The privatisation of resilience

What happens when powerful people stop believing that the future can be salvaged, and they instead start preparing to survive its destruction?

That is the unsettling question at the heart of End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World, the new book by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor. The book argues that a new political formation is emerging from the convergence of religious fundamentalists, ethno-nationalists, Silicon Valley billionaires and other reactionaries. What connects them is not necessarily a common political programme, but an increasingly apocalyptic imagination: the conviction that some catastrophic rupture is coming and that they will somehow be the ones to survive it.

Klein calls this "end-times fascism". Unlike twentieth-century fascism, which sought national rebirth through authoritarianism and exclusion, today's far right increasingly wants to prepare for a world shaped by climate change, resource scarcity, mass migration and other crises.

Klein's ongoing work for more than the last two decades has explored the growing power of corporations, how elites exploit crises for their own benefit, and now how the wealthy seek to insulate themselves from catastrophe.

In a recent interview about the book, she offers a jolting observation about wealth itself: "Wealth has its own deranging effects." Humans, she observes, need stories to make sense of the world around them. The ultra-rich are no different: they, too, need stories to explain why they possess so much while others have so little. The answer can become a story of superiority: that there is something about the wealthy person that justifies their extraordinary share of resources, with the implicit conclusion that inequality is deserved.

This is where Klein's argument becomes particularly relevant to the Global South.

In wealthy countries, apocalyptic politics may take the form of the eccentric fantasy of billionaires to build bunkers or imagine escaping to Mars. In countries such as Pakistan, however, catastrophe is already part of everyday political and economic life. Floods, heatwaves, water insecurity and toxic air are no longer distant possibilities. Yet, the consequences of these emergent threats are not distributed equally. Those who can afford it can protect themselves from the harshest forms of the climate apocalypse.

People with money can purchase safer land, gated housing, private security, generators, solar power, air conditioning, private healthcare and reliable water supplies. They can move away from areas threatened by flooding or extreme heat. They can send their children abroad and, if they have the means, can even build new lives elsewhere.

For poorer citizens, resilience often means trying to navigate weak and apathetic public systems. They remain dependent on increasingly resource constrained public hospitals, schools, water supplies and infrastructure.

Even something as mundane as an air purifier has become a marker of class. In Lahore, where toxic air is a recurring crisis, the air purifier has acquired something of the status once occupied by the UPS during the worst of load-shedding: a private technological solution to a public failure.

The idea of "end-times fascism" can thus be extended beyond the politics of the American far right. In the Global South, it can take the form of a politics of elite insulation: the acceptance that public systems will fail, accompanied by the assumption that those with wealth will somehow be protected.

In Pakistan, where the impacts of the global climate crisis are being acutely felt and the country has limited capacity to contend with these threats, the question becomes: who gets to adapt? If resilience must be purchased, it becomes a privilege.

Climate change is not only making Pakistan more unequal; it is also illustrating how affluence determines who can secure some protection from its effects, making those who can afford it increasingly indifferent to the need to address these public problems.

That is not disaster mitigation. It is the privatisation of resilience.