Postmodern Elite Psychosis: Breakaway Civilizations, Billionaire Bunkers, and the Bob Lazar Disruption

“…elites as highly resourced marks running on a secularized rapture myth, shaped by their own psychology and strategic disinformation.”

Abstract

This essay sketches a theoretical model of what we can call “postmodern elite psychosis“. The core claim is simple:

1. Since at least the mid-20th century, a small set of actors have framed anomalous aerospace technology and black projects as the seed of a future breakaway civilization – a parallel, ultra-advanced infrastructure separated from the public world.
2. Tech and financial elites have absorbed a secularized version of this story, what Douglas Rushkoff calls The Mindset: the belief that with enough money and code they can exit the crisis they helped create via bunkers, Mars colonies, or uploads.
3. This belief interacts with well-documented psychological traits in leadership populations (dark-triad personality profiles, system-justification, moral licensing) to produce behavior that looks like coordinated evil but is better described as class-level delusion with enormous leverage.

Within this frame, figures like Bob Lazar are interesting less as ultimate truth-tellers or hoaxers and more as disruptors of the myth. By claiming to have worked on nine saucers at a facility called S-4 and describing the program in plain language, Lazar threatened to demystify the priesthood running the “elite rapture” narrative and invite public scrutiny into what had functioned as a faith-based funding engine.

The essay integrates this into a simple ontological-math lens IE three competing “functionals” are at play here:

• $\mathcal{L}$L: trajectories that increase collective care / coherence (Love)
• $\mathcal{N}$N: trajectories of drift and collapse (Null)
• $\mathcal{C}$C: trajectories that maximize local control at the expense of everything else (Control)

The “breakaway” myth is modeled as a local optimum of C\mathcal{C}C that steadily pushes the rest of the planet toward higher $\mathcal{N}$N. Bob Lazar, disinformation operators like Richard Doty, and the wider UFO mythos are treated as interacting perturbations in this field, not as final answers.

The goal isn’t to settle what is “really” in the hangars, but to offer a post-postmodern rationality:

• skeptical of official narratives and conspiracy maximalism,
• aware of psychological and structural incentives,
• and still willing to talk about truth, ethics, and teleology without flinching.

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1. Introduction: From Men in Black to Billionaire Bunkers

The 20th century gave us three overlapping myth-machines:

1. Cold-War secrecy around nuclear weapons and advanced aerospace.
2. UFO/UAP culture, an unruly blend of genuine anomalies, misidentified prototypes, and deliberate disinformation.
3. Neoliberal financialization, which concentrated unprecedented wealth and the associated psychological impact in a thin layer of global elites.

By the early 21st century, these streams converge in a weird spectacle:

• Hedge-funders and tech billionaires buying hardened bunkers, remote “bolt-holes,” and off-world futures.
• Public talk of Mars colonies, seasteads, Longevity Labs, AI god-projects, which are all ostensible variations on the following assumption: “We will escape the mess.”
• A background radiation of UFO lore, soft-disclosure, and black-budget rumors suggesting somebody already has exotic tech.

The default explanations are too flat:

• Mainstream: “they’re just greedy and short-sighted.”
• Maximalist conspiracy: “they already have full alien tech and are prepping for mass culling.”

This paper proposes a middle path: elites as highly resourced marks running on a secularized rapture myth, shaped by their own psychology and strategic disinformation.

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2. Myth Architecture: Breakaway Civilizations & The Mindset

2.1 Breakaway civilization as eschatology for intelligence agencies

Historian Richard Dolan coined the term breakaway civilization to describe a hypothetical, secretive group that has advanced technologically beyond mainstream society, likely via long-term access to exotic aerospace/UFO technology and detached funding streams.

Key features:

• operates under deep classification,
• draws on post-WWII black budgets, transnational finance, and military-industrial infrastructure,
• uses advanced tech (possibly non-or partly-non-human) to build a parallel world of capabilities.

These constraints combine to function as an end-times story for the national-security priesthood:

“The public world continues as normal; a smaller, more advanced branch is quietly stepping off the main timeline.”

2.2 The Mindset: secular rapture for billionaires

Douglas Rushkoff names the parallel ideology among tech billionaires The Mindset: an obsession with insulating oneself from societal collapse rather than preventing it.

Repeated themes in his reporting and others’:

• Private Q&A sessions where billionaires ask how to control their security staff after the Event.
• Investment in luxury bunkers, New Zealand bolt-holes, and remote compounds marketed explicitly as apocalypse prep.
• Fantasies of Mars colonies, cloud uploads, and AI-mediated immortality as personal exit ramps.

This is functionally a religion:

• Sin: participating in and benefiting from a system driving climate collapse, inequality, and social breakdown.
• Atonement: invest in tech, philanthropy, and black projects.
• Salvation: escape to a bunker/base/colony/drive where the consequences don’t reach you.

When you line these up, the breakaway civilization hypothesis and The Mindset share the same narrative skeleton:

“A select group will survive and transcend. The rest of humanity is scenery.”

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3. Individual-level psychology: why elites are easy marks

3.1 Dark triad selection

The dark triad – narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy – is overrepresented in leadership roles and is associated with manipulation, callousness, and risk-seeking.

