We're all freaking out, right? We're all coping in different ways. One of my least productive, most unhealthy ways of coping has been to trawl through some of the darker corners of Reddit not actually looking for concrete advice about how to arm myself or how to prepare myself for disaster but just sort of…window shopping for unhinged behavior. Determining that if I did belatedly decide to become a gun guy, I would get a Mini-14. That if I did decide to gird my proverbial loins for the crumbling of American society, I should have two months' worth of rice, beans, and water down in the basement.
That's right: I've been on r/preppers. And you know what? They have lots of good advice! Good advice about first aid training and water purification techniques and home gardening and lots of other stuff I intend to learn about. But you know what else they have? Well, yes, guns. Way too many guns. But also jargon! Jargon for days. More initialisms than the DoD. And there are several initialisms they particularly love that communicate something dark about the prepper mindset (and maybe about the American mindset in general): SHTF, WROL, TEOTWAWKI. These are when the Shit Hits The Fan, when we are living Without Rule Of Law, and The End Of The World As We Know It.
SHTF is a bit vague, kind of an all-purpose label for “things get bad enough that I actually get to put my preps into action.” Not so sinister on its own, but in light of what it turns out many preppers' strongest fixations are, the yearning for that moment starts to feel ugly. WROL is probably the most telling one, because “rule of law” actually means something, and it's not this—a society without rule of law is something we've struggled with, to a greater or lesser degree, for pretty much the entirety of civilization, or at least the part of civilizational history that actually aspired to establishing rule of law. We're definitely living without rule of law in the United States right now, in a particularly significant and dangerous way. But to the gun fetishists, the survivalists, the far-right fantasists, a state “without rule of law” is, in short, one where they get to shoot Black people without consequences. Or, excuse me, rioters and looters. Bandits. Criminals breaking into their houses.
It's an imagined emergency scenario that blends the fictions of postapocalyptic games and zombie shows with the quasi-history of the American frontier and decades of deranged right-wing news coverage. It's not something that has ever really happened in human history; periods of true anarchy tend to be extraordinarily short, because there's always some wannabe government (a barbarian tribe, a rebel general, a gang, a guerilla army, a crime syndicate, a militia) ready and willing to step in, for better or (usually) worse, when the preceding government recedes or collapses. Looting is something soldiers do in wartime; it's not something neighbors do to each other in emergencies, even prolonged ones. The preoccupation with “looters” and “scavengers” is closely tied to news coverage of American riots and natural disasters (as well as films, shows, and games that have reproduced the concept, often in even more lurid form), and that news coverage is propaganda. People steal the occasional TV, sure, but they mostly take essentials—food, sanitary products—that they have no other access to. And they take them from abandoned stores, not from each other, not from family homes.
But we have a lot of people yearning for this fantasy scenario, itching for a lawless state in which they can become the law (and gun down dangerous dark-skinned criminals). They keep dreaming even as actual rule of law dissolves and the Republic with it.
It's TEOTWAWKI that really gets me. Child of the 90s that I am, the phrase never fails to conjure up for me the REM classic “It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine),” and specifically the Roland Emmerich classic Independence Day. Alien invasion! The White House blowing up! Mass destruction across the world, governments decapitated, military forces obliterated. This is essentially what a lot of preppers seem to have in mind as TEOTWAWKI—maybe not the literal aliens, but some cataclysm that obliterates all governments and most of the world's population. Global nuclear war, or in recent years an impossibly virulent and deadly pandemic. A vanishingly improbable event that, if it does come, they will almost certainly not survive.
Meanwhile, the world is ending every day, in ways large and small. The change is usually gradual enough not to feel jarring, but the world never stops turning. Think back to just 10 years ago. How inconceivable did a Donald Trump regime and all its attendant absurdities and humiliations seem? Think back 25 years. Could anybody imagine the erosion of American hegemony, the failure of the new international order, imperialist or revanchist states invading each other across the globe in naked attempts to impose puppet regimes or seize territory? Go back 40 years. Forget the fall of the Soviet Union; who could have imagined the internet? Smartphones? Machine translation?
There's some worldbuilding advice here, something to keep in mind when putting a TTRPG campaign setting together: There is no such thing as global collapse. The Black Death didn't do it; nothing short of complete annihilation will. We will not reexperience the Dark Ages and see worldwide technological regression. (The supposed Dark Ages weren't really all that dark, anyway, even in Europe.) There's arguably not even such a thing as regional or civilizational collapse. The histories we have of collapse, of decline and fall, of civilizational ruin, are nearly all elite narratives. If you were a Roman patrician in 476 CE, the Ostrogothic conquest of the city surely felt like the end of the world. If you were a plebe, or a slave, you could have been forgiven for hardly having noticed. Local government didn't change. The Senate didn't go away. Everybody still spoke Latin. No perceptible catastrophe occurred. The world kept turning. It always does. Things change, and often for the worse, but often in dreary, grinding, unspectacular ways.
There are lulls in history, too, of course, but they're shorter and more contingent and more localized than you might think. The European Middle Ages, particularly in Western Europe—the basis for the traditional fantasy settings that underpin so much of the TTRPG world—seem fairly socially and technologically static to many contemporary observers, but at the same time than England and France were slogging through their Hundred Years' War and building the zillion frontier castles that dot our imagined fantasy landscapes, enormous changes were taking place as nearby as Iberia, and of course French and English people were sailing off to the Crusades (and extraordinary things were happening in the Americas, and in Africa, and in Asia).
And there are counterparts to even the relative lulls. “There are decades when nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen,” as Lenin actually probably never did say. The shit is mostly definitely hitting the fan now. None of us were prepared.
