowledging that there are many you don't even know about, and you ask, 'What's the chance of this breaking in the next decade?' Or invert it: 'What's the chance that nothing breaks in fifty years?' "
One measure of survivalism's spread is that some people are starting to speak out against it. Max Levchin, a founder of PayPal and of Affirm, a lending startup, told me, "It's one of the few things about Silicon Valley that I actively dislike—the sense that we are superior giants who move the needle and, even if it's our own failure, must be spared."
To Levchin, prepping for survival is a moral miscalculation; he prefers to "shut down party conversations" on the topic. "I typically ask people, 'So you're worried about the pitchforks. How much money have you donated to your local homeless shelter?' This connects the most, in my mind, to the realities of the income gap. All the other forms of fear that people bring up are artificial." In his view, this is the time to invest in solutions, not escape. "At the moment, we're actually at a relatively benign point of the economy. When the economy heads south, you will have a bunch of people that are in really bad shape. What do we expect then?"
"I said, 'Crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentation of the women,' but the media took that totally out of context."
On the opposite side of the country, similar awkward conversations have been unfolding in some financial circles. Robert H. Dugger worked as a lobbyist for the financial industry before he became a partner at the global hedge fund Tudor Investment Corporation, in 1993. After seventeen years, he retired to focus on philanthropy and his investments. "Anyone who's in this community knows people who are worried that America is heading toward something like the Russian Revolution," he told me recently.
To manage that fear, Dugger said, he has seen two very different responses. "People know the only real answer is, Fix the problem," he said. "It's a reason most of them give a lot of money to good causes." At the same time, though, they invest in the mechanics of escape. He recalled a dinner in New York City after 9/11 and the bursting of the dot-com bubble: "A group of centi-millionaires and a couple of billionaires were working through end-of-America scenarios and talking about what they'd do. Most said they'll fire up their planes and take their families to Western ranches or homes in other countries." One of the guests was skeptical, Dugger said. "He leaned forward and asked, 'Are you taking your pilot's family, too? And what about the maintenance guys? If revolutionaries are kicking in doors, how many of the people in your life will you have to take with you?' The questioning continued. In the end, most agreed they couldn't run."
Élite anxiety cuts across political lines. Even financiers who supported Trump for President, hoping that he would cut taxes and regulations, have been unnerved at the ways his insurgent campaign seems to have hastened a collapse of respect for established institutions. Dugger said, "The media is under attack now. They wonder, Is the court system next? Do we go from 'fake news' to 'fake evidence'? For people whose existence depends on enforceable contracts, this is life or death."
Robert A. Johnson sees his peers' talk of fleeing as the symptom of a deeper crisis. At fifty-nine, Johnson has tousled silver hair and a soft-spoken, avuncular composure. He earned degrees in electrical engineering and economics at M.I.T., got a Ph.D. in economics at Princeton, and worked on Capitol Hill, before entering finance. He became a managing director at the hedge fund Soros Fund Management. In 2009, after the onset of the financial crisis, he was named head of a think tank, the Institute for New Economic Thinking.
When I visited Johnson, not long ago, at his office on Park Avenue South, he described himself as an accidental student of civic anxiety. He grew up outside Detroit, in Grosse Pointe Park, the son of a doctor, and he watched his father's generation experience the fracturing of Detroit. "What I'm seeing now in New York City is sort of like old music coming back," he said. "These are friends of mine. I used to live in Belle Haven, in Greenwich, Connecticut. Louis Bacon, Paul Tudor Jones, and Ray Dalio"—hedge-fund managers—"were all within fifty yards of me. From my own career, I would just talk to people. More and more were saying, 'You've got to have a private plane. You have to assure that the pilot's family will be taken care of, too. They have to be on the plane.' "
By January, 2015, Johnson was sounding the alarm: the tensions produced by acute income inequality were becoming so pronounced that some of the world's wealthiest people were taking steps to protect themselves. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Johnson told the audience, "I know hedge-fund managers all over the world who are buying airstrips and farms in places like New Zealand because they think they need a getaway."
