I Hope The Trillionaires Die in Their Bunkers

The richest man on earth is now worth $1 trillion. We’re talking about a guy who stinks at coding, despite constantly bragging about it, a guy who pays gamers to level up his characters for him. Think about that for a minute. The richest guy on the planet doesn’t even truly enjoy games. He doesn’t seem to understand that leveling up your character is part of the fun. That’s the problem with this brand of guy, the kind that ultimately has to amass $1 trillion in order to feel any sense of self-worth. Elon Musk hates himself. You can tell. If it takes a trillion dollars to fill you up, to make you feel good about yourself, you’ve got massive problems. Unfortunately, instead of dealing with them, he inflicts them on us.

Imagine hating this planet so much that you devote your entire life to trying to escape it, to go live on a dead red one. Imagine hating people so much that you want to replace them all with robots.

That’s our billionaires.

So far, nothing we’ve tried has managed to get rid of these parasites. Nothing is working. We can’t seem to build a team.

We seem to be stuck in a loop where we constantly fight each other, over the most trivial things, while the parasites have an odd way of banding together in order to protect their own interests. Isn’t that weird? Bezos. Altman. Gates. Thiel. Karp. Zuck. Trump. Vance. They can barely stand each other, and yet they seem to find ways to cooperate to further their own collective goals.

And so, in this moment, we see a lot of people desperate to find something to hope for, and very quick to judge anyone who doesn’t offer it. Personally, I have a very troubled relationship with hope. I’m suspicious of it. I’m suspicious of the word. I’d rather talk about reality. That’s my calling.

One day, I got curious about the word hope. It’s such a polarizing idea. It inspires some of us, and it makes others cringe.

I wanted to know why.

So I looked it up.

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ancient philosophers defined hope “mostly as an attitude to reality that [was] based on insufficient insight into what is true or good.” That definition hits you in the face. It’s not how most people in the world today define that word. But it points to why many of us cringe when we hear it, especially when it’s used to dismiss us.

Hope makes an appearance in Greek mythology. Most people probably know the myth of Pandora, but they don’t know the full story. They know the gods made her. They know she was the first woman. They know she was sent to earth as a punishment (sigh). They know about the box, even though it’s actually a jar. They know she opens the jar out of curiosity, letting loose evil spirits and diseases—along with hardship and sorrow. But they forget about hope.

Hope doesn’t escape.

Once Pandora realizes that the jar contains evil, she seals it shut. She traps the last evil inside the jar, and that’s hope.

Alone there, Elpis, in her indestructible home,
remained within, beneath the lip, nor by the door
escaped, because the vessel’s lid had stopped her first,
by will of aegis-bearing, cloud-compelling Zeus.
Among the people wander countless miseries;
the earth is full of evils, and the sea is full;
diseases come by day to people, and by night,
spontaneous, rushing, bringing mortals evil things
in silence, since contriving Zeus removed their voice.
And thus from Zeus’s mind there can be no escape.

—Hesiod, Works and Days, 700 B.C.

Of course, scholars have debated the word elpis (hope) for centuries. They’ve suggested it might not be hope so much as “expectation” or “awareness.” In that case, the myth makes more sense. Hope isn’t really elpis itself. It’s the absence of elpis or awareness, meaning that if everyone knew the full implications of opening the jar, they would all give up and just sit around waiting to die.

Instead, hope (or the absence of elpis) keeps everyone living in varying degrees of stubborn defiance or blissful ignorance of all the evils in the world. And that sounds pretty much like the situation today, doesn’t it?

When you’re going up against a trillionaire…

Where do you find hope?

Hesiod’s original myth leaves the meaning of hope ambiguous, and it’s probably on purpose. On the one hand, the ancient Greeks saw hope as essential to coping with the world’s evils. On the other hand, they also saw hope as a temptation and a curse. Hope could lead to false expectations. It could nurture passive acceptance and complacency. It wasn’t inherently good.

The Stoics also regarded hope with suspicion. As the Roman philosopher Seneca wrote, hope always accompanies fear. He described the two as “bound up with one another… like a prisoner and the escort he is handcuffed to.” Hope by itself didn’t make things better. For Seneca, both fear and hope “belong to a mind in suspense… Both are mainly due to projecting our thoughts far ahead of us instead of adapting ourselves to the present.”

That’s another interesting definition of hope: the act of projecting our thoughts far ahead of us instead of adapting ourselves to the present.

Creating a mind in suspense…

Nietzsche believed hope “prolongs the torments” of humanity, because it distracts us from the present with promises of future salvation.

There’s a lot of truth to that notion.

By the medieval era, Christian theological approaches to hope focused largely on enduring the world’s evils instead of changing them. Hope was more about patience and tolerance than activism. You just had to get through this life so you could reunite with your god in heaven, and then you could live forever in eternal happiness. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine still paid some attention to action, but it rarely got put into practice in ways we would recognize.

That’s the kind of hope that Nietchze inherited.

That’s why he was so harsh.

We see it a lot today.

Unfortunately, the passive version of hope has come to dominate our discourse. Everyone throws that word around, without really stopping to think about its history or its complicated meaning. Often, someone uses that word to put themselves in a position of authority over us. They use that word to judge us. They use that word to get us to shut up when we’re talking about things they don’t want to think about. In other words, it’s a silencing move.

