HOW COLLAPSE PREPAREDNESS ON THE LEFT IS A MORAL AND STRUCTURAL FAILURE

I sit in this small communal café. I am here for the first and probably last time. The topic to be discussed is the anxiety produced by the ever more obvious disfunctional reality of our systems steering us towards a societal cliff and what to do with that. As I look around the gathered people I feel no pity for them, I do not condemn them (neither individually nor collectively), I even understand where they are coming from; but I see is no future in this room. What I see is the next logical and evolutionary step for a global left that has failed to capture spiritual and worldly power and put it to use for the betterment of all. We have failed to envision and capture the future; so it seems the only option left was to prepare for no future at all. As our belief in systemic transformation weakens, collapse becomes a substitute horizon: change without the politics, disruption without the responsibility, meaning without victory.

All I see here in this room is the diffuse body language of the timid and all I hear are the long pauses of the perplexed. A random assortment of those averse to hierarchy, power and violence, hoping to somehow survive the most violent possible event in human history by organizing locally and without too strong a structure; as to not scare away the already anxious and emotionally scarred.

Let’s then state the most obvious thing first: a societal collapse is not a local or survivable event. ¹ A societal collapse is a cascading failure of interdependent global systems that form the very basis of our survival; at least for those of us in the western world. You cannot be meaningfully prepared for this through small-scale interventions, basic hard skills or local autonomy projects without ignoring its truly global and historic scale. Preparing for societal collapse as if it were a survivable transitional event already implies a fantasy of collapse that is not a sophisticated representation of its reality with all its brutal implications and imperatives. It implies blindness – either deliberately or by lack of knowledge – to the nature of the event.

Real societal collapse is the simultaneous failure of virtually all societal systems: energy, food, logistics, medicine, sanitation, governance, trust. Once these cascade out of control, you do not end up with locally organized pockets of functional autonomy and flat hierarchy; you get the remnant core of society stripped of all of its regulating and mediating instances – and all methodologies of known survival learned through modernity – dominated by unfiltered violence and power.     

What would those fearful to speak too loudly or too forcefully as to not startle those gathered around them – those too timid to assert the smallest sliver of authority – know about such violence and such application of power; how could they possibly hope to be prepared for it?

Let us then state another painfully obvious truth we find here among the gathered: collapse preparedness discourse is a uniquely westernized phenomenon. The imagined end of the world is decidedly that of the western world and its modernity. ² We sit in our communally organized space musing about the dreaded absence of our habitual creature comforts while ignoring that large parts of the world already live with systemic instability and deprivation without framing it as a civilizational event. For large parts of the global south the insecurities we project onto collapse scenarios are not a hypothetical event but a lived reality that has to be managed now. Their realities are those of a living yet brutal world, not the fantasies of its end.

Its decidedly a discourse made possible by experiencing historical safety, insulation, and privilege and fearing their dissapearance. You can only muse about, rehearse, or prepare for immediate collapse if collapse is not already your lived condition. ³ Modern western leftist traditions (the traditions now kept alive through and represented by a younger generation) developed largely under conditions where the state worked just well enough to absorb personal failure costs. We could reject hierarchy, power and authority because our hospitals still functioned, food still arrived, utilities were delivered to you at a financial cost and violence was externalized. Collapse now becomes a mirror in which the west finally sees itself as vulnerable, and instead of responding with responsibility, at the local level it fractures and retreats into survival fantasies that preserve its moral self-image in pockets of tribalism. The impending collapse now threatens to strip away these filters that allowed our ethical purity, horizontalism, and anti-authoritarian aesthetics to function without being tested by material scarcity and unfiltered power.

For the western left the collapse preparedness discourse has become a surrogate for applied agency. When confronted with systemic failures too large to meaningfully influence – be it climate change, capitalism that wormed its way into every facet of daily and personal life, geopolitical inertia in the face of poverty, war, hunger and existential threats – people began to retreat into simulacra of control. Learning basic skills keeps them occupied, imagining small resilient communities and rehearsing post-collapse scenarios feels intellectually and emotionally stabilizing. They allow one to feel active and in control of what small things one can exert control over without confronting the horrifying truth that collapse, if it happens, is not something most people live through or that has a functioning “after” that one can organize towards.     

They also act as a symbolic reconstitution. Personal education becoming irrelevant, symbolic capital evaporating, cosmopolitan identities losing their value, language skills and cultural fluency no longer expressing social power. For the western intellectual left, this is a terrifying existential threat. A fantasy of applying oneself with a new skillset after the collapse is a way to launder that fear into a functional and reaffirming narrative of a new equality in ruins – as if collapse would level the field rather than brutally re-stratify it. For collapse never equalizes. It concentrates power among those willing and able to wield force, seize and apply resources, and make brutal decisions.

