THE WORLD IN A BUNKER: A CONVERSATION WITH EMILY RAY AND ROBERT KIRSCH ON PREPPING, (POST-)APOCALYPSE, AND AMERICAN SOCIETY
Emily Ray and Robert Kirsch, former CAPAS fellows, sat down with Laura Mendoza to discuss their 2024 book, Be Prepared: Doomsday Prepping in the United States. In their conversation, they explore the book’s central themes, including the phenomenon of “bunkering,” on a larger global scale. They also reflect on their time as CAPAS fellows and how their research stay impacted their work.
LM: Your book helped me understand prepping as a way of life in the United States. Without giving too much away, what are some general features of U.S. American apocalypticism that shape what it means to “be American” in modern history?
RK: One of our starting points is that the United States has always been, in a sense, an apocalyptic society. In U.S. history, there has always been a strong eschatological undercurrent of people and groups convinced that the end times would occur in their lifetime. Through epochal shifts—industrialization, mass migration, westward expansion, the Cold War, and then even into contemporary developments like the new space race—these stories that Americans tell themselves persist around the idea that there is something singular, that there is some rupture on the horizon that we have to get past, and America has to persist beyond whatever rupture that is. Within our project, what it means to be American is connected with activating this old mythology of the self-sufficient, yeoman farmers who work the land, tame the wilderness, make what they need, and carry the nation in themselves and their bunkers into whatever is on the other side of catastrophe.
ER: There is a sense that living in apocalyptic times is not at odds with identifying as an American. Living through end times often reinforces the idea: “I am the exemplar of the person who should survive” or “I am the one destined to receive God’s glory at the end of this.” We wrote about the 1950s atomic era, when the federal government pushed the idea that the only thing scarier than the bomb is becoming a communist, and the only thing worse than death is losing your Americanness in the process. That logic persists today. And that is part of the important connection between Americanness and bunker—it is this affirmation of empire that you are supposed to take with you.
LM: This seems to reveal a “longing for collapse.” Is this apocalypticism embedded in the American ethos? And if so, what is its productivity?
ER: Part of what drives this is ideological. Americans are fed the story that human nature is inherently competitive and self-interested. They tend to be anti-communist and anti-socialist because these philosophies are perceived as opposed to human nature. There are even theories of democracy built on the premise that democracy only works when everyone acts in their own self-interest, and we have aggregates of self-interested groups that make decisions. Part of this is what drives the American qualities of the bunkerized subject.
RK: It is embedded for several reasons. Number one is that Americans want to win. There is this idea that not only can I make it through a calamity, catastrophe, or apocalypse, but I will be vindicated by the fact that other people won’t. A prevalent attitude among many people who engage in this behaviour is the idea that if they just make wise consumer decisions, they will win the catastrophe, so to speak.
Apocalyptic preparation then becomes a contest, a test of resilience, with the embedded idea that you can win the apocalypse.
LM: Your book also explores the relationship between prepping and the construction of white nationalist, white supremacist identity—particularly among white American men, who seem to be grieving a “better past” they believe has been lost. Yet, nothing catastrophic has necessarily happened to them directly. So, what exactly are they afraid of losing? How do prepping and white supremacy function in relation to one another?
ER: The way you pose the question is fascinating because while nothing catastrophic has happened to white nationalists, they deeply believe otherwise. They believe they are actually losing their majority status and their associated power. Their fantasy of white supremacy as a feature of the world is under threat, and that feeds into their prepping behaviour. They tend to be accelerationists wanting to hasten the demise of the system, which they believe oppresses them and prevents them from reproducing and restoring America to its “right place.” Prepping then becomes part of white supremacy through anticipating and preparing for race wars. Civil unrest around Black Lives Matter protests gets interpreted as “aha, the race war is accelerating, we’re getting there.”
LM: What about the post-apocalyptic fantasy that fuels prepping culture in general? What happens after the catastrophe? What does this tell us about bunkerization as an ideological fantasy of the future?
ER: In a way, it is a future that is always the same—one that may have to be rebuilt to resemble the present prior to the apocalyptic, but it is that present that we want to return to. There is an inherent conservatism that runs through this, where everything must remain as it was, because change is not what we seek. This future is often a very typical, in some ways, American fantasy: the small farm and the nuclear family, and traditional gender and racial roles. Even their future—which is supposed to be dramatically different and a huge relief from our current context—is one that resembles old fantasies. As long as you remain in hunkered-down mode—protecting, accumulating, waiting, reading the signs—it prevents you from imagining a different future. In that sense, bunkerization is also an attempt to pretend that the present can extend indefinitely in all directions.
Bunkerization also stunts the ability to imagine a future.
RK: This reveals the lack of the American prepper’s imagination. From what I can tell, the future looks like today. That idea is built into this fantasy that you can preserve a particular identity, a particular way of life, a particular set of social and economic relations, and you craft those in miniature within your domicile with a hard-enough shell. When catastrophe happens, you emerge on the other side of it, and things resume as they were. The idea, then, is a kind of non-future future that many people are envisioning.
