Robert Kirsch
Appearances
Today, Explained
Prepping for doomsday
Well, it started off as this sort of investigation into these doomsday prepping kits that were coming out of Silicon Valley from this startup called Preppy.
Today, Explained
Prepping for doomsday
So the way that they sold it, at least at the time that we were looking at their materials, was that this was a bug-out bag that you would be proud to display in your living room.
Today, Explained
Prepping for doomsday
That this didn't mark you as some sort of like weirdo who was sort of secretly kind of stashing away goods, but was rather a sort of outward display of good taste. And so, again, these class markers become super important in telling this story, trying to sort of pull this behavior out of the shadows and sort of trying to locate it at the beating heart of mainstream American culture.
Today, Explained
Prepping for doomsday
I don't. Where I live in the desert, FEMA issues recommendations for geographic regions for what people should have. So my co-author Emily does have a bug out bag because she lives in the Bay Area. I have 15 gallons of potable water ready because I live in the desert.
Today, Explained
Prepping for doomsday
So it can be hard to track because on the one hand, there's no like bright line where a certain behavior turns into prepping. Right. But FEMA does give a national household survey, and their 2023 results indicate that about half of Americans indicate that they are engaging in some kind of preparedness for some kind of adverse event.
Today, Explained
Prepping for doomsday
I think you're right that there's a sort of media spectacle version of a prepper, and that gets informed by a lot of cable reality television.
Today, Explained
Prepping for doomsday
And I'm not even just talking about the extreme preppers. There's an episode of Keeping Up with the Kardashians where they go into an Atlas bunker and try to imagine what it would be like to ride out the end of the world.
Today, Explained
Prepping for doomsday
And so I think that's an interesting starting point. But again, as Emily and I were digging into this, what we eventually concluded was that this behavior can be sort of marginalized and sort of seem to be extreme, but it actually is a kind of behavior that is constitutive of being Americans.
Today, Explained
Prepping for doomsday
In other words, we argue that prepping is an American institution and that from the founding, Americans have seen themselves as a prepared citizenry where Americans are invited to see themselves as the self-sufficient frontiers people who are able to tame the elements and dominate the wilderness and sort of bring America into into new spaces.
Today, Explained
Prepping for doomsday
This kind of behavior is actually pretty close to the heart of the story Americans tell themselves about who they are.
Today, Explained
Prepping for doomsday
There's a couple of ways to tackle that. The first is that I think at the sort of like apocalyptic register, I think things like nuclear war, right? Or the sort of like total social collapse. Americans really haven't had to deal with that. And that's an important part for our analysis too, because we argue that one of the reasons maybe what we call a bunkerization fantasy, right?
Today, Explained
Prepping for doomsday
is potent because Americans have never actually had to go to ground, never actually had to sort of take cover in the way that, say, many Europeans had to during the Second World War. And so that's one part of the story is that it's easy to sort of think about readiness and what to do in the face of total collapse because it's sort of been deferred. And so it becomes a site of fantasy.
Today, Explained
Prepping for doomsday
On the other hand, you're also right that the U.S. has ongoing extreme weather events, hurricanes, wildfires, dust bowls, droughts. The list goes on and on. And the way that we tell that story is sort of the way that we diagnose the sort of neoliberal condition of American political life, which is these disasters happen. there is an oftentimes inadequate or incomplete state response.
Today, Explained
Prepping for doomsday
And so the reaction to that becomes, well, I can't rely on the government to do things or to sort of reorganize things or to play a role in this. So it's up to me to take responsibility for my own preparation. And the way that I do that is through consumption choices.
Today, Explained
Prepping for doomsday
I think it's the latter. I really think this is a sort of conspicuous consumption. And so these ultra-rich people, we hear a lot about their preparation plans. You mentioned Zuckerberg and Thiel. And those are, I think, the two most sort of high-profile examples of
Today, Explained
Prepping for doomsday
And what I think is notable about those is that they get profiled in Forbes or Fortune or, you know, these sorts of like monocle like publications, right, for the sort of upwardly mobile people. And they lavish the reader with all sorts of details about the extravagant things that these folks are doing. And then there's always this kind of coy like, but we'll never tell you where it is, right?
Today, Explained
Prepping for doomsday
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so it's a way to sort of signal this kind of conspicuous consumption that maybe more middle-class or upwardly mobile Americans can at least sort of try to emulate. But I do want to suggest, too, though, that this takes on kind of strange dimensions. I'm sure, for your instance, you've read a lot about Elon Musk's desire to go to Mars.
Today, Explained
Prepping for doomsday
Right. And it's a fantasy. It's in many ways based on this sort of like mentality of like, well, you know, there's nothing we can do here anymore. And so we're going to have to try again on another orb.
Today, Explained
Prepping for doomsday
Yeah. And I think like many other industries in the U.S., it ebbs and flows or booms and busts. And we trace that back to the Cold War where there were home fallout shelter kits that you could buy. And those kind of went under in the 60s. And now they're kind of coming back. You can look at different kinds of preparedness markets that pop up, a lot of shelf stable things.
Today, Explained
Prepping for doomsday
Food is becoming an increasingly common thing to see. I know at my local Costco's, there are often aisle end caps that have like pyramids of these food buckets that you can store in your house. And so we might just be in a period of upswing right now. I mean, there are still companies that will come bury a fallout shelter in your backyard and promise not to tell anybody where they put it.
Today, Explained
Prepping for doomsday
And that's just because, as you can imagine, in the Sonoran Desert, it's hard to imagine making it through 115 degree days without some kind of chemically induced air conditioning.
Today, Explained
Prepping for doomsday
It sounds like a bleak question, but I think in some ways that is the politically animating question. Yeah. What can we confront alone and what can we confront together, right? And if we limit ourselves to confronting things alone, I think that threshold is pretty low.
Today, Explained
Prepping for doomsday
And so you can think about, again, the sort of ultimate example of this, of a thermonuclear conflagration. I would say, no, you don't want to go through that, right? Like you'd want to just sort of vaporize.
Today, Explained
Prepping for doomsday
But once you start sort of thinking about smaller scale or maybe more regionally located catastrophes that might emerge, I think the tolerance for persisting through those things is amplified when they're done in concert and collectively with other people. I would think that when considering risk tolerance, that should be part of that narrative.
Today, Explained
Prepping for doomsday
And so for me, what makes me a cheerful apocalyptician is that for me, the response to that is not, there's more I need to do, but rather we need to form these sort of solidarity networks of concerted collective action to face collectively the problems that we face together.
Today, Explained
Prepping for doomsday
My name is Robert Kirsch. I'm a professor at Arizona State University. And among all the other university duties that I have, I also research doomsday prepping and the end of the world.