This may or may not be the literal Armageddon but just peeking through the shades I can tell you that it's looking pretty goddamn apocalyptic to me. As I write this acidic screed, the only square mile of the continental United States that isn't frozen solid by a polar vortex the size of God's asshole is literally in flames. Deny the violence of science all you want but it doesn't take a charlatan like Al Gore to know which way the wind blows, and our rapidly mutating climate isn't even the most immediate threat posed to humanity at this apocalyptic moment.
In fact, there are almost too many Cthulhus to count. While greenhouse gasses bake the ice caps, NATO and Putin continue to play nuclear footsie in Ukraine as the Chinese Communist Party and the wizards of Wall Street race to put artificial intelligence in charge of it all even while they openly admit that this sick gambit runs the risk of provoking human extinction before the stock market crashes.
Fuck Armageddon, mankind will be lucky to make to next Tuesday while we split ourselves into equally hideous political parties to bicker over the remote. I'm honestly not sure if I can save these assholes and trying is making me want to throw myself into the fire. It's at times like these that I actually find myself begging for an apocalypse. It's at times like these that I can't seem help but to fantasize about living in a Mad Max America. In fact, I can almost smell the diesel fumes now....
Waking up whenever the daylight calls my name through the drapes of a bulletproof yurt, I'll hit the vacant desert plains of Central Pennsylvania in a heavily modified, rust-rod, El Camino technical with my leather clad horde of genderfuck lesbian barbarians to scavenge the radiated ruins of suburbia for coffee and gunpowder....
With a Buck knife in my teeth and a sawed-off M1 Carbine strapped to my thigh, I'll scale the facade of an abandoned football stadium strangled by vines and hunt white tailed buck with a crossbow between the charred rush hour carcasses on Interstate 80 from a defiled billboard....
I'll cook raw flesh on a bayonet over a flaming television set while the blistering riffs of an all-Stooges mixtape crackle over a ghetto blaster and my dreadlock laden coven of heathen sisters howl for Loki at a moon populated by the corpses of billionaires who failed to escape their demons on luxury rocket ships....
Maybe this all sounds a bit sick to you, and it probably is. I often have to remind myself to contain my glee over such notions of post-apocalyptic bliss in public. It only seems to feed the narrative popular amongst more industrial inclined leftists that post-civ anprim types like me are little more than recklessly misanthropic romantics turning the cinematic specters of George Miller's Max Rokitansky and Imperator Furiosa into something akin to Rousseau's noble savage. And I will own up to the fact that my lust for dieselpunk daydreams isn't exactly the most constructive response to an era of unprecedented societal collapse, but I won't apologize either.
These fantasies aren't merely the realm of radical minds anymore. Post-apocalyptic fiction is a growing multibillion dollar industry and I'm not just talking about the Mad Max franchise. Legions of otherwise vanilla office slaves binge themselves sick on countless hours of survivalist videogames and an endless procession of streaming zombie apocalypse spin-offs. Meanwhile, larping city slickers escape to the sticks just so they can haul up in luxury bunkers and take turns shooting each other up to a blister pocked bliss with high-powered paintball guns.
If this is a sickness, then it's a pandemic but it's a plague that makes perfect fucking sense when you consider the fact that we are already living amidst the kind of towering dystopian architecture that George Orwell and Aldous Huxley once shilled out as science fiction.
Your average American lives under a state of constant stimulation and constant surveillance. When they aren't struggling to pay off the debts of bourgeois degrees with borderline third world wages in the boiling kitchen dungeons of your neighborhood casual dining franchise, they are burning through their meager wages on clickbait smartphone crack like Candy Crush and being hounded to buy more shit that no one needs by fifteen adds at once.
All while the Meta-NSA panopticon keeps careful tabs on every bowel movement that you feel compelled by unknown forces to report on social media and murders Somalian peasants with flying robots for choosing Allah over Pepsi-Cola.
THIS is your precious civilization. This is what 500 years of western enlightenment has brought us too. Morbidly obese voluntary enslavement at the barrel of a drone. And all it cost us was our tribes, our villages, our gods, our dignity, and our fucking ecosystem. But I'm the sicko because I'd rather shoot cannibals in the face at the end of the world than vote for backstabbing social democrats and unionizing my cell block at the nearest cubicle colony? Kiss my Unabomber reading faggot ass.
We need to face a few very harsh facts here. The first is that everyone is sick in our post-modern dystopia because we have all been raised on the toxic terrain of a deeply sick society. You smoke crack and I horde ammunition but we're all doing desperate shit to get by in a desperate situation. With that being said, the hardest fact that we need to face here is that, for better or worse, civilization as we know it is fucked, and the damage is likely irreversible.
