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 refugees who suffered the most in these situations. And the moral lesson he drew from this observation, the idea that he took home with him, did not, despite the Christianity he claims as absolutely central to his identity, involve any kind of imperative to alleviate the suffering he’d witnessed, but rather a steadfast personal commitment: “I vowed,” he writes, “never to become a refugee.”
And this void of empathy seemed to me by no means incidental to the prepper movement, but rather a constitutive element of the entire project, the moral void around which it was structured. To be a prepper was to do everything one could do to avoid being one of the sufferers oneself, while contributing nothing to the prevention or alleviation of suffering in others.
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Given their obsession with the prospect of collapsing distribution networks, and with the consequent need for self-sufficiency and self-reliance, the preppers’ relentless fetishization of consumer goods seemed deeply ironic to me, if also basically understandable. The forums were filled with endless discussions on, say, which thermos flask or which flashlight would be the trustiest option in a SHTF scenario, and a small but apparently thriving economy seemed to have grown up around the demand for various gadgets and comestibles catering to the postapocalyptic survival fantasies of American men.
I came across one company called NuManna, named in reference to manna, the foodstuff the god of the Old Testament had provided for the Israelites during the time of their wandering after the Exodus. The company marketed gigantic buckets of freeze-dried powdered foodstuffs with a shelf life of a quarter of a century, whose varieties included, but were by no means limited to, oatmeal, hearty beans and beef, cheddar broccoli soup, and pasta primavera mix with freeze-dried chicken chunks.
In the Testimonials section of NuManna’s website, I read a brief blurb from a customer named Reagan B., which seemed to me an unwitting encapsulation of the absurdity of the entire apocalypse preparedness project. “This stuff is awesome,” wrote Reagan. “My wife has been away for a while so I ate NuManna while she was gone. It was simple and everything I had was really good. I wish NuManna was around when I bought a bunch of bulk food in the past from the Mormons. I don’t want to have all these ingredients and put them together. NuManna was simple and great tasting. I gave away all my other bulk food.”
At first this comment seemed purely and unimprovably comic in its conjuring of a character who, for all his determination to be adequately prepared for the collapse of civilization due to nuclear war or the impact of a massive asteroid, was also the type of man for whom not having his wife around to cook dinner—which seemed to me to be at worst a Domino’s Pizza situation—forced him to crack open his apocalyptic food stash. (Equally bewildering, equally wonderful, was his purchasing food in bulk only to conclude that he lacked the stomach for the labor of assembling all these ingredients into meals.)
But on further consideration, the comedy gave way to something darker and more poignant: the idea of a man whose obsession with preparing for the end times had been so alienating and painful to his wife that she had left him, thereby bringing about a kind of personal apocalypse whose outcome was this helpless, fearful, obsessive person subsisting off a supply of flavored protein sludge he had amassed for the literal end of the world.
And this was a man with whom I identified. Of course I identified with him: I’d all but invented him. (I was his hypocrite reader, I thought: mon semblable, mon frère!) He was an outlandish avatar of my own anxieties and meta-anxieties—my anxieties about the damage my ongoing state of anxiety might be causing.