It’s easy to bash and dismiss these guys - after all, they seem to live in some weird divergent reality in which the world is ending, and are looking out solely for me and mine. What assholes, right?
Well... one of those is true.
These people are not wealthy by accident. They were not gifted their riches. They have acquired their wealth through pattern recognition, through being right when (almost) everyone else was wrong.
Someone here asked me a few weeks ago why I felt travel might not be so easy in the not-too-distant future - I held my tongue. Not so now.
I spend a lot of time rubbing shoulders with these intelligent, cynical assholes - and while I lack their dizzying material wealth, I find myself having my brains picked frequently on technical solutions for the apocalypse, as I made my much smaller fortune through - you guessed it - pattern recognition. All successful businesses boil down to individuals who can, to some degree or another, predict the future.
Why does this matter? Why am I defending them?
Firstly, I’m not defending their moral worth. Some of these folks are perfectly lovely, others yet you get the feeling are thinking about asset stripping your organs, and set up dead man’s SOS timers before going to a meet, particularly if it isn’t in public.
It matters because they are almost certainly right. This interglacial period is a bug on the windshield of time. This century and a bit of liberal democracy is a mere blip on the radar. These post-war decades of unfettered growth are a fluke, an artifice built on nothing but itself.
Is the planet going to explode, Death Star style? Unlikely.
Is it going to become a place largely hostile to human life? Probably.
You might think that it’ll take a massive event - all-out war, total crop failure, diabolical climate change - but the reality is that it doesn’t take much, and the more interconnected and interdependent our world becomes, the less it takes. We haven’t created resiliency, we have created points of failure. The internet is the ultimate amplifier and feedback loop - information and its impact now spreads and distorts like never before, waves overlapping and interfering constructively and destructively, creating ripples in the fabric of human civilisation. Those amplitudes can only grow so much before said fabric starts to tear, buckle and break before the strain.
No, this is a chaotic system, with multifarious inputs, and a few well (or badly, if you rather) timed shoves will send it way off “normal”.
There are also those who have taken a page from Asimov, and are attempting to hasten the Event, as a crystal of civilisation is more likely to survive a well planned and rapid demolition than a slow, aching, chaotic collapse.
A flood here, a drought there, an insurrection over there, an environmental disaster there, a refugee crisis here, a small food shortage, an interruption to power supplies, a market crash there, a bread riot here, a mass exodus here, a closed border there, martial law here, panic there, sell-offs here, no economy here, no food here, no security here, no life here.
Not with a bang, but with a whimper.