Shownotes Transcript
I had a dream, which is not all a dream. The bright sun was extinguished. There are apocalypses everywhere for those with eyes to see. The Last of Us is back. Netflix made the A-turn out. Paradise got another season. People are building bunkers and buying bunkers. Mark Zuckerberg's blabbing to Theo Vaughn about his tunnel.
There's this whole meme about how people are saying I built this, like, bunker underground. It's like more of underground storage. It's for sure a bunker. Zucky got that bunkie. Costco's got 150 serving emergency food bucket. Americans love this shit, but why? Today on Today Explained, a concise history of our obsession with the end of the world. ♪♪
Whatever you look for in a getaway, you can find it at Virginia Beach. When you're there, you'll be able to enjoy some of the best cultural attractions, activities, and culinary experiences the world has to offer. You could take a stroll on the world's longest pleasure beach that travels for miles and miles. Or you could take part in their annual festivals, concerts, and waterfront dining. And if you're in the mood for dinner, make sure to check out their fresh local seafood with farm-to-table ingredients.
It's a trip that everyone in the family will remember for a lifetime. Go to visitvirginiabeach.com to learn more. Right now, the Home Depot has spring deals under $20. So what are you working on? If you're planning on cooking out this season, head to the Home Depot so you can fire up the grill with deals on charcoal.
Right now, get two 16-pound bags of Kingsford charcoal for only $17.88. Was $19.98. Don't miss spring deals under $20 now through May 7th at The Home Depot. Subject to availability, valid on select items only. You're listening to Today Explained.
My name is Robert Kirsch. I'm a professor at Arizona State University. And among all the other university duties that I have, I also research doomsday prepping and the end of the world. How does one get into, at the university level, researching the end of the world? Well, it depends.
started off as this sort of investigation into these doomsday prepping kits that were coming out of Silicon Valley from this startup called Preppy. What was the story that the Preppy, P-R-E-P-P-Y? An I, intentionally misspelled, of course, yeah. Right, okay, Silicon Valley. What is the story that that bag is telling?
So the way that they sold it, at least at the time that we were looking at their materials, was that this was a bug-out bag that you would be proud to display in your living room. This is a fancy bag. This is very upscale. This is canvas that's waterproof-coated.
and all made by hand. So it's kind of like you're getting like a nice bag of Barneys, except we put all this good survival stuff in it too. There's Nats Brothers chocolate, caviar, and a champagne koozie.
This didn't mark you as some sort of like weirdo who was sort of secretly kind of stashing away goods, but was rather a sort of outward display of good taste. And so, again, these class markers become super important in telling this story, trying to sort of pull this behavior out of the shadows and sort of trying to locate it at the beating heart of mainstream American culture. Do you have bug out bags?
I don't. Where I live in the desert, FEMA issues recommendations for geographic regions for what people should have. So my co-author Emily does have a bug-out bag because she lives in the Bay Area. I have...
15 gallons of potable water ready because I live in the desert. Good, good, good. Yeah, I have a little, I have what I'd call a kit, a just-in-case kit. I have always wondered how many other people are engaged in prepping or prepping adjacent behavior. Like, how many of us are there out there? So it can be hard to track because on the one hand, there's no, like, bright line where a certain behavior turns into prepping.
Right. But FEMA does give a national household survey and their 2023 results indicate that about half of Americans indicate that they are engaging in some kind of preparedness for some kind of adverse event. Huh. If you told me to envision a prepper, I have a picture in my head. Is my picture fair? Is there a type of person who preps?
I think you're right that there's a sort of media spectacle version of a prepper, and that gets informed by a lot of cable reality television. Tyler Smith and his cousin Chris are building homemade body armor.
They hope it will give them the upper hand if society collapses. I never want to go too far without a good metal pot. This is going to allow me to cook my food and get all the nutrients and also make lots of teas. And I'm not even just talking about the extreme preppers. There's an episode of Keeping Up with the Kardashians where they go into an Atlas bunker and try to imagine what it would be like to ride out the end of the world.
- Oh my God, I can't be in here. - Chloe, if we treat this like a joke, then we won't get the full experience out of this and we won't know if this is what we need. - And so I think that's an interesting starting point, but again, as Emily and I were digging into this,
What we eventually concluded was that this behavior can be sort of marginalized and sort of seem to be extreme, but it actually is a kind of behavior that is constitutive of being Americans. In other words, we argue that prepping is an American institution.
