 Humans are fascinated with the end of the world, and by the end of the world I mean the end of civilization as we know it since the Earth is usually still there afterwards. In the Bible we have a story about the entire world flooding and everyone dying except one man and his family who were prepared for the disaster. It goes back even further than that though, to the epic of Gilgamesh. Collected in 2000 BCE some of the stories go back even further and also involve the end of the world. But in almost every case there is a small subset of humanity that survives, which is why I specified that it was the end of civilization, not the world. With the current situation forcing us to stay indoors or else kill all our grandparents, I thought it might be nice to examine the way we've dealt with this in the past and what we can learn from that. Before that, sponsor time because this video is brought to you by Campfire. Organizing stories can be hard, but it doesn't have to be. 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A lot of people are attracted to end of the world fiction right now, even though we're currently in the midst of a disaster, well, multiple disasters. You'd think we'd all be searching for some light-hearted escapism, right? This isn't the first time something like this has happened, though. The 20th century saw an uptick in stories about civilization ending, mostly science fiction and mostly revolving around nuclear war. Turns out the Cold War was on everyone's mind 60 years ago. For the first time, the world could end not through an act of God, but through the actions of a small number of humans. If the US President or Soviet Premier decided to launch the missiles, then the other would have to react and that would be the end of things. Best case scenario, we'd enter into a dark age that would take decades or centuries to crawl out of. And people were acutely aware of this. Isaac Asimov's Foundation series deals with this on a galactic scale, with a massive empire collapsing and civilization being saved by a few groups of scientists and engineers. This series began before nuclear bombs were invented and continued through the Cold War, reflecting Asimov's, and society's, fear of their world collapsing. At the same time, it shows that they had hoped things could go back to normal eventually. All they had to do was prepare. But it also reflects Asimov's general distaste for American anti-intellectualism, which he saw as just as big of a threat as nuclear war. Nuclear apocalypse stories continued well into the Cold War and beyond. The Fallout video game series is one of the first examples that many of us will think of. The world has been almost totally destroyed and the survivors have gone right back to humanity's old ways of fighting over resources and ideology. The games definitely have an anti-nuclear armament and anti-war undercurrent to them, but they're more a criticism of American exceptionalism, nationalism, environmental degradation, unrestricted capitalism, imperialism, and consumerism. They came out after the Cold War, when the average person had gotten used to the sort of Damocles that is nuclear destruction hanging over their head. But the 90s were a decade where neoliberal capitalism reigned supreme, and many feared that its austerity would lead to social isolation, hunger for endless growth, and an eventual neo-fascist backlash. It's a good thing that hasn't happened, right? Oh. Oh dear. Apocalypse stories reflect the fears of the time, just like regular horror stories. Insert shameless self-plug here. The first Mad Max movie deals with resource shortages, particularly oil shortages, and it came out only a few years after the oil embargo from Arab countries. It reminded Americans how much they relied on oil and how easily they could lose access to it. The later films go back to the old standbys of nuclear war and environmental degradation, but the first one was different. For a while, we had a bit of a dip in apocalyptic stories. After all, the Cold War was over, American capitalism had won out over Soviet communism, and now the world could go into an age of unprecedented prosperity. Right? The western world's optimism of the 90s ended with 9-11. Then we remembered that we're all vulnerable. But there was less focus for a time. The reasons for the end of the world as we know it varied, from the environment in the day after tomorrow and the last book in the universe to supernatural reasons in The Power of Five or Left Behind. We also got some alien apocalypses, like Titan AE, Half-Life, and Falling Skies. And of course, the fifth wave. You'll get your roast soon enough. Various enemies from some far away place with overwhelming technology come in, destroy much of the population, and begin stealing our resources. Only a small number of humans live and are reduced to guerrilla fighting slash scavenging to live. Seems almost like a metaphor for imperialism, though I'm convinced that's totally by accident, since in the end the heroes usually wind up defeating the aliens through pluckiness. Most of the time, this is just a standard action story with a somewhat unique setting. Then in the late aughts, we got an influx of zombie stuff. And I say stuff because they were absolutely everywhere. Movies, comics, TV shows, books, video games, podcasts, everywhere. I've talked about this a bit in the past. This was about the fear of political differences, mindless hordes that you can't reason with infecting your friends and destroying your way of life. It's not exactly subtle. Zombieism is most often spread through a virus carried by other followers of zombieism. If they get ahold of you, they'll turn you and send you out to turn your friends. Just like propaganda and word of mouth. This fad came at the same time as the western world was seeing a rise in reactionary movements, with people like Rupert Murdoch pumping billions of dollars into propaganda telling you that you should be afraid of the gays and that Muslims want to blow up your Ford Focus specifically. This helped with, though it didn't cause, the rise of far right politics, which is all based on fear of modern society turning people into, quote, degenerates. Not that everyone who likes The Walking Dead is or was a reactionary, of course. Many of us just liked watching heads explode. And this can easily be seen from the other direction, too, with liberal and left-wing people fearing growing extremism. That was the beauty of the zombie fad. It reflected everyone's fears, not just the fears of one specific group. And that leads me, finally, to apocalypses brought about by pandemics. These have been around for quite some time, always in the background and never all that popular. Stephen King's The Stand is the most prominent example where a superflu escapes from a U.S. military installation and kills over 99% of the population, leaving only a handful of survivors who are immune from the virus. Because everyone died so suddenly of tiny