Even if by some miracle all the nation states of the world joined hands, buried their nuclear stockpiles, ended their various cold wars, and agreed to "go green" immediately, the sheer amount of infrastructure it would take to transform a colossal, fossil-fueled, global juggernaut like ours into one powered exclusively by renewable energy would require enough pollution and plunder to finish the job gasoline started in the process.
Society itself is the problem. Our entire civilization was designed for the sole purpose of endless expansion. You can pass all the Green New Deals you want, even the ones that aren't colossal scams will merely be shoveling shit against the tide.
This isn't to say that we should all just throw up our hands and go quietly into that good night. We should work like hell to do the only thing that can possibly curtail the damage of global capitalism and that's downsize; decentralize, secede, drop out, rebuild locally autonomous village communities divorced from the restraints of big business and big government.
But we should also prepare for the worst because it's already here and there are worse teachers than Max Rokitansky to learn these lessons from.
The titular character of the first Mad Max film that began George Miller and Byron Kennedy's five-part apocalyptic opus in 1979 started out much like my critics, trying to work within the system to govern an increasingly ungovernable society on the verge of collapse.
Max attempted to achieve this quixotic goal as a skull-cracking highway patrolman, but the more skulls he cracked, the less human he became until he found himself virtually indistinguishable from the highway savages he hunted. The resulting violence cost him his family and his humanity. So, Max left everything but the violence behind him and escaped in his battle-scarred Pursuit Special Cruiser to the desert abyss that stared back.
For the rest of the series Max essentially plays the role of the consummate egoist loner sketched out in the works of individualist anarchists like Max Stirner and Ernst Junger. His interactions with other survivors, often various kinds of tribal collectives, begin as solitary exchanges governed exclusively by self-interest, protection for petrol, but Max repeatedly discovers that even the strongest lone egoist cannot survive without forming longer lasting unions with those of seemingly divergent values and lifestyles based on the evolutionary principle of mutual aid.
These experiences don't exactly transform Max into a model communalist, but he learns to do as Stirner suggested in his 19th century masterwork, The Ego and Its Own, with his concept of the Union of Egoists. He builds temporary, voluntary, and non-systematic associations that exist only as long as all parties involved are willing to cooperate, and through this process Max, the other Max, rediscovers the humanity that fighting to keep a polluted society cohesive stripped him of.
However, this school of post-industrial egoism is far from the only approach to stateless survival presented in the franchise and speaking personally, as a genderqueer anarcho-feminist as well as a survivor of systemic sexual violence, the story of Imperator Furiosa told in the last two films of the series is one that resonates very deeply with me.
After being robbed of a childhood amidst her matriarchal tribe by sadistic marauders who saw her gender as little more than currency in an apocalyptic landscape, Furiosa must conceal her gender and assimilate to a lifestyle of rape and pillage in order to survive. She only finds an opportunity for redemption when she attempts to help the marital sex slaves of her master, Immortan Joe, to escape to "the green place of many mothers" of her childhood.
However, when Furiosa discovers her utopia polluted beyond repair it is Max the masculine egoist who convinces her that salvation lies in her forming a union of many kinds of prisoners, including Joe's own conscripts, to retake the resources that their collective labor created back at the fortress from which they escaped.
The lesson here, as I see it, is that in an age of collapsing superstructures designed by disintegrating majorities, a tribal minority like mine can only survive unassimilated not only by binding ourselves together in a common subculture of resistance but by collaborating with other struggling subcultures of resistance and encouraging those still devoted to patriarchal master races to do the same.
I can't tell you how the next movie ends. I can only tell you that the odds of it ending harmoniously are not in our favor, but that doesn't mean that there is no hope. It simply means that our best hope rests in the survival of the small amidst the wreckage of the big.
If Furiosa can do that with one arm chained to God's jawbone, then the very least I can do is die dreaming while civilization's useful idiots roll their eyes.
Devoted in loving memory to David Lynch (1946-2025) who left in a cloud of smoke with the flames still burning....
Peace, Love, & Empathy- Nicky/CH
Soundtrack: Songs for an apocalyptic mixtape
* This Magic Moment by Lou Reed
* Search & Destroy by the Stooges
* We Will Fall by the Stooges
* Down on the Street by the Stooges
* Success by Iggy Pop
* Raw Power by the Stooges
* No Fun by the Stooges
* TV Eye by the Stooges
* The Passenger by Iggy Pop
* Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell by the Stooges
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