The prepper movement. A response to the threat of the end of the world?
Jolanthe Kugler
Do you believe that energy independence, local networks, sustainable farming, food autonomy, a self-reliant lifestyle, and a culture of mutual support and altruism are vital to a future worth living? If so, you are, at least in part, a prepper. The word “prepper” tends to conjure up images of armed zealots holed up in bunkers waiting for the end of the world. But the reality is less dramatic. Today’s preppers are doctors, doormen, headteachers, advertising copywriters, and happily married couples from the suburbs: in short, ordinary people.
However, they are part of a group that is firmly convinced that our world, as it is today, is doomed. Preppers believe in the imminent and inevitable collapse of all our systems―and, therefore, of society. Instead of succumbing to fear, they choose a coping strategy that provides them with a sense of control over the uncontrollable, as social scientist Mischa Luy puts it: [1] namely, active preparation for what they refer to as TEOTWAWKI―The End Of The World As We Know It. Preppers’ preparation is twofold: they plan how to survive the inevitable collapse; but they also prepare for the challenging process of building a new world after TEOTWAWKI.
This world will be one in which institutions are no more, a place where people live with the greatest possible autonomy, no state surveillance, and no state aid. In post-TEOTWAWKI reality, the only thing that counts is our ability to survive in a primarily hostile environment. Preppers are therefore concerned with sustainable methods of food cultivation. They strive for intelligent energy autonomy and advocate taking on more personal responsibility. They believe in independence and self-sufficiency. They acquire skills that have become superfluous in our urbanised, consumer-oriented and institutionally controlled western world. These include making a fire, surviving in the forest in winter, distinguishing edible plants and herbs, growing a garden, filtering water, and preserving food. Some preppers build bunkers, hide supplies in secret places, practise self-defence, and learn how to use weapons.
From radical survivalism to prepping as mainstream lifestyle
The prepper movement had its origins in the 1960s in America, during the Cold War. Initially known as “survivalism”, it focused on practical solutions to potential cultural and environmental disasters. Of course, the primary concern in those years was the possibility of nuclear war. This threat, according to survivalists, was brought about by scientists, politicians and elites who were willing to sacrifice citizens in the name of geopolitics.[2] Many of the era’s survivalists, therefore, distrusted both the government and globalisation. They stopped paying taxes, disregarded government authorities, and relocated to remote areas within the US.[3] (Ironically, in many respects their ideas about the “right to self-determination” sound quite like one of the basic rights laid out in the US Constitution.) The term “survivalist” provides some insight into the attitudes prevalent at the time: an English term derived from “survival”, it is supplemented by the suffix “ism”, which refers to a doctrine, an ideology, an attitude and, at the same time, a practice. The term is said to have been coined by the American writer Kurt Saxon, who advocated armed revolution and wrote instructions on how to make improvised weapons and ammunition.
For decades, survivalism was dismissed as paranoid radicalism. Today, however, under its new name, “prepping”, the movement has become a global phenomenon that unites various subcultures: the retreaters who gravitate to remote areas and cultivate an autonomous lifestyle; the bushcraft enthusiasts who practise DIY; offline activists who disconnect from public services; and the survivalists who are known for their more combat-oriented approach to preparation. They all tend to conjure up a wacky image: be it the lumberjack with a tinfoil hat, the neurotic collector of tinned beans, or the religious preacher of the apocalypse. In fact, prepping has taken many different cultural forms over the last century. Most preppers today “take a defensive stance . . . to distance themselves from the politics of the early survivalists”.[4] Today, prepping is a large movement with around twenty million active members in the US alone. From its marginal origins, it has become mainstream.[5] And it is still growing, owing to the fears that have multiplied in recent years: the Y2K bug at the turn of the millennium, 9/11, the 2008 financial crisis, the end of the world in 2012 allegedly predicted by the Mayan calendar, wars, terrorist attacks, the coronavirus pandemic, the invasion of Ukraine, and the escalation of the conflict in Gaza.