Johnson wishes that the wealthy would adopt a greater "spirit of stewardship," an openness to policy change that could include, for instance, a more aggressive tax on inheritance. "Twenty-five hedge-fund managers make more money than all of the kindergarten teachers in America combined," he said. "Being one of those twenty-five doesn't feel good. I think they've developed a heightened sensitivity." The gap is widening further. In December, the National Bureau of Economic Research published a new analysis, by the economists Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman, which found that half of American adults have been "completely shut off from economic growth since the 1970s." Approximately a hundred and seventeen million people earn, on average, the same income that they did in 1980, while the typical income for the top one per cent has nearly tripled. That gap is comparable to the gap between average incomes in the U.S. and the Democratic Republic of Congo, the authors wrote.
Johnson said, "If we had a more equal distribution of income, and much more money and energy going into public school systems, parks and recreation, the arts, and health care, it could take an awful lot of sting out of society. We've largely dismantled those things."
On a cool evening in early November, I rented a car in Wichita, Kansas, and drove north from the city through slanting sunlight, across the suburbs and out beyond the last shopping center, where the horizon settles into farmland. After a couple of hours, just before the town of Concordia, I headed west, down a dirt track flanked by corn and soybean fields, winding through darkness until my lights settled on a large steel gate. A guard, dressed in camouflage, held a semiautomatic rifle.
He ushered me through, and, in the darkness, I could see the outline of a vast concrete dome, with a metal blast door partly ajar. I was greeted by Larry Hall, the C.E.O. of the Survival Condo Project, a fifteen-story luxury apartment complex built in an underground Atlas missile silo. The facility housed a nuclear warhead from 1961 to 1965, when it was decommissioned. At a site conceived for the Soviet nuclear threat, Hall has erected a defense against the fears of a new era. "It's true relaxation for the ultra-wealthy," he said. "They can come out here, they know there are armed guards outside. The kids can run around."
Hall got the idea for the project about a decade ago, when he read that the federal government was reinvesting in catastrophe planning, which had languished after the Cold War. During the September 11th attacks, the Bush Administration activated a "continuity of government" plan, transporting selected federal workers by helicopter and bus to fortified locations, but, after years of disuse, computers and other equipment in the bunkers were out of date. Bush ordered a renewed focus on continuity plans, and fema launched annual government-wide exercises. (The most recent, Eagle Horizon, in 2015, simulated hurricanes, improvised nuclear devices, earthquakes, and cyberattacks.)
"I started saying, 'Well, wait a minute, what does the government know that we don't know?' " Hall said. In 2008, he paid three hundred thousand dollars for the silo and finished construction in December, 2012, at a cost of nearly twenty million dollars. He created twelve private apartments: full-floor units were advertised at three million dollars; a half-floor was half the price. He has sold every unit, except one for himself, he said.
Most preppers don't actually have bunkers; hardened shelters are expensive and complicated to build. The original silo of Hall's complex was built by the Army Corps of Engineers to withstand a nuclear strike. The interior can support a total of seventy-five people. It has enough food and fuel for five years off the grid; by raising tilapia in fish tanks, and hydroponic vegetables under grow lamps, with renewable power, it could function indefinitely, Hall said. In a crisis, his swat-team-style trucks ("the Pit-Bull VX, armored up to fifty-calibre") will pick up any owner within four hundred miles. Residents with private planes can land in Salina, about thirty miles away. In his view, the Army Corps did the hardest work by choosing the location. "They looked at height above sea level, the seismology of an area, how close it is to large population centers," he said.
Hall, in his late fifties, is barrel-chested and talkative. He studied business and computers at the Florida Institute of Technology and went on to specialize in networks and data centers for Northrop Grumman, Harris Corporation, and other defense contractors. He now goes back and forth between the Kansas silo and a home in the Denver suburbs, where his wife, a paralegal, lives with their twelve-year-old son.
