Excerpt: ‘Adventures in the apocalyptic style: Preppers and the end of everything’

This is an excerpt from an essay I wrote for the Australian literary journal Griffith Review, titled ‘Adventures in the apocalyptic style: Preppers and the end of everything’. The essay is, in turn, part of a much longer book project about survivalist and prepper subcultures around the world, working title: We Are All Preppers Now. My big idea is that preppers shouldn’t be ridiculed as absurd or paranoid figures. They also shouldn’t be fetishised as hard-headed ‘realists’ who have special access to some grim truth (about imminent societal collapse) that the rest of us normies are too complacent to accept. Rather, prepping is an understandable, ambivalent and deeply contradictory response to a future that is perceived as impossibly difficult to predict, yet nonetheless locked onto a path of decline and eventual catastrophe. Understanding preppers is a way to better understand this doom-struck historical moment.

 

I BECAME FASCINATED – okay, obsessed – with prepper subcultures back in 2019. My partner, Laura, had just gotten a job as a university lecturer and we’d moved to Palmerston North, a small, unthrilling New Zealand city plonked in a cow paddock next to an army base. I had grown up in Wellington, two hours’ drive from Palmy, and had nothing but contempt for the place; Palmy was the butt of countless jokes, usually involving sheep. After two decades of la dolce vita in bohemian Melbourne, Laura’s regional posting felt like a mini- exile, a personalised kind of collapse for me and my career. But it did mean I had a lot of time on my hands to research preppers.

At first, I found the whole thing both absurd and repellent. There were US billionaires buying up huge swathes of land in remote corners of New Zealand to use as boltholes in case of [insert global catastrophe here], and I hated them for it, but it didn’t seem that interesting or novel; rich people had been ruining my country of birth for decades. There were prepping Facebook groups in Australia and New Zealand that recycled creepy American memes about ‘the government’ and ‘the elite’. The preppers were obsessed with frankly ludicrous threats – such as EMP (electromagnetic pulse) attacks, which would apparently disable the whole electricity grid overnight and plunge us into chaos. One man shared a video of a crossbow he’d rigged to fire a tangled web of rope into the air, capable of taking out an enemy drone snooping over his property: cool, kind of, but mainly stupid.

And yet. I kept scrolling despite myself, and somewhere along the line got hooked. In February 2020, in between the New World Order conspiracies and recipes for quince jam, I found content like this:

I’m only new to this stuff and can’t afford too much as I’m still at school and don’t have a job but so far I have 2 big cans of baked beans a tin of beetroot about 15 cafe sized packets of salt and pepper and sugar that’s 15 each a tin of potatoes 2 packets of microwave pasta and 4 tins of tuna I know it’s not much but it’s a start until I get a job and a car but if anything happens in the mean time I’ll be expected to ration out my food with my mum, dad and brother because they don’t want to be preppers…

The post had forty-nine likes and 109 comments. I assumed this was a pitch-perfect piece of trolling that had sucked everyone in, but down the thread the poor young guy was asking genuine questions about the best plastic bottles to store boiled water in preparation for the breakdown of society. And the online community was rallying around to help: ‘Coles has half-price sales that change every week…’, ‘Dehydrated potato from Aldi is cheap.’

I found this utterly fascinating. And I wanted to find people like this to talk to: bog-standard, non-billionaire people making sacrifices in their everyday lives in anticipation of some terrible future.

Over the past four-and-a-half years, I have spoken with dozens of prep- pers and ‘prepper-adjacent’ folks in New Zealand, Australia, Indonesia (well, Ubud), the US and Norway. Out of all the interviews I’ve done, my very first still stays with me.

In April 2020, a couple of weeks into the initial Covid lockdowns, I got in touch with a middle-class, middle-aged industrial designer and subur- ban dad, Richard Hovey. On a grey, rainy afternoon, over a crackly phone connection through to Wellington, I asked Richard when he first realised he was becoming a prepper.

‘I think…there was just this slow burn, where I didn’t necessarily realise I’d lost the mainstream buy-in with my [new] ideas,’ he replied. ‘Weirdly, the closest thing to compare it to is when people talk about losing their religious faith. It happens gradually, over a period of time – but everyone else around them, their family and friends, still believes, so they can’t talk about it… For me it was this quite internal process of losing faith, really. Just seeing all the [climate science] numbers and finding these things out.’

Here are some of the things Richard was sceptical about: long-term economic growth. Global supply chains. The world’s agricultural systems, when combined with worsening climate disasters. New Zealand’s political systems, when faced with a worsening ecological crisis (Richard used to be a paid-up member of the NZ Green Party, but now sees them as ‘the new face of denial’). The country’s ability to feed itself if the electricity grid went down for good. The usefulness of firearms in a post-apocalyptic world (‘there’ll be a lot of people with guns and no ammo’).

Other preppers worry about other issues: government overreach. Corporate villainy. The deep state. The UN. Communist and/or fascist coups. George Soros and/or Bill Gates. Mandatory vaccines. 5G microchips. Chemtrails. The fragility of the social contract. The fundamental selfishness of human nature. Race wars. Pandemics. Taken in aggregate these concerns add up to a generalised lack of faith in the future, as subscribed to by members of mainstream society. While some preppers aren’t working to a ‘doomsday timeline’, others are clear that they don’t expect business as usual to last much longer: perhaps a few more years; a decade or two max. They are turning their backs on the universalist promises of the postwar welfare state because they see governments as either inherently oppressive (right-wing prepper opinion) or no longer up to the task of governing following decades of priva- tisation and infrastructure decay (left-wing prepper opinion). They have also implicitly abandoned centuries-old Enlightenment-era notions of continual improvement and human progress. If we’re on the cusp of a new Dark Age – and lord knows it feels like that sometimes – the preppers saw it coming first. Most preppers have also lost faith in the viability of large-scale systems, be they technological, ecological, political or social. These networks are just too complex, too interdependent, too vulnerable. In their place, prepper imaginaries often focus on technologies of self-sufficiency (grey-water systems; spare batteries; knives). Instead of a too-big-to-not-fail ‘society’, we find small-scale social units: the lone wolf. The nuclear family. The MAG (mutual assistance group), which is how some preppers have reconceptualised the strange and inefficient notion of ‘friends’. Plus the odd militia.

Having spent way too long thinking about this, I’d argue that although far-right and far-left prepper worldviews seem to contradict one another, they should instead be seen as mirror-image yearnings for a simpler, more practical lifestyle. A hands-on existence where individuals are in control of their immediate environments, and hence their destinies. This is a libertarian dream, for sure, but it’s also an anarchist one.