Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back

by Mark O'Connell

Cartoons, viral videos, radio news bulletins, uneasy exchanges with neighbors about how it never used to be this warm in February. So many things felt like a flashback sequence in the first act of a postapocalyptic movie, like we were living right before the events of the main timeline kicked in. I knew that this kind of thinking was as old as human civilization itself, that imagining the apocalypse was immemorially a response to times of rapid change and uncertainty. This recognition made it no less oppressive, no less real.

No, what is actually meant by the end of the world is, in its particulars, a province of terrors fleetingly glimpsed, barely apprehended. What we are talking about is the collapse of the systems by which the known world operates, slowly and then all at once.

It was all there in strange microcosm: the frontier mythos of freedom and self-sufficiency, the overwrought performance of masculinity that utterly failed to conceal the cringing terror from which it proceeded, the sad and fetishistic relationship to consumer goods, the hatred and mistrust of outsiders. Lurking on the forums and blogs and Facebook groups of these preppers—reading their literature and even listening to the occasional podcast—I came to see their movement as a hysterical symptom of America itself.

The bug-out bag video was a kind of apocalyptic variation of this display of consumerist achievement.

This is a prediction of the future that could be offered only by someone who was never fully convinced by the idea of society in the first place. This seemed to me to be implicit in everything I learned about the preppers, and in everything Rawles wanted to impart to his readers. What he was offering was, in this sense, not so much a prediction of the future as a deeply political interpretation of the present.

And when preppers like Rawles invoked the specter of the savage, what they were doing was setting up a divide between themselves—as carriers of the flame of civilization, as heirs of the frontier spirit—and those who would immediately revert to a state of nature, the wild natives of the post-collapse world. And in setting up that divide, what they were further doing, whether they understood it or not, was creating the necessary conditions for a return to the cleansing violence of the nation’s colonial past.

This vision of God-fearing members of the business community and war veterans coming together to defend themselves against an onslaught of urban looters and general lawlessness was plainly a fantasy of purgation, focused on the violent elimination of “bad” elements of American society. In fact, you couldn’t even properly call it crypto-fascism: it was really just good old-fashioned original-style fascism. It didn’t seem necessary either to do a lot of racial decoding when it came to all the talk of “urban” versus “rural” America, of “city-style” gangs versus homeowner association posses. The whole appeal of the apocalypse, for this J. J. Johnson, seemed to be that it gave him a pretext for this kind of Klan-style fantasy.

Prepping is rooted in the apprehension of an all-consuming decadence. Society has become weak, excessively reliant on systems of distribution and control whose very vastness and complexity renders them hopelessly vulnerable. The city is the source of this decadence. Preppers don’t trust cities, or those who make their lives in them. All those people living at a remove from the production of food, completely reliant on those vast and fragile systems, of distribution and waste collection, those heaving masses of humanity, incorrigibly plural and various. And what this suspicion amounts to is a suspicion of modernity itself.

The protagonists of the show, typically middle-class rural white men—not especially wealthy or highly educated, but comfortable enough to invest significant proportions of their income on fantasies of rugged self-sufficiency in the wake of a great civilizational crackup—are uniformly obsessed with purifying their lives of dependence on others. These men’s critique of modernity, such as it is, is a critique of the extent to which the individual has become weakened and compromised by such dependency.

Preppers are not preparing for their fears: they are preparing for their fantasies. The collapse of civilization means a return to modes of masculinity our culture no longer has much use for, to a world in which a man who can build a toilet from scratch—or protect his wife and children from intruders using a crossbow, or field dress a deer—is quickly promoted to a new elite. The apocalypse, whatever form it takes, will mean misery and death for most human beings, but for the prepared, it will mean a return to first principles, to a world in which men are men. Especially if they are white.

The failure to acknowledge, or even to perceive, the lengthening shadow of the vast dramatic irony that attended this whole matter—namely that it was precisely society’s most marginalized and oppressed people who truly understood what it might mean to live in a postapocalyptic world, and who were therefore most fully prepared—seemed to me to indicate a total moral incapacity.