LM: You describe “opting out” as a defining feature of the bunkerized subject—a kind of egotistical, individualist withdrawal from collective responsibility, especially in the face of crisis. Do you see this same logic underlying the prepping practices of the ultra-wealthy—especially Silicon Valley elites and others operating on an entirely different scale? Have they long opted out of this world?
RK: Absolutely. When I wrote about this six years ago, it felt somewhat clandestine—seasteading, New Zealand citizenship, and similar practices. What is striking about our present moment is that Silicon Valley elites are now explicitly articulating how and why they are opting out, why they are leaving us all behind. This extends to civic life and civic responsibility. Whether it is Bezos, Thiel, or others in that constellation, they argue that democracy does not work and we need to abandon this planet.
ER: There is an interesting aspect to opting out and opting in simultaneously among the tech elites. They are opting out in the sense that they are doing the same things as the people storing cans of food, but the scale is entirely different because they live in an economy that is different from that of the everyday person. They can simply purchase a helicopter and acquire all the means of their survival to maintain their class status, while also attempting to retain the power structure that keeps them in their current position. In some ways, opting out is not only what they are doing. They are also opting in in a way that most of us could never do. These are also startups and startup culture producing “the next prepping bag” and “here’s what you can do.” There are many things the elites can accomplish through bunkerization that reaffirm the subject: property acquisition, maintaining power, and reinforcing class.
LM: You have made the case that bunkerization is rooted in American history and culture. But in my reading—as a Latina and from a non-U.S. perspective—many things felt uncomfortably familiar: consumer culture, neoliberal politics, and traits of white supremacy that right-wing politicians in my region exhibit. You note that these things may travel and are adaptable. Is this something you see happening more broadly or internationally—and if so, how?
RK: I would highlight two tendencies. The first is the direct export of bunkerization. We have spoken with colleagues in the UK and Australia, where people adopt these same behaviours. Even in Germany—search YouTube for “prepping” and you will find enterprising young men digging holes in the Black Forest, installing metal cubes, and declaring “Look, I made a shelter.” This is part of a broader Americanization. That is one trajectory for how bunkerization gets exported. The second is a general kind of spatial reordering—this idea of bunkerized subjects or bunkered societies. In another project we are developing, we refer to it as “Fortress America.” That kind of fortification requires a spatial reordering of the Earth, raising fundamental questions: Where will people be? Where are the resources? How do we establish distribution channels for essential supplies? And this spatial reordering easily travels, because it raises fundamental questions: Where will humans thrive? Who is important? How will they be provisioned? And conversely, who gets sacrificed? Who does not merit consideration?
ER: And spatial reordering is not new. What is significant now is the way the U.S., as a hegemonic power, forces itself into defining what spatial reordering means. It is concerned with who is savable. Christian missionary efforts enter here: “We can make you a savable population if you accept this belief system.” Then you are included in what it means for the U.S. to “care” about you.
LM: Another striking insight from your book is how bunkerization reaches beyond the physical bunker. Could you discuss the everyday practices of bunkering and control that shape the mentality of the American prepper? And could those same mentalities help us understand the anxieties and ideologies taking root in unequal societies such as those in Latin America?
RK: In some ways, this redirects the arrow—or maybe boomerangs—where the U.S. is learning aspects of domestic life from Latin America. Where I live, half the houses on the market are in gated communities. They vary in their levels of security, but the underlying idea is that you are behind walls. Gated communities have become incredibly common in the U.S. This ties in with some of our work around “Fortress America,” where we argue that Americans are increasingly encouraged to think of their domicile as a miniature nation-state. Their role becomes securing that plot of land and taking on a quasi-sovereign responsibility for ensuring it persists—against environmental, social, or economic threats. If we examine how people respond to growing inequality in other parts of the world, including Latin America, I believe we see a similar pattern: hardening the carapace of the home, retreating behind gates, and weaponising the domicile. The “bunker-as-a-way-of-life” model becomes a coping mechanism for instability over which individuals feel they have no control.
So, in some ways, as is typical of imperial adventures, the logic comes home. The inequalities produced by imperialism return to the core, so to speak.
LM: Finally, going back to your time as CAPAS fellows—the discussions, the working groups with other fellows and the CAPAS team. Were there any recurring themes or conversations from your time as fellows that influenced or helped shape your book?
ER: Certainly, the time at CAPAS was formative for the book. The interdisciplinary dialogue was very important, because political science and political theory do not typically engage with bunkers or apocalypse as explicitly as some of the humanities fields do. Drawing especially from Jenny Stümer’s work, we explored the concept of apocalypse as a way to describe our current moment—a time and place we are already living in—rather than something we are preparing for. Since “bunkering” means something different depending on whom you are talking to, hearing diverse and international perspectives on what preparation means in different contexts was also helpful in strengthening our central theory.
RK: The time at CAPAS made us more careful thinkers ultimately. Its structure allowed us to have time to sit with really smart people from various disciplines and think intentionally and deeply about the projects we were all pursuing.