You Can't Run from Collapse

It was a simple plan at first.

A private military executive named Barrett Moore was building the ultimate prepper compound in northern Michigan. He stocked it with millions of N95 masks, pallets of freeze-dried food, and a John Wick's worth of guns. He envisioned an entire secret supply and logistics chain for the super rich, including a communications network and a small military to protect them as they traveled between bunkers. In the end, Moore's dream ended in "a handful of overwrought construction projects and a tangle of lawsuits."

Some of Moore's survivalist clients spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on rations and guns with their names engraved on them. If you get the impression they were fantasizing about social collapse, you'd be right. They talked about it all the time. They couldn't wait.

I've spent the last two years reading about social collapse and prepping. There's a certain irony to it all. By the time you've fully prepared for social collapse, you've built a society.

That society can collapse.

Moore started building his collapse empire in the mid 2000s, arguably one of the most optimistic times in human history. If you were stockpiling food and preparing for something like bird flu, just about everyone thought you were nuts. My idea of a pandemic was something like swine flu, something that barely registered on my radar as a grad student. Back then, I was more worried about paying my rent than dying from a virus.

How times change.