The End of the World Won’t Make You Brave

Sometimes, the delusion is just too on the nose. The home page of Preppers Shop UK, one of many online retailers specializing in starter pack essentials for life after collapse, features not one, but seven replica knives from the Rambo franchise. The multipack (£149.99) is sold out.

Prepperism is hobbyist world-creating filtered though an impossible fantasy of control. This is unsurprising, given its demographic centre: white American males with disposable income and a moat mentality.

Odds are the kind of person who buys a machete off the internet because it’s got Stallone’s face is also the kind of person who gets into arguments with flight attendants about masks — unlikely to be level-headed in a crisis.

Everyone thinks they’re the knife — no-one thinks they’re the throat.

On screen, the Earth’s core explodes so that Jon Cusack can finally make things right with his daughter, and retake his spot at the head of the table. Disaster is a (last) chance for correction.

The Walking Dead comics promise that “in a world ruled by the dead, we are finally forced to finally start living.” Among the bored and comfortable of the developed world, the idea of disaster holds a certain interruptive appeal—a Big Bad to wipe the apps and make us real.

Apocalypse will melt away our soft spoiled flesh, like in Sarah Connor’s atomic fever dreams, and we will walk the earth anew, graphite skeletons glinting in the sun.