It won't look like Mad Max

One thing that strikes me is how apocalyptic narratives in pop culture are so deeply aligned with right wing, even fascist, views of the world. They long for an idealized past, feature a patriarchal male figure using violence to protect a family like group, others are othered or even dehumanized, and they show distrust of the bookish and intellectual.

Largely these narratives exists to create a space for men to, at least imaginatively, act out violence which our society does not allow them. In society you can't shoot anyone who is different and feels threatening... unless you are cop... but in these fictions you would be justified, even prudent to do so.

These fictions create these justification by how they have selected the frame.

Rather than localized disasters as exist in the real world, these catastrophes extend in all directions. There's no outside where safety and care persist. Rather than catastrophes that are limited in time followed by recovery and rebuilding, these narratives present persisting collapse or only show the period of time where immediate survival is the prime focus.

If rebuilding begins, these stories end.

By selecting the frame in this way, they stack the deck to overvalue heroic action by patriarchal males and justify "whatever it takes" for survival.

The problem is, these stories are one of the primary ways we see the world when we think about climate collapse or the end of capitalism. We imagine a Hobbesean war of all against all. And there's no evidence that's what any historical collapse was like. Again and again, we survive as communities.

While there are inevitably periods where things get dicey in terms of individual survival, those periods are limited in space and time. Collapses and transitions happen over time and effect areas unevenly.

Taking these violent apocalyptic fantasies as realistic depictions of how catastrophic transitions happen, or how people behave in those circumstances, can only make it harder for us to adapt to the challenges facing us.

By imagining a world of total collapse, we also give ourselves a false sense of where we are on the timeline. Because it doesn't currently seem as bad as our imagined apocalypse, so many of us are still waiting. But our apocalypse is happening now.

The collapse of our society is well underway. We are already living in the breakdown. We need to begin transitioning to a new way of living. We need to create new systems to support our survival, together.

If we are waiting for things to look like Mad Max, we may wait too long. If we think we need to horde food and guns, we may be preparing for the wrong crisis. We can't let these fictions drive us toward extinction.

References:

The Next Apocalypse by Chris Begley