Or, Surviving the Apocalypse, part 2. There is a man who has built a bunker in Minnesota, valued at over $100 million, with features such as anti-aircraft water cannons, a moat that has the capacity to instantly alight in flames, and lethal drones. The man who built it is not a war criminal or Bond villian who has reason to believe that he will be the target of some specific voilence, he just thinks this is a logical response to generalized threats.¹

I had intended to listen to it as a quirky human interest story, but it quickly made me sad. Because the default assumptions of it were sad. Here’s what the prepper told the host of the podcast about his reasons behind his enormous bunker: 

PREPPER: I didn’t build it with the intentions for nuclear warfare. My scenario is an EMP. All power’s gone. People turn the water on, no water. Ninety-nine percent of people probably have supplies in their house to maybe last three, four days, maybe a week. So what’s gonna happen after that when people go to the grocery stores and there’s no groceries?

I’ll be self-sufficient. I’ll have a hydroponics room, endless amounts of water, and endless amounts of food and air, and I’ll be protected from anybody trying to penetrate into here.

Do you hear it? That after 3 days, what? Everyone would kill each other over the last few cans of beans on the shelves? Why would he assume that? What evidence is there of that? There have been thousands of years of disasters, famines, warfare, and catastrophes in human history, and we have pretty good records of many of them because they were pretty memorable to the people who lived through them. In the last century, especially, we have become tragically good at cataloguing, recording, and archiving apocalyptic suffering, and its aftereffects. We know how people behave when the grocery shelves are empty, because in a lot of places, at a lot of different times, the grocery shelves have been empty.

The people who study this have found that prosocial behavior (cooperation, protecting the vulnerable, thinking of the good of the whole) increases during times of disaster. The data suggests that it is exactly when the shelves are empty, when the lights go out, that we are at our best, kindest, most self-sacrificing. Panic, looting, and aggression during disasters are extremely rare because social ties are resilient to disaster and are often strengthened during them. True panic tends to only set in when people are totally isolated (like, for example, in a self-sufficient bunker).²

The evidence is clear: the best way to ensure your chances of survival against a wide variety of unpredictable and ever-evolving threats, isn’t to build the best bunker, it’s to draw close to your community, get to know your neighbors, be plugged into the people and institutions who are around you. We aren’t meant to go it alone. If your desire is to survive some unpredictable threat, the best thing you can do is to build as robust and supportive a community as possible. If you’re worried about the world ending, don’t build a bunker, make some friends. 

In the same podcast, a bunker salesman posits this (frankly infuriating) hypothetical:

AL CORBI: You are a good man. You, you are a respectful person. You love your family. You wouldn’t do anything wrong, right? What’s gonna happen when I’ve got the water, I’ve got the food, and I’ve got the medication, and you don’t? What are you gonna do?

HOST: Yeah. Good people will be forced to become bad people.

AL CORBI: No, no, no. No, say it. What are you gonna do?

HOST: Yeah, take it from someone.

If I could have yelled through my headphones, if I could have burst into the conversation, I would have asked the most obvious question. If you’re a good man, and have food and water and medicine and your neighbor doesn’t, what are you gonna do? 

Share it. 

I’ve never survived a real apocalypse, but I’ve survived a couple of little ones, and so have you – two weeks without power in an ice storm, a flood that cut us off from all communication with the outside world for 5 days, a pandemic. In all of them, I found myself relying on and being relied on by my community in ways I am profoundly grateful for. No part of me wishes that I had called less loved ones, or had less loved ones call me. What is the virtue of going it alone? Why would we assume the only thing that has held constant in all of human history, relationships, community, love, is the thing that will collapse? 

As leaders, where are we trying to go it alone when the answer is community? I once told the story of a church I worked with a $100 million endowment, whose stated goal was to ensure that the church could continue ad infinitum even if the pews were empty and not a dollar went into the plate. Why? Why not use the $100 million to invest in the mid-size city where the church was located, where it could make a real difference, build affordable housing, support scholarships, and build the kind of connection and impact that would make it matter that the church was there, that would advance the kingdom of God? Connection with neighborhood churches, with schools, with partners, that is where there is sustainability, that is the net that will hold. If what you care about is the survival of the church, then you need to make sure the community it is called to survives with it. 

You don’t need a stronger bunker, you need more friends. You need a community, you need to be deeply invested in the well-being of the neighborhood, your neighbors, the birds, bees, bugs, bureaucrats, and businesses around you. Apocalypse in its original Greek means the unveiling, or the revelation. It is meant to be a discovery of what was real, what really mattered, and what the truth of the world and of God is. Obviously much of that revelation is unknowable, but here’s what we do know: whatever we are called to do, whatever we are called to be, I’m basically 100% confident we aren’t meant to do it, or be it, alone, proudly self-sufficient, as we let the world burn around us. All of our fates are intertwined, and I have a feeling we were created that way on purpose.

1. https://www.agoricmedia.com/suspicious-minds-season-2 ↩︎
2. “Numerous individual studies and research syntheses have contrasted commonsense ideas about how people respond during crises with empirical data on actual behavior. Among the most important myths addressed in these analyses is the notion that panic and social disorganization are common responses to imminent threats and to actual disaster events (Quarantelli and Dynes, 1972; Johnson, 1987; Clarke, 2002). True panic, defined as highly individualistic flight behavior that is nonsocial in nature, undertaken without regard to social norms and relationships, is extremely rare prior to and during extreme events of all types. Panic takes place under specific conditions that are almost never present in disaster situations. Panic only occurs when individuals feel completely isolated and when both social bonds and measures to promote safety break down to such a degree that individuals feel totally on their own in seeking safety. Panic results from a breakdown in the ongoing social order—a breakdown that Clarke (2003:128) describes as having moral, network, and cognitive dimensions.
   
   National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2006. Facing Hazards and Disasters: Understanding Human Dimensions. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/11671.” ↩︎