And that from the founding, Americans have seen themselves as a prepared citizenry where Americans are invited to see themselves as the self-sufficient frontiers people who are able to tame the elements and dominate the wilderness and sort of bring America into new spaces. This kind of behavior is actually pretty close to the heart of the story Americans tell themselves about who they are.
And that 40% of us are preparing in some way, this feels like a very high number to me, would seem to suggest you're right. This is part of the identity of many of us. When do we see this put to the test? There's a couple of ways to tackle that. The first is that
I think at the sort of like apocalyptic register, I think things like nuclear war, right? Or the sort of like total social collapse. Americans really haven't had to deal with that. And that's an important part for our analysis too, because we argue that one of the reasons maybe what we call a bunkerization fantasy is...
is potent because Americans have never actually had to go to ground, never actually had to sort of take cover in the way that, say, many Europeans had to during the Second World War. And so that's one part of the story is that it's easy to sort of think about readiness and what to do in the face of total collapse because it's sort of been deferred. And so it becomes a site of fantasy.
On the other hand, you're also right that the U.S. has ongoing extreme weather events, you know, hurricanes, wildfires, dust bowls, droughts,
The list goes on and on. And the way that we tell that story is sort of the way that we diagnose the sort of neoliberal condition of American political life, which is these disasters happen. There is an oftentimes inadequate or incomplete state response.
And so the reaction to that becomes, well, I can't rely on the government to do things or to sort of reorganize things or to play a role in this. So it's up to me to take responsibility for my own preparation. And the way that I do that is through consumption choices.
One beautiful part of the American economy is that there is always somebody who will sell you something if you have enough money. And when we think about preppers, when I think about preppers, I do tend to think about ultra rich people like Mark Zuckerberg, Bush.
buying a private island, raising their own food, these guys in Silicon Valley buying land in New Zealand. What is the deal with the ultra wealthy and their preparation for the end of the world? Is it like, do they know something that we don't? Or do they just have a lot of money and need to spend it?
I think it's the latter. I really think this is a sort of conspicuous consumption. And so these ultra-rich people, we hear a lot about their preparation plans. You mentioned Zuckerberg and Thiel, and those are, I think, the two most sort of high-profile examples. And what I think is notable about those is that they get profiled in Forbes or Fortune or, you know, these sorts of like monocle-like publications, right, for the sort of upwardly mobile people.
And they lavish the reader with all sorts of details about the extravagant things that these folks are doing. And then there's always this kind of coy like, but we'll never tell you where it is, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so it's a way to sort of signal this kind of conspicuous consumption that maybe more middle class or upwardly mobile Americans can at least sort of try to emulate. But I do want to suggest too, though, that this takes on
kind of strange dimensions. I'm sure, for your instance, you've read a lot about Elon Musk's desire to go to Mars. So much, yes. And we're going to take Doge to Mars! Right, and it's a fantasy. It's in many ways based on this sort of mentality of like, well...
You know, there's nothing we can do here anymore. And so we're going to have to try again on another orb. There's a risk here of upping the ante. So what starts with the rich often trickles down to the less rich, which is why I have a life straw and an LLB knife. And I wonder, like, if we talk about people who are not the Elon Musks of the world or the Peter Thiel's of the world, right?
Is prepping big business among the kind of middle class as well? Yeah. And I think like many other industries in the U.S., it ebbs and flows or booms and busts. And we trace that back to the Cold War where there were home factories.
Fallout shelter kits that you could buy and those kind of went under in the 60s and now they're kind of coming back. You can look at different kinds of preparedness markets that pop up. A lot of shelf stable food is becoming an increasingly common thing to see. I know at my local Costco's there are often aisle end caps that have like pyramids of these food buckets that you can store in your house. Um,
And so we might just be in a period of upswing right now. I mean, there are still companies that will come bury a fallout shelter in your backyard and promise not to tell anybody where they put it. You're in Arizona. What's the scenario that most worries you, for real, for real? Grid failure. Uh-huh. And that's just because, as you can imagine, in the Sonoran Desert, it's hard to imagine making it through 115-degree days without some kind of...
of chemically induced air conditioning. - My biggest ones are electromagnetic pulse,
hurricane, tornado, and civil war. Electromagnetic pulse is akin to grid failure, right? It means the electricity goes out and you're trying to figure out what to do. We just saw this happen in Spain and Portugal. It was really a nightmare. It makes me wonder, should we really want to survive a doomsday scenario? It sounds like a bleak question, but I think in some ways that is the politically animating question. Yeah. What can we confront alone and what can we confront together?