Millions of people in the west―such fears preoccupy principally those who have something to lose―have begun investing in their own safety. They are buying essential survival equipment and stocking up their pantries. Hundreds of guides and YouTube tutorials have been published on topics such as wilderness survival, what food to store, which air filter to buy, how to warm up, or which walkie-talkie to use. Television programmes have also repeatedly taken up the topic in recent years. The most famous is the American reality TV show Doomsday Preppers, which between 2012 and 2014 portrayed various survivalists. Activists promoting alternative lifestyles have millions of followers online, and off-grid activists are the new heroes.
Today’s preppers belong to all social classes and age groups. They are suburban dads who want to prepare their families for emergencies, young urban hipsters trying to convert their flats and balconies into vegetable production centres, and technology gurus from Silicon Valley investing in remote islands[6] ―or building a luxury bunker complex in an abandoned intercontinental ballistic missile launch facility [7] constructed during the Cold War as part of the US defence system.[8] Preparing for the moment when everything blows up in our faces―WSHTF (When Shit Hits The Fan), as preppers call it―and TEOTWAWKI that’s bound to follow has become a billion-dollar industry.
The “noble savage” and the lost paradise
Regardless of which approach they follow, most preppers, according to sociologist Betrand Vidal, share the belief that “the man of today, the western consumer, city dweller, urbanite, [is] a man with a defect, a kind of war cripple or civilisation cripple who has lost his [natural, primitive, wild, etc.] 'abilities’ because he has distanced himself too far from [his] nature”.[9] According to this belief, man must rediscover the “primitive” in himself, return to his origins. This notion contains a good dose of romanticism, drawing as it does on the idea of the “noble savage”, i.e., the thesis of the intrinsic goodness of man in a state of nature, as it emerged in the seventeenth century during a period of European colonial expansion.[10] That we are no longer “good”, so the idea goes, is the fault of civilisation, through which the noble savage has degenerated into an ignoble man of civilisation―and, at worst, has become a SHEEPLE. The blend word SHEEPLE, combining sheep and people, is used by preppers for people who allow themselves to be driven like sheep by the PTB (Powers That Be) and who believe that the government will always care for them.
But if we are “basically good”, as Dutch historian Rutger Bregman so convincingly argues, [11] if our innate humanity and kindness are corrupted solely by civilisation, then, according to the preppers, it is not just inevitable but desirable that civilisation should fall apart. Prepping is, therefore, not only “a culture of the end, of destruction”; it is also a ”fantasy of redemption", [12] which makes it even more attractive to many. Indeed, utopia and apocalypse are closely linked in the prepper narrative.
This yoking of downfall and resurrection is unmistakably akin to so-called collapsology, a term coined by agronomist-biologist Pablo Servigne and eco-adviser Raphaël Stevens to designate the transdisciplinary study of the risks of the collapse of industrial civilisation, and to explore strategies for adapting to such scenarios. According to collapsology, one system after another will collapse, setting humanity back centuries or millennia. Servigne and Stevens believe that such a collapse is likely by 2030. However, they also believe that “another end of the world is possible”, [13] one that does not end in chaos, destruction and violence. Convinced that only those who cooperate with one another will survive the impending collapse, [14] they advocate a culture of mutual support and altruism.
Even if the suffix “ology” gives the impression of scientific rigour, collapsology remains more of an ideology than a science. It mixes scientific data with deliberately set beliefs and prioritises “scientific belief” over “scientific knowledge”.[15] Although it does encompass some interesting approaches, collapsology has been criticised for romanticising the life of pre-modern communities and glorifying the past as a kind of “lost paradise”.[16] It has this in common with many of the subcultures of the prepper movement.
