Economist Channel

Preppers - doomsayers gearing up for civilisation’s collapse - used to be seen as paranoid, tinfoil-hatted folk wasting time on a disaster that would never come. Not so much now. Before the presidential election, the Lincoln Leadership initiative polled Americans: Hillary Clinton voters reckoned there was a 63 per cent chance that Donald Trump would start a nuclear war.

Survivalists call it the “SHTF scenario” - when the Shit Hits The Fan. And it might not even be caused by the geriatric man-baby’s tiny fingers on the nuclear button: it could be a financial system failure, a flu pandemic or climate change.

When I interviewed Wahaca co-founder Thomasina Miers recently, she argued soil erosion was the great, unnoted crisis facing humanity. Locally, a London prepper, who’s also a fund manager, says: “People don’t think about flood risk. My guess is that the Thames barrier is going to fail at some point. Battersea and Richmond will be buggered.”

Meanwhile, Lionel Shriver’s latest novel, The Mandibles, is set in a future where the debt burden has left the US bust. “Preppers aren’t crazy - they’re people who are capable of thinking creatively,” she tells me. “I think [economic collapse] is a real possibility. Though I’ve so far found myself incapable of acting on that anxiety. I have savings and shares but I don’t trust anything: the dollar, the pound or the markets.”

Many are acting on these fears, though. In Silicon Valley, survivalism has high-profile followers. Reddit boss Steve Huffman recently told the New Yorker that he’d had laser eye surgery to prep himself for armageddon, while ex-Yahoo exec Marvin Liao has been learning archery. Others have built underground bunkers with air-filtration systems or land in New Zealand.

In Shriver’s novel, she discusses complexity theory - the idea that as the world becomes more complicated, it also gets more fragile: “Complex systems collapse catastrophically. They can go on and on – uncannily – everything seems fine while instabilities build up in  the system. It’s a house of cards, the classic example, or a deep piled mountain of gravel, you trip one rock and the whole thing comes tumbling down.” The 2008 economic crisis was an example of this: it showed how interlinked the system is now. “People didn’t have an idea how far the subprime mortgage crisis would proliferate or penetrate,” says the prepper.

In a disaster scenario, the fear is that you will be the person who falls over, shrieking “go on without me!” As Shriver notes, in the UK, we are now a long way from the wilds: “We are very socially dependent and we’re not very competent animals any more. If you put me in the woods, I would starve.”

How best to prepare for the apocalypse, then? “It depends on the type of disaster, but for most types, it’s important to have some form of portable wealth,” says the London prepper. She suggests gold: “It’s elemental, so there’s a finite amount of it in the world. But you need it in small parts like coins, or a bracelet or watch with links - not heavy gold bars. Diamonds probably aren’t useful, because they aren’t divisible - though uncut they’re easy to hide, because they don’t sparkle. You could take silver as well, but the rate of gold to silver in currency value has really varied over the years and you have to carry so much more.” If the collapse is economic, the Government may (as happens in the Mandibles) seize gold - so you need to hide it. She proposes a safe in the floor: “It has to be accessible. With jewellery – you wouldn’t want it showing. Secrete them abut your person.”