Doom sells: why everyone’s talking about the end times
The apocalypse is in vogue because our fascination with catastrophe is lucrative
Chine McDonald
© Ann KiernanWhen the Middle East crisis escalated earlier in the summer, I felt a familiar sensation.
It was one I recognised from the earliest days of the Covid-19 pandemic, and the hours after the planes crashed into the Twin Towers in 2001.
The thought that perhaps this was it: the end of the world.
A dark humour started creeping in to everyday conversations: “If the world is still here in the autumn, shall we book that holiday?”
One friend nonchalantly told me they had prepped for nuclear fallout, including ensuring the garage is stocked with enough tinned food to see them through.
So I knew the feeling of doom that hit when earlier this year scientists set the Doomsday Clock to just 89 seconds to midnight, which represents the moment we will have made the earth uninhabitable.
People have always been fascinated by the end times and an apocalypse of sorts can be found in most sacred texts.
The early Christian communities of the first century were preppers, living with the urgency of believing that Christ’s return was imminent.
The Book of Revelation has shaped much theological thought about eschatology (the study of what happens at the end of days).
In Hinduism, Vishnu returns on a white horse to battle evil.
Islam describes a period of tribulation and immorality followed by wars before justice returns.
In an age of supposed declining religiosity in the west, it seems that preoccupation with the apocalypse has moved beyond people of faith.
Religious ideas of apocalypse, which play on the human tendency towards thinking about our own place in history (our collective “main character energy”) are being co-opted.
Why?
Because our fascination with catastrophe is lucrative.
Perhaps, as Haruki Murakami writes in his novel 1Q84: “Everyone, deep in their hearts, is waiting for the end of the world to come.”
And doom is big business.
Last month Netflix released the documentary Apocalypse in the Tropics, charting the rise of evangelical politics in Brazil, including prophecy and themes from the Book of Revelation.
The past few years have brought successful viewing on the subject including hit TV show The Last of Us and the movies Don’t Look Up, and Leave the World Behind, the psychological apocalypse thriller.
My own evangelical Christian upbringing was inspired by a religious strand of American popular culture.
I was among the preteens who devoured books in the Left Behind multimedia franchise.
Published between 1995 and 2007, they focused on a seven-year conflict — the post-rapture Great Tribulation, pitting an underground network of Christian converts against the anti-Christ.
Several were New York Times bestsellers, and by 2016, 65mn copies had been sold.
As a child reader, I wasn’t entirely sure whether to welcome the end of the world, or be terrified of it.
The current manifestation has been described as the Doomscroll Industrial Complex.
Where once prophets of doom could walk around villages shouting that the end was nigh, now the internet is full of such visionaries, warning us that our polycrises — climate catastrophe, economic instability, nuclear destruction — point only in one, final direction.
These online spaces capitalise on our penchant for the negative over the positive: one recent study highlighted that negative words in headlines from online news media increased click-through rates.
For some, doomsday predictions propel them towards action, in a desperate bid to take control.
Fear-based marketing preys on our propensity to avoid loss or confronting mortality.
Consumers are promised a future among people who took the signs seriously and so survived the apocalypse.
Apocalyptic marketing also pushes us towards individual self-sufficiency.
Perhaps one of the drivers of increased end-times fascination is a pervading mistrust of the big institutions meant to keep us safe.
Social fracture, political turmoil, economic uncertainty and global conflict, along with fear of natural disasters and climate catastrophe, mean that the ground we walk on seems unsteady.
We feel far away from each other, too, and preoccupied with our own lives.
This self-preservation is at the heart of Channel 4’s sitcom Everyone Else Burns — an ultrareligious family makes sure they will be OK when the apocalypse comes.
But perhaps there is another way of being.
Rather than saving ourselves, maybe we should look to communal solutions that might mean we survive whatever is to come together.
The meaning of “apocalypse” does, after all, translate as “revelation”.
Maybe this fascination might help us see beyond destruction to the prospect of resurrection and renewal.
Perhaps it might reveal that we needed each other all along: because what’s the point of surviving the end if you survive it alone?
The writer is director of the think-tank Theos
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