Tombs of rich & powerful. Zuk’s Meta bunker & ‘survival follies’. The limits of privilege.
Altruism is not in their DNA.
While they willfully ‘dig our graves’ for profit, rather than invest in the preservation of the global ‘commons’, cognitive dissonance creates the self-delusion that they can ‘dig’ their way to safety. Indeed, the structure and limitations of their cognitive aptitudes leave them no other option.
They are wholly unable to work for the common good. “Common” is anathema to them. In their minds, they were never common and association with anyone ‘beneath’ them is dangerous for their monstrous self-esteem and fragile inner self-worth.
With few exceptions, the one percent and their hydra fringe, are so cocooned in their privilege that they cannot conceive of their vulnerability in a collapsing world. When they lost what little humanity they had, that perspective went with it.
It would be easier to get a shark to go vegan, than for the ‘raptors’ of wealth to forgo their gluttony.
Zuckerberg continues to permit FaceBook’s algorithms to allow the spreading of environmental disinformation, enabling the Fossil Fuel industry for his personal gain — for which he made the Guardian’s list of the top dozen climate villains:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/oct/27/climate-crisis-villains-americas-dirty-dozen
He also does little to stop the spread of propaganda and ‘opinionized lies’ that undermine our democracy, all of which will ultimately leave him naked at the climate ‘cocktail party’. He appears to be under the misconception that he can compensate by employing legal ‘sleight of hand’ to co-opt prime real estate in Kauai on which to build himself an ‘extinction proof’, above and below ground, luxury estate ‘bunker’. That he is not building a small subterranean city or at least an underground sports complex, is indicative of his lack of vision, caused by his myopic self concern.
Aside from himself, and immediate family (?) — it remains unknown to me who else will have the ‘great good fortune’ to share this refuge with him, but it seems a given that he will need a small army for protection once ‘civilization’ collapses. Nevertheless, there is no specific mention of ‘barracks’ for guards in Pakalolo’s diary. Only that “The compound will include 12 buildings…” and “will have its own natural water supply and agricultural fields and even raise livestock for food.” All of which displays superficial foresight, as the dependability of world climate stability gets increasingly tenuous.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/12/18/2212366/-It-could-be-that-Mark-Zuckerburg-becomes-the-last-human-to-die-in-a-bunker?utm_campaign=trending
I have read extensively about the ancient Roman Empire. After Augustus established his imperial lineage, the governance of the Empire began to almost immediately display prescient signs of inevitable decline. His grandson, Caligula, nearly drove Rome into the ditch. That he did not succeed in doing so, is a testament not to the deep ruts already worn into Roman roads, but to the resilience and strength of the Empire which had only begun to suffer from the decadence and over-reaching that would eventually unravel it.
Claudius benefited from the stabilizing effect of this tensile elasticity and in his long reign was able to undo the damage — and then Nero had another go at dislodging the stones.
Eventually, imperial history began to see-saw between stable and at times brilliant leadership, to tipping into madness.
Within a couple of hundred years, as the Empire proceeded to crumble due to pressures brought to bear from attrition and outside forces, societal stability was further eroded and the Imperial system underwent decay that devolved quite literally into something of a ‘free for all’ amongst the foolish within ‘sight’ of the throne.
This reached a crescendo during which an Emperor might be chosen and then placed on the throne by the Pretorian Guard. The shortest reigning emperor was Pertinax (193AD), who ruled for 87 days before being ‘removed’ by the Guard. And so it went with emperors being killed and replaced, sometimes by another ‘lucky enough’ to be picked from the Guards own ranks. The chosen one immediately became master of most of the known world, but was enslaved to the whims and hubris of the other Pretorians and court intrigue. All and all, starting as early as Caligula, the Guard assassinated 13 ‘Imperials’.
Ironically, Augustus had originally expanded and reorganized the Guards to protect him and whoever would inherit the title of Augustus from him.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Praetorian-Guard
Without an overarching shelter of protective laws empowered by responsible enforcement, what is to stop the Master of Meta from meeting a similar fate at the hands of his own ‘Pretorian Guards’, as the ‘privilege’ of the strongest becomes ascendant over wealth. Even if some of his select army possess morality and ethics, how long will it take before the more aggressive and sociopathic become tired of taking orders from an annoying narcissistic fop who is fundamentally survival worthless. If they don’t kill him outright, he’ll survive only for his usefulness cleaning latrines.
While the ‘shepherd’ of Meta-ocrity is obviously brilliant, he appears to lack common sense. He was smart enough to get where he is, but remains too dense to understand that however the game he’s backing goes, he’s holding a losing hand. If fascism is successful he becomes vulnerable by the destruction of the institutions that protect him — that is if environmental collapse doesn’t force him to the ‘bunker’ first, where madness and death await.
He has bought into his own myth and marinates in a false sense of omnipotent privilege.
While there is still time we need to do whatever we can to see that he never gets to use his ‘tomb’ — not to ensure his survival, but rather our own.
Anyone still on Facebook, needs to ask themselves how their ‘rationale’ for being so stacks up against contributing to global annihilation? There are those who use FB to spread important information, counter balancing the harm of feeding Zuk’s vast wealth. As for the rest, is the convenience of this particular mode of keeping in touch, worth the potential suffering and death of ‘friends and family’? Do average FB users really want to be funding toilet paper for his luxury ‘fuck the rest of you’ bunker?
To go even further, we all need to take a deeper look into the choices we make as consumers that enable the aggregation of vast wealth into the hands of so few. Great wealth is a burden that most humans buckle under, with the collapse of whatever moral and ethical bearings they might have started out with.
They won’t change, because they cannot.
This sociopathic behavior is provided ‘safe harbor’ by the collective ‘worship’ of money and a pervasive ethos of ‘every man for himself’, which gets distilled and refined in individuals and societies as economic ‘strength’ becomes increasingly toxic to social empathy.
The consumer has the power to get this under control by curbing consumption responsibly. But in order to do so, we first have to recognize and accept our part in environmental collapse.
We chase the chimera of an ‘easy’ life and it impoverishes us.
More precious than diamonds, our convenience is —
more precious than life itself, it would seem.