The pleasure of doom
Twentieth-century discourse―be it in science, culture, or the media―has been dominated by imaginary threat scenarios. Particularly since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, these imaginary threats have entered the realm of technical possibility.[17] Today, apocalyptic doomsday scenarios are booming. We are experiencing a veritable “doom boom”:[18] a growing belief in inevitable catastrophe. One in seven people think they will experience the end of the world, [footnote]Ibid., 18.[/footnote] and over eighty per cent of 16-to-25-year-olds report high climate anxiety and dissatisfaction with their government.[19]
So, it’s no wonder that preppers have no positive expectations of the future. They do not believe in progress, i.e., that we will make the world a little better every day thanks to technological, medical and other developments. In their view, according to the cultural and literary scholar Eva Horn, the future will inevitably present itself as a catastrophe.[20] Gone are the days when the future held promise, “when prosperous landscapes were hoped for and grandiose technological progress . . . would relieve people of the burden of labour and the suffering of disease”.[21]
Paradoxically, the belief in the imminent apocalypse entails a certain pleasure in doom: “At present, most of the imagery of futuristic societies . . . delights in disaster, in downfall, in the end, in the coming catastrophe…”[22] Or, as Horn puts it: “The catastrophe is both a dream and a nightmare”.[23] This coming catastrophe, the latest apocalyptic films suggest, will probably be caused by man himself and will most likely be climate-related, but other scenarios are conceivable. This man-made catastrophe will not initially manifest itself in a single, all-destructive event but will approach us slowly. It is a “catastrophe without event”, as Horn puts it, the catastrophe being that nothing changes substantially until a “tipping point” is reached, i.e., a significant and irreversible change caused by a continuation of the present.[24]
Catastrophic thinking about the future has always existed in various forms. The apocalyptic prediction of the Mayan calendar is only the most recent example. World history has seen countless warnings of the world’s imminent end. They are, arguably, as old as human civilisation. Among the many ancient end-of-the-world scenarios is the biblical myth of the Flood, in which God wiped out the entire human race. Only God-fearing Noah survived―with his animals in the ark―thus becoming the “first known prepper in history”.[25] Also memorable is the prophecy handed down through an Assyrian clay tablet from around 2800 BC. It reads: “Our Earth is degenerate in these later days; there are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end; bribery and corruption are common; children no longer obey their parents; every man wants to write a book, and the end of the world is evidently approaching”.[26] Incidentally, the word “apocalypse” comes from the Greek and means “unveiling”, “uncovering” or “revelation”. It is no wonder, then, that the one thing religious apocalypses have in common is that they are not to be feared, but hoped for. Evil will be defeated and good will survive. A new, better world will emerge. In the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, however, a catastrophic way of thinking about the future emerged which dispensed with the religious narrative of the Last Judgement. Romanticism conceived of the coming end of humanity without the judging hand of God. Romanticism foretells the profane end of the world, which is not necessarily linked to a new beginning. What is also new is that this downfall is attended by a lonely soul: “The last man stands at the end of the history he looks back on."[27] This is how many preppers see themselves: as the last members of the old world, and the first members of the new one.
Our seemingly pervasive fear of imminent doom has had one startling effect: apocalypse films are more popular today than ever. This is where the desire for doom comes to the fore again. Could it be that we actually take pleasure in the idea that we could be the very last humans? It is also striking that scenarios of a climatic catastrophe “without an event” dominate the filmscape. Take Roland Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow, in which the end of the world is portrayed as the consequence of an “uneventful present that blatantly and against its better judgement continues to march in the same direction”.[28] Films like Emmerich’s end-time drama may even feed a secret desire for doom: by turning that which we fear into reality, they put an end to all the bad news we have grown accustomed to. Apocalypse films thus act as sedatives, stimulants, or placebos. But they are also psychograms: they thematise the political, cultural and moral-ethical problem-constellations of our era.
Existential threats and risk assessment
The flood of bad news we receive every day from the media makes the fears of preppers seem reasonable. We are bombarded with doomsday headlines telling us that the soil will no longer be able to support plants, that fish will disappear from our oceans and that we should reconsider having children. Our existence is threatened by numerous risks, both natural and man-made. The former include all geophysical, meteorological and climatic events such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, landslides, droughts, forest fires, storms and floods. Among the latter are existential threats such as nuclear bombs, the new power of AI, pandemics, the collapse of our financial systems, and the collapse of the global economy.
