The wealthy are planning for apocalypse — Amitav Ghosh asks what that reveals about our future

In a memorial lecture delivered in New Delhi at the second edition of BML Munjal University Memorial Lecture, titled “Intimations of Apocalypse: Catastrophist and Gradualist Imaginings of the Planetary Future,” he turned to the imaginations of the ultra-wealthy and what he called the “cognitive elite.” He described a milieu in which “the idea of a radical transcendence of the human condition by a cognitive elite has grown into a complex ideology.”

Amitav Ghosh uses “cognitive elite” to describe a narrow class of highly educated tech and intellectual leaders who see themselves as equipped, by knowledge and technology, to ride out or even steer civilizational crisis, often with little faith in the survival of the global poor. He said some believe catastrophe will mean “the deaths of billions of people, which for them is a comparatively trifling issue.”

The stories they tell themselves about breakdown, he suggested, offer a window into how power anticipates disruption.

From nuclear Armageddon to multi-crisis apocalypse

Ghosh began with the caveat that apocalyptic thinking is not new. During the Cold War, nuclear annihilation loomed large in public consciousness. It inspired films, novels and mass political movements. Yet even then, not everyone saw the apocalypse as purely terrifying. Some religious groups viewed nuclear war through prophetic frameworks, as part of a divine timeline. He recalled that nuclear weapons were once seen by some as fulfilling prophecy, when “everything is in place for the battle of Armageddon.”

What has changed, Ghosh argued, is not the presence of apocalyptic fear but its sources and its social location. Today’s apocalyptic scenarios are plural. They include climate change, biodiversity loss, pandemics, runaway artificial intelligence, nanotechnology and geopolitical instability. Rather than a single end-of-the-world trigger, many elites now envision a “convergence” of crises, essentially cascading system failures. In his words, collapse is imagined as “a cascade… among which global warming is only one.”

This worldview is visible in what media theorist Douglas Rushkoff calls “the Event” in his book Survival of the Richest: a catch-all term for societal breakdown, whether caused by environmental collapse, cyberwar, pandemics or financial implosion.

In his lecture – ‘Intimations of Apocalypse: Catastrophist and Gradualist Imaginings of the Planetary Future,’ delivered at BML Munjal University – Amitav Ghosh turned his attention to the imaginations of the ultra-wealthy. (Generated using AI)

For Ghosh, what is striking is who is most invested in preparing for this possibility. Not fringe cults or isolated survivalists, but founders of major technology companies, venture capitalists and billionaires with extraordinary access to information and influence. “When many very powerful and extremely knowledgeable people start heading down the same path,” he said, “it needs to be asked why.”

The bunker as worldview

Stories of luxury bunkers, remote compounds and sea steading projects often circulate as curiosities or the eccentric hobbies of the ultra-rich. Ghosh says they are better read as expressions of a coherent worldview. He observed that these shelters aim to be “self-sufficient and off the grid in all respects.”

These projects assume three things. First, collapse is likely. Second, it will be unequal in its impact, and thirdly, wealth and technology can buy survival. This raises questions about who is expected to live and who is expected to die.

Ghosh connected this thinking to longer Western intellectual histories, including eugenics and colonial ideologies that treated some populations as expendable in the march of “progress.” In earlier centuries, many European thinkers naturalised the disappearance of Indigenous peoples under colonialism as inevitable. Today, he suggested, similar assumptions sometimes appear in discussions that imply climate catastrophe will primarily devastate the global South while wealthy nations endure. He warned that these visions resemble “the re-emergence of the vein of exterminationist thought.”

Catastrophists vs gradualists

A major distinction in Ghosh’s talk was between “catastrophist” and “gradualist” imaginations. Gradualists tend to view the planetary crisis as a problem of governance, policy and technology. Their frameworks dominate climate negotiations and international agreements. The underlying assumption is that coordinated action, emissions reductions and innovation can manage the problem. Catastrophists, by contrast, expect rupture. They imagine sudden, violent disruptions and system collapses, social breakdowns and irreversible tipping points. For some, collapse is no longer a risk, but an inevitability.

