Even in the most charitable reading assuming this event actually occurred, if these people were so smart and cynical about human nature, as the writer claims they are, wouldn’t they have known the writer’s views and intentions before sitting down and thus said what they are least likely to do to test the writer?
“The Event” is no more than a natural part of the human psyche formed by our understanding of the life-to-death cycle we see in nature.
It’s as old as the earliest creation myth and if real will be something that very few of us will experience and be able to prevent.
Reason: The chances of us becoming technologically advanced and emotionally mature enough to prevent a large asteroid from hitting our planet or escaping our solar system to live in space or find another habitable planet are slim to none.
To me, it has felt that a vague apocalyptic feeling, or at least a millenarian one, has seemed to be everywhere, not just among the super-rich.
It has right- and left- variants. Mostly it leans right. The climate versions lean "left", though honestly I think the interest comes from more center-left/Davos places than from far-left/purple-haired places. Which means that, as a grassroots thing, it's more "right-wing".
(There's some interesting crossover in the vaguely hippy / Peak Oil / Stewart Brand / permie space, though this skews older.)
Prior to COVID, "prepping" peaked in 2017, before seeing renewed interest, spiking in 2020, though we're now back down to 2015 levels in the psychologically-"post-COVID" era.
"Climate change" is apparently a somewhat passe topic (who knew?), peaking in 2007 (that actually isn't great; it means people got tired of it before anything was done):
Even in the most charitable reading assuming this event actually occurred, if these people were so smart and cynical about human nature, as the writer claims they are, wouldn’t they have known the writer’s views and intentions before sitting down and thus said what they are least likely to do to test the writer?