Hall led me through the garage, down a ramp, and into a lounge, with a stone fireplace, a dining area, and a kitchen to one side. It had the feel of a ski condo without windows: pool table, stainless-steel appliances, leather couches. To maximize space, Hall took ideas from cruise-ship design. We were accompanied by Mark Menosky, an engineer who manages day-to-day operations. While they fixed dinner—steak, baked potatoes, and salad—Hall said that the hardest part of the project was sustaining life underground. He studied how to avoid depression (add more lights), prevent cliques (rotate chores), and simulate life aboveground. The condo walls are fitted with L.E.D. "windows" that show a live video of the prairie above the silo. Owners can opt instead for pine forests or other vistas. One prospective resident from New York City wanted video of Central Park. "All four seasons, day and night," Menosky said. "She wanted the sounds, the taxis and the honking horns."
Some survivalists disparage Hall for creating an exclusive refuge for the wealthy and have threatened to seize his bunker in a crisis. Hall waved away this possibility when I raised it with him over dinner. "You can send all the bullets you want into this place." If necessary, his guards would return fire, he said. "We've got a sniper post."
The swimming pool at Larry Hall's Survival Condo Project. These days, when North Korea tests a bomb, Hall can expect an uptick in phone inquiries about space in the complex.Photograph by Dan Winters for The New Yorker
Recently, I spoke on the phone with Tyler Allen, a real-estate developer in Lake Mary, Florida, who told me that he paid three million dollars for one of Hall's condos. Allen said he worries that America faces a future of "social conflict" and government efforts to deceive the public. He suspects that the Ebola virus was allowed to enter the country in order to weaken the population. When I asked how friends usually respond to his ideas, he said, "The natural reaction that you get most of the time is for them to laugh, because it scares them." But, he added, "my credibility has gone through the roof. Ten years ago, this just seemed crazy that all this was going to happen: the social unrest and the cultural divide in the country, the race-baiting and the hate-mongering." I asked how he planned to get to Kansas from Florida in a crisis. "If a dirty bomb goes off in Miami, everybody's going to go in their house and congregate in bars, just glued to the TV. Well, you've got forty-eight hours to get the hell out of there."
Allen told me that, in his view, taking precautions is unfairly stigmatized. "They don't put tinfoil on your head if you're the President and you go to Camp David," he said. "But they do put tinfoil on your head if you have the means and you take steps to protect your family should a problem occur."
Why do our dystopian urges emerge at certain moments and not others? Doomsday—as a prophecy, a literary genre, and a business opportunity—is never static; it evolves with our anxieties. The earliest Puritan settlers saw in the awe-inspiring bounty of the American wilderness the prospect of both apocalypse and paradise. When, in May of 1780, sudden darkness settled on New England, farmers perceived it as a cataclysm heralding the return of Christ. (In fact, the darkness was caused by enormous wildfires in Ontario.) D. H. Lawrence diagnosed a specific strain of American dread. "Doom! Doom! Doom!" he wrote in 1923. "Something seems to whisper it in the very dark trees of America."
Historically, our fascination with the End has flourished at moments of political insecurity and rapid technological change. "In the late nineteenth century, there were all sorts of utopian novels, and each was coupled with a dystopian novel," Richard White, a historian at Stanford University, told me. Edward Bellamy's "Looking Backward," published in 1888, depicted a socialist paradise in the year 2000, and became a sensation, inspiring "Bellamy Clubs" around the country. Conversely, Jack London, in 1908, published "The Iron Heel," imagining an America under a fascist oligarchy in which "nine-tenths of one per cent" hold "seventy per cent of the total wealth."
At the time, Americans were marvelling at engineering advances—attendees at the 1893 World's Fair, in Chicago, beheld new uses for electric light—but were also protesting low wages, poor working conditions, and corporate greed. "It was very much like today," White said. "It was a sense that the political system had spun out of control, and was no longer able to deal with society. There was a huge inequity in wealth, a stirring of working classes. Life spans were getting shorter. There was a feeling that America's advance had stopped, and the whole thing was going to break."