To be a prepper was to do everything one could do to avoid being one of the sufferers oneself, while contributing nothing to the prevention or alleviation of suffering in others.

Because that was the thing about preppers: they were easily ridiculed, and their politics made it tempting to outright disdain them, but at an instinctual level I felt that I understood where they were coming from. Though I didn’t share their manic insistence on preparing for the collapse of civilization, I knew the distributed matrix of unease from which the certainty of that collapse grew.

Vivos was offering more than just the provision of ready-made bunkers, turnkey apocalypse solutions. It was offering a vision of a post-state future. When you bought into such a scheme, you tapped into a fever dream from the depths of the libertarian lizard-brain: a group of well-off and ideologically like-minded individuals sharing an autonomous space, heavily fortified against outsiders—the poor, the hungry, the desperate, the unprepared—and awaiting its moment to rebuild civilization from the ground up. What was being offered, as such, was a state stripped down to its bear right-wing essentials: a militarized security apparatus, engaged through contractual arrangement, for the protection of private wealth.

The question I needed to ask myself, he said, is which group I wanted to be in when it all went down, when whatever was going to happen happened. When the asteroid landed. When the lights went out. When the economy crashed for good. When the bombs started falling. When the seas began to drown the cities. When the waters were made bitter. When the EMP hit. When for whatever reason, in whatever way, the whole setup went tits irrevocably up, as it unquestionably would. Did I want to be out there trying to get in? Because if I thought I was going to be able to get past the armed guards Vivos would have stationed at all the property’s perimeters, good luck to me. I was going to be out there, and you know who was going to be out there with me? A whole lot of other people, and not a lot of food. And it was a known fact, historically, that after twenty-one days without food, people will resort to cannibalism. Here he appealed to the precedent of the Donner Party. In his telling, it seemed to me to be both origin myth and prophecy, a story about a country founded in savagery and destined to devour itself.

It seemed to me that this scenario Vicino had outlined, the haves battening down the hatches against the have-nots, was in some basic sense how the world essentially was, only more so. And though I was not certain about much, I was certain that I didn’t want to be one of the haves in a world like that. I knew there was some real hypocrisy in this: if this was already the arrangement of the world, after all, I was nothing if not a have. How could I be so sure that in the wake of some cataclysmic event, I would not be—would not, in fact, have to be—even more heedless of the suffering of others than I already was.

The bunker, purchased and tricked out by the individual consumer, is a nightmare inversion of the American Dream. It’s a subterranean abundance of luxury goods and creature comforts, a little kingdom of reinforced concrete and steel, safeguarding the survival of the individual and his family amid the disintegration of the world.

In any discussion of our anxious historical moment, its apprehensions of decay and collapse, New Zealand was never very far from being invoked. It was the ark of nation-states, an island haven amid a rising tide of apocalyptic unease: a wealthy, politically stable country unlikely to be seriously affected by climate change, a place of lavish natural beauty with vast stretches of unpopulated land, clean air, fresh water. For those who could afford it, New Zealand offered at the level of an entire country the sort of reassurance promised by Vicino’s bunkers.

There was something about the way those first European settlers were valorized by the proponents of Mars colonization, at a time in which migrants from countries suffering the effects of political violence and climate change were relentlessly villainized, that felt to me like an intimation of a future in which a tiny minority of obscenely wealthy people were free to colonize other planets, mine asteroids, escape the smoldering wreckage of the Earth, while the poor and the desperate would be made to seem like invading armies, barbarian hordes.

In their lists of reasons for establishing a “backup planet” for humanity, advocates for Mars colonization invariably included the prospect of climate change making the Earth unlivable. And yet even in the most dire projections of Earth’s future, there was no suggestion it might ever become as hostile to life as Mars, a planet with essentially no atmosphere, and on which the surface radiation levels were one hundred times that of Earth.

