Why would you want to survive the apocalypse in a world without hope?

Breadcrumb Trail Links

OpinionColumnists

Article content

The day was warm, the sky, cloudless. The neighbourhood was blissfully quiet, and the dog and I had the street to ourselves. The apocalypse seemed a remote possibility.

And yet: A neighbour was in her front yard, and in the course of our short conversation, she said she was buying a trailer and stocking it full of emergency supplies. She said she wanted to be prepared for any catastrophe that might visit the neighbourhood — earthquake, flood, fire, plague.

Article content

“After all,” she said, “it’s every man for himself.”

I blinked mentally at the coldness of her reasoning, but given the state of the world, I wasn’t about to say she was entirely wrong either.

But then, further down the street, I thought:

“Wait, is it every man for himself?”

I worked over 40 years as a journalist, and wrote about many people who found themselves in dire circumstances, and in every case I witnessed exactly the opposite — that it wasn’t every man for himself and never had been, that the people I saw and wrote about invariably felt compelled to rush in to help those in need, even at the peril of their own lives. Often those people rushing in to help were living through the same dire circumstances as those they were helping.

I saw it everywhere — in towns devastated by forest fires, in horrendous car accidents, on cancer wards.

Disaster didn’t bring out the worst in people: It brought out the best in them. Empathy. Love. And — the distinction is important here — not exceptional acts of bravery, though that was sometimes the case, but acts of selflessness inspired by simple common decency. The fact that most people were instinctually capable of such acts, that they were evolutionarily hardwired for them, needs to be said and recognized.

Informed Opinion

A daily roundup of Opinion pieces from the Sun and beyond.

By signing up you consent to receive the above newsletter from Postmedia Network Inc.

Article content

Article content

You don’t have to look hard to witness it now either. You can see it on your TV screen nightly amid the horrors of the Gaza Strip and Ukraine, with the living rushing into bombed out buildings to rescue the wounded and retrieve the dead. You saw it during the worst of COVID-19, when charitable donations and volunteering actually increased across Canada despite the isolating effects of government mandates. You saw it during the fires that razed Fort McMurray, Alta., and Lytton, where the examples of extraordinary acts of aid were simply too numerous to list here.

On the other hand, you don’t see such altruism and humanity reflected in popular culture. Altruism? Nope. There, chaos reigns and selfishness sells.

Libraries groan under the weight of end-of-days novels, with protagonists running the gamut of cannibalistic zombies or gangs of rapacious gun-toting thugs. (Cormac McCarthy’s unrelentingly bleak and unreadable The Road tops the list.) Movies like the Mad Max pictures imagine the apocalypse as a thrilling playground for tragic, taciturn loners. In TV, a generation of viewers has been raised on a diet of Survivor, Squid Game, Big Brother, Physical 100, etc., etc., all of which promote the idea that selfishness isn’t only the best stratagem for success, but that it’s also rewarded — despite the fact that in real life, nothing could be further from the truth.

Article content

And let’s not forget the genre of reality TV shows where participants not only act badly out of a sense of entitlement and abhorrent selfishness, but also revel in it as if it were somehow comical — as in the Real Housewives franchise, The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, Below Deck, Jersey Shore, and Keeping Up With the Kardashians, to name a few.

But to return to my neighbour.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with being prepared for disaster or wanting to protect oneself and one’s family from harm. Given the existential threat that climate change poses to mankind, I’m sure more and more people have thought about a safe harbour they can flee to in times of duress or whether they should have an emergency supply of food and medical supplies on hand. I know I have.

And certainly the world’s wealthy have. Some, with private jets always at the ready, have taken out citizenship in isolated island countries like New Zealand. Some have built super-yachts so well-stocked that they can stay at sea for years. Others have bought underground bunkers the size of small towns.

(One developer of armed, maximum-security compounds said his biggest concern wasn’t a violent confrontation with an armed mob storming his compound. It was, he said, “the woman at the end of the driveway holding a baby and asking for food. I don’t want to be in that moral dilemma.” Right. Giving food to a starving baby constitutes a moral dilemma for you? Averting your eyes from the suffering because it might cause your conscience to twitch, not to mention eat into your hoard of supplies? Buddy, you’re already in hell.)

Article content

And that, in microcosm, is survivalism. It’s an excuse for withdrawal or inaction, for turning your back on the world and your fellow human beings, and for doing nothing to address the problem rather than doing something to alleviate the suffering the problem might cause.

It’s an understandable impulse — after all, who doesn’t want to survive? — but ultimately it’s a conceit, one in which the survivalist imagines themselves triumphantly coming out on the end unscathed while everyone else dies because of their stupidity.

But the question they fail to ask:

Why would you want to survive the apocalypse?

Why would you want to live in a world bereft of birds?

Or children’s laughter?

Or hope?

mcmartincharles@gmail.com

Recommended from Editorial

Pro-Palestinian encampment dismantled at Vancouver Island University

Israel’s army says it will pause daytime fighting along a route in southern Gaza to help flow of aid

Bookmark our website and support our journalism: Don’t miss the news you need to know — add VancouverSun.com and TheProvince.com to your bookmarks and sign up for our newsletters here.

You can also support our journalism by becoming a digital subscriber: For just $14 a month, you can get unlimited access to The Vancouver Sun, The Province, National Post and 13 other Canadian news sites. Support us by subscribing today: The Vancouver Sun | The Province.

Article content

Share this article in your social network