Notes from an Apocalypse A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back - Mark O'Connell Page 0,34

through technological means. Cryptocurrency as a method of evading both government regulation and the taxation on which nation-states depended. Above all, a belief in the emergence of a new “sovereign individual.”

“It’s about radical individualism,” he explained. “It’s survival-of-the-fittest, a belief in the rights of the wealthiest and most powerful among us to do whatever the fuck they want, including living forever. Thielism doesn’t necessarily represent a human apocalypse, per se. Humanity could still continue living under its conditions. But it’s an assault on the civilizational values I hold most dear, like creativity, empathy, love, freedom of expression, connection.”

In a café in Queenstown, about an hour’s drive from Thiel’s estate, we met a man we’d been put in touch with by a wealthy and connected art world acquaintance of Anthony’s. A well-known professional in Queenstown, he agreed to speak anonymously for fear of making himself unpopular among local business leaders and friends in the tourism trade. He had been concerned for a while now, he said, about the effects on the area of wealthy foreigners buying up huge tracts of land. (“Once you start pissing in the hand basin, where are you gonna wash your face?” as he put it, in what I assumed was a purely rhetorical formulation.) He told us of one wealthy American of his acquaintance, “pretty left-of-center,” who had bought land down here to allay his apocalyptic fears in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s election. Another couple he knew of, a pair of Bitcoin billionaires, had bought a large lakeside estate on which they were constructing a gigantic bunker.

This was the first I’d heard since coming here of an actual bunker being built. From the point of view of the modern apocalypticist, the whole appeal of the country—its remoteness and stability, its abundant clean water, its vast and lovely reaches of unpeopled land—seemed to be that it was itself a kind of reinforced geopolitical shelter, way down there at the bottom of the world. If wealthy foreigners were buying land here and building literal bunkers, fortifications beneath the ground of this country that had welcomed them in the first place, what did that say about their motivations, their view of life?

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More than a year after my trip to New Zealand, the country was once again a focus of international attention, when an Australian white supremacist walked into a Christchurch mosque during Friday prayers and murdered more than fifty people with an assault rifle, streaming the killing live on Facebook. On several occasions that week, I found myself watching videos online of New Zealanders—both Māori and Pākehā—performing the haka for the Muslim victims of racist violence. The raw masculinity and aggression of the Māori war dance channeled into a gesture of inclusivity and love was something I found deeply moving. More than once, I was brought close to tears. I mentioned this to Anthony in a text exchange after the massacre, and he talked about how extraordinary the public response had been. The day after the attack, he and his family had gone to their local mosque, he said, to bring flowers and pay their respects, and the place had been filled with white families like his own, most of whom had never been in a mosque in their lives.

If civilization meant anything at all, I thought, it was this. It was non-Muslim families crowding into a mosque the day after an act of fascist terrorism. It was a group of Māori men performing a war dance in the name of inclusion and solidarity and collective grieving: the precise symbolic opposite of fascism. It was not the building of bunkers beneath private land that would allow us to survive the catastrophes we faced, but the strengthening of communities that already existed.

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In Queenstown, before we set out to find the former sheep station Thiel had bought, we went to look for the house he owned in the town itself. This place, we speculated, must have been purchased as a kind of apocalyptic pied-à-terre: somewhere he could base himself, maybe, while whatever construction he had planned for the sheep station was under way. We found it easily enough, not far from the center of town, and recognized it right away from one of the paintings in The Founder’s Paradox. It was the sort of house a Bond villain might build if for some reason he’d been forced to move to the suburbs: ostentatious in a modest sort of way. The front of the