they will destroy their world and themselves because they cannot stand any longer the boredom of a meaningless life.39
Colin Mason in The 2030 Spike: Countdown to Global Catastrophe, also says about proposed solutions to the environmental crisis: “if proposed solutions don’t take the lowest common denominator of human nature realistical y into account, they will not work.”40
The pessimistic sentiment about the “lowest common denominator of human nature” is defensible and a pessimistic tradition of philosophical thought, antagonistic to progressive liberalism and humanism, and even nationalism, supports this.41
For example, the Spanish philosopher Jóse Ortega Y Gasset (1883-1955) in The Revolt of the Masses (1930),42 saw the early 20th century 38 Mike Adams, “The Overpopulation Myth MYTH,” NaturalNews.com, March 15, 2013, at http://www.naturalnews.com/039490_overpopulation_myth_ecological_footprint_
population_col apse.html.
39 Erich Fromm, The Sane Society (Cowl Books/Henry Holt, New York), 1955, pp. 359-360.
40 Colin Mason, The 2030 Spike: Countdown to Global Catastrophe (Earthscan, London, 2003), p. 8.
41 On the pessimistic view of human nature and life see James Sul y, Pessimism: A History and Criticism (Henry S. King and Co., London, 1887); R. Scrutton, The Uses of Pessimism: And the Danger of False Hope (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2010).
42 Jóse Ortega. Y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (George Allen and Unwin, London, 1961, published in Spanish in 1930).
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as a “levelling period” where the mass-man, our friend the “sheeple,”
“feels himself lord of his own existence” and “crushes beneath
[him] everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and select.”
A dumbing down and col apse of culture is hence inevitable: “[t]he characteristics of the hour is that the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and impose them wherever it wil .”43 All of that, decades before the “cultural wars.”
The zombie apocalypse has as a philosophical subtext, as a very insightful Wikipedia article has put it, that “civilization is inherently fragile in the face of truly unpredictable threats and that most individuals cannot be relied upon to support the greater good if the personal cost becomes too high.”44 Frank Darabont, creator of early amc’s The Walking Dead, also sees the zombie apocalypse as an allegory of civilizational col apse: “I think we’re coming to grips with the fact that we’ve created something here that is unsustainable as a civilization. The sheer numbers and resources we’re consuming, there’s a real sense of great potential death about to befall us.”45
The zombie apocalypse phenomenon “represents a profound disturbance in the Western collective unconscious caused by anxieties over the decline of Western civilization,” Brian Anse Patrick observes in Zombology.46 Zombies are a sign “for disorder, chaos, overpopulation, civil breakdown and more.”47 Zombies, Delfino and Taylor say, “are a projection of some of our worst fears… [and] the idea of a “zombie apocalypse”… cal s to mind a kind of Judgement Day – “the wrath of god.”48 “The zombie apocalypse is an il ustration 43 As above.
44 “Zombie Apocalypse,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zombie#Zombie_apocalypse.
45 Frank Darabont, quoted in Graeme Blundel , “Heroes or Vil ains,” The Weekend Australian (Review), October 12-13, 2013, p. 26.
46 Brian Anse Patrick, Zombology: Zombies and the Decline of the West (and Guns) (Arktos, London, 2014), p.25.
47 As above, p.168.
48 Robert A. Delfino and Kyle Taylor, “Walking Contradictions,” in Wayne Yuen (ed.) The Walking Dead and Philosophy: Zombie Apocalypse Now (Open Court, Chicago, 2012), pp.39-51, cited p.51.
