Doomsday Prep for the Super-Rich
Some of the wealthiest people in America—in Silicon Valley, New York, and beyond—are getting ready for the crackup of civilization.
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 García Martínez, 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, García
Martínez 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.”
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.”
How
did a preoccupation with the apocalypse come to flourish in Silicon
Valley, a place known, to the point of cliché, for unstinting confidence
in its ability to change the world for the better?
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
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?”
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.”
As
public institutions deteriorate, élite anxiety has emerged as a gauge
of our national predicament. “Why do people who are envied for being so
powerful appear to be so afraid?” Johnson asked. “What does that really
tell us about our system?” He added, “It’s a very odd thing. You’re
basically seeing that the people who’ve been the best at reading the tea
leaves—the ones with the most resources, because that’s how they made
their money—are now the ones most preparing to pull the rip cord and
jump out of the plane.”
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.”
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?’ ”
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.”
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.”
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.)
Fear
of disaster is healthy if it spurs action to prevent it. But élite
survivalism is not a step toward prevention; it is an act of withdrawal.
Philanthropy in America is still three times as large, as a share of
G.D.P., as philanthropy in the next closest country, the United Kingdom.
But it is now accompanied by a gesture of surrender, a quiet
disinvestment by some of America’s most successful and powerful people.
Faced with evidence of frailty in the American project, in the
institutions and norms from which they have benefitted, some are
permitting themselves to imagine failure. It is a gilded despair.
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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