There are preppers, and then there are preppers. Some people have a generator and a couple extra days of food. Other people have a compound stocked with everything they need to wait out the end of the world as we know it. And some — the adherents of collapsitarianism — are chomping at the bit for the world to hurry up and end already.
The distinguishing feature of collapsitarianism, however, is not its zeal for social and economic collapse. It’s the sense that collapse isn’t just desirable, but inevitable. Collapsitarians do not prep with an eye not toward some potential abstract disaster. Rather, they use public choice theory to postulate a specific and inevitable collapse.
Collapsitarians and the Tragedy of the Commons
Specifically, collapsitarianism is concerned with what is known as the Tragedy of the Commons. This is when a common resource is overexploited by rational actors all behaving in their own self-interest in a way that negatively impacts the whole, potentially depleting the resource entirely.
While generally associated with natural resources, contemporary central banks are the Tragedy of the Common to the nth degree. Large investment banks rationally act to acquire as much fiat currency as possible; but this causes broader social calamities, from runaway inflation to total social collapse.
Collapsitarians hold a myriad of doomsday prophecies. They might be prepping for the Federal Reserve’s fiat to collapse, or environmental degradation, or the gears of industrialism burning themselves out, or the unsustainability of globalism.
Read more about Collapsitarian at Spread Great Ideas: https://spreadgreatideas.org/glossary/collapsitarian/
