There was this article that went viral on Twitter about this technology guy who had been employed by the world’s five richest men to sit down and have a conversation with them about the future. These five guys were mostly concerned about what they called “the event.” The event was basically the tipping point at which the world as we know it would cease to exist. The event is brought by climate change and patriarchal racial capitalism.
It turns out that five of the world’s richest men are pretty much just concerned with one question: how to keep a security force loyal to them after capitalism falls.
Reading this article gave me a lot of fear and a lot of relief. On one hand, it was preposterous. For all their power and money, the rich are actually just afraid of us. They’re afraid of people. They’re afraid of people power—they’re afraid of what happens when people come together.
This isn’t a fear that I share. I’ve never been afraid of people. Whether it was moments of feeling held in protesting crowds, of sharing resources with those who hold me, or of just walking in a park and feeling relieved when I see people—I’ve never been afraid of people. When COVID-19 hit NYC, my roommates and I watched the movie Contagion. Contagion is a dystopian style depiction of a global pandemic. Dystopia is a movie genre that depicts the fears of the elite. In Contagion, the pandemic severed community ties and people started stealing resources away from each other as panic set in.
It turns out, disaster movies got it wrong. When the pandemic hit, our institutions failed us. Sometimes, people panicked and started hoarding inane things or stealing from each other. In addition, people also started realizing that health is shared. We started sharing what we have, driving food to those who are most vulnerable, giving money away when we are precarious, and coming together to talk about systemic issues. It turns out, even when it is dangerous to share space, that people come together in love and care.
It turns out, unlike the very rich, we don’t have to be afraid of each other.
In their books Make Kin Not Population and This Changes Everything, both Donna Haraway and Naomi Klein talk about how the idea that climate change is happening because the Earth is not able to support all the lives that are living on it is just, well...not true. In the real world, climate change is happening because of patriarchal racial capitalism and the ways we have decided to distribute resources within patriarchal racial capitalism. The Earth is abundant and rich enough to support all of us.
The Earth is abundant and rich enough to support all of us.
As a millennial who grew up watching too many disaster movies, this was a shock to me. In disaster movies, the world always ends because there are too many people, because there is an unexpected weather change, or because there is a lack of fertility. In disaster movies, people always eat each other. In disaster movies, the culprit is never patriarchal racial capitalism. Because disaster movies reflect the fears of the rich, they always question whether we are able to survive without patriarchal racial capitalism and they never question whether they are able to survive within it.
The article about the fears of the five richest people also gave me a lot of anxiety. It’s obvious from the article that the rich are not prepared to confront their fear of people. They’d prefer to continue to feed their security complexes and addictions to wealth hoarding until money itself becomes obsolete. They’re prepared to feed their fears rather than confront why they’re so insecure that they cannot be with the rest of us. Because the rich are scared, they make decisions that affect the rest of us until money becomes obsolete.
The rich make decisions that affect us until money becomes obsolete.
I have a lot of scarcity anxiety. My most contemporary ancestors have all lived through famine and food scarcity. People from my hometown are characterized as being mean, thieves, and cut throat because of this scarcity mentality. Famines are almost never natural and almost always created by issues of distribution. Famines are always artificial and engineered. Famines happen when the resources of one region are distributed towards another. When the rich make these disaster movies that tell us that we will kill each other when capitalism fails, they’re telling us that they’re going to sacrifice all of us so that they can try to keep their privileges.
In my hometown, there were a lot of instances of people eating their family members or dying of starvation related diseases. The stories of cannibalism that I’ve heard about are often about negotiated cannibalism—not forced cannibalism. They’re stories of lovers eating parts of each other or of family members giving up limbs. Even when they are at their most desperate, people find ways to love each other.
In the United States, cannibalism has a different history. Much of the cannibalism in the United States is not negotiated but forced. Historically, white people ate a lot of indigenous and Black people. However, they didn't do this due to starvation reasons but because of carnivalistic ones. White people ate other people in celebration of their whiteness. Whiteness is a political identity that was created by the elites to protect themselves against the rest of us. White people are more likely to believe the disaster movies because identifying with whiteness is about identifying with the buffer class. White people are more likely to eat us. When we assimilate to whiteness, we are more willing to eat each other and we are also more scared of each other.
The richest people in the world are terrified of the day that money becomes obsolete because they’re afraid of being eaten and having to eat people. They’re scared of this day because they’re scared of people. For them, survival is always about fear and not about love.
For the rest of us—we know people. We know when to not trust people and we know when to trust people. We know that trust happens when it’s given in both directions. We know that most people don’t want to eat other people. We know that, when people survive, it’s not without love and insurmountable debts.
