If I Were a Rich Man...

And I thought it smart to hedge against the danger of a collapse, here’s what I would do...

The odds of a serious collapse brought about by climate change, peak oil, or financial greed are growing daily. This is not news, or debatable. In fact, the odds are rather good that more than one of these disasters will happen around the same time and combine with other disasters, like a collapse in the world fisheries and/or wars over water.

The effects of this collapse will be to end civilization as we know it. No longer will it be possible to jet off to annual vacations in the sun, or feast on fruits and vegetables flown in daily from thousands of miles away. Mundane things like getting a new pair of eyeglasses will become quite complicated, even if there are still optometrists around, because paying them will be difficult – assuming they found a way to run and maintain their equipment and get lenses and frames.

Part of the problem, of course, is that any collapse will also bring about an economic collapse, meaning a loss of faith in our economic system and in money. There will no longer be any guarantee that cash will be exchangeable for items of real value – of which gold is not one. Gold bugs will discover the reality that “precious” metals are only so because we believe them so, the same as pieces of denominated paper printed by the government. Our economic system rests on faith.

The question is, then, if you have accumulated a small fortune, say between a few million and some tens of millions, what to do? A Swiss bank account won’t help you much if the people who produce items of value are demanding something of equal value. Cash will no longer be king, and people will no longer worship the almighty dollar. Worse, from the rich man’s point-of-view, is that a lot of people are going to blame the rich.

This is not entirely unjustified, of course. Wealthy people tend to vote for and financially support conservative parties, and those same parties have been leading the charge toward the abyss. The super-rich, those with vast fortunes of hundreds of millions or billions, are at greatest risk, because they have funded ‘think tanks’ whose primary purpose has been to justify wealth, excess, greed, to deny climate change, to ensure that we continue our lemming-like rush to oblivion, always assuming they can buy their way out of any troubles. This may no longer be the case when there is not enough to go around; the super-rich have been rather short-sighted in their single-minded pursuit of lower taxes (for themselves). They have been slowly killing the golden goose and the foundation for stability in our civilization: the middle class. When reality bites back, there will suddenly be a lot of people with little left to lose and some obvious targets for their anger.

Perhaps some super-rich are looking forward to a return to some sort of feudalism, where they have land holdings and servants and innumerable peons (you and I) from which they can continue to extract a handsome living. I doubt this will happen. We no longer accept a fixed place in the social strata. And, of course, we have guns now. In the days of feudalism, you pretty much had to get close to someone to kill him, meaning you – and likely your family and perhaps half your village – would be killed to discourage this sort of thing. In the event of collapse, a rifle or an IED will make murder very difficult to trace.

So, what to do for the man who has accumulated some wealth and sees the writing on the wall? How best to prepare?

First, it would be wise to eliminate items of conspicuous consumption, especially gas-guzzling ones.

Second, start being seen as contributing to solutions – push your city council to adopt green building codes, contribute to and support green candidates, fund the local library, and so forth. (The Internet will not be as reliable a source of information as it was, assuming the servers and satellites and all the rest of the complex infrastructure is still running to support it. While you’re at it, stock up on ‘how-to’ books.)

And third, hope for the best but prepare for the worst – quietly. Buy some good land, with forests and farm, and start building a community there. Hire some organic farmers to grow a diversity of crops, year-round, even if you lose a bit of money on the farm for now. Hire others to manage the forests sustainably. Build low-tech solar-heated, well-insulated houses that don’t require continuous maintenance the way our modern houses do.

Very importantly, build sustainable sources of energy. This means solar, wind, run-of-river, biomass. No oil. Make the community as walkable as possible, even in winter. Especially in winter.

Persuade a doctor and optometrist and dentist to live there, even if they maintain practices elsewhere. A naturopath and herbalist could be lifesavers. Specifically exclude those who will be useless, but may be currently highly paid, like lawyers and MBAs. Find people with diverse skills for a lower-tech, more reality-based society. Look for good attitudes: flexible, easygoing, inventive. Set it up as a non-profit cooperative, so that costs are low and nobody resents you. There is no room for competition in a small community that has only one of everything. It will be worth your while to subsidise all this temporarily, if need be, but there is no need to make it a charity. Sell shares in the cooperative, and give share loans to those who have little money in our current society but will be valuable; organic farmers, for example.

If our current slide turns into a bad collapse – and it is hard to see how it cannot – then you will be much more likely to come through it, and certainly more comfortably, in the midst of a self-reliant community than as one rich man trying to buy everything you need from people who no longer have much use for your money. And who may resent you.

Ideally, you will combine with other such communities whose abilities complement those of your community. If Community A can make glass, for example, and can trade with Community B for steel, that would be most helpful. With an interlocking set of communities, we can still do things like replace broken windows and even create very beautiful new ones – we did it in the Dark Ages, surely we can do so again. And forget about the idea of 40-hour-per-week “jobs”; if you need to fire up the glass plant once every three months, that sounds like a fine winter activity.

And perhaps, if the collapse is not too severe, if climate does not change too much, if widespread wars do not darken humankind’s final hours, we can one day again dream big dreams, think about exploring the stars, map our genes, cure all diseases – realise humanity’s potential.

If I were a rich man, this is what I would be doing, right now.