According to most preppers, the greatest risk to our world as we know it is climate change, followed by economic collapse, social unrest, the possible impact of an asteroid, extreme solar storms, pandemics, or―triggered by recent events―the fear of nuclear annihilation.[29] These anticipated calamities, which impel the prepper’s lifestyle, lead to different strategic approaches to preparedness. And these approaches show similar patterns of justification, both inter- and intra-subjective: on the one hand, justification for a prepper’s strategic approach is shaped by inner experience, memories, feelings and wishes; on the other, it is fuelled by extrinsic motives―things that are brought to the prepper from outside. Mischa Luy identifies three levels of narrative that preppers use to justify their actions. Biographical justification entails feelings of being deprived of agency and lacking security, along with a sense of being threatened―and the experiences and memories of parents and grandparents can feed in here. Secondly, specific events―second-hand experiences such as historical events, news, and stories about how people, institutions and societies have reacted and behaved in emergencies―provide further justification for taking preparedness into one’s own hands. And finally, preppers create hypothetical narratives, i.e., stories of a possible future, enabling them to rehearse in an imaginary way how they will relate to such a future.[30]
Among the many fears perceived as real, diffuse fears have the strongest power over us and most often cause us to take concrete action. Diffuse fear relates not to an acute danger, triggered by a situation or object, but to unclear future events or general worries. Diffuse fear manifests itself in threats and predictions about the future, leaving the rest to the imagination.[31] Climate change is one such unclear future event that is beginning to express itself in various forms but whose final manifestation we cannot predict.
Fears are fuelled principally by the media, whose reporting focuses less on providing us with facts and truths and more on capturing our attention by any means necessary. The reporting of natural disasters, for example, gives us the impression that more people are dying every year from them. However, between 1920 and 2020, the number actually declined: from around half a million annually to just under forty thousand.[32] In fact, the observed improvement in many areas of life―be it poverty, hunger, access to education, or global infant mortality―has been quite remarkable. The figure for global infant mortality fell from 12.6 million children in1990 to 5.6 million in 2016.[footnote]→ unicef.de/informieren/aktuelles/presse/-/kindersterblichkeitweltweit-unicef/277012.[/footnote] That is still too many, but the improvement is significant. The fact that, despite optimistic figures like this one, we misconceive the efficacy of measures taken to date and how well or poorly we and our planet are faring[33] has a lot to do with the way news is reported. The truth is, “not all deaths are equal”, [34] concludes Sandra Tzvetkova, Senior Policy Advisor at the independent climate change think tank E3G, after researching how many deaths it takes for an event to be picked up by the news.
Yet it is not only media reporting but also serious science that, intentionally or not, fuels fears by ignoring research or relying for decades on research that later turns out to have been falsified―or that is, at least, dubious.[35] A chilling instrument of science is the Doomsday Clock, whose midnight symbolises the fateful date of the end of time. The Doomsday Clock is an invention of the Atomic Scientists of Chicago, the researchers who participated in the Manhattan Project.[36] After the trauma of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan, in 1946 they began publishing the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. According to its committee’s website, the Doomsday Clock is “a design that warns the public about how close we are to destroying our world with dangerous technologies of our own making. It is a metaphor, a reminder of the perils we must address if we are to survive on the planet”. Since 1973, the Bulletin's science and security committee has discussed world events twice a year and, when necessary, reset the clock. The committee comprises scientists and other nuclear technology and climate science experts, who often also act as advisors to governments and international agencies. The committee has reset the minute hand of the Doomsday Clock twenty-five times since its inception in 1947, most recently in 2023 when it was reset from one hundred to ninety seconds before midnight. Despite the clock’s proximity to scientific thought and thinkers, it attracts harsh criticism from many researchers today. Cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker sees the Doomsday Clock as a political stunt, pointing to the words of its founder that its purpose was “to preserve civilisation by scaring men into rationality”. Anders Sandberg of the Future of Humanity Institute has commented that the “grab bag of threats” currently mixed together by the Clock can induce paralysis.[37]
The Doomsday Clock is typical of the instruments deployed in the west―where relative security prevails, and fears of an increasingly uncertain future are all the greater. According to risk culture theorist Aaron Wildavsky, “the more objective security increases, the more the feeling of insecurity increases, following an exponential curve and giving way to ever more fantastic and, as in the case of the ‘bells of the apocalypse’, anachronistic and untimely imaginings.”footnote]Bertrand Vidal, Survivalisme: Êtes-vous prêts pour la fin du monde (Paris: Arkhê, 2022), 116.[/footnote]
Today, it seems that our (supposed) “world of security”―which is not at all dissimilar to the one so powerfully described by Stefan Zweig in the first chapter of his autobiography, even if his world is just before the First World War[38]―has gone off the rails (again). Risk lurks everywhere, and everything suddenly becomes a risk―at least, that’s how it seems to us. Rather than letting this diffuse fear paralyse us, we should recall the philosopher François Ewald, who claims that “nothing in itself is a risk; there is no risk in reality. Conversely, everything can be a risk; everything depends on how you analyse the danger and how you look at the event”.[39] Thus, according to Bertrand Vidal, “risk” refers more to attempting to make the unpredictable effects of our social decisions predictable and controllable [40] than to describing a possible misfortune objectively.
