The rich can’t buy their way out of death, but they can certainly postpone it for a while. All of the pure food and expensive healthcare and personal trainers that money can buy do indeed keep the wealthy breathing longer, on average, than the rest of us. Yet it is not death itself that is the great equalizer; it is the fear of death. That is the thing that the highest piles of money cannot safeguard against.
The futility of all of those meticulous attempts to maximize lifespan is revealed by death’s approach. Much of the behavior of the world’s wealthiest people can be understood as a pitiful attempt to stave off something that is unstoppable, like a person throwing their hands up to stop an oncoming freight train. For all of us languishing in the masses of regular-folkdom, this is our consolation: we cannot match the world’s greatest fortunes, but we can take solace in the knowledge that they are being wasted on mankind’s oldest folly.
In 2015, the Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, one of the richest men on Earth, announced that he would be giving away the bulk of his wealth during his lifetime. One of the main goals of his charity, he wrote in a treacly public letter to his daughter, was “promoting equality”.
“Today we are robbed of the potential so many have to offer,” he declared. “The only way to achieve our full potential is to channel the talents, ideas and contributions of every person in the world.”
Now, in homage to this admirable ideal, Zuckerberg is offering the underprivileged residents of the Hawaiian island of Kauai the chance to live up to their full potential, to wit, “building a lavish ultraluxury compound where Mark Zuckerberg can hole up and survive the apocalypse while the hordes of normal people perish”.
As the journalist Guthrie Scrimgeour details in a staggering investigative story for Wired magazine, Zuckerberg has spent almost a decade buying up land on the island for the construction – now well under way – of a sprawling, 1,400-acre compound of mansions, treehouses and tunnels. The crown jewel of the $270m project is a 5,000-sq-ft underground shelter with “its own energy and food supplies” and “what appears to be a blast-resistant door”.
Odd, is it not, that a man whose primary concern is global equality would need a subterranean apocalypse shelter designed to seal him off from all of the (equal) people outside who would be, presumably, burning or starving or being eaten by the zombies? Wouldn’t Zuckerberg’s powerful passion for enhancing the future of all mankind compel him to fling open the armored doors to his compound and welcome in all of his fellow Hawaiian islanders, for whom he has the deepest concern and respect? Or, even simpler, compelled him to have spent the hundreds of millions of dollars that he spent on this tightly secured elitist fantasyland on something a bit more public-minded? I’m sure that his soaring, scenic parcel of land would make an excellent public park.
A millimeter below every billionaire’s charitable spirit lies an endless well of self-preservation. This sort of desperate planning for the End Times gives the lie to everything that Zuckerberg and his moneyed peers say about the rising tide that lifts all boats. When the tides rise high enough, your rickety boats will sink, while they will float away on their yachts. Every charitable check can be seen as a tranquilizer dart, designed to pacify the public just enough that they won’t start wondering why the nice plutocrat who came to their island and bought all the land built such a big wall around it all.
The most fervent quasi-religious hope of every billionaire is that he can have it all; that he can both bask in opulent wealth and be a good person, beloved by one and all. Unfortunately for the rich, this hope will always be revealed as an impossible dream.
Moral philosophers have long pointed out that the mere act of giving away some money does not absolve you from the responsibility of doing something ethical with all the rest of your money. To feed one hungry child and then let a thousand more starve as you build your mansion is not an act that balances the scales of right and wrong.
In a resource-constrained world, there is no escaping the moral imperative for the wealthy to use their stupendous resources to help the needy as much as possible. There is no buying your way out of that situation. The “indulgences” that the Catholic church used to sell to escape the effects of sin were, we all now recognize, a scam. The charitable foundations of modern billionaires can be understood the same way.
Of all the problems that the existence of billionaires creates, the biggest is simply the fact that having that much money gives individuals too much power. Sure, you, the average person, might get drunk and dream about buying up an entire town’s worth of land to build your exclusive treehouse survivalist kingdom, but you don’t have the means to actually do it. And that is a good thing. When society allows people to get 10-figure net worths, all of the most idiotic fever dreams of the human mind begin springing into reality.
That is not progress. Capitalism’s tendency to grant godlike powers to the sort of people that are sociopathic and tasteless enough to accumulate billions of dollars is one of its most embarrassing flaws.
But, like Ozymandias, Mark Zuckerberg may one day learn the hard way that all of his planning to elevate himself above the risks of the mortal world has been for naught. If the apocalypse does come, hurling us all into a state of nature, the first thing that is going to lose all of its value is money.
The security guards that you hired to protect you are going to think more about protecting themselves. The construction workers who built your compound will know where all the food is hidden. The mighty billionaire boss will inevitably find that no pile of gold is high enough to keep away fate.
Should have been a socialist, Mark. If the worst happens, then at least you would have had some comrades who you wouldn’t need to pay to watch your back.
Hamilton Nolan is a writer on labor and politics, based in New York City
