Utopian Apocalypse

America's post-apocalyptic novels reveal the fear and hopes of a politically potent segment of society

For well over a decade, self-published e-books have flooded the market, bypassing the literary establishment’s traditional gatekeepers. Authors of these books know their audiences through social media, and appeal directly to readers who form a literary sub-culture of millions. Among several main genres, post-apocalyptic e-books offer a window into not only the fears and nightmares, but also the beliefs and ideals of a politically potent segment of American society.

I have read about fifty of such books on my Kindle. They are stories about what happens to individuals, families, and communities following the destruction of the country’s electrical grid by an Electro-Magnetic Pulse (E.M.P.) attack or after other disasters like plagues, devastating volcanic eruptions, and earthquakes, and the collapse of financial systems and economic infrastructure.

These books reflect well-founded fears about the American infrastructure’s vulnerability. Deprived of electricity, supply chains would come to an abrupt halt and urban populations would begin to starve in a few days. An EMP attack could be pulled off relatively simply by a terrorist group, not to mention a hostile nuclear power, and would disable modern automobiles, airplanes, computers, and any machine that depends on semiconductors and circuits. We would lose our ability to communicate and move. A plague, natural disaster, or financial collapse could also lead to a broad breakdown of the services upon which we all depend, including electrical power.

But while the books show the fragility of a society dependent on electricity and technology, they really center on weaknesses in our culture, our politics, our communities, and in individual character. Many of the books, in the millenarian tradition, suggest that we are responsible for the disaster that destroys our way of life; that we are being punished, by God or nature, for our moral failures.

First, they show a society where social bonds are fragile, perhaps an illusion altogether: a society where widespread and savage violence and brutality will break out when the deterrent of law enforcement is removed. This Hobbesian world is filled with types whose go-to activity after they are freed from external constraints, is to murder, rape, and pillage others and to form themselves into paramilitary gangs ruled by the strongest, most ruthless, and most despotic. In these emasculated societies, too few people are capable of defending themselves and their families from violence and most naively believe that reasoning with those who want to take what you have is possible. 

Our vulnerability to this latent immorality and violence is a result, the authors imply, of the preferences of our meritocracy: our ability to manipulate numbers, ideas and images rather than strength and moral virtue, preferences that reflect the failure of moral education. Our grasp of basic distinctions and society’s moral consensus have been eroded and our survival instincts have atrophied. 

(Photograph by Luz Adriana Villa/Flickr.)

They portray people in our putatively knowledge-based system as lacking knowledge, skills and common sense. We have become like infants, dependent on the state, institutions, markets, media, and experts to provide for our welfare and security. We do not understand how to organize food, shelter, sanitation, and such basics for ourselves. And like self-indulgent children, immediate gratification is our only reality, while we have never confronted or planned for obvious threats.  

Finally, lacking individual self-reliance, we expect that our needs will somehow be met by surviving off pooled resources. When disaster strikes, many feel entitled to the private property of others. Most of these books question whether people who have sacrificed immediate pleasures by preparing for the crisis and accumulating stores of food, water, coffee, antibiotics, weapons and ammo—everything from diapers to pet food—should be expected to share with those who have not.

The United States government is of no help, and either obstructs survival efforts out of incompetence, or is portrayed as exploiting the disaster to accumulate more coercive power, or even causing the disaster in order to do so. Citizens are herded into FEMA camps, supposedly for their own good, where they must agree to give up individual rights in return for minimal standards of food and shelter. Those who resist are hunted down as anti-social resisters. Some post-apocalyptic novels show America, crippled by disaster, invaded by United Nations troops supplied by China.

The heroes of these books are generally men with families. They are stoical and react to challenges with a sense of proportion. Many of the heroes are pious Christians who respect family life above all. None are cynical anti-heroes; all embrace moral systems with fixed points of reference.  

Some are former special-ops soldiers with experience in combat and facing existential threats, but all have wide-ranging technical knowledge, survival skills, and weaponry. Military service is emphasized as a virtue, along with knowledge of guns, ammunition, and commando tactics; hunting, fishing and agricultural experience; general mechanical ability in electricity, carpentry, automobile mechanics, etc.; and of course, preparedness. The books tend to be didactical, showing how to prepare for the apocalypse and how to survive it. 

When disaster strikes, the central characters are often working in typical, boring jobs like information technology. The disaster rescues them from conventional suburban lives and allows them to be men in full: strong, courageous, magnanimous, resourceful, selfless, loyal and faithful to their wives and tender but firm with children. Their days are spent combating marauders, fortifying dwellings and communities, foraging for food and supplies, repairing primitive machines, oiling and cleaning weapons, training militia and presiding over local political bodies. Female partners of heroic men are their intellectual and moral equals, and also good with guns, but they generally do different work, maintaining households, inventorying and rationing supplies, and nurturing and schooling children. Life is often grim, but it is serious and purposeful. Pre-apocalyptic life was superficial; self-reliance, self-governance, and self-defense have made life authentic.

In the post-apocalyptic world, the conflict between good and evil is existential and vivid.  The threats to survival are parasitical elements in the shattered society, including remaining governmental institutions, and military threats by globalist armies. Those who try to live off the efforts of others die, or are killed off; surviving communities are cleansed of parasites and the morally corrupt. New bonds based on trust and common beliefs allow small groups to live together in value-based communities.

As the stories move toward conclusion, and consistent with the pattern of millenarian expectation, many point to the formation of a new society, made up of those who, by their virtues, have survived. The new Americans have fought off predators, domestic and foreign. They have defeated their own government’s efforts to enslave them. They have begun to build a new United States based on respecting Constitutional rights and limiting the power of the federal government, as the Founders intended. The new United States is filled with self-reliant citizens who follow traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and principles. Self-reliance means knowing how to do many things, not being in the narrow vocational ruts of the specialized digital and internet economy. It means reverting to national or local life, and an end to globalist inter-dependence and international communalism.

Post-apocalyptic novels thus commonly imply that the only way reform our society, one morally and physically weakened by its success and disrespectful of the freedoms and moral principles upon which it was founded, is destruction. These are books about society’s collapse, but they are also utopian. When citizens are challenged by the destruction of society as we know it, the authors have them a new, improved one. Insofar as they avoid the self-made problems of the old—the erosion of morality by secularism, dependence on technology, a meritocracy of enfeebled desk-jockeys, the infantilizing effect of reliance on government, and the collapse of social bonds—it is a perfect society inhabited by idealized people. Given the destructive history of attempted utopias, and how the success of free societies tends to undermine their principles, a prolonged series of post-apocalyptic novels might thus find the descendants of these survivors finding opportunities for change in another disaster.