Why are fantasies of apocalypse or collapse so prevalent in the popular imagination? People of opposing political stripes, or no partisan affiliation at all, openly state some variation of the idea that it would be better for civilization as we know it to collapse. The logic goes that upheaval would clear the way for regrowth or rebirth along healthier lines. The implicit promise is that such an event would produce a world free of the originator's preferred grievances and would punish those deemed responsible for them. These prophecies come from people who have never lived more than 24 hours away from fossil fuels, instant ramen, or Coca Cola, which raises a question: what need does this desire for a hard reset fulfill?
I would argue, in line with Weber, that our world has become disenchanted and that we are bereft of many of the myths that gave humanity a sense of purpose and direction. Myths once explained why things were (Pandora released wickedness from a box) and pointed to moral lessons for the future (follow not false prophets lest they be the Antichrist and the writing be upon the wall). With those myths gone, people still want comforting stories that uphold a sense of justice and order in the cosmos, especially Westerners whose sensibilities are built on Romano-Christian traditions.
The modern collapse narrative follows a monomythic structure designed to provide this catharsis. It is broken into three phases. In the first, legitimate grievances with the status quo (economic stagnation, institutional rot, decadence, negative intersexual relations) are acknowledged to be dire but fixable, so long as the warnings of the apocalypse fantasists are heeded. In the second, those warnings go unheeded, and previously fixable issues become so pronounced that they lead to wholesale societal collapse. In the third, the collapse renders moral judgment: the "hard reset" punishes the wicked and rewards those with the correct beliefs. Think of Mad Max, where in spite of enormous armies of techno-barbarians, it's the last robust good cop played by Mel Gibson who defeats the forces of lawlessness through grit and gunfighting. Even in the most violent scenarios, those deemed "bad" by pre-collapse morality must be punished.
This is a form of secular eschatology. The collective West is culturally post-Christian, no longer believing in the divine, but still united by the conviction that salvation is imparted on all who share its ideological framework. Just as Christ sends to Hell all those who defy Him at the Last Judgment, those who advocated for unlimited mass migration or plastic straws are supposed to be punished during the secular apocalypse. The faithful are welcomed into heaven. It is assumed that the advocates of collapse, whatever ideological stripes they may wear, are the ones to prosper and survive. The fantasy requires both halves: the wicked are punished and the faithful endure. In the wake of the sidelining of religion generally and Protestantism specifically, the structure parallels sola fide, salvation by faith alone.
Unfortunately, that's not how societal collapses work. What follows is an examination of the common fantasies, why they persist, and what the likely outcomes actually look like.
The 1984 action film Red Dawn is the earliest fully realized example of this monomyth. I apologize to the conservatives in the audience for critiquing this particular favorite and want you to know the movie is a hoot. The issue is that it suffers from all the same delusions as most collapse fantasies. On the surface level of its own plot, it's basically the wet dream of a Reagan conservative, wherein a bunch of pussy Jimmy Carter Democrats win power in Congress, don't do anything about the Reds, and then suddenly there's communist Mexico and Soviet paratroopers somehow landing in central Colorado. How a country incapable of feeding its own populace could mount a transatlantic invasion is never explained, but the point is: commies bad, liberals let this happen. It's up to the plucky high school football team (the Wolverines) to put an end to Bolshevist tyranny.
It's a cool plot for a movie and a fun watch. Even so, it has all the features of the apocalypse fantasy, with doom brought upon America by leftists being weak in a very specific way they basically were not in the 1980s. There's a reason this movie holds such an enduring place in the imagination of the XXXL plate carrier types bearing Gadsden flags.