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of the “fatal y soft” and weakness of modern humanity, a state produced by our own technology.”49 Zack Snyder, director of the zombie apocalypse movie Dawn of the Dead (2004) sums up this matter as follows: “ I have a feeling that our whole way of life is like an eggshell that we think is so impervious, but once you put a crack in it everything comes apart pretty quick.”50 Our “unthinkable world”
of planetary horrors, Eugene Thacker has observed, produces “an absolute limit to our ability to adequately understand the world at all.”51
Tauriq Moosa asks how our world differs from Thomas Hobbes’
state of nature and the zombiescape.52 The difference is one of degree as there are daily doses of misery facing the majority of humankind, not so much in the developed world, but certainly in the developing world, with disease; lack of resources (e.g. clean, safe drinking water); armed militants killing, raping and looting; natural disasters; violence and atrocities. For example, across much of sub-Saharan Africa, violence—including murder, cannibalism, torture and rape
—is a way of solving social problems in a world where police forces are total y corrupt and powerless against gangs and warlords. Over in India, visitors to the Ganges River can usual y see corpses floating downstream, often to lodge at the banks of the river, to be eaten by feral dogs. (No cultural/racial criticism or imperialism etc. implied by the way. These places are just in “advance” of the times. Our turn is just around the corner.) That is close to The Walking Dead in terms of shock value (at least when first one sees it, the corpse-eating dogs, that is).
49 Jonathan Maberry, “Take Me to Your Leader: Guiding the Masses Through the Apocalypse with a Cracked Moral Compass,” in J. Lowder (ed.), Triumph of the Walking Dead: Robert Kirkman’s Zombie Epic on Page and Screen (Smart Pop, Dal as, 2011), pp. 15-34, cited pp. 18-19.
50 Zack Snyder, quoted from Matt Mogk, Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Zombies, p. 99.
51 Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of this Planet [Horror of Philosophy Vol. 1] (Zero Books, Winchester, 2010, cited p. 1.
52 Tauriq Moosa, “Babies in Zombie Land,” in Wayne Yeun (ed.) The Walking Dead and Philosophy: Zombie Apocalypse Now (Open Court, Chicago, 2012), pp. 231-242.
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Moosa says that our world may be worse than even the zombie apocalypse and for many people “a zombie apocalypse would be an improvement” for “[z]ombie attacks are like animal attacks, they’re unfortunate when they happen, but they’re not the horror of thugs raping you or your family, killing your neighbors, and burning your vil age to the ground. It’s obvious that the thugs are worse and, what makes it more so is that the thugs exist right now.”53 Many examples of such terrors can be cited: the 2014 Islamic State beheadings of Lebanese soldiers, Kurds, British aid workers, American journalists and French nationals who had their heads hacked off with knifes; the brutal murder of British soldier Lee Rigby in Southeast London, stabbed and hacked to death by British-born, Nigerian-descent jihadists; the multitude of stabbings, hit-and-run car attacks, shootings and explosions, committed in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv against ordinary Israelis by Palestinian extremists, and the Paris shootings of November 13, 2015, where three Islamic terrorists killed 130 people. Much more on this later in this book.
Few in the comfortable West shed a tear for hate crimes committed against homosexual people in Africa, involving machete and hammer attacks, vigilante groups brutal y beating gays and the
“corrective rape” of lesbian women by gangs. One horrific crime involved a 23-year old gay man who was decapitated and had his genitals severed and inserted into his mouth. Another ghoulish crime occurred in 2011, where a lesbian was murdered by being stabbed to death with glass shards, mutilated, her genitalia cut out and a bottle inserted into the wound. Her body was then dumped in a ditch and rocks and used condoms tossed on her face.
Neo-masculinity writer Jack Donovan has given another take on the zombie apocalypse.54 He notes that not everyone is rattled by guilt and fear about growing social inequality. In the wilds of ‘merica news about the face-chewing incident gave some tough
guy a hard-on as he lovingly stroked his ar-15 and perhaps other weapons featured in 53 Moosa, as above, p. 236.
54 Jack Donovan, “Zompocalypse Now: America’s Training Wheel Tribalism,” July 8, 2012, at http://www.jack-donovan.com/axis.
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Guns & Ammos’ Zombie Nation.55 His guns may be loaded with special ammunition produced by Hornady for the zombie apocalypse, the “Zombie Max Ammo”56 and on his belt may be one or more of Ka-Bar’s range of zombie apocalypse blades (Ka-Bar zk (zombie killer) series), handles in ghoulish apocalyptic green.57 The zombie apocalypse gives men the prospect of returning to a life on the edge, where being alive means fighting for survival, not tap dancing on computer keys. Donovan quotes the tagline form The Walking Dead graphic novel: “[i]n a world ruled by the dead, we are forced to final y start living.” This represents a return to a way of life lived by men for most of history, where one’s right to life was fought for and defended.
