Why Are So Many Celebrities Building Doomsday Bunkers?
How Late-Stage Capitalism Fears and Fetishizes the Apocalypse
A uniquely late-stage capitalist anxiety—a neurosis that the current social order will spontaneously come to an end (and it is all somehow, in some way, my fault!)—is spreading through some of the richest people in America. The gray, concrete manifestations of this anxiety—underground bunkers stocked with canned food and endless, pre-recorded entertainment in isolation—are a consequence of the selfish enjoyment of our decaying neoliberal order. “Don’t think about anyone else, don’t think about the future, just enjoy and record and enjoy. After all, it could end any second now.” Perhaps our cultural fear of the world ending is the final justification for the inherent selfishness of late-stage capitalism.
The neurosis that the world will suddenly cease to exist is antithetical to reality. Yet, there are perfectly healthy, sane, and “normal” individuals who also happen to believe that the world will end at any second from nuclear war, climate change, or economic collapse. Billionaires like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk have reportedly constructed concrete underground bunkers in deserts and remote locations. The phenomenon of rich celebrities constructing end-of-the-world bunkers is becoming increasingly common as the conversation around the apocalypse grows louder.
The neurosis seems to be societal. It is spread throughout our cultural lifeworld so that no one person snaps from all the pressure. Few say it outright: If they do, they’re mocked or scorned. Instead, our fear that the world will end is always hinted at, with thousands of climate-disaster and zombie-apocalypse movies at the box office. The fear of the end of the world is embedded in our cultural unconscious—never at the tip of our tongues, but always there.
The easy answer to the phenomenon of celebrities building doomsday bunkers is that they, like children, were too scared by these post-apocalyptic pieces of media. Unlike children, celebrities have the resources to construct a child-like deterrent against their wildest fears. But a whole subculture of non-celebrity “doomsday preppers” (people who are preparing for the end of the world) formed around these fears prior to the celebrities who appropriated their practices of building bunkers and stocking up on MREs.
People take pride in their end-of-the-world luxuries. It isn’t just a bunker somebody constructs; it is an obsession. Perhaps the reason people construct apocalypse bunkers isn’t just unhealthy fear (a negative motivator), but a desire to dominate this post-apocalyptic world. But how does one differentiate between the desire to dominate the post-apocalyptic world and the fear that they will starve in a post-apocalyptic world?
The fear of an entity transforms into a desire to dominate that entity, and one of the methods of doing so is culture. Take post-9/11 mass panic: The culture around 9/11 began as fear of retaliation, then that fear turned into a desire to commit a great act of vengeance. The result was a war for which the cause simply did not exist—namely, the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Perhaps the same process is happening with the end of the world: We are witnessing the transformation of end-of-the-world fear into end-of-the-world desire.
However, a logical transformation occurs when fear transforms into domination: the presupposition that that fear will manifest itself. To truly justify the invasion of Iraq, its weaponry was presupposed to exist. To prepare for the end of the world and to obsess over it, one must take for granted that it will occur.
At a certain point, “just in case” fails to truly justify the concrete safe houses of celebrities. The further the obsession, the more commonplace and less fringe these doomsday fantasies become, and the more we have to interrogate our underlying assumptions about the end of the world. In order to do so, we must understand the cultural roots of apocalyptic anxiety.
Media about the end of the world usually appears in two forms: an apocalypse caused by nuclear war (à la Fallout and The Road) or a climate disaster (e.g., The Day After Tomorrow and Interstellar). There are two relevant throughlines within these kinds of films: the disaster was caused by humans, and the concerns are always material. There is always an issue of not having enough water (the driving force behind Fallout 1), not having enough food, or having to fend off “savages” who are trying to steal one’s hard-earned food and water (often, these savages are mutated and grotesquely non-human).
The end of the world resembles feudalism, plain and simple. All resources are material. Intellectual property is nonexistent. Land is king. Cultural capital and the interconnectivity of the modern world have ceased to exist. Why is this the world that capitalists and celebrities desire and obsess over?
Perhaps celebrities and capitalists obsess over the post-apocalypse because the feudalistic, selfish world of movies and TV is the closest possible world to the cultural reality neoliberal media creates. By obsessing over the end of the world, they pre-justify their selfishness.
The similarities between the cultural post-apocalyptic and the neoliberal world are self-evident: There’s always a perpetual sense of danger from an Other, whether it is bandits, zombies, or mutants. Resources are inherently scarce; the apocalypse is a zero-sum game. Perhaps the most important facet of the media’s portrayal of the end of the world is that there is a moral justification for selfishness. Everyone is out to get you, and those who aren’t selfish meet their rapid end.
Almost every single cultural narrative about the end of the world attributes a base state of selfishness and cruelty to people—the same base state that capitalism presupposes. In fact, capitalism assumes that this selfishness is leveraged to create the maximum amount of value for the most people: it is people’s base selfishness that promotes technological growth and the growth of capital.
However, the contradictions between the real world and this presupposition become increasingly evident every day: Most modern technology is built on public-sector labor, and the wealth gap is getting sharper and sharper while the rich seem to get richer. The result is a real-world situation that sends back the message: Encouraging selfishness is not the best way to set up a society. Something has to change.
The capitalist, at this point, faces an existential crisis: To acknowledge that selfishness is not the best way to organize wealth would be to acknowledge that in some way, the surplus value they have drawn from their capital is inherently the product of exploitation. Their solution is to presuppose the end of the world, to fear it, to obsess over it as if it is going to happen: There, in the fantasy that they have constructed, they can safely justify their wealth: The world is truly selfish.
This logic can be extended to the cultural logic of immigration. In the real world, immigrants raise wages and lower prices for everyone. This is antithetical to both the neoliberal, zero-sum logic of Fox News and to the apocalyptic world. Thus, the language of the apocalypse is adopted regarding immigration, with immigration being touted as a crisis, a war, and finally, as an apocalypse.
What is to be done? If media about the apocalypse shapes our understanding of the real world, perhaps we need to change the media we make. More stories about real, human connection after the world ends can create a new cultural narrative framed by the idea that humans are not innately selfish and feudalistic. Games like Death Stranding, movies like Wall-E, and parts of The Last of Us have the power to change how we think about the end of the world, and may even drive us to change it, making it better for all.: Perhaps if we change the way we think about the end of the world, we can change the world itself.
 | A guest post by
|