Business titans grew uncomfortable. In 1889, Andrew Carnegie, who was on his way to being the richest man in the world, worth more than four billion in today's dollars, wrote, with concern, about class tensions; he criticized the emergence of "rigid castes" living in "mutual ignorance" and "mutual distrust." John D. Rockefeller, of Standard Oil, America's first actual billionaire, felt a Christian duty to give back. "The novelty of being able to purchase anything one wants soon passes," he wrote, in 1909, "because what people most seek cannot be bought with money." Carnegie went on to fight illiteracy by creating nearly three thousand public libraries. Rockefeller founded the University of Chicago. According to Joel Fleishman, the author of "The Foundation," a study of American philanthropy, both men dedicated themselves to "changing the systems that produced those ills in the first place."
During the Cold War, Armageddon became a matter for government policymakers. The Federal Civil Defense Administration, created by Harry Truman, issued crisp instructions for surviving a nuclear strike, including "Jump in any handy ditch or gutter" and "Never lose your head." In 1958, Dwight Eisenhower broke ground on Project Greek Island, a secret shelter, in the mountains of West Virginia, large enough for every member of Congress. Hidden beneath the Greenbrier Resort, in White Sulphur Springs, for more than thirty years, it maintained separate chambers-in-waiting for the House and the Senate. (Congress now plans to shelter at undisclosed locations.) There was also a secret plan to whisk away the Gettysburg Address, from the Library of Congress, and the Declaration of Independence, from the National Archives.
But in 1961 John F. Kennedy encouraged "every citizen" to help build fallout shelters, saying, in a televised address, "I know you would not want to do less." In 1976, tapping into fear of inflation and the Arab oil embargo, a far-right publisher named Kurt Saxon launched The Survivor, an influential newsletter that celebrated forgotten pioneer skills. (Saxon claimed to have coined the term "survivalist.") The growing literature on decline and self-protection included "How to Prosper During the Coming Bad Years," a 1979 best-seller, which advised collecting gold in the form of South African Krugerrands. The "doom boom," as it became known, expanded under Ronald Reagan. The sociologist Richard G. Mitchell, Jr., a professor emeritus at Oregon State University, who spent twelve years studying survivalism, said, "During the Reagan era, we heard, for the first time in my life, and I'm seventy-four years old, from the highest authorities in the land that government has failed you, the collective institutional ways of solving problems and understanding society are no good. People said, 'O.K., it's flawed. What do I do now?' "
A dental chair in the Survival Condo Project's "medical wing," which also contains a hospital bed and a procedure table. Among the residents, Hall said, "we've got two doctors and a dentist."Photograph by Dan Winters for The New Yorker
The movement received another boost from the George W. Bush Administration's mishandling of Hurricane Katrina. Neil Strauss, a former Times reporter, who chronicled his turn to prepping in his book "Emergency," told me, "We see New Orleans, where our government knows a disaster is happening, and is powerless to save its own citizens." Strauss got interested in survivalism a year after Katrina, when a tech entrepreneur who was taking flying lessons and hatching escape plans introduced him to a group of like-minded "billionaire and centi-millionaire preppers." Strauss acquired citizenship in St. Kitts, put assets in foreign currencies, and trained to survive with "nothing but a knife and the clothes on my back."
These days, when North Korea tests a bomb, Hall can expect an uptick of phone inquiries about space in the Survival Condo Project. But he points to a deeper source of demand. "Seventy per cent of the country doesn't like the direction that things are going," he said. After dinner, Hall and Menosky gave me a tour. The complex is a tall cylinder that resembles a corncob. Some levels are dedicated to private apartments and others offer shared amenities: a seventy-five-foot-long pool, a rock-climbing wall, an Astro-Turf "pet park," a classroom with a line of Mac desktops, a gym, a movie theatre, and a library. It felt compact but not claustrophobic. We visited an armory packed with guns and ammo in case of an attack by non-members, and then a bare-walled room with a toilet. "We can lock people up and give them an adult time-out," he said. In general, the rules are set by a condo association, which can vote to amend them. During a crisis, a "life-or-death situation," Hall said, each adult would be required to work for four hours a day, and would not be allowed to leave without permission. "There's controlled access in and out, and it's governed by the board," he said.
