Notes from an Apocalypse A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back - Mark O'Connell Page 0,10
Dog Gangs That Will Form After the Collapse,” posted in August 2017 to the “Reality Survival and Prepping” channel. The video focused on a scenario that was obsessively fetishized among preppers: what they referred to as WROL, or “Without Rule of Law.”
Sitting in a cramped room with the shades drawn, against the lurid backdrop of one of those “Don’t Tread on Me” flags with the coiled rattlesnakes, a man named J. J. Johnson, who looked to be in his late thirties, laid out his understanding of American society and his vision of how, in the chaos that would immediately follow the coming collapse, certain elements of that society would coalesce to form a bulwark against savagery and lawlessness.
At present, in his view, there were two separate and irreconcilable Americas. There was urban America, which was densely populated and “controlled” by the Democrats, and there was rural America, where people went to church and were enthusiastic about the recreational use of firearms. He went on to speak of “good guys,” and although he did not explicitly mention “bad guys,” it was fairly clear that his division of America into two implied a “good” America and a “bad” one. America, he said, had a lot of good guys—a lot of good guys with guns—who would not put up with “a lot of lawlessness.” (In an aside, he referred his viewers to a previous video in which he discussed how, in an SHTF scenario, looters and “brigands” would be killed first.)
Johnson’s overall thesis, it quickly became clear, was that certain preexisting social groups would emerge as de facto law enforcement during the breakdown of civilization, maintaining—by violence if necessary—the sanctity of private property and the safety of “good” American families. These groups he referred to as “sheep dog gangs.” (“And when I say ‘gang,’ ” he hastened to clarify, “I’m meaning it just as in a group of people. That’s really all this is. It doesn’t mean they’re going to behave like an urban-style city gang.”) Examples of existing groups that would form these postapocalyptic “sheep dog gangs”—or “posses,” as he referred to them at one point—were men’s organizations, homeowner associations, veterans’ groups, and local chapters of the Rotary Club.
For all that I relished the absurdity of Rotarians coming together to defend civilization, I was also capable of recognizing crypto-fascism when I saw it, and this seemed to me as good an example as I’d encountered in the wild. This vision of God-fearing members of the business community and war veterans coming together to defend themselves against an onslaught of urban looters and general lawlessness was plainly a fantasy of purgation, focused on the violent elimination of “bad” elements of American society.
In fact, you couldn’t even properly call it crypto-fascism: it was really just good old-fashioned original-style fascism. It didn’t seem necessary either to do a lot of racial decoding when it came to all the talk of “urban” versus “rural” America, of “city-style” gangs versus homeowner association posses. The whole appeal of the apocalypse, for this J. J. Johnson, seemed to be that it gave him a pretext for this kind of Klan-style fantasy.
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The idea of collapse speaks, on some primal level, to a reactionary sensibility—a sensibility in which the world is always necessarily in an advanced state of degeneration, having fallen from a prelapsarian wholeness and integrity. (Feminism, political correctness, the supine attitude of the left toward Islam, and so on: the structure of Western civilization is, in the reactionary view, always being eaten away from within.)
Prepping is rooted in the apprehension of an all-consuming decadence. Society has become weak, excessively reliant on systems of distribution and control whose very vastness and complexity renders them hopelessly vulnerable. The city is the source of this decadence. Preppers don’t trust cities, or those who make their lives in them. All those people living at a remove from the production of food, completely reliant on those vast and fragile systems, of distribution and waste collection, those heaving masses of humanity, incorrigibly plural and various. And what this suspicion amounts to is a suspicion of modernity itself.
Take the show Doomsday Preppers, which aired on the National Geographic Channel from 2011 to 2014. On the surface level, this was a reality television program about American men making elaborate preparations for the collapse of civilization: building fortresses, bunkers, remote rural hideouts; stockpiling weapons, tools, foodstuffs, and other postapocalyptic essentials. But you don’t have to sit through very many episodes on YouTube to understand the