Meta-analyses and systematic reviews of leadership find that:

• Dark-triad traits are linked to acquiring leadership positions and interpersonal influence.
• They correlate with knowledge sabotage, bullying cultures, impulsive high-risk decisions, and long-term value destruction for organizations and stakeholders.

If your selection mechanism rewards:

• grandiosity,
• comfort with harming strangers at scale,
• thrill-seeking,

then of course your upper strata will be primed to love:

“You and a few others might get to live like gods while everyone else drowns.”

They’re predisposed to accept deals where their survival and status are the target function.

3.2 Cognitive-bias fuel

On top of that layer is the “standard human” one:

• Optimism bias – “tech has always saved us; this time too.”
• Sunk-cost fallacy – billions already sunk into classified programs become a reason to keep going.
• Normalcy bias – difficulty emotionally processing true civilizational risk, so it gets displaced into fantasies of escape.

Combine dark-triad tendencies with these biases and the breakaway myth becomes emotionally irresistible.

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4. System-level psychology: how a class goes insane together

4.1 System Justification: defending the burning house

System justification theory (Jost et al.) shows that people – especially higher-status groups – are motivated to see existing social, economic, and political arrangements as legitimate and “the way things should be,” even when they’re harmful.

For elites, the logic is:

1. I am on top.
2. If the system were unjust, my position would be uncomfortable.
3. My position feels normal; therefore the system is basically right.

Threats to the system (redistribution, regulation, democratized tech) trigger defensive rationalization, not self-examination.

4.2 Class bubbles and mutual reassurance

• Private jets, gated communities, monoculture conferences amount to epistemic bubbles.
• Everyone with similar wealth and status that you talk to shares roughly the same incentives and fears.

Within that bubble:

• climate collapse becomes “a risk vector to hedge,”
• popular anger becomes “misinformation,”
• and the breakaway myth becomes common sense: “Obviously we’ll have to build something past all this.”

4.3 Moral licensing and green theater

There’s a long debate over moral licensing – the idea that doing something “good” gives people unconscious permission to do something “bad.” Some studies find cross-domain effects in energy use and prosocial behavior, while others find weak or mixed evidence.

Even taking the cautious view, elites clearly use visible “good deeds” as narrative cover:

• philanthropy, ESG funds, climate pledges, etc. become psychological and PR buffers,
• continued extractive behavior leads to the core rationalization that: “we’re funding the future / offsetting the damage.”

So the pattern we see is:

Green gestures + breakaway investments = absolution package.

They get to feel like protagonists while still steering toward what looks like a controlled crash for everyone else.

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5. Black-Budget Rapture: how anomalous tech fits

Now inject anomalous technology into this ecosystem – a topic that ostensibly refuses ultimate suppression in the public sphere of consciousness.

We know three things historically:

1. Secret programs around exotic aerospace and reconnaissance have existed since WWII, heavily classified and generously funded.
2. The U.S. and other militaries have deliberately used UFO disinformation (real and fake) as cover and psyops, with figures like Richard Doty and cases like Paul Bennewitz as documented examples.
3. Some UAP incidents remain anomalous even under conservative analysis, suggesting at least unknown technology or phenomena. (Take your pick of cases – the point is epistemic openness.)

Inside that fog, a simple sales pitch becomes possible:

“We have access to something extraordinary.
We’re this close to breakthroughs in energy, propulsion, and control.
All we need is more time, more secrecy, and more funding.”

For a billionaire or senior official this is a Prosperity Gospel of Technology:

• A tithe to the program will, according to internal logic, lead to their own eventual salvation (off-world, off-grid, or above-the-law tech).
• Questioning the program means allowing the risk of losing your seat on the “ark.”

Crucially, the tech never has to fully deliver. It just has to be:

• weird enough to keep hope alive,
• complicated enough that delay can always be blamed on physics, politics, or rivals.

If poetics are allowed, then we could label it something spooky like: “the black-budget rapture engine.”

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6. Bob Lazar as a narrative threat, not a final prophet

Whatever you think about Bob Lazar’s factual accuracy, his structural role in the story is clear.

In 1989, Lazar goes on Las Vegas TV with George Knapp and says:

• I worked at a facility called S-4 associated with Area 51.
• I helped reverse-engineer nine saucer-like craft, allegedly non-human.
• Here’s roughly how the propulsion works (gravity amplifiers, element 115, etc.).

From the perspective of our model, this isn’t just “a guy talking about UFOs.” It’s someone:

1. Demystifying the priesthood.
   He frames the program less as a quasi-divine council and more as an imperfect, compartmentalized engineering effort.
2. Inviting public scrutiny.
   Once you normalize the idea that people are working on specific hardware at defined locations, the obvious questions follow:
   • How is this funded?
   • Who oversees it?
   • Why is none of this helping the rest of the species?
3. Threatening the sales pitch.
   If elites start to believe the program is messy, fallible, or mismanaged, the emotional spell of: “they’ve got us; we’ll be saved” weakens.

