Paul Beckwith Mar 4, 2023
Over the last week or so I read the new book by Douglas Rushkoff called “Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires”.
The book gives many fascinating insights into the Mindset of many billionaires, their worldview that we are heading to societal collapse, and how they are hoping to survive in bunkers or on remote islands in the event of global catastrophe.
The core of the book is how Rushkoff was invited to an exclusive resort in the middle of the desert, for one-third his annual professor salary, to what he thought was a talk to a hundred of the wealthiest people. Instead, he met with five billionaires and peppered with questions such as “New Zealand or Alaska?”; what’s the best place to be to survive climate catastrophe causing societal collapse.
I found the book fascinating, so I chat about the ideas and thoughts of the super elite, who are much more concerned about saving their own hides than they are about the well-being of the people on the planet; they just want to escape. They make little effort to “save humanity” and are absolutely certain societal order and civilization will soon collapse. The more money and power they accumulate, the less empathy they have for others, borne out by studies measuring brain activity patterns.
I have often said that we need to take the entire military budget of the USA (about 800 Billion $ for 2023) and use it to fight climate change for a few years. That’s a tough sell, but one billionaire near the top of the heap has about one third of that amount, so the top three or four billionaires could match that amount. Utopian, I know, but times are getting very desperate.
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See related:
- Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires
- Misplaced Metaphors in the Anthropocene: Beware of the Devastating Power of Cultural Clichés & Misconstrued Metaphors on a Small Planet
- Overcoming the Multiple Legacies of European Colonialism: Can The West Survive Its Most Cherished Historical Myths?
- “Just take the case of agriculture…”
- Why The World Is Running Out Of Soil
- The Vulnerability of the Global Food System and the Strategies Needed for a Sustainable “Recovery”
- The Malthus Insight and the Global Limits of “Green Revolution” Food Production
- “If you do not change direction, you will most likely end up where you are headed.”
- The Fatal Consequences of a Misplaced Metaphor: Agriculture Industry and Infinite Growth
- Killing the Soil that Feeds Us: Food, Profit & the Fatal Impact of Petro-Dependent Agriculture
- The mistake of petro-intensive agriculture – the UNA “Global Engagement Summit”
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