Amitav Ghosh on Billionaire Apocalypse Plans: A Crisis of Imagination and Abandonment
The wealthy are increasingly planning for apocalypse, and novelist Amitav Ghosh argues this trend reveals a profound crisis of imagination and a dangerous politics of abandonment. In a recent lecture in New Delhi, Ghosh explored how survivalist fantasies among billionaires and the cognitive elite signal a shift in how power anticipates planetary disruption.
Apocalyptic Thinking: From Myths to Bunkers
For millennia, humanity has imagined its own end through scriptures, prophecies, myths, and modern media. However, Ghosh notes that for the world's ultra-rich, apocalypse is no longer a distant allegory but a practical scenario demanding bunkers, exit strategies, and technological escapes. This fixation, he suggests, offers a window into how contemporary elites interpret the planetary moment, with many envisioning a convergence of crises like climate change, pandemics, and AI runaway.
The Cognitive Elite and a Vein of Exterminationist Thought
Ghosh uses the term cognitive elite to describe tech leaders and intellectuals who believe their knowledge and technology can help them survive civilizational collapse, often with little regard for the global poor. He connects this mindset to historical ideologies like eugenics and colonialism, where certain populations were deemed expendable. Today, similar assumptions appear in discussions implying climate catastrophe will devastate the Global South while wealthy nations endure, resembling what Ghosh calls the re-emergence of exterminationist thought.
Catastrophists vs. Gradualists: Divergent Visions of the Future
In his talk, Ghosh distinguished between catastrophist and gradualist imaginations. Gradualists view planetary crises as problems solvable through governance, policy, and innovation, dominating climate negotiations. Catastrophists, however, expect sudden ruptures and system collapses, seeing breakdown as inevitable. While Ghosh acknowledges real risks like fragile supply chains and nuclear threats, he critiques the elite conclusion that insulation and isolation are viable survival strategies.
The Myth of Elite Escape and Rethinking Resilience
Ghosh questions the practicality of escape fantasies, such as bunkers or Mars colonies, highlighting dependencies on global systems that may fail in a collapse. He argues survival is as much a social and ecological problem as a technological one. Moreover, he provocatively reframes vulnerability, suggesting that subsistence communities with skills in food growing and local cooperation might be more resilient than wealthy elites reliant on complex infrastructures.
Climate Politics as Biopolitics and Literature's Role
Ghosh frames climate negotiations as biopolitical conflicts over ways of life, where some actors bet their lifestyles will survive while others perish. If elites see collapse as inevitable, they may invest less in prevention and more in insulation, eroding solidarity. As a novelist, Ghosh sees literature as a tool for perceiving climate reality, shaping what societies consider plausible and challenging narratives that exclude vast populations from the future.
In closing, Ghosh poses a thought-provoking question: in a true collapse, would you rather be with a tech magnate or a farmer who knows the land? This underscores his call for a more interconnected and imaginative approach to our shared planetary fate.