Authoritarians often use hope and vague promises about future utopias to dismiss criticism and silence dissent. They use it to reject solutions that call for too much sacrifice or inconvenience. They use it to pacify resistance. If you can channel everyone’s energy and emotions into the passive version of hope, then you can defuse actions that threaten your power.

And your wealth.

Why else would these billionaires talk about colonizing space and unleashing boundless productivity with robots, while building bunkers to hide from the world they control? They’re floating false hope and empty promises. Deep down, maybe they don’t even believe their own promises.

We’ve seen how these authoritarians weaponize hope in order to shut down hard conversations about the future. They use hope to advance false solutions to problems, ones that aren’t even designed to work, like carbon capture or aerosol injection. They call solutions they don’t like “pessimistic.” They don’t want solutions that work. They want solutions that sound good.

That’s their version of hope.

It’s been effective.

Daoism over doomism

Next, I got interested in hope described in other cultures. That’s where I ran into Confucianism and Daoism. In these philosophies, hope becomes a responsibility, not a passive emotion or an expectation of eternal happiness. In Confucianism, you have to cultivate your best self to help bring about balance and harmony. That’s the ultimate goal. Hope isn’t personal. It’s a group project.

It’s not about how things turn out for you as an individual. It’s social and communal. Your hopes have to align with the greater good.

Hope isn’t an escape hatch from struggle.

Daoism treats hope as an expectation or anticipation for nature to restore balance and order to the world. For Daoists, it’s mostly about getting out of the way. There’s really no room for your own personal wishes and desires. Pursuing those tends to put you at odds with nature, and it leads to bad things.

If you just want to stand back and let industrial civilization collapse, then maybe you’re not a doomer. You’re a Daoist. The same goes for “fighting fascism.” I’ve only started reading through the Tao Te Ching, but it has some interesting things to say about oppression. You’re never going to beat fascists in a direct confrontation—not unless you have an army. (We don’t.)

Instead, you have to outlast them.

Daoist hope isn’t about getting back to brunch in 2029. It’s not about stopping the climate crisis or preserving our way of life.

A Daoist doesn’t hope for everything to turn out the way they want. They hope for things to turn out the way they should, even if that means they don’t turn out so great for us personally. You focus on freeing yourself of the personal, selfish desires that make the natural order so… hard to deal with.

There’s a difference.

As Daoists might say, we’ve already unleashed the destructive forces that are eventually going to wipe out industrial civilization, maybe even within our lifetimes. If that’s the case, then it’s arguably a good thing.

Palantir doesn’t stand a chance against what the planet has in store for us. The forces we’re talking about make Musk look like an ant. So if you doubt our ability to overthrow the fascists, rest assured that nature will finish the job. To take comfort in that, you have to let go of the outcome you envisioned.

You have to let go of brunch ‘29.

Of all the approaches to hope I’ve seen, Daoism resonates the most with me. The more money you amass, the more data centers you build, the more killbots you make, the more stuff you’re just giving nature to blow apart.

So, what do I hope for?

At this point, my hopes don’t rest in elections. They don’t rest in activism. We might continue to engage in all of these things. But a Daoist would say you have to let go of your emotional attachment to the outcomes. Do these things because you believe they’re the right thing to do, not because you think they’ll bring back your carefree weekend brunch. Some of us never had that anyway.

I’m hopeful that as the world crashes through tipping points, as ocean currents deflate, as glaciers melt, as land bakes, as the earth unleashes its full power of destruction against us, that some version of humanity will manage to hang on and build something from the rubble of this civilization. It’s iffy. There’s a growing chance that humans will end all life on earth, but that’s where I choose to be hopeful. Not brunch ‘29, but in preserving life on the planet.

Elon Musk won’t be the last trillionaire.

So…

If you’re looking for hope, you don’t have to find it in promises you don’t believe in. Not tonight. And if you’re just looking for comfort, you don’t even need hope. Just learn to let go of the outcomes you wanted, and see the world the way it is. See how small the trillionaire is, and understand that he’s even more miserable, even more doomed, than the rest of us. Everything here has its own beauty, even the violent storms. The guy who pays gamers to level up his character, the guy who spent the best years of his life selling daydreams about Mars, will never sit still and enjoy watching the lightning for an afternoon. Not even one. You can. He'll never know what it feels like to actually be good at anything, other than lying and stealing. You probably do. In that sense, you have more wealth than he’ll ever have in a thousand lifetimes.

That’s not just a platitude to make you feel better. That’s the kind of truth that doesn’t care how you feel about it.

I hope the trillionaires die in their bunkers before they can finish destroying all life on the planet. Given their trajectory, that seems likely. You can’t live on a scorched planet with killbots and mercenaries. It doesn’t matter how much money you have. Nature will make it all worthless. It will restore balance.

I hope life outlasts them.

That’s my hope.

Survival Illustrated is a reader-supported publication that also receives funding from organizations like the Alfred Kobacker and Elizabeth Trimbach Fund. You can offer one-time support here. To receive new posts and support this work on a more regular basis, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.