No truly free places left in our world. The kind of freedom that was being invoked here was the freedom from government, which meant freedom from taxation and regulation, which in turn meant the freedom to act purely in one’s own interest, without having to consider the interests of others—which seemed to me the most bloodless and decrepit conception of freedom imaginable. (It was surely no coincidence, I thought, that little was ever said about building “communities” on Mars: the concept of community involved thinking of other people as more than burdens, or resources to be exploited, or rational actors with whom you could trade.) The notion of escaping “beyond politics” was, in other words, itself inescapably political.

Trump is only the most visible symptom of a disease that has long been sickening the country’s blood—a rapidly metastasizing tumor of inequality, hyper-militarism, racism, surveillance, and fear that we might as well go ahead and diagnose as terminal-stage capitalism.

I was out of my comfort zone. It was a narrow zone, but deceptively spacious, and I did not like to be out of it. My comfort zone had good Wi-Fi and 3G coverage, and you could get Japanese food delivered to it, and there was craft beer within walking distance, and bookshops, and it was clean and it was at all times more or less room temperature. It was a good place to be, my comfort zone. There were rarely spiders in it, and never any spiders that were on fire. There was not much nature in it at all, in fact, unless you counted potted plants, which were very much optional. My comfort zone was, strictly speaking, inside.

I was all for nature in theory, but in practice I had no feel for it, no sense of any relationship with it at all.

Caroline was convinced, she said, that what had happened on Easter Island was what was happening right now, what we were doing to ourselves. Our whole planet, she said, was Easter Island. Here we were, she said, doggedly persisting in the practice of our idolatrous consumerism, heedlessly continuing in the way of life we knew to be causing total ecological collapse, knowing full well the gravity of its consequences, persisting until the last tree was gone, until the soil could no longer support life. “The way we build our gods,” she said, “is the way we build the apocalypse.”

An airport is a place in which time and personal autonomy are suspended, in which the only freedom you possess is the freedom to make purchases. The aggressive automation of labor; the nightmare synthesis of fevered consumerism and authoritarian surveillance; the apocalyptic frisson of knowing that all this exists in service of, and is dependent upon, massive rates of carbon consumption. And always, too, the distant limbic hum of death, the screaming descent of the burning jet, as the situation’s presiding possibilities, the Chekhovian pistols unholstered at security and irrevocably introduced into the psychic theater of air travel. The oppressive space of the airport—the junkspace, to use Rem Koolhaas’s unimprovable term—is the architecture of the future itself.

It was astonishing to behold how quickly we humans became irrelevant to the business of nature.

These apocalyptic anxieties of mine—the incessant reading of signs and portents, the perverse fantasies of disaster and collapse—were enfolded in a complex fabric of guilt and self-contempt. Because wasn’t the impulse to catastrophize, to imagine the collapse of one’s world, only the pursuit of a mind shaped by leisure and economic comfort? What did I really mean by the end of the world, after all, if not the loss of my own position within it? What was it that made me anxious, if not the precariousness of the privilege I had been born to, had passed on with doubtful hands to my own children? In the end, I understood that my fear of the collapse of civilization was really a fear of having to live, or having to die, like those unseen and mostly unconsidered people who sustained what we thought of as civilization.

There is no way of contemplating the catastrophe of our way of life from the outside. There is no outside. Here, too, I myself am the contaminant. I myself am the apocalypse of which I speak.

The future is a source of fear not because we know what will happen, and that it will be terrible, but because we know so little, and have so little control. The apocalyptic sensibility, the apocalyptic style, is seductive because it offers a way out of this situation: it vaults us over the epistemological chasm of the future, clear into a final destination, the end of all things. Out of the murk of time emerges the clear shape of a vision, a revelation, and you can see at last where the whole mess is headed. All of it—history, politics, struggle, life—is near to an end, and the relief is palpable.