The "medical wing" contains a hospital bed, a procedure table, and a dentist's chair. Among the residents, Hall said, "we've got two doctors and a dentist." One floor up, we visited the food-storage area, still unfinished. He hopes that, once it's fully stocked, it will feel like a "miniature Whole Foods," but for now it holds mostly cans of food.
We stopped in a condo. Nine-foot ceilings, Wolf range, gas fireplace. "This guy wanted to have a fireplace from his home state"—Connecticut—"so he shipped me the granite," Hall said. Another owner, with a home in Bermuda, ordered the walls of his bunker-condo painted in island pastels—orange, green, yellow—but, in close quarters, he found it oppressive. His decorator had to come fix it.
That night, I slept in a guest room appointed with a wet bar and handsome wood cabinets, but no video windows. It was eerily silent, and felt like sleeping in a well-furnished submarine.
I emerged around eight the next morning to find Hall and Menosky in the common area, drinking coffee and watching a campaign-news brief on "Fox & Friends." It was five days before the election, and Hall, who is a Republican, described himself as a cautious Trump supporter. "Of the two running, I'm hoping that his business acumen will override some of his knee-jerk stuff." Watching Trump and Clinton rallies on television, he was struck by how large and enthusiastic Trump's crowds appeared. "I just don't believe the polls," he said.
He thinks that mainstream news organizations are biased, and he subscribes to theories that he knows some find implausible. He surmised that "there is a deliberate move by the people in Congress to dumb America down." Why would Congress do that? I asked. "They don't want people to be smart to see what's going on in politics," he said. He told me he had read a prediction that forty per cent of Congress will be arrested, because of a scheme involving the Panama Papers, the Catholic Church, and the Clinton Foundation. "They've been working on this investigation for twenty years," he said. I asked him if he really believed that. "At first, you hear this stuff and go, Yeah, right," he said. But he wasn't ruling it out.
Before I headed back to Wichita, we stopped at Hall's latest project—a second underground complex, in a silo twenty-five miles away. As we pulled up, a crane loomed overhead, hoisting debris from deep below the surface. The complex will contain three times the living space of the original, in part because the garage will be moved to a separate structure. Among other additions, it will have a bowling alley and L.E.D. windows as large as French doors, to create a feeling of openness.
Hall said that he was working on private bunkers for clients in Idaho and Texas, and that two technology companies had asked him to design "a secure facility for their data center and a safe haven for their key personnel, if something were to happen." To accommodate demand, he has paid for the possibility to buy four more silos.
If a silo in Kansas is not remote or private enough, there is another option. In the first seven days after Donald Trump's election, 13,401 Americans registered with New Zealand's immigration authorities, the first official step toward seeking residency—more than seventeen times the usual rate. The New Zealand Herald reported the surge beneath the headline "trump apocalypse."
The shooting range at the Survival Condo Project. Hall said that the hardest part of the project was sustaining life underground. He studied how to avoid depression (add more lights) and prevent cliques (rotate chores).Photograph by Dan Winters for The New Yorker
In fact, the influx had begun well before Trump's victory. In the first ten months of 2016, foreigners bought nearly fourteen hundred square miles of land in New Zealand, more than quadruple what they bought in the same period the previous year, according to the government. American buyers were second only to Australians. The U.S. government does not keep a tally of Americans who own second or third homes overseas. Much as Switzerland once drew Americans with the promise of secrecy, and Uruguay tempted them with private banks, New Zealand offers security and distance. In the past six years, nearly a thousand foreigners have acquired residency there under programs that mandate certain types of investment of at least a million dollars.