And if we limit ourselves to confronting things alone, I think that threshold is pretty low. And so you can think about, again, the sort of ultimate example of this, of a thermonuclear conflagration. I would say, no, you don't want to go through that. You'd want to just sort of vaporize. ♪
But once you start sort of thinking about smaller scale or maybe more, you know, regionally located catastrophes that might emerge, I think the tolerance for persisting through those things is amplified when they're done in concert and collectively with other people. And so,
I would think that when considering risk tolerance, that should be part of that narrative. And so for me, what makes me a cheerful apocalyptician is that for me, the response to that is not there's more I need to do, but rather we need to form these sort of solidarity networks of concerted collective action to face collectively the problems that we face together.
Robert Kirsch studies the end of the world at Arizona State. He's co-author with Emily Ray of Be Prepared, Doomsday Prepping in the United States. Every day, thousands of Comcast engineers and technologists like Kunle put people at the heart of everything they create. In the average household, there are dozens of connected devices. Here in the Comcast family, we're building an integrated in-home Wi-Fi solution for millions of families like my own.
It brings people together in meaningful ways. Kunle and his team are building a Wi-Fi experience that connects one billion devices every year. Learn more about how Comcast is redefining the future of connectivity at comcastcorporation.com slash Wi-Fi. Your snacking routine can get a little dull. Time for an Oikos remix or Light and Fit remix. ♪
Like a crunchy storm of sea salt praline pretzels, dark chocolate, and butter toffee showering down into a smooth, creamy yogurt. Enjoy six remix varieties, three epicomplete protein Oikos remix options, or three craveable light and fit remix options. See remixyogurt.com.
The spirit of innovation is deeply ingrained in America, and Google is helping Americans innovate in ways both big and small. The Air Force Research Laboratory is partnering with Google Cloud, using AI to accelerate defense research for air, space, and cyberspace forces. This is a new era of American innovation. Find out more at g.co slash American innovation.
Today Explained, we're back for now. The original stories about the end of the world, the ones that we know about anyway, started with organized religions. Now, some religions see time as a circle that goes around and around. But some religions developed the idea that time was like an arrow. Eventually, it hits a terminus, an end of a world.
Then in the 19th century, a whole host of things conspired to take the apocalypse out of religion and move it into secular works. Dorian Linsky wrote Everything Must Go, the stories we tell about the end of the world. So the first secular narratives about the end of the world, which as far as I could tell, were Lord Byron's poem Darkness and Mary Shelley's novel The Last Man. Both appear in the first quarter of the 19th century.
And there's lots of different things happening at the same time. There's the discovery that the world is much older than people had imagined. For example, skeletons identified for the first time as dinosaurs. There was the discovery of the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum in the 18th century and a general fascination with ruins. Like British tourists would go through Europe visiting the ruins and reflecting on hubris and nemesis and so on.
So all of these different currents are converging. And so it makes perfect sense that this is the era where Byron would come up with the possibility of an end of the world story which doesn't feature God. And as soon as you exclude God, you exclude what happens at the very end of the book of Revelation.
which is that the righteous are chosen and that they ascend to paradise. So in darkness, which really sort of shocked and confused critics at the time, it is just the end. It is nothingness. And that was a very startling proposition. How influential was that poem? Well, if you judge it by how many similar works emerged in the coming decades, you would have to say not many.
And Mary Shelley, who was actually living in the same part of Switzerland as Byron when he was writing Darkness, and in fact she was coming up with Frankenstein at the same time, when she writes The Last Man about a decade later, it's absolutely destroyed by the critics that they think that it is a loathsome idea from the start. This is a novel about a pandemic that wipes out everybody in the world except one person.
And it was seen at the time that this was just not something that you should do. Perhaps it's certainly not in the form of a novel. That there were religious poems about this idea of the last man. There were satirical poems about it. But this very long, and it has to be said, not particularly great novel, it was seen as the product, as one critic said, of a diseased mind. And essentially, there are no successes to these works for decades. Not until...
the late 19th century, do you really get a whole wave of these? But I think the reason it becomes so influential in literary terms is because of HG Wells, who is the first person that comes to this and pulls together all these things, fear of foreign invasion, fear of social collapse, fear of runaway technology, and just does it better than anybody else.
