A forensic taxonomy of the personalities who fuel (and get trapped in) the collapse industry

The doom ecosystem isn’t a monolith. It’s a psychological marketplace. Different personalities consume, propagate, and evangelize doom for different internal reasons. Understanding these categories explains why certain figures—Collum included—fit so neatly into the machinery that powers the hard-asset fear economy.

Here are the Six Psychological Archetypes of Doomers.

Type 1: The Financial Trauma Survivor

“I’ve been burned before, so everything is a bubble forever.”

This type is created, not born. They lived through a major financial wound—1970s inflation, 1987 crash, dot-com bust, 2008, or a personal financial disaster. The trauma calcifies their worldview: once the system fails them, they assume the system is permanently corrupted.

They aren’t looking at data—they’re looking at their past reflected back at them.
This type buys doom because doom feels familiar, and familiarity feels safe.

Common traits:

Overweight precious metals
Deep distrust of financial institutions
Overinterprets every risk indicator
Repeats “It’s just like last time” endlessly

Influencers who cater to this type: Schiff, Rickards, Kiyosaki.

Type 2: The Opportunistic Perma-Bear

“If collapse sells, collapse is what I’ll predict.”

This type consciously or unconsciously recognizes that negativity converts, and that pessimism is a profitable brand. They may or may not believe their own predictions, but they know the incentives:
Fear → clicks → subscribers → gold sales → conferences → media appearances.

Their messaging is always on:

Crisis is imminent
Inflation is uncontrollable
The Fed is trapped
Fiat is dying
Stocks are a rigged non-stop bubble

This type maintains a consistent persona not because the forecast is accurate, but because the market rewards consistency.

Common behaviors:

Vague predictions
Moving goalposts
“I was early, not wrong”
Hyperbolic language

Examples:
Rickards, Stansberry personalities, certain Kitco/Wealthion circuit regulars.

Type 3: The Intellectual Nihilist (Dave Collum’s Category)

“Everything is corrupt, everything is broken, and everything is falling apart.”

This type doesn’t just expect collapse—they need collapse to validate their worldview.
They’re not motivated by money.
They’re motivated by diagnosis: the belief that society is fundamentally diseased.

They see rot everywhere:

Institutions
Markets
Government
Universities
Media
Culture
Technology
Public discourse

Their doom isn’t financial—it’s civilizational.

This type often has:

High intelligence
Broad knowledge
Strong contrarian reflexes
Deep distrust of narratives
A tendency to universalize problems
A personal identity tied to being “the one who sees what others ignore”

Why Collum fits Type 3 perfectly:

His doom is existential, not analytical.
His predictions are rooted in worldview, not models.
He frames systemic failure as inevitable and overdue.
His interviews are less forecasts and more philosophical autopsies.
He treats societal decay as axiomatic.

He is not selling metals or newsletters—he is selling the belief that everything is collapsing because everything deserves to collapse.

This makes him uniquely valuable to the doom ecosystem: he provides the atmosphere that activates the other types.

Type 4: The Cassandra Ego-Trip

“One day the world will realize I was right all along.”

This is the doomer who wants vindication more than understanding. They’re addicted to the fantasy of the “I told you so” moment. They see themselves as visionaries ignored by the masses, misunderstood geniuses whose wisdom will only be appreciated post-collapse.

Features:

Chronic social alienation
Resentment toward institutions that didn’t reward them
Academic/research background that went unrecognized
Deep desire for intellectual validation
Strong identification with catastrophic predictions

These individuals tend to treat macroeconomics not as a discipline but as destiny. They are drawn to narratives that position them at the center of future historical judgment.

Typical audience:
Boomers who once felt culturally central and now feel culturally displaced.

Type 5: The Apocalypse Fetishist

“Collapse feels exciting, cleansing, or morally clarifying.”

This type romanticizes collapse. They view it as a purge—an overdue reckoning, a great reset (the non-WEF kind), a cleansing event that eliminates corruption and rewards the righteous. For them, collapse is not just possible but desirable. It represents moral realignment.

Traits: