In the Apocalypse, the Person Who Saves You is Your Neighbor

history and data show: the end of the world isn't something you survive alone

N.b. This smaller piece is part of something larger I’m working on in the form of a video essay (I will also publish the essay as a written word piece probably, for those of you who don’t like that) - but for now, here’s a taste of the whole.

In movies, surviving the apocalypse is often a matter of out-surviving other people, or going it alone. People drive out of cities, they make off to isolated bunkers. People lock all the doors of their houses. People get picked off one by one. The lone survivor, or perhaps the lone small crew, make it out alive.

But this idea of the apocalypse as something you bunker down and survive alone is terribly misleading. It’s romantic, it’s foolish. It won’t help us face the apocalypse of sorts that we’re dealing with now.

Because in real life, when bad things happen, especially the kinds of bad things that are coming in the polycrisis of today (dramatic weather events, governmental instability, precarity, poverty) surviving means surviving things together. Research on natural disasters shows that those who have more social connections are more likely to survive. During some of the most recent Japanese and Indian tsunami, for example, researchers found that the height of the waves where you were hit only predicted your survival rate a bit. And interestingly, the availability of emergency services wasn’t predictive of your survival rate at all. Even your level of wealth didn’t matter. Instead, researchers found, “measures of social capital and social ties…were the best predictors of survival, even more so than the extent of the flooding.” If you have close connections, you’re much more likely to survive, even if the physical disaster is worse, because people (not professionals, just your neighbours!) will come look for you, and save you - and you will hopefully do the same for them. People will share resources. One family might have blankets, another fuel, another food. And so on. You can read some incredible stories about it here.

Still from this film

The same phenomena holds true during heatwaves - what matters is if people know you enough to check in on you and help you. Research has shown that in otherwise similar neighbourhoods (equally poor, racially diverse, etc), survival rates are far better when the neighborhoods have public spaces where people congregate and hang out. This is because if those spaces exist, people get to know their neighbours, even a little. They know which folks (especially the elderly, vulnerable, sick, pregnant etc) are in their neighborhood, and they worry when they don’t see them seated out front on the sidewalk or feeding the birds in the park. During a heatwave, they go looking for the folks they know and save them from overheating.

The same body of research shows that when NGOs provide resources in a way that encourages competition, not cooperation, (for example new kinds of fishing boats that are more individually manned) this can cause harms as great as the original natural disaster, in many ways. It is, in fact, the community that kept people safe, and when new economic forces tear that community apart, it’s no longer safe as it was before. In a way, we’re all living in a world where we’ve been taught to be competitive like this, implicitly, by the economic model and options available to us. And we’re now accordingly uniquely poorly positioned for what we’re about to face.

And if you’re worried that people will just crush each other and steal from each other in a disaster, read Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell, where she looks at five natural disasters and how people reacted in them not by pulling inward but by becoming, in effect, their best selves, their most kind, generous, and cooperative versions.

If you want to survive an apocalypse, you want to know your neighbors. And you want to build a community where your neighbours will know you. Sure, I guess, learn to make a fire, forage, fix things, maybe even shoot a gun (though honestly, I’m pretty dubious about the last one being as useful as it sounds). But also: learn how to share resources, how to support your neighbours, how to resolve group conflict, how to befriend a stranger, have to have difficult conversations, how to listen and learn from other people.

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This myth of surviving the apocalypse alone is tied to the longer, troubled use of this idea to understand big societal crises. It is of course true that in real life, and not just books and movies, we, the human species as a whole, are facing a kind of apocalypse, although using that as the framework can mislead us in various ways. It feels most fair to say that we are, at minimum, facing the end of one kind of world (where capitalist liberal democracy provided, for a very limited many, the illusion of a stable equilibrium of sorts for human society).

Notice this means we’re also entering another world, perhaps not an easy or fun world, one that will be created in the wreckage of climate catastrophe, fascism, and more. Some of us will face the sharp end much far than others; everyone will be affected. That’s what’s really happening - it’s the end of one world, yes, and the start of another.

