The current pandemic is giving humanity a crash course in apocalypse management. Whether COVID-19 is actually apocalyptic or not is debatable, but the pandemic has many of the characteristics that we associate with something of that scale. Like climate disruption, it’s global; like nuclear war, it’s deadly. Most importantly, like any crisis of this magnitude, it cannot be solved by a single country or region alone, no matter how powerful. Pushing back against COVID-19, let alone the apocalypse, requires cooperation, and not just at the level of the nation-state, but within communities as well. It is probably not a surprise that this is proving difficult.
It certainly comes as no surprise to those of us who have encountered the various novels, movies, or television shows about the end of the world: a lack of cooperation in the face of catastrophe is a common theme in apocalypse stories. Tales of an imminent eschaton often include selfish, fearful, and greedy people unwilling to help their neighbors or work together. It occurs frequently enough to be considered a narrative trope and sits at the heart of all sorts of post-apocalypse sagas. The uncooperative antagonists might be paranoid neighbors, armed gangs stealing food, or wannabe-warlords using basic resources like water as a means of control. Or, more frequently—and more simply—they could just be hoarders jealously guarding their supplies of toilet paper.
But COVID-19 has shown us that this paradigm is actually incomplete, and in a fairly surprising way. It’s something that authors of apocalyptic narratives have rarely, if ever, envisioned. It turns out that an unwillingness to cooperate can also arise from the complete denial that a global catastrophe is underway.
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