Zombie apocalypse preparation is a way for modern detribalized men, “to dip their toes into a kiddie pool of tribalism and get used to the feel, texture and temperature of blood.”58 To continue this line of thought, the zombie apocalypse is a metaphor for the coming col apse of civilization and the rise of the neo-barbarian.59 That is the argument of this book, and the next one.
conclusion: The zombie apocalypse is a metaphor for the col apse of civilization, with zombies being a “death’s head.” The symbolization of death and destruction is cultural y more important than considerations of these literal y being the “living dead.” The (brain) dead living are more frightening because we dwell amongst them.
55 Zombie Nation, Guns & Ammo, July 5, 2012, at http://www.gunsandammo.com/blogs/
zombie-nation/.
56 On the Hornady “Zombie Max Ammo,” see http://www.hornady.com/ammunition/
zombiemax and also http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQWb-5nblx4.
57 See
www.kabar.com/.
58 Donovan, as above.
59 Venkat, “The Return of the Barbarian,” March 10, 2011, at http://www.ribbonfarm.
com/2011/03/10/the-return-of-the-barbarian.
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The Coming Col apse of Civilization
proposition 3: The zombie apocalypse, representing a coming col apse of civilization, is no more fiction. There is a substantial body of research, particularly from environmentalists, indicating that techno-industrial civilization is doomed, with a breakdown occurring as early as 2030, and perhaps sooner.
It has been argued by those who have examined the evidence of the array of converging and compounding crises,60 that due to the interplay of a multitude of interacting and compounding factors and forces—such as natural human aggressiveness and violence; the lack of survival adaptability of modern humanity to life without advanced technology and infrastructure (which has made people into domestic human battery hens) and the immense destructive impact of the contemporary world upon ecological services and resources—that there will be no soft landing or green, tree-hugging transition to “sustainability.” Instead, there will be a “rapid descent” into a Dark Age of barbarism and savagery. Civilization—
represented by life in concentrated nucleated settlements, cities—is a product of the abundance of resources, especial y energy resources, and an impending collision with the mountain of ecological scarcity will lead to civilization’s destruction.61 Civilization involves “political consolidation, economic specialization, social stratification, some sort of monumental architecture, and a flowering of artistic and intellectual endeavour.”62 Logical y, a col apse of civilization involves a breakdown of these factors, and a Dark Age.63
A Dark Age, as Widdowson defines it, is a “time without government, without trade, and without any sense of community. It 60 See for example, J. M. Greer, Dark Age America: Climate Change, Cultural Col apse, and the Hard Future Ahead (New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island, 2016).
61 David Price, “Energy and Human Evolution,” Population and Environment, vol.16, 1995, pp.301-319.
62 As above, p. 315. See further V. Gordon Childe, Social Evolution (Watts, London, 1951).
63 Roberto Vacca, The Coming Dark Age (Doubleday, New York, 1973), p. 174.
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is a time of everyone for himself or herself. During the Dark Age, mere survival is the only concern. No one has the leisure for a higher activity, including keeping records. That is why a Dark Age is dark.
Its principal feature is that we know little of what took place in it. The col apse that precipitates the Dark Age is abrupt and unexpected.”64
Shorter and sweeter (depending on your point of view) is James Ballou’s definition in his Long-Term Survival in the Coming Dark Age, of a period of time “marked by frequent warfare and a virtual disappearance of urban life,” as civilization, involving organized political power, the rule of law and some form of sociocultural and economical structure and organization, col apses.65 Thus, it will be Mad Max/Road Warrior, sans the hot cars (fuel depletion), sans the leather-clad homoeroticism, and after a time, no ammunition.
Moreover, given Fury Road (2015), it will also be sans feminism. The vision depicted in the movie and book The Road (2009),66 with some qualifications, is essential y correct.
The col apse of civilization or the zombie apocalypse needs to be distinguished from, I argue in chapter three of this book, the extinction of the human species itself from existential threats such as comet strikes, black hole collisions, runaway high energy experiments or even if the human race has a use-by-date because of a species-genetic biological clock.67 The human race seems to have survived a climate-change induced drought that almost extinguished our species 70,000 years ago, reducing human numbers to as little as 2,000, but here we are, for the time being.68 Civilization though, is not as resilient and inevitably crashes.
