“Crops will rot in the fields and orchards,” he wrote, “because there will be nobody to pick them, or transport them, or magically bake them into Pop-Tarts, or stock them on your supermarket shelf. The Big Machine will be broken.”
The average American family, he pointed out, had less than a week’s worth of food in its possession at any one time. He conjured a scenario whereby the supply chain breaks down, and all of a sudden you’ve got hordes of “Joe Six Packs”—Rawles’s contemptuous term for the unprepared suburban paterfamilias—striking out into the collapsing world in search of food and other supplies for their families. It’s hard to ignore the distinct note of relish in the projection of this scenario, whereby these Joe Six Packs are suddenly shaken from their long dream of security and comfort and awoken to the harsh reality of TEOTWAWKI (The End of the World as We Know It): “The power grid is down, his job is history, the toilet doesn’t flush, and water no longer magically comes cascading from the tap. His wife and kids are panicky. The supermarket shelves have been stripped bare. There are riots beginning in his city. The local service stations have run out of gas. The banks have closed. Now he is suddenly desperate.”
The result of this situation, for Rawles, is the collapse not just of the nation-state and the economy, but of civilization itself, of a system of relations between individuals that was always, in this view, extremely delicate to begin with, always based on a necessary mass delusion as to the true nature of the world. You’re looking at widespread looting, people stealing food and supplies from their own neighbors, mass violence, the total breakdown of law and order. At first, the chaos will be centered on cities, with desperate urbanites targeting restaurants and shops. But then, as food sources grow scarcer closer to home, these people will inevitably venture out into the provinces in search of sustenance for their families. Many of these people will form armed gangs, he predicts, running their vehicles on siphoned gas. These looters will finally come to grief as a result of the flu or of lead poisoning, but not, he warns, before causing a great deal of destruction.
This is a prediction of the future that could be offered only by someone who was never fully convinced by the idea of society in the first place. This seemed to me to be implicit in everything I learned about the preppers, and in everything Rawles wanted to impart to his readers. What he was offering was, in this sense, not so much a prediction of the future as a deeply political interpretation of the present. One passage in particular seemed to me to reveal the movement’s total ideological abjection. “There is just a thin veneer of civilization on our society,” writes Rawles. “What is underneath is not pretty, and it does not take much to peel away that veneer. You take your average urbanite or suburbanite and get him excessively cold, wet, tired, hungry, and/or thirsty and take away his television, beer, drugs, and other pacifiers, and you will soon see the savage within.”
Apart from the extent to which it indicated Rawles’s complete lack of investment in society itself, the introduction of the figure of the savage here was a lot more revealing than he presumably intended it to be. It had always seemed clear to me that, as a group, preppers were involved in the ongoing maintenance of a shared escapist fantasy about the return to an imagined version of the American frontier—to an ideal of the rugged and self-reliant white man, providing for himself and his family, surviving against the odds in a hostile wilderness. But what the use of the word savage made explicit here, I thought, was the extent to which this reactionary fever dream arose not out of any real understanding of the present or the future, but rather out of the historical trauma of America’s originary apocalypse: the dehumanization and near-annihilation of indigenous peoples and their cultures.
And when preppers like Rawles invoked the specter of the savage, what they were doing was setting up a divide between themselves—as carriers of the flame of civilization, as heirs of the frontier spirit—and those who would immediately revert to a state of nature, the wild natives of the post-collapse world. And in setting up that divide, what they were further doing, whether they understood it or not, was creating the necessary conditions for a return to the cleansing violence of the nation’s colonial past.
The most absurdly overdetermined manifestation of this energy was a video I watched on YouTube entitled “Top 10 Sheep 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.