It’s strange, growing up in a world that already seemed doomed to die before you were born. 

Even before I became aware of how profoundly we fucked up the world, I was told the end of the world was nigh. But when I was a child, the causes leading to the end of the world were different. I attended a fundamentalist church between the ages of roughly eight and seventeen. This was a Southern Baptist church in the middle of New England. My family also attended other churches during this period. We passed through the doors of several Episcopalian churches for a time. But we always returned when those Episcopal churches became too “progressive.”

This particular church never declared the end was near, but the church elders did. At social gatherings, it was common to speculate which person was the Antichrist. Others proffered their beliefs that Russia or China was Gog and/or Magog. In its basement, the church had a reading room. It was across the hallway from the Sunday school classroom for elementary-aged children. There was an entire bookcase devoted to apocalyptic literature. This collection included both print and hardcover editions of the Left Behind books.

But the end of the world for these people is not the same end of the world I speak about now. The end of the world, as depicted in Revelation, is an event well-plotted out in advance. The description given may be vague and allegorical. Still, if you can interpret world events, you can gain insight into most of what is about to happen. There will be a lot of suffering. But if you can endure it for its allotted period, you will enter into New Jerusalem, overseen by Christ.

Thus, my childhood was what I can best describe as a schizophrenic social environment. Discussion of my life – my college plans, my social life, etc. – mixed with the end times, an event starting soon. Yet I was still expected to observe the formalities of a society approaching its end date. The church remained conservative. It remained devoted to upholding social arrangements that they believed were dying. Denying they were about to die was one of God’s many unspoken commandments. 

I never asked one of these church elders to describe the post-tribulation world. I doubt they would’ve given me a meaningful answer if I did. I reckon they would’ve described a world that was an endless tract of suburban expanse. A nuclear family in every house and a church in every neighborhood. No gays, though, nor non-Christians (Jews maybe excepted, but kept out of sight, out of mind). No undeserving poor people, either; no “welfare queens” or “illegals”. The unspoken claim, of course, was that there wouldn’t be many non-white people in the world. Just the “good ones”, and they would, like the Jews, be out of sight, out of mind.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve lost my faith in Christ, but not in the world’s impending end. Only the ending I foresee is not the final, cataclysmic struggle between good and evil I was raised on. I now see that version as both hopelessly naive and deviously sadistic. The parishioners who clung to it often shared the status of well-off but “downwardly mobile.” They saw a world they felt was slipping out of their grasp. It was only natural to believe that vindication would come, to assuage oneself that the anxieties of the modern age are only temporary.

But the ending of a world never goes according to plan. Constantine initiated the end of pagan Roman rule by legalizing Christianity. But he never foresaw that the Christianized Roman Empire itself would suffer from religious strife. The world of the Ancien Régime came to an end when the representatives of the Third Estate gathered to swear an oath. Yet, they could never have foreseen that they were starting a chain of events that would lead to Waterloo. The Emperor Meiji ended the samurai era when he dissolved the Tokugawa Shogunate. But the mushroom clouds appeared over Hiroshima and Nagasaki long after this death; how could he even imagine such an outcome? 

It’s hard to say when the end began, exactly. Some point to 9/11; others to the Trinity Test. Fukuyama was onto something when he declared the “End of History.” The collapse of the USSR, the end of the Cold War, and then the global triumph of neoliberalism have ushered in a new era. This era features the gradual erosion of our ability to address social-scale problems. Venture funding and shareholder supremacy have weakened corporations’ ability to develop long-term plans. Market reforms have eroded state power. 

COVID has revealed how far our institutions have ossified while accelerating the decay. States failed to enforce mask mandates in the face of public resistance. At the same time, corporations struggled to adjust to the strain placed on the supply system. They had allowed their supply chains to become weak and unable to handle delays. Yet neither public nor private actors learned any lessons from the pandemic. They only realized that when the next pandemic happens, they ought not even try to fight the outbreak. In the new world, if you cannot deal with a problem, refuse to acknowledge its existence.

We live in the Age of Entropy. The End of History is here, and what it looks like is the winding down of a vast machine while parts rust and fall away. Please don’t bother trying to find the repairman; he was laid off years ago, when the machine was still working fine. We assumed we would never need him again. We thought the machine would continue to operate at full capacity, as it had been doing for as long as we could remember. The future was meant to be just the present, extending into eternity.

Not everyone realizes the repairman left so very long ago. They assume he’s still around, working secretly, behind the scenes, having taken a secret identity such as “Q”. They believe he is fighting the evil people who have sabotaged our perfect machine. It is a simple fantasy – that there are people out there who are both in control and intelligent. Yet, the people in control are not smart. To be in a position to gain power, you must believe the machine is still functioning. You have to think that the gears are not rusted, and that the cogs are not falling into the abyss below.

Every day, I grow more convinced that we have missed the deadline to turn things around. Even if people who are capable of building a new machine get into power, I fear the necessary tools are long gone. They were all sold off when the repairman was laid off. What happened when the government needed people to stay inside for a few weeks and wear masks? About a third of the United States and at least a tenth of the world’s population are in a frenzied state of social paranoia. This was all the result of having to make the most minor sacrifices. What will happen if these people have to adjust to fundamental, revolutionary reforms? You know, the kind required to stave off environmental and societal collapse?

I don’t know what the end of the world will look like, except for those portions that are already unfolding before us. I cannot and will not predict the final destination. Still, I will offer some predictions about the journey to that destination.

You are going to see violence on a scale you will go mad from comprehending. At the personal level, people you know and love will lose their minds. They will believe things in five years that not even the most Q-brained person today believes. These beliefs will drive them to harm their loved ones, directly through abuse and acts of violence, and indirectly through political action. They will elect politicians who will make Ted Bundy look like a swell guy.

At the corporate level, profit rates are expected to continue declining. As a result, the C-suite will push for punitive treatment of workers and exploit consumers. Those executives become consumed by their sadistic exercises of power. They will understand what Hannibal Lecter meant when he said, “If one wants to become like God, one must do as God does.”

At the state level, those leaders I mentioned will face an ossified state capacity. They will run out of the ways politicians used to hurt the “undeserving” in society. There will be no more social safety net to slash, no more methods of punitive policing to enact. Yet, they will need to prove to the voting masses, who demand more, that they are crueler than their last leader. In that moment, they will begin to press the forbidden buttons. Wars and rumors of wars will reach the ears of people who demand more, and then the slaughter will commence in full.

And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the world.

Unlike what I believed in my youth, the actual apocalypse we fear is unlikely to end in salvation. There are many people alive today whom one could call the Antichrist, if so inclined. But Christ? He isn’t coming back. He came to Earth two thousand years ago to preach his message of peace and goodwill, and they crucified him.

What will become of humanity? Sometimes I say that this will all end with our extinction, that things will get so bad we won’t be able to adapt. If climate change doesn’t kill us, then nuclear war will, or a new disease out of melted ice, or something. But maybe that is naivete. We’ve survived the apocalypse before. But what will come out the other side of the catastrophes the coming decades will unleash upon us? Will it be something we want to call “humanity?”

The descendants of the Holocaust’s victims today are committing genocide in Gaza. Today, they run prison camps where child rape is a daily occurrence. There is no guarantee that people will become stronger as a result of suffering. This century promises atrocities far larger and more depraved than the last. I fear that the survivors of those, if they don’t go on to commit their own vile atrocities, will be only a society of husks. A society of people resolved to exist until the time comes for their body to drop away and their soul to depart.