I’m positing that personal economic vulnerability is at the heart of America’s desire for an apocalypse. We joke about a zombie apocalypse, and during the reign of Trump, people bandy about ideas of civil war as an inevitable outcome if their president is removed from office, but at the heart of American life for the past twenty-some years is a generalized wish that the entire system should somehow collapse. Why?

Housing costs, credit ratings, job insecurity, and lack of a safety net if someone gets sick, are contributing to our hopes and dreams that something should break with such ferocity that the playing field is reset. Many people voice how they have the mettle to survive true hardship and if it were to come to a gunfight, they are ready to go all out. This is not rational. On the battlefield of the job market, if you are not in demand and earning over $100,000 a year, your entire sense of stability is hinged on variables that if any of the dominos topple, the person might see the crumbling of not only their dignity but the roof over their head, the food they hope to eat, their relationships, and their health. With a blotch on their credit rating, they may not be able to rebuild the house of cards. With this kind of instability and lacking the intellectual skills to compete, it’s better to hope for a street brawl where a person can lay claim to what they need through sheer force. Isn’t this the mentality we already see among gang members?

Capitalism and the gross imbalance of how wealth is distributed in America have created a toxic economy and mindset where millions of people seek redemption and greater participation through the demise of civility. They perceive that a breakdown in the social order will allow them to rise above as they prove to others their value through strength and fortitude. The current environment where people are being victimized by the ever-increasing cost of housing, which is one of the three basic necessities of life, plays a large part in the economic chessboard where your home is a move away from checkmate.

We have allowed capitalism to devolve to a point where many people feel insecure trying to participate in an economic model based on debt and the resultant relative servitude. There is no security when someone feels trapped and in potential danger. Fear then becomes exploitable, allowing those holding the purse strings to exercise the tools that force people to bow their heads and hope nobody hears them complain. Surround the most economically vulnerable with the threat of imminent violence coming from crime, the migrant horde, or the unseen viral plague, and you have the recipe to keep the bottom 50% of a population captured on a hamster wheel where stepping off would be economic and cultural suicide.

We are no longer a community or cohesive nation; we are the consumer body prodded along to deplete inventories with perfectly timed marketing. We are like a shopping bacteria under threat of a Black Friday antibiotic that will extinguish any hope of learning who we might have otherwise been.

How are the signs of this expressed? First, I should admit that my filter is a biased interpretation of randomly ambiguous signals. I feel that it is most often witnessed in toxic masculinity, where guns, cars, tattoos, piercings, attitudes, and a potential for violence all segue into a person with something to prove in appearance, and they might argue substance, but the intellectual underpinnings are often missing. This is not a rule or a universal and I certainly know of many exceptions to this ugly and gross generalization. The differentiation is easiest for me to demonstrate by the example of who stands behind strength as a bulwark of an all-encompassing totality and those who integrate it as an effective part of their character and a small aspect of a persona.

Mastering hunting and killing skills in order to brag about them. Lifting trucks and employing massive tires that never see dirt but elevate the driver above others. Wearing a pistol on one’s hip in public to show dominance. Projecting allegiance to a group via specialized clothing that acts as de facto uniforms, such as those used by motorcycle gangs, veterans, political ideologues, and many sports fans, are all symbols that transform these people into the conformist lifestyle/brand dolts afraid to be themselves. To a large extent, I do not find these behaviors among women, but among the overly masculine and lesser-educated, I am willing to make the preposterous supposition that these behaviors are cover for the person’s own awareness of their intellectual shortcomings.

Maybe that 1-4% of Neanderthal DNA we inherited is fighting to come out and express itself? Should the troglodytes win, the irony will be that everything they covet will disappear in the flash it will take to return humanity to the pre-stone age era of living in caves or simple huts where they’ll hone their hunter-gatherer skills and celebrate having killed off thinking.