Look, I know I’ve been a little obsessive lately. I’ve been writing about how it feels as if our governing elites have somehow concluded that they’ll be able to construct a world based entirely on “libertarian” principles (meaning “all the goodies for me, none for anyone else, and if you object you’re just being jealous of how smart, strong, and good-looking I am”)…
And then, when the inevitable happens, and a system based wholly on unthinking greed and unlimited consumption comes to a crashing halt, they can cheerfully pick up and go someplace else. Mars, maybe.
But there’s the rub. For the foreseeable future, no one’s going to Mars. At least our elites aren’t. And they’re not going anywhere else, either. There is no place they can go to get away from the problems they, themselves, are currently creating.
Here, for instance, is an interesting story I ran across a while back. It seems that many of our leading bankers, lawyers, entrepreneurs, etc. have already prepared for The End. There are whole companies that do nothing but construct luxurious doomsday bunkers for the Rich and Powerful. And, when Covid hit, many of the aforesaid Rich and Powerful hightailed it to the bunkers…in places like New Zealand, which is about as far from nasty stuff as you can get.
Except…except…when they got to their bunkers, some of them didn’t know how to get into them. They didn’t remember the combination to the lock on the front door. So, they ended up frantically phoning their bunker builders for instructions. How the hell, they asked, do I get in?
No, I’m not making that up. Go see this article in the Daily Mail: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8235565/Billionaires-fled-doomsday-bunkers-New-Zealand-coronavirus-crisis-escalated.html
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My point is that even the most powerful of us…even the richest, the strongest, the most self-reliant, cannot really survive wholly on their own. None of us can. Eventually, you find yourself standing in front of the gates to Heaven or Galt’s Gulch, unable to remember the combination, and desperately phoning someone, somewhere, in an attempt to recover it.
Ah, but what if that someone is not there, any longer? What if the system has been allowed to collapse completely? What if the phone no longer works…the company is gone…the city it was in is now a smoking crater…the money in your pocket or in your bank account is worthless…?
What do you do then?
The answer, of course, is that you die. Just like the rest of us. Which means that you better not let things get that bad in the first place. Which means that you better do things like pay taxes, and share some of your resources with your fellow citizens, and support a limited but real government, and to admit, however reluctantly, that yes, you share a destiny with the rest of humanity.
Because the alternative…no matter how distasteful you might find it…and even though Ayn Rand would not approve…
Is your own destruction.
And surely, of all the self-inflicted crimes against the self…
…extinction is the most severe, and the least forgivable.
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Until Next Time…
Onward and Upward.
~mjt
Copyright©2021 Michael Jay Tucker
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