Okay, so that's the late 19th century. That takes us neatly, time takes us neatly into the 20th century, famously a time when we had a lot of conflict. Two wars that we now call world wars. How does the narrative change, evolve, adapt to meet the 20th century? Well,
Well, end of the world fiction is inspired by catastrophic events. You know, when I was talking about the 18th century, the Lisbon earthquake would seem like a genuine sort of local apocalypse. If you were living in Lisbon, it probably felt like the end of the world. And that is how the First and Second World Wars felt to so many people. The First World War seemed like
carnage on a scale that was considered impossible and yet sort of predicted in some of HG Wells' novels. In fact, in 1913, before the First World War, he writes The World Set Free, in which he invents the phrase atomic bomb and just imagines how an atomic bomb might work. And the Second World War, obviously not an apocalyptic event, but producing these horrors, particularly the Holocaust and Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that were such a shock to
to the human imagination that these things were possible. And as soon as the bomb drops on Hiroshima, the whole sense of the end of the world shifts pretty much in an instant. Because before then, we're generally thinking about things like comets and asteroids and floods and things that would have kind of made sense to somebody in the Middle Ages.
And now there is a weapon that really exists that theoretically could destroy the whole world. And from then on, I think almost every end of the world story has a sense of human culpability. And that introduces all these themes of guilt.
And whether it is something that we actually deserve. If we move up to the present day, what do our, and now we're beyond books, right? We're into television shows, we're into movies, we're into music. What is the culture telling us about music?
how we now think the world we're in or what we're worried about now. Well, it's sort of everything now. It's everything, man. It's everything. It's not like we've left behind the old ones. There will still be movies about floods or being hit by asteroids or a new ice age or all these things that sort of, you know, predate the atomic bomb. There's still nuclear weapons.
I mean, I suppose climate change and AI. AI, yeah. So they're relatively recent. And obviously pandemics take on a different resonance now in fiction because of COVID-19. But it's sort of everything. And it is entirely mainstream entertainment. You know, The Last of Us is one of the most talked about TV shows based on one of the most talked about video games of recent times. Wait, wait, wait, don't turn the reason on.
Please don't! You had your chance! I'm infected! I'm infected. Really? So are you.
A couple months ago, there was some news that a comet was headed toward Earth, and it was a big one. They were calling it a city killer, not a planet killer. I started checking in on that comment every morning, right? How close is it? What are the odds that it's going to hit? And then I read something that cheered me up, made me feel a little bit better, which is that everybody seems to think they're going to be alive when the world ends, and they never are because the world has not yet ended.
But why do you think we do this to ourselves? Why do you think we obsess and maybe even wish that we would be around to see the end? Well, you can see this in religious terms, and that when Jesus talks about the end of the world in the Gospels, and certainly in the book of Revelation, it is imminent. This will happen in your lifetime. So you could say that it's a legacy from that.
But the critic Frank Kermode, who wrote a great essay about this, and he saw it more in narrative terms. And it was almost like nobody wants to live in the middle where nothing really important seems to happen. And you think if there's going to be an end of the world, there's an almost kind of temporal narcissism that you're going to be around to see it. And that is, of course, what makes it quite dangerous and dangerous.
People who see it in religious terms as something where ultimately will be good for them, it could deliver them from the corruption and misery of the world, and because they are righteous, they're the ones who will receive the reward. They will actively seek it. There were Christian ministers in America in the 1980s who opposed nuclear disarmament because they thought that nuclear weapons would be the device that God was going to use to bring about Armageddon and the millennium and so on.
And if you look at, you know, preppers and survivalists, like, well, they're going to look quite foolish if it doesn't happen. It's almost like they've, it's like sunk cost fallacy. They've invested in the catastrophe happening. So they kind of want the catastrophe to happen because they think they're going to have a massive advantage. And so there's a difference between fear of the end of the world, which perhaps seems most natural to people, and
and a craving for it because they think that it is either going to be some kind of punishment or cleansing or opportunity. And that's where it can get very dangerous because you're basically talking about, we want this event to happen to get rid of all these people that I don't like and preserve this core of, you know, strong, virile, righteous men with guns and lots of canned food.
I'm Noelle King.
Today Explained is distributed by WNYC and the show is part of Vox. If you want to support our journalism, you can join our membership program on this day. Go to vox.com slash members to sign up. Remember, we make a show on the weekends now. To check out Explain It To Me in this feed every Sunday morning.