Ghosh did not dismiss catastrophist concerns outright. He acknowledged that scientists have issued stark warnings and that modern systems are indeed fragile. Supply chains, food networks and infrastructure can fail in cascading ways. Nuclear risks remain real and geopolitical tensions are high. His disagreement lies in the conclusions drawn from these premises. Where some elites conclude that they must insulate themselves and prepare to outlast the masses, Ghosh sees this as a misunderstanding of how survival works.

The myth of elite escape

‘Survival of the Richest – Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires Hardcover’ by Douglas Rushkoff. (Source: Generated using AI)

The fantasy of escaping collapse, whether to Mars, fortified islands or sealed compounds, rests on assumptions about control. Ghosh, echoing Rushkoff, questioned the practicalities. In true systemic breakdown, how do private jets take off from blocked runways? How are high-tech systems maintained without global supply chains? How are armed guards paid or kept loyal when currencies and institutions failhese plans assume that survival is primarily a technological problem. Ghosh suggested it is just as much a social and ecological one.

Off-grid bunkers still rely on spare parts, chemicals, technical expertise and global production systems. Isolation can increase dependence rather than reduce it. Self-sufficiency at a technological level is extraordinarily difficult.

Rethinking vulnerability

Perhaps the most provocative part of Ghosh’s argument concerned who might actually be resilient in a crisis.In elite statistical frameworks, vulnerability is often measured through income, access to consumer goods and integration into modern systems. By these metrics, subsistence farmers or fishing communities can appear extremely vulnerable. But Ghosh urged a reframing. Many such communities already live with uncertainty, environmental variability and limited infrastructure. They possess skills – food growing, repair, local knowledge, community cooperation – that are directly relevant to survival.

He was careful not to romanticise poverty or suffering. Hard lives are still hard. However, resilience is not identical to wealth. People who have always lived “off the grid” do not need to learn how. Those who rely daily on complex systems may be more exposed if those systems fail. This inversion challenges a common assumption in techno-futurist thinking that advanced societies are automatically more survivable.

Climate politics as biopolitics

Another thread in Ghosh’s talk concerned “ways of life.” Climate negotiations often stall around this phrase. When political leaders declare that a national lifestyle is “not up for negotiation,” they signal that climate action is not just about carbon metrics but about identity, comfort and power. Ghosh framed this as a kind of biopolitical conflict, wars over modes of living and relationships with the environment. Historically, colonial expansion destroyed Indigenous lifeways through ecological transformation as much as through warfare. Forests were cleared, rivers dammed, species moved and diseases spread.

Today’s planetary crisis, in his view, also pits different ways of inhabiting the Earth against one another. Some actors implicitly bet that their way of life will survive while others will not. However, if influential people come to see collapse as inevitable and unequal, they may invest less in prevention and more in insulation. In extreme forms, this can slide toward a quiet acceptance that large numbers of people will suffer. That shift matters politically. Expectations shape policy. If elites imagine themselves as future survivors rather than co-inhabitants of a shared fate, solidarity erodes.

Ghosh’s broader body of work has long emphasised interconnection – between human and non-human worlds, between histories of empire and present ecological crises. His critique of apocalyptic elitism fits that trajectory. It asks who gets imagined into the future and who is written out of it.

Literature’s role in planetary crisis

Why does a novelist engage these themes? Far from an escape – for Ghosh –  literature is a tool for perceiving the climate reality. Stories shape what societies consider plausible. For years, he has argued that mainstream literary fiction avoided climate-scale events because they seemed improbable within the conventions of realism. Yet the planet itself has become “improbable.” Apocalyptic narratives, whether religious or technocratic, are also stories. They encode values, hierarchies and hopes. Examining them is part of understanding climate politics.

Ghosh ended with a thought experiment: in a true collapse, whom would you rather be with – a tech magnate behind screens, or a farmer or fisher who knows land and water? He closed with the pointed question: “Who would you rather be with?”