What will your role be after the apocalypse?

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Right-wingers have long fantasised about the end of the world.

Whether they belong to a church that preaches a literalist interpretation of the Book of Revelation or they are prepping a bunker in their backyard, the idea is always the same: they possess some kind of individual qualities that will allow them to personally thrive when the shit hits the fan. More often than not, post-apocalyptic media tends to depict worlds where ‘every man for himself’ is the overriding ethos and he has moral licence to kill ‘others’ in order to protect himself (and maybe his family). The biggest offender that comes to mind is The Walking Dead and all its spinoffs where one’s enemies have been literally robbed of their humanity and there is nothing wrong with doming as many of them as possible1. “What would you do in a zombie apocalypse?” has long been a clichéd question asked by boring people.

Figures who think like this have their grubby little paws all over the reins of power. Uncle Elontity in the US, Immortan Javier in Argentina and David Dementus who rules over the wasteland from his citadel in Epsom, are all actively seeking to take a sledgehammer to institutions. To be clear, this isn’t some kind of speculation, it’s their stated ideology. Whether you’re talking about the Dark Enlightenment or Neo Reactionary Movement or The Mindset,2 accelerationism is the name of the game. So when Trump or Luxon crash the economy, it’s not just because they are incompetent (although they are certainly incompetent), it’s because they are working in the service of figures who believe worsening material conditions will enable them to take more power for themselves at the expense of democracy. As Douglas Rushkoff says in Survival of the Richest “the very structure of The Mindset requires an endgame. Everything must resolve to a one or a zero, a winner or loser, the saved or the damned.”3

During the first term of Trump’s presidency, liberals loved to throw around the word ‘populism’ and I always bristled at this. Although Trump 1 was much closer to a typical Republical Presidency than Trump 2, the idea that either of these administrations genuinely represented the political will of the people is flat-out wrong. Soon after the 2016 election, we started getting stories about billionaires buying boltholes in places like Aotearoa (most notably Peter “People Eater” Thiel who counts the Vice President among his disciples). What’s notable is that, in interviews, these figures mostly cited their fear of the masses as the main motivating factor for their doomsday plans. They don’t have the popular support to be post apocalyptic warlords. To call their ideology ‘populist’ is to concede that mainstream liberalism doesn’t have the possibility of a better world to offer people.

But the thing is, I don’t think a doomsday scenario would play out the way that these misanthropes hope. For me, the piece of 21st Century zombie media that rings the most true is Train to Busan. This is unusual in the genre for the way it explicitly frames individualism (represented by the cowardly business executive Kim Eui-sung) as villainous compared to heroic altruism of working class legend Yoon Sang-hwa (Ma Dong-seok in a career-best performance). The characters’ survival depends on looking after their most vulnerable members.

The neo-reactionaries might be working as hard as they can to destroy institutions around the world but our human connections have the power to outlast them. The fact that life is getting more apocalyptic for those living in the imperial core may be terrifying but history is full of apocalypses. From the Black Death to the colonisation of the global south to the last couple of years in Gaza, people have been confronting the end of the world as they know it for milennia. This isn’t to soften the very real impact of violence inflicted on the many by the few but to say that there are lessons to be learned from the past. In Aotearoa, the most successful activist movements have always had some sort of grounding in Te Ao Māori where 200 years of violent colonialism has necessitated resistance that is completely independent from colonial institutions. I can’t think of a better recent example of this than the roadside checkpoints set up by iwi during COVID and the way they were able to protect communities when our formal health system was not up to the challenge.

There are no shortage of politics and economies and sources of power that lie outside the increasingly narrow constraints of mainstream institutions. If you want to look after those you care about in the coming years, it behooves you to learn from those who have come before. Tap into your networks and communities, be they unions or religious groups or arts collectives. Survival depends on working together, not throwing our comrades under the bus.

…but here’s a button down the bottom as well!