I was reading a Cracked article (one that didn't have the 'X Ways That Show You Can't Trust Anybody' template activated) about apocalypse obsession. The writer nearly got it right: he mentioned that the apocalypse is ultimately a game that disenfranchised people use to prove their way of life is correct. He's right, but he misses the chance to say something greater about human nature: the apocalypse is the ultimate way to show how utterly selfish and self-serving the wisher really is.
The apocalypse is not freedom, it's selfishness. All apocalypse theories have one thing in common: the one who is making it up always survives and is somehow master of this new world that they alone will prosper in. It's the ultimate self-gratification where the inventor of the apocalypse has done everything right. It's indicative of how selfish and arrogant someone is because they require the end of everything just to play a sad game of 'I was right all along!" But this is not a justified excuse. The need to destroy everything to prove someone wrong is a toxic mindset that shows the rugged individualism in American life is poisonous to all, even the One that believes themselves above it all. Humans are social animals who benefit from group activities and interactions. When you are excluded from that pack, you turn weird. You may have been weird in the first place, but something about our lives glorify individuality for all the wrong reasons. We crave acceptance by not craving acceptance, an ass-backward, childish idea that shows how immature the thinker of imagined apocalypses would be. It's nothing more than a pre-Columbine/'Carrie' notion of Showing Them All through violence.
One of the problems that keeps haunting America is the idea of individualism is a wholly good thing. It's fun to think that you have absolute control of your life. But even within man-made society, that idea is inherently foolish. Nobody has absolute control of their lives: at best it's a way to keep reaching for better horizons, at worst a way to carry unnecessary responsibility over things you have no control over at all. It plays to the need of power in our daily lives that, ironically, is created by civilization. It speaks to labor that has been horribly disconnected from product to such a point where meritocracy simply falls apart. Cause and effect hasn't been shattered as much as it's grossly miswired to the point where hard work can only mean hard work and maybe something else, but perhaps not.
In this lens, individuality becomes a trap. It ceases to be a useful part of the human experience and becomes a delusion used to lay every single thing that happens in the world to be the fault of one who wishes for it. The word 'responsibility' is thrown about casually but without any sense of reality behind it. It speaks a lot of a people who blame themselves for every little thing. Reality does not play like that. How am I supposed to be responsible for rain? The absolutist thinking that pushes an unrealistic binary argument onto us--are we responsible for everything or nothing--rejects the nuance that within lies the truth. And it leaks through to our imaginations of the apocalypse, externalizing the phenomenon as either Normal Society or some hyper-individualized apocalypse that's custom-made for lunatics unable to recognize the real issue but more than content to play in their little destruction, mistaking their survival as the ultimate last word in a bizarre and sad argument that ends with total isolation.