The issue is that the fantasy required the Wolverines to cleanly resist the Soviets and defeat them via guerrilla warfare. Is this possible? Absolutely. The Taliban proved it when fighting against the United States. They also took lopsided casualties (better than ten to one against coalition forces) over a prolonged period of twenty years. They experienced deprivations in the form of illness, being cut off from supplies, and the unique horrors of being shelled with substances like white phosphorus. Above all else, they required staging areas and bases in Pakistan, without which the insurgency could not have survived. Could red-blooded American teenagers replicate this feat of arms? Perhaps, but the horror is never accurately portrayed because the reality would interfere with the fantasy. It is more entertaining to see dramatic raids than to admit large numbers of guerrillas are likely to die of dysentery or from a lack of antibiotics. The fantasy further overlooks that large numbers of one's former neighbors would be collaborators for reasons of material security rather than real ideological alignment, and such mostly-innocent people would likely be punished in retaliation for partisan activity.
Speaking of neighbors, we need to talk about zombies. While Red Dawn appealed to boomers and a certain subset of right-leaning America, it was zombie media, with its inherent dehumanization of one's fellow man for the thrill of the equalizing apocalypse fantasy, that dominated the cultural zeitgeist throughout the late 00's and most of the 10's.
The zombie apocalypse was a curious cultural phenomenon, but one which I believe succeeded because it stripped out any sort of political filter and reached its crescendo in the popular imagination in the immediate wake of two American national traumas: the War on Terror and the Great Recession. As the cultural center of the world, zombie-mania spread first to the rest of the West, then to the world generally, and its appeal was that it provided a democratized version of a collapse fantasy without any political filler. There was no need to blame the Reds or finger-point to left-coded imaginings of collapse from environmental degradation. The zombie is the perfect "other" in an apocalypse scenario: faceless, blank, projectable, and easy to exterminate without moral cost. Every person casting themselves as a survivor gets to be a Wolverine without picking any political side. More importantly: you fantasize about yourself as the survivor. It's the next person, preferably someone with the wrong opinions, who is zombified. In reality, in the dense urban societies that constitute most Western countries, such pathogens would be so destructive that few could escape infection, even those in rural areas, which are much more interconnected with the global economy than most would care to admit.
As for the theoretical ideological blankness, zombie fiction has a clear allegiance. One constant of the genre, be it the dark and gritty The Walking Dead or the humorous Zombieland, is that the protagonists emulate the morality and beliefs of the audience. In a survival scenario, people living through such tumult would likely engage in behaviors viewers or readers would consider downright evil. Instead, they tend to abide by the moral assumptions of goodness that we hold in the comfortable world of uninterrupted supply chains and easy access to Wal-Mart. While I’m hardly an edgelord trying to claim that every character on screen in an apocalypse scenario needs to be a murderous villain, it should be taken for granted that many, if not most, would behave far worse than early-season Rick Grimes.
The same monomythic structure appears in explicitly left-coded fiction. Climate apocalypse novels deploy all three phases of the fantasy. In Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future, the wicked oil executives and recalcitrant deniers face punishment while eco-conscious technocrats reshape civilization toward virtuous outcomes. In Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, the morally awakened build sustainable enclaves while the unprepared turn on each other. Adam McKay's 2021 film Don't Look Up made the structure most explicit: those who heeded the warnings of the apocalypse fantasists are vindicated, and the rich flee to a planet that promptly devours them. The Wolverines turn out to exist on every part of the political spectrum, with each side casting itself as the saved remnant and its opponents as the punished.
By the late 10's, zombiemania was over and the phenomenon was considered passé, though this was more a result of over-saturation than any decline in the desire for societal collapse. When the international pandemic crisis of COVID-19 actually arrived, it was significantly more boring than most fantasies. COVID-19 did more than fail to produce protagonists. It resulted in most Western states becoming more powerful and arbitrarily using their enforcement apparatus to uphold a series of contradictory and often nonsensical lockdown and vaccination mandates that severely damaged the trust between state and subjects. Actual collapse does not look like the movies. There are several broad outcomes, and none of them deliver moral judgment or protect those who fantasize about the end from the consequences of getting what they wished for.