Jack Matthews, an American who is the chairman of MediaWorks, a large New Zealand broadcaster, told me, "I think, in the back of people's minds, frankly, is that, if the world really goes to shit, New Zealand is a First World country, completely self-sufficient, if necessary—energy, water, food. Life would deteriorate, but it would not collapse." As someone who views American politics from a distance, he said, "The difference between New Zealand and the U.S., to a large extent, is that people who disagree with each other can still talk to each other about it here. It's a tiny little place, and there's no anonymity. People have to actually have a degree of civility."
Auckland is a thirteen-hour flight from San Francisco. I arrived in early December, the beginning of New Zealand's summer: blue skies, mid-seventies, no humidity. Top to bottom, the island chain runs roughly the distance between Maine and Florida, with half the population of New York City. Sheep outnumber people seven to one. In global rankings, New Zealand is in the top ten for democracy, clean government, and security. (Its last encounter with terrorism was in 1985, when French spies bombed a Greenpeace ship.) In a recent World Bank report, New Zealand had supplanted Singapore as the best country in the world to do business.
The morning after I arrived, I was picked up at my hotel by Graham Wall, a cheerful real-estate agent who specializes in what his profession describes as high-net-worth individuals, "H.N.W.I." Wall, whose clients include Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist, was surprised when Americans told him they were coming precisely because of the country's remoteness. "Kiwis used to talk about the 'tyranny of distance,' " Wall said, as we crossed town in his Mercedes convertible. "Now the tyranny of distance is our greatest asset."
Before my trip, I had wondered if I was going to be spending more time in luxury bunkers. But Peter Campbell, the managing director of Triple Star Management, a New Zealand construction firm, told me that, by and large, once his American clients arrive, they decide that underground shelters are gratuitous. "It's not like you need to build a bunker under your front lawn, because you're several thousand miles away from the White House," he said. Americans have other requests. "Definitely, helipads are a big one," he said. "You can fly a private jet into Queenstown or a private jet into Wanaka, and then you can grab a helicopter and it can take you and land you at your property." American clients have also sought strategic advice. "They're asking, 'Where in New Zealand is not going to be long-term affected by rising sea levels?' "
The growing foreign appetite for New Zealand property has generated a backlash. The Campaign Against Foreign Control of Aotearoa—the Maori name for New Zealand—opposes sales to foreigners. In particular, the attention of American survivalists has generated resentment. In a discussion about New Zealand on the Modern Survivalist, a prepper Web site, a commentator wrote, "Yanks, get this in your heads. Aotearoa NZ is not your little last resort safe haven."
An American hedge-fund manager in his forties—tall, tanned, athletic—recently bought two houses in New Zealand and acquired local residency. He agreed to tell me about his thinking, if I would not publish his name. Brought up on the East Coast, he said, over coffee, that he expects America to face at least a decade of political turmoil, including racial tension, polarization, and a rapidly aging population. "The country has turned into the New York area, the California area, and then everyone else is wildly different in the middle," he said. He worries that the economy will suffer if Washington scrambles to fund Social Security and Medicare for people who need it. "Do you default on that obligation? Or do you print more money to give to them? What does that do to the value of the dollar? It's not a next-year problem, but it's not fifty years away, either."
New Zealand's reputation for attracting doomsayers is so well known in the hedge-fund manager's circle that he prefers to differentiate himself from earlier arrivals. He said, "This is no longer about a handful of freaks worried about the world ending." He laughed, and added, "Unless I'm one of those freaks."
Every year since 1947, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a magazine founded by members of the Manhattan Project, has gathered a group of Nobel laureates and other luminaries to update the Doomsday Clock, a symbolic gauge of our risk of wrecking civilization. In 1991, as the Cold War was ending, the scientists set the clock to its safest point ever—seventeen minutes to "midnight."
"I accidentally picked up my daughter's backpack this morning."JUNE 28, 2010
Since then, the direction has been inauspicious. In January, 2016, after increasing military tensions between Russia and nato, and the Earth's warmest year on record, the Bulletin set the clock at three minutes to midnight, the same level it held at the height of the Cold War. In November, after Trump's election, the panel convened once more to conduct its annual confidential discussion. If it chooses to move the clock forward by one minute, that will signal a level of alarm not witnessed since 1953, after America's first test of the hydrogen bomb. (The result will be released January 26th.)
