Notes from an Apocalypse A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back - Mark O'Connell Page 0,12

through the skillful dispensing of violence, masculine know-how, and ingenuity. There is a fetishizing of older ways of being a family, of how things were imagined to be before the advent of feminism and other corrosive social forces.

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Preppers are not preparing for their fears: they are preparing for their fantasies. The collapse of civilization means a return to modes of masculinity our culture no longer has much use for, to a world in which a man who can build a toilet from scratch—or protect his wife and children from intruders using a crossbow, or field dress a deer—is quickly promoted to a new elite. The apocalypse, whatever form it takes, will mean misery and death for most human beings, but for the prepared, it will mean a return to first principles, to a world in which men are men. Especially if they are white.

The racial dimension of prepper anxieties and fantasies is impossible to ignore. It’s there in the distrust of cities and their inhabitants. It’s there in the clarification, in that YouTube video, of the distinction between “sheep dog gangs” and “urban-style city gangs.” And it’s there in all the excited discussion of looting and “lawlessness,” and the things that might have to be done to keep them from getting out of hand. When preppers talk about “civil unrest,” as they frequently do—it is, after all, one of the primary methods by which the shit is expected to hit the fan—they invariably seem to be referring to black people and their reactions to systemic racism and violence. In 2015, when a grand jury declined to bring charges against six police officers involved in the death in custody of Freddie Gray, the city of Baltimore erupted in riots, and these riots were viewed by many preppers as a harbinger of precisely the kind (and precisely the color) of WROL scenarios they are preparing for.

Example: in the immediate aftermath of the civil unrest in Baltimore, a website called The Prepper Journal posted an article whose title posed the presumably rhetorical question “What Would a WROL World Look Like?” If the photograph that appeared on top of the post could be taken as its own kind of answer, a WROL world would look like a group of young black men, hooded and masked, jumping on the roof of a police cruiser. The article itself never mentioned Baltimore or Freddie Gray or the Black Lives Matter movement, but the photograph’s provenance was obvious. (The side of the police car, for one thing, bore the words “Baltimore Police.”) Farther down the page was another lawlessness-themed photo, depicting a hooded black man in the act of hurling an unseen object, behind him a parked car engulfed in flames. A reverse Google image search confirmed my suspicion that the photo was taken during the London riots of 2011.

Two things immediately struck me about this article, and the photos the author had chosen to illustrate it. The first was the more or less explicit association of lawlessness with young men of color. The perceived savage population here—the sector of society whose natural inclination toward violence and chaos would be given immediate expression in the event of a systemic breakdown—was emphatically nonwhite, emphatically urban. And the second was that the context for both photographs, Baltimore in 2015 and London in 2011, was widespread grief and rage about the death of a young black man in police custody. The people who were being made to stand for a world without rule of law, in other words, were those who understood most intimately and urgently what it meant to live without the protection of the state, to know that the law had never been intended to protect them in the first place.

The failure to acknowledge, or even to perceive, the lengthening shadow of the vast dramatic irony that attended this whole matter—namely that it was precisely society’s most marginalized and oppressed people who truly understood what it might mean to live in a postapocalyptic world, and who were therefore most fully prepared—seemed to me to indicate a total moral incapacity.

This moral incapacity was something I’d recognized in Rawles’s book, too, most memorably in a story he’d related about his time as an army intelligence officer in Iraq. One of the things he observed on the job, he says, was that in situations of structural collapse—such as, presumably, the collapse of Iraqi society that had resulted from his own government’s illegal invasion in 2003—it was always