The bunker is imagined by some as a chrysalis for transformation into a “model self”, where preparations lead to a perfectly routine existence after which time a person can emerge as a superior version of themselves. Many of us experienced this playing out during the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic, which for some brought relief from unwanted travel obligations and for others provided a productive period of isolation and privacy. A utopia for some was a disaster for others, who were without the resources to hunker down and were left jobless, sick, and dead.

So in this sense, the rational, orderly, planned space of the bunker is the antithesis of what some see as the pointless acceleration and accumulation of modern life. These narratives contrast the media’s representation of prepping and bunker building as a gloomy, dystopian practice. My research found that prepping is ultimately hopeful, if a little selfish. Selfish because the preppers are looking out for themselves, given that they don’t trust the government to do so. However, as may of them have made clear to me during the current pandemic, the fact that they are self-sufficient has alleviated pressure on critical resources and health-care facilities, putting an altruistic spin on what looks to be a self-centered endeavour. Unlike survivalists, the goal of the prepper is not to exit society, but to help prop it up through personal preparedness.

One bunker builder in California explained to me that that “no one wants to go into the bunker as much as they want to come out of the bunker”. As such, the bunker is a form of transportation, but one that instead of transporting bodies and material through space, it transports them through time.

Hope from dread

To preppers, the bunker is both a controlled laboratory in which to build better selves, a place to reassert lost agency and a chrysalis from which to be reborn after a necessary “reset” of a messy, complicated and fragile world.

In the light of the COVID-19 pandemic it has become clear that the preppers are not social anomalies, but gatekeepers to understanding the contemporary human condition – just as survivalists of the past were a reflection of Cold War anxieties. Spaces like the Survival Condo seem improbable, if not impossible, but it’s the choice to build them that matters, because in action hope can spawn from dread. As Hall suggested at the end of our tour:

This was not a space of hope. The defensive capability of this structure only existed to the extent needed to protect a weapon, a missile – this bunker was a weapon system. So, we converted a weapon of mass destruction into the complete opposite.

But what the preppers are building is less important than our need to understand that prepping refracts underlying anxieties created by inequality, austerity, shrinking trust in government, despondency about globalisation and the speed of technological and social change. The COVID-19 pandemic is only likely to increase people’s dread – and therefore willingness – to normalise prepping practices. So it may well be that the future of humanity is not in the stars after all – but deep under the surface of the Earth.

Bradley Garrett’s new book Bunker: Building for the End Times, will be published by Allen Lane in August.

For you: more from our Insights series:

• Lockdown lessons from the history of solitude

   

• What will the world be like after coronavirus? Four possible futures

• The end of the world: a history of how a silent cosmos led humans to fear the worst

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Bradley Garrett, Social and Cultural Geographer, University College Dublin

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Image: Reuters