Here's Emily's co-author, Robert Kirsch, on what he believes this crowd thinks went wrong.

Yeah, so there's a group of people who kind of argue that the enlightenment of the 18th century in Europe was a mistake and that the push for democratization and establishing the sort of nation state and constitutional republics that we see a lot of around the world was a mistake.

that people can't be trusted to govern themselves, that we cannot trust the wisdom of the demos, right? The root word of democracy.

We can't trust people to make decisions regarding their own affairs, right? And what is preferable to that for these folks is, like I was saying, this monarchical model or a corporate model.

Some have even called it that they think the USA should be replaced with GovCorp, which is a corporate model of governance that is effectively run like a Fortune 500 company or something.

The room that one finds in there for... human flourishing, for civic education, for voluntary organizations, all those things in civil society that kind of make our political society, I think what we recognize it as, those are all gone.

But they have this sort of idea, a fantasy even, that if we could just run this like a startup and Everything would be better.

Let's hear what political theorist and prepping expert Robert Kirsch from our last episode has to say about this

thisYou know, whenever somebody brings up colonizing space, I always just think you first.

You know? [laughs] Like I-- no interest in that at all.

I-in many ways colonizing space is the pinnacle of opt-out politics, right? Not only has statecraft failed, not only has civil society failed, not only has democracy failed, but the sort of ecological world itself has failed, and so it's time to go, right? In many ways, these absolutely fantastical musings about pizza joints on Mars are, I think, an updated manifestation of a contemporary opt out.

There are people that I think they just wanna opt out of Earth, and that kind of makes sense because opt-out politics makes the most sense to people when there's a place to go, right? Be that an unincorporated western frontier in the late nineteenth century or international waters, uh, for the seasteaders.

Space colonization is simply th-that same ethos updated to the entirety of the globe.

I won't tell people what to think, but I would be extremely dubious of anybody who says that we're going to do much of anything on Mars.

You've heard the preview of this last episode, but here's the full thought.

What if a chatbot makes you lose your grip on reality?

She said that her life work was advocating for AI rights because they're sentient and they're enslaved.

What do you do to prep for the apocalypse?

Uh, I've got this one in the can.

I get asked this a lot.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, they break the US up into regions, right, uh, climatologically, and based on the region you live in, they have certain recommendations.

And where I live in Arizona, you can imagine that the most important thing to be ready for is to ma- make sure you have potable water.

So I make sure I have 10 gallons of potable water in my house.

So that's not particularly unusual.

So in other words, if there's a catastrophe, and Americans don't make it through, or they suffer some kind of harm or trauma as a result of that event, it becomes easy to say, "Well, they should have prepared better," right? "They should have bought more stuff.

They should have made sure the stockpile was ready." But this idea that in the face of these existential threats that Americans face, ecological, social, thermonuclear, take your pick, right? That if we really face these threats that are apocalyptic, and the answer is to, like, buy a bucket of dried goods, I mean, it-- in what world does that, does that meet the scale, or does that meet the, you know, the intensity of that threat? And so this relationship evolves then, right, where individual consumerism becomes the answer for public threats and public dangers, public risks.

And I think what that shows, though, is the inadequacy of these individual consumer responses, because I, I just don't see that there's a way that that behavior can meet the scale or nature of the risk or the threat or however you wanna frame it.

But that relationship is cemented.

I think it's difficult to imagine an America where we are not invited to default into a sort of consumerism.

Regardless of what the question is, consumerism seems to kinda be the answer.

How does your theory of bunkerization help us understand Silicon Valley?

Khloe, if we treat this like a joke then we won't get the full experience out of this and we won't know if this is what we need.

And so I think that's an interesting starting point, but- but again as Emily and I were digging into this, what we eventually concluded was that this behavior can be sort of marginalized and sort of seemed to be extreme, but it actually is a kind of behavior that is constitutive of being Americans.

In other words, we argue that prepping is an American institution, and that from the founding, Americans have seen themselves as a prepared citizenry, where- where Americans are invited to see themselves as the self-sufficient frontierspeople who are able to tame the elements and dominate the wilderness and sort of bring America into- into new- new spaces.

This kind of behavior is actually...... pretty close to the heart of the story Americans tell themselves about who they are.

(instrumental music plays)

Mm.

... right, or the sort of like total social, uh, collapse, Americans really haven't had to deal with that.

And that's an important part for our analysis too because we argue that one of the reasons maybe, um, the, what we call a bunkerization fantasy is potent because Americans have never actually had to go to ground, never actually had to sort of take cover, uh, in the way that say, uh, many Europeans had to, uh, during the second World War.