The thesis of col apse is widely accepted by environmentalists, but most see a silver lining to a very dark cloud. Thus W. H. Kötke 64 Mark Widdowson, The Phoenix Principle and the Coming Dark Age: Social Catastrophes
– Human Progress 3000 BC to AD 3000 (Amarna LTD, Bedford, UK, 2001), p. xi.
65 James Ballou, Long-Term Survival in the Coming Dark Age: Preparing to Live After Society Crumbles (Paladin Press, Boulder, Colorado, 2007), p. 1.
66 Alan Weisman, The World Without Us (Picador, New York, 2008).
67 D. M. Raup, Extinction: Bad Genes or Bad Luck? (W. W. Norton, New York, 1991).
68 D. M. Behar (et al.), “The Dawn of Human Matrilineal Diversity,” American Journal of Human Genetics, vol. 82, 2008, pp. 1130-1140.
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in The Final Empire: The Col apse of Civilization and the Seed of the Future,69 believes that the col apse of civilization is inevitable because economic growth has reached ecological limits and there are no more frontiers on Earth. Thus, our generation “is on the verge of the most profound catastrophe the human species has ever faced.” Our present world is a “culture of suicide” and the only hope for humanity is “to regain balance with the earth” by creating “a utopian paradise, a new Garden of Eden.” Dream on; based on the initial assumptions, we are doomed, doomed, doomed, and maybe doomed a wee bit more.70
Carolyn Baker, in Sacred Demise: Walking the Spiritual Path of Industrial Civilization’s Col apse (2009),71 expresses col apse optimism, a “sacred demise.” For Baker, col apse is “more stable” than a “zombie apocalypse” and involves “subtle patterns of abandonment and decay that unfold over long periods of time.”72 Even so, the breakdown of techno-industrial civilization “is likely to be the most devastating holocaust in the recorded history, and will be the end of the world as any of us has known it.” There will be “unprecedented escalations of violence.”73
Not as sweet, the “Health Ranger” Mike Adams sees the col apse of techno-industrial society occurring relatively
soon.74 There will be “untold human suffering and death,” but a rebirth of human civilization will occur along with “human spiritual awakening.” He says “[i]t is my belief that the majority of today’s living population 69 W. H. Kötke, The Final Empire: The Col apse of Civilization and the Seed of the Future (Arrow Point Press, Portland, OR, 1993).
70 Craig Dilworth, Too Smart for Our Own Good: The Ecological Predicament of Humanity (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2010), pp. 453-454.
71 Carolyn Baker, Sacred Demise: Walking the Spiritual Path of Industrial Civilization’s Col apse (iUniverse; http://www.iuniverse.com, 2009).
72 Carolyn Baker, “What if Col apse Happened and Nobody Noticed?” May 3, 2012 at http://carolynbaker.net/2012/05/03/what-if-col apse-happened-.
73 Carolyn Baker, Col apsing Consciously: Transformative Truths for Turbulent Times (North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, 2013), p. 45.
74 Mike Adams, “How to Prepare Yourself for the Col apse of the Age of Human Delusion (and the Arrival of Human Spiritual Awakening),” NaturalNews.com, July 14, 2014 at http://
www.naturalnews.com/045991_age_of_delusion_spiritual_awakening_mental_practice.
html.
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will not survive the inevitable sequence.” Nevertheless, after about a century a rebirth will occur. That is nonsense in my opinion, for once the great spiral down has happened it will be virtual y impossible for humanity to rise out of the primeval mud. However, Adams wisely recommends that people strive to achieve physical, mental and spiritual toughness and the cultivation of all-round survival skil s.
Clive Hamilton in Requiem for a Species,75 focusing on climate change and humanity’s inability to deal with the climate crisis, sees the end of modern civilization, if not the human species: “[t]he prospect of runaway climate change challenges our technological hubris, our Enlightenment faith in reason and the whole modernist project.”76 The evidence of global climate change shows that, “the world is now on a path to a very unpleasant future and it is too late to stop it.”77
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