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Prepping for Collapse vs Building the Future
In this thought-provoking discussion, we analyze why apocalyptic and “prepper” mindsets have taken hold more than acknowledging the coming “dark age.” Apocalyptic visions absolve personal responsibility, making them memetically potent yet useless. Preparism feeds individualist control fantasies, not actual resilience.
In contrast, “dark age” outlooks force confronting the future to shape it for one’s community and posterity. We see figures like Curtis Yarvin and some organized religious groups taking this road less traveled. Ultimately more people must build alternative structures, not just bunkers, to inherit the future.
Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] He thinks that that individual should be chosen based on their proven competence and if they're capable to be cycled out that that would cause negative effects on, on the society, like they would be cycled out for the wrong reason.
And he's not insane for thinking this. I mean, if we look historically, like the two, I think greatest figures in demographic history were both betrayed by their own countries.
Would you like to know more?
Simone Collins: By the way, did you know that the, the phrase toxic masculinity came out of the mythopoetic men's movement.
It was actually a description of the type of bad behavior that comes out of a society that suppresses masculinity.
Malcolm Collins: Interesting. Yes. But, we're here to talk about something else.
But I am very excited to be here with you today. Yeah. So, what I wanted to talk about, because this is something I was thinking about, where we often point out that humanity is heading into a dark age, but we also often really complain about apocalypticism in the Judeo Christian canon, [00:01:00] right? So if you look historically within the Judeo Christian tradition, there have repeatedly been trends towards apocalyptic approaches to the world.
Yeah. Which is to say you can look at the Millerist movement early in the U. S. There was this movement in the seventies. It was some like number code in the Bible. There was Y two K, there was and this number coded the vitals, the, the Mayan calendar one after that. Oh yeah, the Mayan calendar one.
Yeah. We just as, as the Judeo-Christian culture is incredibly, and it doesn't seem to happen with Themic culture as much as specifically, which is part of the Judeo-Christian tradition. So what I really mean is Jews and Christians really, really, really, really susceptible to apocalyptic. We love
us
Simone Collins: some edge times.
Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And these memetic sets of somebody who's like, well, aren't your views apocalyptic? Because you say we are headed towards the dark age. And I actually pointed out something that I don't think a lot of people realize, which is that dark ages, the belief that we are about to head towards a significant and dramatic [00:02:00] decline in culture.
is actually fairly rare historically in the Western canon. thEre are people who have said things are worse today than they were in the past, that it's very different than dark ageism. Warning that things are about to take a dramatic decline downwards, but one that you have power over and can affect.
Simone Collins: Right, because instead the view is that there's going to be a dramatic End. Just an end. It's end times. It's not, it's not dark times.
Malcolm Collins: And so why is this? Because I, because I think this is very interesting. Why, why there's this, this huge split here. And I think it's because of well two things. The mimetic viability of each of these ideas.
And two, what they imply for the individual. Right. So the biggest, if I was going to like sum it all up in one little piffy quote, it's that apocalypticism removes [00:03:00] responsibility from the individual. Ye
Published on 2 years ago