Prepping as practical response
Today, making the unpredictable manageable is a concern of numerous private and state-funded research centres, which advise governments on developing more or less complex programmes to protect the population. While it is the task of think tanks to assert the risk, civil protection or civil defence must prepare for it. Even while many of the protection plans developed by governments are undoubtedly laudable, events in the past have repeatedly shown that the measures may not have been as effective as they should have been. Events have also shown that the promise of many governments to provide help within a maximum of seventy-two hours cannot always be kept.
Preppers have traditionally harboured a deep distrust of government measures. Now, trust in our society at large, too, is gradually declining. However, this distrust takes different behavioural forms. Non-preppers tend to seek refuge in passivity, snuggling up on the sofa watching films about the end of the world and taking refuge in “outsourced enjoyment or action”, and so, “in the mode of ‘as if’, one’s own activity shifts to the medium, allowing the old game to continue as if everything were in perfect order”.[41]
Prepping, on the other hand, mounts a practical response to crises and disasters viewed by preppers as no longer the business of government but as challenges to be overcome individually. Thus, prepping has an interpretative and meaning-creating function: it does not control the fear of doom, but can take the edge off it.[42] Paradoxically, many prepper subcultures try to ensure their own survival through consumption―a main target of their criticism of current society. The best-known bloggers and YouTubers praise the best products―and sell them on their websites. The best knife, shovel, rucksack, compass, sleeping bag, tent, water filter, etc.
Survivalism is a paradoxical culture, but here the paradox reaches a climax: if the basic idea is that everything will eventually collapse, especially the consumer society and the market―good riddance, some say―it is still possible to find solutions to collapse in the consumer society based on the market and consumption. The snake that bites its own tail.[43]
Prepping, the prepping gurus would have us believe, “is a matter of being in the right place at the right time with the right stuff. Protection can be bought. Survival is for sale, that is shelter, security, staples, implements, accessories. And anything else expected to sharply accrue or preserve value when disruption occurs”.[44]
These are the words of Richard G. Mitchell Jr, sociologist and author of Dancing at Armageddon: Survivalism and Chaos in Modern Times. Mitchell continues: “Stroll through the survivalist market. Consider the offerings. Note their diversity”.[45]
And then, of course, buy. French preppers with whom Bertrand Vidal was able to speak invest, on average, between three hundred and four thousand euros per household in emergency equipment.
Overdramatic worldview―or is everything completely different?
