Why Are The End Times So Hot Right Now?
How Fallout has highlighted our desire for freedom and chaos
Why is entertainment based on people having bad times in very bad situations having such a moment right now?
It would be a deeply confused reading of Fallout, both the new TV series and the original video game series, to see it as an aspirational universe. Like the real ‘Old West’ of Cormack McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, it is a virtually amoral and chaotically violent world.
So why do these barren and inhospitable lands hold such appeal to the audience? Because chaos, and pressure, clarify the mind.
There is simplicity in a world not weighed down by the sheer heft of what we have built around ourselves as a society. Our spoken and unspoken rules. Our ever increasing need to conform to a broad persona, a more pronounced political sub type below that, and a cultural niche below even that, comes at the cost of more fundamental values.
A world turned to shit, by contrast, would be more free than anything our highly personalised bubbles are capable of. It would allow us to focus on moral fundamentals and aspirations not tied to the labyrinthine constraints of Modernity.
No more demands to sign petitions, or template select committee submissions created by a 20 year old intern that will just be treated as one submission anyway. No more adherence to, or reliance on, party politics to tell you what to believe in.
The wasteland is pure in its equal opportunity savagery. It is always ethically murky, but it doesn't pretend to be anything else, and any other allusions to contemporary politics are direct.
The fascistic brotherhood of heavily armoured knights, they're fascists. Not in a lazy metaphorical sense, in a literal one. They raise children to grow up to be fascist, to know and seek no other life.
The monstrous Judge Holden is a highly educated sadist and nihilist. Even his encyclopaedic knowledge of philosophy doesn't cut through the brutality of the Mexico–United States border, or his enjoyment of the violence. For all his education, he's still a monster, joyously evil.
In times like those portrayed by McCarthy or in Fallout, there are only two possibilities - embrace evil or reject it.
On Monday I opened Instagram, once a final online bastion of non-partisanship, to find over a dozen calls to action on the Fast Track Approval Bill.
As a former advisor to the Secretary for the Environment, someone who spent virtually my entire 20s in similar roles for various public service leaders and Ministers, in long meetings and late nights while these same posters had fun, I was annoyed.
Not because the Bill is without faults, but out of pure pettiness.
Here were people stealing ‘process bro’ valour, and treating our complex world as something simple. Willing cogs in an intricate machine, comparable to the subordinates in the Brotherhood Of Steel. It incensed me because it framed our world as something so simple - you see, you repost, you did ‘good’.
A doomsday scenario would have freed me of having to read Green Party content dressed as someone’s unique wisdom. It would also free these people of having to pretend like they're actively engaged with legislation when they are solely seeking external validation. To look ‘good’ without the effort of actually creating something of true worth.
This is cruel, obviously, but that's also the thrill of end times - it's a very light dash of meritocracy served with a massive helping of blind luck.
The villains of the wasteland are not the well-intentioned slackivists. Though they would likely be the first to die. The villains are people like me, the technocrats and moderate process bros who would seek to impose an order similar to the one that had created the now fallen order. The heroes of the dystopia, as in Fallout, are often the simple and the earnest who are committed to a very basic moral compass.
In real life, people who lack nuance are often the villains - Mill’s Tyranny Of The Masses is a prime example of this kind of blunt force - but in a dystopia where everything is on the cards the inverse would be true. Hierarchies would need and deserve to be broken.
Back in real life, this SubStack recently hit over 100 subscribers and over 2000 views all in its first month. It’s not just about numbers, the calibre of readership I've built here is intimidating.
You are professors, former and current members of Parliament, two think tank directors, at least one court judge, and a wealth fund manager I'm not successful enough to need the services of.
I am deeply flattered, but I'm also aware that we have out-sized influence in the world as it is now. For those who don't, an apocalypse would at least level the playing field. It would also prove our lives were wasted, and theirs weren’t.
Therein lies the true appeal of the end times, it would be a clean slate.
It would be truly, dangerously, free.
That freedom, like social media before it became endless war porn and needless doomsday politics, I can see the appeal of.
Keep up the great writing ✍️ 💪