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Preppers are not preparing for their fears: they are preparing for their fantasies.
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.
Every single day in Dublin I practically stepped over the literal human bodies of the poor, the addicted, the destitute. I complained about the government that did nothing for these people, that had no intention of addressing the systemic injustices that necessitated their suffering, but I myself did essentially nothing to help them, aside from the occasional tossed coin, offered as much to alleviate my own guilt as to ease the suffering of the recipient.
To read it is to be continually reminded that the dystopia of your darkest insomniac imaginings is almost always someone else’s dream of a new utopian dawn.
If civilization meant anything at all, I thought, it was this. It was non-Muslim families crowding into a mosque the day after an act of fascist terrorism. It was a group of Māori men performing a war dance in the name of inclusion and solidarity and collective grieving: the precise symbolic opposite of fascism. It was not the building of bunkers beneath private land that would allow us to survive the catastrophes we faced, but the strengthening of communities that already existed.
it was a fantasy of retrieving the idea of the future from the past, recuperating a twentieth-century optimism and excitement about technology and science, and rehabilitating it for the present. It was, in this sense, an exercise in future-nostalgia.
Robots and algorithms will not make America great again—unless by “America” you mean billionaires, and by “great” you mean even richer.
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.
What they didn’t understand, she said, was that the thing that would allow people to survive was the same thing that had always allowed people to survive: community. It was only in learning to help people, she said, in becoming indispensable to one’s fellow human beings, that you would survive the collapse of civilization.
Nature was something I stopped the car to get out and have a look at, before getting back in the car and continuing on. It was something that I consumed, experienced, like a cultural product.
The subtext of every news headline now, of every push notification, was that we were completely and irrevocably fucked.
It was interesting, I thought, how these men managed to maintain both punctiliously styled hair and unremittingly bleak views of human existence.
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.
My job is to maintain for him the realness of the world as he inhabits it.
It’s not simply that I care about the world in a way I somehow didn’t before I had children, but rather that the future has become a realer and more intimate presence in my life, something in relation to which I no longer feel inclined to take abstract positions.
Which is not to say that I have become an optimist, or anything even close, but simply that life no longer seems to afford me the luxury of submitting to the comfort of despair.
It was one of those spectacles only nature could have successfully pulled off. If anyone else had tried it, it would have looked garish and tasteless.