Many preparedness practices function to manage anxiety and restore a sense of agency, not however to realistically address what collapse would entail. They prepare for an idea of collapse, not its material reality. Collapse would abolish neither power nor hierarchy; it would strip away the norms and the institutions that constrain them and make them manageable. Rejecting structure and authority in advance or in principle guarantees their reemergence in informal, violent, and unaccountable forms. A lot of contemporary left spaces conflate all hierarchy with oppression, as if all structured authority were congenial. That works rhetorically under stable conditions. In a collapse scenario however this aversion might quite well become lethal. Scarcity forces prioritization, prioritization forces decision-making, decision-making forces authority. If this isn’t formalized, it reappears as informal power, as coercion, as charismatic manipulation, and as strategic violence applied onto us not as an ethically grounded application of an ordering principle by us.

Within this movement towards a post-collapse agency we find the seeds of acceptance and desire. While individually tempting and dangerous they are particularly devastating for the collective left and its moral framework. Where there is no future to project identity onto – no shared undertaking that demands skills, resilience and the trust towards its realization – Identity shifts towards its unmaking and its absence. There then collapse and preparedness become a source of identity, community, and meaning and its nonappearance begins to threaten intellectual and material investments. This is doubly true in a present that seems to be devoid of reason and purpose for many in the western world; so organizing efforts towards collapse preparedness easily developed an irresistible allure. Here then collapse starts to subtly shift from feared outcome to awaited event. With time any investment in the absence of future will result in purpose and determination. Collapse then is not to be avoided but a functionally stabilizing inventory of one’s sense of self. This then shift the discourse from avoidance towards acceptance and even subtle realization. What good is it to prepare for the end of the world if it never comes? It’s the outsourcing of their agency and self to an apocalypse they increasingly need to happen.

In its most extreme and most advanced stages this can result in almost fundamental beliefs – as the far right prepper scene (that is a few decades ahead of the left) has demonstrated ⁴ – and even have almost evangelical undertones; where the collapse then becomes a purifying event that separates the worthy from the unworthy and celebrates the collapse of society as a return to some form of divine nativeness; devoid of the illusions and artificiality of modern life. ⁵ Once we have reached this stage preventing collapse begins to look like the prolonging of a civilizational and social lie and its intrinsic suffering. Those opposed to it are labeled naive, complict or even cowardly and can become enemies of supposed or implied truth. And we all know what historically happens to those labeled enemies of truth.

It is here where we as the global left have to confront this fatalistic, defeatist and nihilistic death cult that is coming to terms with end times scenarios. Both as an acknowledgement of our own failure to present viable alternatives, as well as a moral impossibility. Any politics that treats it as a plausible planning scenario rather than an absolute failure condition has already conceded its essential moral core. One cannot ethically adapt to the deaths of billions. There is no post-collapse utopia waiting on the other side; only a radically diminished, traumatized humanity governed by brutal constraints.

We cannot allow for our brothers and sisters to fall prey to this ruining desperation. We cannot allow them to lose hope in better outcomes and a radically changed and living world that can produce a future. This particular discourse attracts those that can no longer imagine victories only endurance. While not inherently malicious it makes their politics conservative in the most fundamental sense: it’s their personal project of conservation of self under conditions where the world around them is allowed to decay into nothingness. A cruel and amoral bet with reality is made that states in no uncertain terms “Some will die, some may survive, I intend to be among the latter.” Explicitly this wager is one that accepts that many millions or even billions will die and so it wraps itself in talk of resilience, adaptability and realism. Collapse preparedness is the consent to mass death while preserving a self-image of care. It lays bare the fundamental difference between preparedness in a world that needs a project that is concerned with its future and rehearsing survival beyond its death. One is a reaffirmation of shared obligation towards life and society; the other is a selfish withdrawal that looks for accomplices.

Lastly, collapse preparedness is also selective. Skills, ressources, social and material capital, physical abilities and psychological resilience are unevenly distributed among the world and within even local communities. The core tenent of preparedness is to deepen and reinforce those inequalities ahead of time as to increase one’s own chances of survival. Those without access, health, time, education, or capital are silently written out of the post collapse future. No applied forms of violence are needed, it can even be wrapped in the politics and language of care which makes this final injustice very easy to life with.

Modern emancipatory politics (whatever its failures) however is grounded in the idea that lives are not expendable, that suffering is not acceptable simply because it is widespread, common or to “be expected” and that a shared future needs shared hope and investment. Collapse preparedness suspends this principle and in its stead practices abandonment. Here death on a global scale becomes an externality to realism rather than a moral failure to be prevented. Preparedness normalizes loss instead of resisting it.

1. At least not for most. Many simply lack the grit, determination and unscrupulousness to survive the downfall of western society as we know it. They will starve, be predated on and murdered by those more amoral than them. ↩︎
2. With many a religious and spiritual undertone of the rapture ↩︎
3. I do not fail to see the irony in my own musings ↩︎
4. Right wing preppers made this move earlier and more explicitly. For them, collapse promises vindication: proof that they were ultimately right about human nature, weakness, outsiders and the state. Their eagerness is overt. What’s different on the left is not the incentive structure but the justification. The left wraps the same anticipatory desire in ethics: mutual aid, horizontality, healing and rebirth instead of unfiltered domination. ↩︎
5. Which is particularly enticing for parts of the anarchist left ↩︎