The likeliest and primary outcome is unromantic mass death via suffering. When the Soviet Union dissolved (the most recent "hard reset" in living memory), age-adjusted mortality in Russia rose by 33% between 1990 and 1994. Male life expectancy dropped from 64 to 58 in four years, a peacetime decline without precedent in the industrialized world. The killers were not invading armies or roving warlords, but cardiovascular disease, lack of adequate healthcare, and alcohol. Men aged 35 to 44 saw their death rates more than double. Children born during the transition measured over a centimeter shorter than those born just before or after, a sign of nutritional deprivation and maternal stress the body carries for life. The only people to emerge as would-be protagonists were neo-communists in 1993 who tried to storm the Russian Duma (or parliament, in which they coincidentally held an electoral plurality) and restore some semblance of the Soviet order. The sitting President, Boris Yeltsin, shelled them with tanks from a Russian army he had bribed and was applauded by Al Gore for being a laudable democrat. Thereafter, people simply died faster of boring things in apartments that got colder, until the country limped into recovery in the late 1990s.
I am not done with the Soviet analogy. Collapse fantasies like Red Dawn want to punish the guilty (i.e. "the liberals did this, now they get gulaged just like they deserve"). Except… that’s not how regime change works in reality. When actual communism fell, the former Party functionaries skipped the Last Judgment entirely and became the new political elite. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the Central Asian "stan" countries, where the Party secretaries seized the apparatus of the state wholesale and passed it down to their chosen cronies, and often their own family members. In Russia, men who had sworn undying allegiance to Marxism-Leninism from youth were among the first to defraud citizens under the newly-privatized system, taking the deeds to their apartments and shares in state enterprises. While victims of the old regime were acknowledged in speeches and given memorial plaques, nobody un-executed the dead. Many of those who had seen to the false imprisonment or death of dissidents found that they, like Yeltsin, were now respectable democrats even if their entire electoral operations were based on bribery and graft.
The final example in living memory is perhaps the most unpleasant: that of state collapse imposed by external military action. We saw this play out in both Iraq in 2003, and especially in Libya in 2011. In both cases, the results were disastrous at a minimum. Libya had Africa's highest Human Development Index before 2011. It is now a failed state partitioned between rival governments and militia coalitions. The warlord of fiction (think Negan from The Walking Dead, full of quips and baseball bats) shares little with his real counterpart. Real warlords control chokepoints (grain, fuel, ports, border crossings) and frame that control in local legitimacy: tribal authority, religious sanction, ethnic solidarity. They are charismatic and monstrous simultaneously. They provide services to their communities while brutalizing everyone else. Collapse fiction cannot render this because writers default to redemption arcs and do not understand that being an effective warlord requires both brutality and patronage networks. Aspiring warlords bad at these duties tend to find themselves and all their loved ones dead and thus have few incentives to renounce their methods. These writing habits are in part due to how Western audiences want to believe the warlord is either secretly good or satisfyingly defeated. Reality offers neither.
What the outcomes of realistic collapse share is the absence of the moral judgment that every collapse fantasy (and, by extension, every collapse fantasizer) promises. There may be Wolverines, but there is no moment where correct beliefs are vindicated and incorrect ones punished. There is just a worse version of the same grubby power dynamics that existed before, only now with less medicine, less food, and much less pretense.
This is not an argument that nothing ever happens. Large-scale wars, environmental disasters, and political crises are all possible, and some are probable. The issue is that collapse fantasies function as comforting myths: they require nothing from the believer except correct opinions and patience, and promise the punishment of the vaguely-defined "guilty" in return. It is more comfortable to believe that there is an ideal destination which societal collapse will bring us closer to than to accept that nobody gets vindicated or punished, and that there is just a lot of suffering on the way to a new equilibrium which may be worse than the present conditions we feel malaise toward.
The desire for a reckoning is understandable, even deeply human. It is the same impulse that produced every religion and every myth, and there is no shame in wanting the universe to be just. This is why these fantasies are so strong, and why they are likely to continue enduring. However: if one knows about the actual cost of a societal collapse, it is something one should almost never hope for.