What is this “doom boom” all about? Should we all start preparing for doom? Are we SHEEPLE if we don’t? No, says Hannah Ritchie, a data scientist and head of research at Our World in Data, a non-profit research organisation whose mission is to publish research and data to make progress in tackling the world’s biggest problems. Not the End of the World is the title of her optimist’s guide to the climate crisis, which attempts to provide a counterpoint to the creeping sense of global doominess―what cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker has called the “overdramatic worldview”.[46] Ritchie tries to contrast the doom boom with a world view created from data, following in the footsteps of physician Hans Rosling who did for social problems what Ritchie is trying to do for environmental problems. That is, to “zoom out from the daily news stories, which are a terrible way to understand the bigger picture, look at the long-term data in order to get a clearer view of what is really going on, and then explain that to people".[47]
Science journalist Peter Brannen reminds us that the planet has already experienced five global mass extinctions in its history―yet continues to exist.[48]
Bertrand Vidal tries to dampen our expectations of an imminent end by stating that we have already survived the 183rd identified end of the world since the fall of the Roman Empire on 4 September 476 and notes that “each generation perceives itself as the last before the end of the world”.[49]
Dutch historian Rutger Bregman tackles another prepper fear in a different way by trying to decide who is right: Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Thomas Hobbes? That’s to say, in our original state of nature, without the protective hand of a sovereign or at least a social contract, are we good (Rousseau), or instead driven by self-preservation to act selfishly, deceitfully and brutishly (Hobbes)? The answer to this question has a decisive impact on what we believe will happen in the event of an existential catastrophe that results in the collapse of all our systems. Will people “shed the thin veneer”, [50] strip off the thin layer of civilisation and become what they are: wild animals, concerned only with their own survival? Is the world a dangerous place, a competitive jungle?[51]
If we believe this, we are more likely to follow the path of the survivalists, build hidden bunkers, practise self-defence, acquire weapons and fundamentally distrust all other people. Of course, this assumption is not unique to preppers but is widespread in society, as is the correlative view that looting is inevitable in the event of a disaster.[52]
Disaster sociological research either rejects this deterministic assessment as a myth, or at least insists on due differentiation: such as, who behaves how, and when? What, for example, is looted, and why? Who shoots and why? In none of the cases investigated by the pioneer of disaster sociology and founder of the Disaster Research Centre at Ohio State University, Enrico L. Quarantelli were private homes looted, [53] for example. Rather, shops were looted only when they contained the essentials for survival, such as water. Indeed, it seems that people develop a touching solidarity in extreme, disaster situations.
So, are we naturally good after all, as Rousseau is convinced and Bregman tries to prove? Rebecca Solnit memorably confirms that we are in her book A Paradise Built in Hell, in which she analyses the biggest disasters in the US over the last hundred years. What she finds, and what is confirmed by the overwhelming majority of disaster research, is surprising, touching, and highly reassuring. In the event of a life-threatening disaster, we become altruistic, friendly, considerate; we seek protection in the community and put the lives of others before our own.[54]
Those who act brutally and selfishly in disaster situations, on the other hand, tend to be the people who should be protecting us: the mayors, the military, the police, those with institutional agency. In short, in prepper’s lingo, the PTB (Powers That Be). The PTB see their power threatened and react with violence. And the people sent to rescue the victims of a catastrophe often see those victims as the enemy. This attitude―evincing the Hobbesian view of man as innately brutish―had catastrophic consequences for the victims of the great earthquake in San Francisco in 1906, as it did in New Orleans in 2005 in the days after Hurricane Katrina, to name just two examples. After both disasters, more people died by human actions than as a result of the disaster itself. Whether we believe that people are good or evil by nature has a decisive influence on our actions.[55]
Informed and impelled though it is by one-sided media coverage, lucrative Hollywood doomsday films, diffuse fears, and the essential question of the nature of humankind, prepping can be understood fundamentally as a consequence of modernity and at the same time as a means of understanding modernity itself.[56] The attitude of preppers recalls the philosopher and sociologist Georg Simmel, who stated over one hundred years ago in his ground-breaking Die Grosstädte und das Geistesleben: "The deepest problems of modern life spring from the individual’s claim to preserve the independence and uniqueness of his existence against the superior powers of society, the historical heritage, the external culture and technology of life―the final transformation of the struggle with nature that primitive man has to wage for his bodily existence."[57]
This is precisely what preppers are trying to do today: with the greatest determination, they attempt to preserve―or rather reinvent―their independence and their uniqueness. Richard G. Mitchell Jr shows us that survivalists and preppers are looking for ways to define themselves and test their talents in a society that is becoming devitalised and formless.[58]
Furthermore, preppers’ fear of the apocalypse and TEOTWAWKI can be read as a diagnosis of the present. It offers a profound and meaningful critique of today’s society. Preppers’ actions make visible society’s fears, and in the din of opinions and self-fulfilling prophecies, preppers’ questions about today’s world and a possible future remain important―albeit disturbing. Politely consigning them to cranks’ corner is not a good idea. On the contrary, the sometimes-radical attitude of preppers should prompt us to rethink our attitudes and consumer behaviour and inspire us to take more personal responsibility in all areas of life. The prepper stance reminds us to regularly subject our beliefs, fears and coping strategies to critical scrutiny―and to keep an open mind towards other world views.