How to Thrive in Our Zombie World

The world as we know it has already ended. It's time to begin rebuilding.

Thinking about recent events like the Arab Awakening and the triple disaster in Japan, it occurred to me that we already live in a post-apocalyptic society – it’s just unevenly distributed. I’m alluding to the William Gibson quote, "The future is already here – it's just not very evenly distributed." In some ways, we already live in a post-apocalyptic world, but many of us are too trapped in bubbles of privilege or zoned out by media pabulum to see this with clarity.

In places around the world, normal life and the institutions that support it have already collapsed. And we're not just talking about Africa or the Middle East. We're also talking about the developed North. Within the evacuation zone of the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan, recovery is probably a generation away. In Detroit, a 25 per cent population decline over the past decade calls for the city to shrink. There are some bold ideas circulating about returning parts of the city to wilderness or farmland. This is post-apocalypse in the heartland of the American industrial age.

In addition to the evidence provided by the daily news, I've also taken note of the post-apocalyptic turn in pop culture. Zombie apocalypse movies and TV shows and zombie walks in our cities show our culture's fascination with post-apocalyptic themes. The interesting thing about zombie stories is that they're about the struggle of life after the apocalypse. The world as we know it is gone, but life continues. It's definitively not the end.

We can see evidence of zombie institutions all around us: our zombie Parliament; the zombie media; zombie politics; zombie capitalism; zombie banks; the zombie welfare state; zombie security; and let's not forget zombie consumerism.

Those from the fundamentalist tradition of apocalyptic Christian belief warn us to "repent, for the end is nigh," but they are missing the point. The world as we know it has already ended. We're past the point of no return, and look around: I don't see any evidence of the Rapture anywhere.

But I don't believe that we're beyond redemption. In zombie apocalypse mythology, human redemption is still possible in the midst of destruction.

Once we realize that the world has ended but that life continues, we will adapt, and we will rebuild. Belief that the end is nigh, or that the world can be restored so that it once again exists as it did before, are ideas that disable action because they make our desired goals seem impossible, and our actions futile. Humans have always found ways to adapt to changing environments, but we cannot do this if our mental models are out of touch with the realities of our environment.

In contrast, a post-apocalyptic world view is tremendously liberating and enabling. Rebuilding in the wake of the apocalypse gives us the freedom to question underlying assumptions. In fact, it requires us to do so. We see the world around us not as “given” and static, but as a vast expanse of raw material and tools available for reuse and reinterpretation. The post-apocalyptic world view is therefore more radically creative than either an “apocalyptic Rapture” world view or a “restoration of stability” world view.

So, in order for life and civilization to thrive again, do we first need to understand that we're already beyond the apocalypse? Maybe the revolution we need is first and foremost a revolution of thought – a new way of making sense of our world, and of accepting the true nature of 21st-century life.

Maybe we should embrace the zombie apocalypse as our great hope for the future.