microbes, the environment and infrastructure are mostly intact. There's plenty of food and transportation to go around. The virus is no longer a threat, so what is the threat? Well, being a Stephen King story, there's an evil wizard and a psychic grandma who gather up the good and evil survivors because God told them to and it gets weirder from there. The apocalypse barely factors into the main storyline. It's more like an inciting incident that forces all the main characters into a difficult situation that really has little to do with surviving Captain Trips. They don't have to worry about radiation or mutant animals the way they would in a nuclear apocalypse. They don't have to worry about the Antichrist taking over the world like they would if the raptor came and they certainly don't have to worry about being infected and turned into zombies. The superflu no longer poses any threat to them. There aren't any people who survived by avoiding the spread. Everyone who wasn't immune died. Obviously, part of the success of apocalyptic fiction can be attributed to the fantasy of being some sort of Wild West badass. You build up an arsenal of weapons, gather up some loyal friends, then go out and kill everyone who threatens you. It's a power fantasy where you get to go to a new world and be a hero, just like Harry Potter or Narnia or Sword Art Online or, hell, a hundred other things you can think of. There's nothing wrong with that. We all wish we had more power sometimes. And that's the thing to remember about every apocalypse story. The apocalypse is not the draw. The stories of those who survive is the draw. When the bombs drop or the virus comes, that wrecks the old world. All the infrastructure, government services, division of labor, and transportation we rely on for our current lifestyle goes away. Then what comes next? What sort of society do we build in the ashes of the old? Can we build a new society at all? Ending the world is most often a choice regarding setting and theme, not a story choice. Think about it. Is Fallout about the nuclear war that ended human civilization, or is about someone who's out to save his home by finding a McGuffin that'll give them clean water? Is the story of Noah and his Ark about the world flooding, or is it about the man who survives on a boat? Many stories are about the heroes averting the end of the world. Apocalypse stories are about worlds where the heroes never showed up to help. And pandemics are a specific type of crisis. You can't prevent yourself from being infected by being a badass like in a zombie outbreak, and there's no big explosion that kills people. They just start dying in droves around you, and there's little you can do to protect yourself or others. Viruses aren't flashy or cool, they're invisible, and then they kill you. That made them sound cooler than I meant it to, but you get the point. Disease is the ultimate way that the universe can tell us shit happens. There's no one to blame for the start of the disaster, though some people share the blame for making it worse. It's a reminder that whatever we may think of ourselves, bad things will still happen. Humans use fiction as a way of imagining what the worst case scenario is, and when they see that, they feel like the real world isn't that bad. Coronavirus has killed a metric fuckload of people, but we aren't yet at the point where governments have collapsed and dead bodies are littering the streets. We know that this crisis will pass eventually, though we don't know how long it'll take or how many will die in the meantime. We understand that we won't be left in a mad max hellscape afterwards, but we don't know exactly what the world will look like, nor do we know if our loved ones will all make it. And some people are probably worried about things besides their own well-being, such as the health of their country or some cause they've worked towards. If you know me, you know I don't have a high opinion of nationalism or patriotism or whatever the hell you wanna call it, what's important is a lot of other people do, and the end of the world as we know it brings the countries that they've staked their identities on crashing down. If you survive when everything you've worked for comes crashing down around you, what's next? If you've convinced yourself that you're part of the greatest country, not on earth, but in history, and you see that country collapse along with the civilization it was part of, how do you figure out what to do with yourself? Do you try to rebuild what was there before? And many generations after the apocalypse, when everyone who remembers the old world is long gone, how do those remaining view it? It probably says something about the American psyche that the only situations we can conceive of that don't have a United States are ones where the entire world was destroyed. The idea that we might be destroyed or broken up somehow while the rest of the world continues is unthinkable to many of us. I don't know, just a thought. Here's the thing though, the end of the world as we know it has come for plenty of civilizations in the past, and the world kept on turning. The Western Roman Empire, Assyria, the British Colonial Empire, the indigenous Americans, the Bronze Age civilizations, they all thought of themselves as the center of the universe, and they all fell. When the American Empire eventually falls, a lot of people won't know what to do with themselves and they'll feel like the world has ended, but it won't. Life will go on. It might be better or worse, but it will continue. Not that we shouldn't be upset about massive loss of human life or the destruction of our homes, it's just that from a big picture standpoint, none of this will seem like a big deal, even if to us, it's everything. And I think that's the ultimate message to take away from any story where the world ends. Life goes on. Maybe it sucks, but that doesn't matter because being alive is always better than being dead, and as long as there are humans out there, civilization survives. Except the road, that shit is weaponized oppression with no point behind it. Anyways, that brings me to the end of my ramblings about pandemics. I know it's not all that focused, but neither is the genre. It's just people trying to imagine a scenario they've never been in and make sense of it. You're not weird for being worried or for trying to make sense of it by watching zombie movies. The real world is chaotic and fiction is orderly. By campfire. Special shout out to Appo Savalainen, Brother Santotis, Christopher Hawkins, Christopher Quinten, Emily Miller, Joel, Joseph Pendergraft, Madison Lewis Bennett, Taylor Briggs, Tobacco, and Vaivictus, as well as all the other names here. If you want early access to my videos along with other benefits, then consider becoming a patron. It starts at a dollar a month. And if you can't do that, then simply sharing this video around helps me immensely. Good luck and stay healthy, all of you. Bye.