Underground skyscrapers and off-grid bunkers: inside the world of preppers

One thing that appeals to him about prepping is a newfound sense of agency. “We’re all familiar with dread, aren’t we? Well, dread is unbearable because it has no object, so you can’t do anything about it. Overcoming the dread is what it’s about. When we give shape to the things we dread, we make them manageable.” Having agency in the face of disaster is particularly appealing to Americans in 2020, he argues. Garrett grimly offers a reminder of the fact that Trump in 2018 dismantled the Obama-created National Security Council directorate charged with preparing for a pandemic. “When the government doesn’t prepare for emergencies, you do it yourself.”

Garrett’s suggestion is that behind such ill-advised cutbacks lurks the uber-disruptor Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist. For Bannon, short-term disaster is to be welcomed, perhaps even provoked, since it can be used to leverage power. Garrett notes that Bannon would arrive for White House meetings with a book called The Fourth Turning under his arm. That book, by William Strauss and Neil Howe, proposed a cyclical understanding of history called generational theory, which holds that major events take place in 100-year cycles. Each cycle is made up of “seasons” lasting roughly 25 years: growth (The High), maturation (The Awakening), entropy (The Unravelling), and destruction (The Crisis). For the past 20 years, the US has been in entropy. But after entropy, narcissism and spiritual decay comes revivifying destruction. At least, so Bannon argued in his 2010 film Generation Zero.

But if cultivating chaos for political ends sounds like a manifestation of American exeptionalism, Garrett suggests we should consider what happened in 2017 at a hotel in London. Bannon and Jacob Rees-Mogg met to discuss how to further the conservative cause in the UK. Garrett writes: “It seems no small coincidence that both men were the puppet masters behind what we might call ‘pro-collapse governments’ in both the US and UK. Leaders in these movements see chaos as an opportunity to seize wealth and power.”

What’s more, Garrett reminds us, Rees-Mogg’s father, William, was one of the authors of the 1997 neoliberal text The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive during the Collapse of the Welfare State, which opens with the quote “The future is disorder”, from Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia and predicts that digital technology will make the world hugely more competitive, unequal and unstable.
— Read on www.theguardian.com/books/2020/mar/27/underground-skyscrapers-and-off-grid-bunkers-inside-the-world-of-preppers