The image of this complex shift as “the apocalypse” matters because so many that I speak to and write for tell me that’s what we’re facing: they see it as the end of the world. That is the lens through which so many, even the supposedly secular, understand what is happening around them.

I think this idea that what we’re facing is the apocalypse is a bit troubled, for lots of reasons. I will probably always argue, even given the enormous scale of the climate crisis, that it might be more helpful to see what we’re facing as the end of just one world, to remember that there have been other ends of the world, for other people, at other times. (Again, more on this in a longer forthcoming piece). Thinking in terms of apocalyptic imagery pushes us towards thinking about things in terms of radical ruptures, because apocalyptic imagery tends to be provided in this way. To start with, the OG account of the apocalypse in the Book of Revelation is seductive because it is, frankly, kinda metal. There are angels. There are dragons. There are beheaded people standing ready in judgement before the throne of God.

The Last Judgement, Hieronymous Bosch

Also, notably, the elect, a far smaller group, are saved. They don’t have to handle the ed of the world, not really, because they’ve been good. Meanwhile, all the worst people will finally suffer. It’s a revenge fantasy with peak drama, and who doesn’t love a revenge fantasy?

Modern literature echoes this theme largely by suggesting it’s something you survive precisely by being apart from everyone else. But we need to rid ourselves of this fantasy, both because at the end of the day it is a bit petty and a lot morally abhorrent, and because it won’t help us survive ourselves.

The empirical studies on surviving big crises, climatic and otherwise, says this: don’t make for the hills. Stay with the trouble, and face it together. (And if you want ideas for how to do this, look at my writing on food co-ops in my book, or join a local mutual aid group.) Since the apocalypse is happening slowly, it’s this slow ongoing crisis that you most need to survive. That won’t be helped by a bunker, it will be helped by your neighbours. The crisis we face is more likely to be a series of floods or heatwaves where lots of people have to move. Going to a bunker won’t help because, when you run out of food and supplies, you’ll have to go back to the world and it will still be there--it will just look a bit different, and you might now be understood as the person who just abandoned everyone else.

In fact, we should go back and reexamine, with great suspicion, the cultural intuition that in a crisis only a few will survive. Such fantasies have a hint of strange longing in them, perhaps our longing to be special, select. I would suggest it’s a hangover from that longing to be one of those aforementioned Christian elect. It has also probably been encouraged by one of the worst aspects of various varieties of liberalism: a fierce and unrealistic ideal of individualism. And, of course, we learn to think about the apocalypse this way through literature that plays on the lone survivor trope.

I find better accounts in (say) the work of Octavia Butler, where people survive largely based on whether the group dynamics are good, not on their own. Even in Butler’s work, the groups are, I think, unrealistically small. We’re going to need everyone to get through this, in a sense. If this isn’t obvious to you when things are good, trust me (and social science): it will be clear we need each other when things get bad.

We need other people to survive all the coming fires and floods literally, and also to survive it with our spirits intact. After all, we’re not about to experience cannibalism or vampires, we’re not even always going to experience major time-limited weather events. A lot of it is going to be unemployment, precarity, government surveillance and oppression, social atrophy, despair. And those are not individual matters, they are not matters of personal misfortune and they cannot be addressed individually.

In one of my favourite of his short essays, “The Uses of the Blues”, James Baldwin says this:

right now you find the most unexpected people building bomb shelters…It is a private panic which creates a public delusion that some of us will be saved by bomb shelters. …Perhaps, if we had a more working relationship with ourselves and with one another, we might be able to turn the tide and eliminate the propaganda for building bomb shelters.

The billionaires with their bunkers, the preppers with their secretive personal kits, have got it wrong. What we need for the coming crisis is each other. What we need to prepare for, build the skills for, and do now and in the future, is life with each other.

We need to reimagine survival as something that we can all do, that we have to all do--where we don’t leave anyone behind. We need to build the skills for that now. It’s going to be a lot less dramatic and romantic than it sounds in literature. It’s going to mean you have to talk to strangers. It’s going to be difficult and occasionally also quite joyful. I hope you get started now.