The End Of the End Of the World

The TV series Doomsday Preppers ran four seasons on the National Geographic Channel, and while I never looked for it, I somehow always found it. The series aired during the years I worked third shift at a local car-parts factory, and when I staggered home, too tired and unfocused to read, second-run episodes always seemed right there on cable. Like a bloody car wreck, I couldn’t look away.

Though that series gave apocalyptic survivalists a national platform, the movement predated the show. Back in the 1990s, when I was significantly more conservative, I received the Loompanics catalog, that pre-Amazon shopping extravaganza of violent Libertarian paranoia. Mixed in with guidebooks for home gunsmithing and paperwork-free tax dodging, the catalog always included topics like building your own bomb shelter, canning veggies without electricity, and how to raise and slaughter goats.

I’ve read claims that apocalyptic survivalism gained mainstream traction with the movie Red Dawn, in which plucky teenagers armed with assault rifles and camping gear staved off a Soviet invasion. But while that perhaps made many people aware of survivalism, it certainly didn’t invent the field. We could arguably trace survivalism to the Essenes, the isolated Jewish sect most famous today for preserving the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran.

These preppers, and other doomsday narratives like LaHaye and Jenkins’ Left Behind, share an important prior supposition: Somebody is going to survive Doomsday. It might as well be me. The exact nature of Doomsday keeps shifting, of course. Nuclear war, pandemic, the Mayan calendar, and malignant AL will hasten the Final Judgement. But the end of the world isn’t really an end, but a pause, a societal bottleneck.

The post-apocalyptic theme goes back generations. The science fiction narrative dates back to Mary Shelley’s 1826 novel The Last Man, though surviving the cataclysm is older than that. Even Noah, in the Hebrew Bible, is arguably a post-apocalyptic narrative, and that story is even older. Like much of the first eleven chapters of Genesis, the Noah narrative was probably repurposed from Sumerian myth, wherein Earth has been destroyed and recreated multiple times.

Both the Christian Apocalypse and secular doomsdays share an agreement that Earth is not eternal. It had a beginning; it must therefore also have an end. The only difference lies in what different sources consider that end—meaning end both in the sense of “conclusion,” and in the sense of “ultimate purpose.” In theological terms, we consider this dual end “eschatology,” though that term serves equally well for secular considerations.

Perhaps it helps to consider the actual meaning of the word “Apocalypse.” Because of its Biblical usage, we’ve grown accustomed to considering the meaning as Doomsday, the end of the world, the final cataclysm. But in Greek, “Apocalypse” literally means removing a shroud, making visible that which was previously concealed. Apocalypses, like the Hebrew Daniel or the Christian revelation, promise to reveal the true forces driving our world.

Such thinking gets a bad rap. “Conspiracy theorists” peddle everything from the Blood Libel to QAnon, moonshine narratives describing a world beset by constant wickedness. The only solution, these theories claim, is to huddle together under the protection of a unitary king (or pope or president) who will protect against that wickedness. The enemy is supposedly both pervasive, and so entrenched that only a strongman can actually kill it.

But another version of that narrative exists. The Biblical Revelation describes a faithful remnant surrounded by an Empire which appears both powerful and eternal. Appeasing the Empire’s injustice sometimes looks like the only way to survive. But the Empire, the Bible tells us, is transitory, and will ultimately destroy itself through infighting. In the First Century CE, that might’ve appeared impossible, but history has proven it true.

Therefore the question becomes: What truth does your Apocalypse reveal? What force does your Revelation glorify? The apocalyptic thinking behind QAnon sees a world beset by evil which is distinctly female, non-White, and religiously other. QAnon can only propose one solution: bestowing god-king authority onto a unitary President. The occasional Ashli Babbitt is a small price to protect that White Supremacist truth.

All doomsday narratives assume, on some level, that somebody will survive. They also assume that some people have to die because their eyes are so clouded that they’ll never see the truth. Though QAnon is particularly visible, this willingness to let the ignorant die (or even hasten their deaths) isn’t unique or partisan. Whenever anybody embraces an apocalyptic narrative, they tacitly admit whom they’d willingly let die.