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Phoenix666 [soylentnews.org] writes:

It's a good time to be in a fear-based industry [pulse.com.gh]. Public comments from some of the planet's richest people reveal a strain of paranoia about insurrection. At the last annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, observers noticed elites growing more alarmed about the possibility of social unrest. Last year, entrepreneur and venture capitalist Nick Hanauer published an open letter to his "Fellow Zillionaires" in Politico Magazine that summed up the growing worry among the wealthy: "What do I see in our future now? I see pitchforks."

This matches what Vicino hears. "They're going to Patagonia, they're going to remote locations of the world," he says. "Their reasoning is more to be insulated from a revolution, rebellion, anarchy, or whatever, following an economic collapse."
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Prepping can also be linked to the rise of libertarian strains of thought in American life that hold that the government is unable to properly address social and ills, or that any attempt on its part to do so would qualify as tyranny. It's a philosophy that at its most stark replaces love thy neighbor with a mystical faith in self-interest. Hiding in a bunker as the rest of humanity falls apart because they failed to prepare as you did is, in some ways, the ultimate libertarian fantasy.
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At the end of my bunker visit, I thought of a new society Vicino was trying to enable. Some of the wealthy are not only refusing to read the real writing on the wall—such as inequality being a glaring problem that requires our whole society to confront it head-on—but are living in their fantasies. To some, an escape to gold-plated survival shelters is the answer when reality falls apart for everyone else.

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