As Huffman, of Reddit, observed, our technologies have made us more alert to risk, but have also made us more panicky; they facilitate the tribal temptation to cocoon, to seclude ourselves from opponents, and to fortify ourselves against our fears, instead of attacking the sources of them. Justin Kan, the technology investor who had made a halfhearted effort to stock up on food, recalled a recent phone call from a friend at a hedge fund. "He was telling me we should buy land in New Zealand as a backup. He's, like, 'What's the percentage chance that Trump is actually a fascist dictator? Maybe it's low, but the expected value of having an escape hatch is pretty high.' "
There are other ways to absorb the anxieties of our time. "If I had a billion dollars, I wouldn't buy a bunker," Elli Kaplan, the C.E.O. of the digital health startup Neurotrack, told me. "I would reinvest in civil society and civil innovation. My view is you figure out even smarter ways to make sure that something terrible doesn't happen." Kaplan, who worked in the White House under Bill Clinton, was appalled by Trump's victory, but said that it galvanized her in a different way: "Even in my deepest fear, I say, 'Our union is stronger than this.' "
That view is, in the end, an article of faith—a conviction that even degraded political institutions are the best instruments of common will, the tools for fashioning and sustaining our fragile consensus. Believing that is a choice.
I called a Silicon Valley sage, Stewart Brand, the author and entrepreneur whom Steve Jobs credited as an inspiration. In the sixties and seventies, Brand's "Whole Earth Catalog" attracted a cult following, with its mixture of hippie and techie advice. (The motto: "We are as gods and might as well get good at it.") Brand told me that he explored survivalism in the seventies, but not for long. "Generally, I find the idea that 'Oh, my God, the world's all going to fall apart' strange," he said.
At seventy-seven, living on a tugboat in Sausalito, Brand is less impressed by signs of fragility than by examples of resilience. In the past decade, the world survived, without violence, the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression; Ebola, without cataclysm; and, in Japan, a tsunami and nuclear meltdown, after which the country has persevered. He sees risks in escapism. As Americans withdraw into smaller circles of experience, we jeopardize the "larger circle of empathy," he said, the search for solutions to shared problems. "The easy question is, How do I protect me and mine? The more interesting question is, What if civilization actually manages continuity as well as it has managed it for the past few centuries? What do we do if it just keeps on chugging?"
After a few days in New Zealand, I could see why one might choose to avoid either question. Under a cerulean blue sky one morning in Auckland, I boarded a helicopter beside a thirty-eight-year-old American named Jim Rohrstaff. After college, in Michigan, Rohrstaff worked as a golf pro, and then in the marketing of luxury golf clubs and property. Upbeat and confident, with shining blue eyes, he moved to New Zealand two and a half years ago, with his wife and two children, to sell property to H.N.W.I. who want to get "far away from all the issues of the world," he said.
Rohrstaff, who co-owns Legacy Partners, a boutique brokerage, wanted me to see Tara Iti, a new luxury-housing development and golf club that appeals mostly to Americans. The helicopter nosed north across the harbor and banked up the coast, across lush forests and fields beyond the city. From above, the sea was a sparkling expanse, scalloped by the wind.
The helicopter eased down onto a lawn beside a putting green. The new luxury community will have three thousand acres of dunes and forestland, and seven miles of coastline, for just a hundred and twenty-five homes. As we toured the site in a Land Rover, he emphasized the seclusion: "From the outside, you won't see anything. That's better for the public and better for us, for privacy."
As we neared the sea, Rohrstaff parked the Land Rover and climbed out. In his loafers, he marched over the dunes and led me down into the sand, until we reached a stretch of beach that extended to the horizon without a soul in sight.
Waves roared ashore. He spread his arms, turned, and laughed. "We think it's the place to be in the future," he said. For the first time in weeks—months, even—I wasn't thinking about Trump. Or much of anything. ♦
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