When The Rich Become Preppers, It’s Time To Worry

When The Rich Become Preppers, It’s Time To Worry

Submitted by Chris Martenson via PeakProsperity.com,

For over 10 years now, we’ve been openly advocating that folks take action to become more prepared should crisis arrive. And for a long time, this advice relegated us to being labeled “tin-foil hat doomsday preppers” (and other less-polite monikers). The media just couldn’t figure out any other box to put us in.

But now, the concept of taking at least some responsibility for your own future well-being by increasing your self-reliance is finally moving towards the mainstream.

Of course, government agencies have long ascribed to “situational planning” in case sudden unrest were to happen. Nations around the world have long invested in redundant supply chains, as well as well-stocked disaster ‘continuity caves’, fortresses and hardened facilities of all sorts.

It’s strikes us as puzzling that most private citizens fully expect their government to be prepared for disaster like this, yet don’t see similar wisdom in practicing a similar approach to preparation in their own life. In fact, many go so far as to denigrate and even mock their friends and neighbors who do.

Perhaps that gap between what’s considered acceptable in a public institution but not in a private home is best explained as abdication of personal responsibility. It happens a lot in our society. Live your life and let the government worry about the scary stuff. They’ll take care of us if something bad happens.

We think it’s a huge error in judgment (remember Katrina, anyone?), but we understand why it’s a convenient and comforting narrative to hold. Plus, it frees up a lot more time to shop at the big box stores and keep up on the Kardashians. Life’s more fun and stress-free…right up until some unexpected disruption occurs.

Well, we here at Peak Prosperity deeply believe in shouldering our own personal responsibility. And not just to protect our own private well-being, but also that of the communities we live in and depend on.

After all, Peak Prosperity’s mission is To create a world worth inheriting. You don’t do that simply waiting to see if the calvary is ever going to show up. You assume responsibility for your own destiny, and inspire others to do the same by offering your support and serving as a living model for others to emulate.

Those expecting/demanding the State to have high emergency preparedness while not practicing the same in their own lives lack integrity. Nobody respects a low-integrity person for very long. (Pro tip:  Don’t fly your personal jet to give a lecture on the importance of addressing climate change.)

A resilient nation is built from the bottom up, starting with resilient households. Enough of those households creates resilient neighborhoods, and those in turn lead to resilient towns and cities. And then counties, and states — you get the point.

So taking steps to be partially self-sufficient in the basics of life – food, warmth, shelter and water – and have useful experience or skills (medicine, fixing things, building, distilling, to name just a few) just makes sense. You don’t have to strive to be completely self-reliant — it’s not realistic or necessary. Just position yourself to reduce your lifestyle requirements during times of strife, and to contribute valued support to those whom in turn you ask for help.

Preparing Is Rapidly Going Mainstream

For years now, I’ve written that the highly wealthy people whom I encounter through conferences, family offices and private consultations all got the “bug out” vibe after the 2008 crash, if not before. Today, many of them are more thoroughly prepped than us regular folks can imagine.

Disaster prepping is now acceptable enough that this week’s article in The New Yorker had no trouble finding high-profile executives to talk to on record. I couldn’t help noticing that the reporter avoided inferring that these folks were crazy, or implying as much. I guess once a critical mass of super wealthy tech entrepreneurs jumps on the bandwagon it’s suddenly hip to be a prepper?

At any rate, if you haven’t already seen the article, it’s a real eye-opener:

Doomsday Prep For The Super-Rich

Jan 30, 2017

 

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 focused 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.’ ”

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