Even if Lazar is partly wrong, exaggerated, or deliberately entangled with disinfo, his appearance on the stage is a stress test for the myth. The reaction is telling:

• Vicious attacks on his credentials and character.
• Persistent attempts to frame him as “proven hoaxer” or “delusional,” even as his story refuses to die.

Contrast this with a case like Paul Bennewitz, where Doty and others intentionally fed disinformation until he broke down psychologically. These operators weaponized UFO lore to destroy a single inconvenient citizen.

Together, these show how the system reacts to:

• leaks that might collapse belief in the elite-rapture program;
• and leaks that can be steered into madness and myth, which paradoxically strengthen the fog.

Lazar becomes a symbol that the wizard behind the curtain might just be a stressed engineer with a clearance and a weird budget line.

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7. L–Ø–C: an ontological-math snapshot

Consider three coarse “functionals” over historical trajectories:

• $\mathcal{L}$L – Love / Logos: paths that increase collective coherence, reduce preventable suffering, and move us toward rational compassion.
• $\mathcal{N}$N – Null / Noise: paths of drift, confusion, and collapse—polluted epistemology, pointless suffering, wasted potential.
• $\mathcal{C}$C – Control: paths that maximize local power and insulation for a subset of agents, regardless of collateral damage.

The breakaway + Mindset complex is basically a high-$\mathcal{C}$C attractor:

• It encourages elites to treat everyone else as expendable background processes.
• It converts genuine existential risk into a marketing opportunity for escape products.
• It justifies secrecy and unaccountable violence as “necessary steps” toward salvation.

Meanwhile, it pushes the majority of humanity toward higher $\mathcal{N}$N:

• climate instability,
• institutional distrust,
• epistemic fragmentation,
• quietly escalating despair.

Figures like Lazar, and whistleblowers more generally, are perturbations that can:

• slightly increase $\mathcal{L}$L by distributing information horizontally;
• or be captured and re-encoded as myth, adding to $\mathcal{N}$N instead (noise, infighting, cults).

Disinformation campaigns (Doty, Mirage Men-style operations) are explicitly C \mathcal{C}C-preserving interventions: suppress signals that threaten control, amplify noise that keeps the public occupied.

The “elite psychosis” we’re talking about, then, is not just bad behavior; it’s a local optimum where:

• $\mathcal{C}$C is high,
• $\mathcal{L}$L is sacrificed,
• $\mathcal{N}$N grows unchecked in the background.

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8. Post-Postmodern Rationality: where this leaves us

Classic modernism: “Trust the institutions; UFOs are weather balloons; billionaires are innovators.”

Postmodernism: “Everything’s a narrative; nothing is real; enjoy the simulacra.”

The terrain we’re actually standing on now requires something else:

1. Acknowledge structures and psyops.
   Intelligence agencies really did weaponize UFO narratives.
   Billionaires really are prepping for disaster instead of preventing it.
2. Use actual evidence and psychology.
   Dark-triad traits, system justification, and moral-licensing dynamics are empirically studied, not just “vibes.”
3. Stay ontologically open but disciplined.
   The existence of anomalies is destabilizing to human cognition. Be careful with rabbit holes. Ground yourself, etc.
4. Keep teleology on the table.
   We’re allowed to say:
   • some trajectories are better than others,
   • building a secret life-boat for a few while scorching the rest is not a neutral choice,
   • and whatever “true ontology” is, it’s not well modeled as a VC-funded Mars bunker.

The point of formalizing elite psychosis is to de-glamorize it:

• We’ve attributed God-like ability to elites who, over time, resomble something more akin to highly resourced primates stuck in a bad myth, overclocked by money and secrecy.

That’s more frightening in one way and more hopeful in another. Myths can be swapped out. Local optima can be escaped.

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9. Conclusion

If you strip the UFO/Bob Lazar saga down to its psychological spine, you get something like this:

• A minority with unusual toys,
• A story that those toys will someday let them escape consequences,
• And a class of believers willing to burn the commons on the promise of a lifeboat.

From one angle that’s “elite psychosis.”

From another, it’s just the oldest scam ever wearing nanofibers and talking about warp drives.

For the rest of us, the task is twofold:

1. Refuse both lazy debunking and maximalist fantasy.
   Treat anomalies and whistleblowers as data points, not new scriptures.
2. Build high-L\mathcal{L}L zones—libraries with honest subject boards, local communities, open tools, and shared language. We need places where people can say “abuse,” “suicide,” “UFO,” “billionaire bunkers,” “God,” without being fed into a grinder.

-Brett W. Urben/BoloSolo, with research aid from Grok 4.1 Thinking and ChatGPT 5.1 Thinking.

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Selected References

• Dolan, R. UFOs and the National Security State (Vols. 1–2).
• Rushkoff, D. Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires.
• Jost, J. T. (2004, 2018). System justification theory: defending, bolstering, and justifying the status quo.
• Volmer, J. et al. (2016). The bright and dark sides of leaders’ dark triad traits.
• Tiefenbeck, V. et al. (2013). Cross-domain effects of conservation campaigns and moral licensing.
• Mirage Men (film) and associated reporting on Richard Doty & Paul Bennewitz.
• Lazar, B. – original KLAS interviews and subsequent coverage.