From luxury bunkers to billionaire boltholes, the world’s richest are planning for collapse rather than preventing it. Julian Cribb argues this fear reveals a deeper failure of our economic system – and a stark choice for humanity’s future.

Welcome to BunkerWorld, the new planetary order of the terrified rich.

As a seven-year-old, I snapped this shot of Hitler’s ruined bunker with my old Kodak Box Brownie. My father who, as an RAF Pathfinder, had devoted much of his young manhood to reducing Hitler’s dreams to rubble (including bombing his home at Berchtesgaden), took me into East Berlin (the ‘Soviet Sector’) to see what became of tyrants. It was an instructive trip.

Now, as I gaze about me from the tower of my 75 years, I see that bunkermania is alive and kicking, worldwide, as the world’s super wealthy tremble at the cataclysm they foresee all too clearly, lying ahead for all of us. The collapse of modern civilisation.

Bunkers are hardly a novel idea. Farmers began fortifying their homesteads at least 5000 years ago, when the Bronze Age afforded them good reason. And the world is littered with the decayed grandeur of a hundred thousand ancient fortresses, castles that could sometimes withstand armies – but not the siege of time or the march of history.

Yet the spirit that animated that age-old spate of fort-building – a potent amalgam of greed and fear – is alive and thriving in the new world dis-order that is emerging today.

In their polished arrogance and self-confidence, today’s billionaires and corporate oligarchs exhibit the entitlement of the born-to-rule. Inside, however, they are quaking. Viewing the world – as they tend to – through a narcissistic prism, they assume the rest of society is motivated by the same ugly impulses as themselves – greed, envy, pride, selfishness, aggression. And they are petrified that some may want to plunder their wealth or status, just as they plundered others'.

So being very rich also means being very scared. It is a psychotic couplet. It is the cornerstone of BunkerWorld. Interviews with the super-rich reveal them to have three primary fears: health failure, family conflict and loss of wealth. The explosion in opulent fortification seeks to defy all three.

The Oppidum is a luxurious doomsday bunker in the Czech Republic mountains. Sprawling over 323,000 sq ft, it has seven apartments, a golf course, helipad, a spa, swimming........

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