Apocalypse vibes

The word apocalypse comes, via Latin, from the Greek word apokalyptein, “uncover, disclose, reveal,” itself a compound word made up of apo-, “off, away from,” and kalyptein, “to cover, conceal.”

This means a few things:

1. An apocalypse is an uncovering, a revelation. The original name of the last book of the Greek New Testament is Apocalypse. It doesn’t introduce anything new into the world, but reveals what had always been true yet hidden.
2. Post-apocalyptic fiction — Mad Max, Apocalypse World, The Walking Dead, etc. — presents an uncovered version of the pre-apocalypse world. What is revealed is what had already been going on this whole time: the all-against-all fight for limited resources where humans prey on other humans. It’s the veneer of so-called civilization that’s stripped away, revealing the quick of humanity.
3. The process of apocalypse never ends: there is always more to uncover. Moreover, the uncovering doesn’t arrive everywhere all at once. Consider Max Headroom. In the periphery, the conditions of bare survival already obtain: people huddle around fires in trash cans, scavenge for food and supplies, live in rubble and wastelands. Meanwhile, the center still retains its privileges: television networks, courts, offices, luxury apartments. The periphery is the repressed truth of the center: what’s really going on is we’re all scrambling to survive in a hostile world filled with hostile people, but sometimes we pretend that everything is fine. That doesn’t mean that brutality can’t occur before the uncovering; on the contrary, what the uncovering reveals is how much violence had been going on the whole time.
4. All learning is an uncovering, but it’s also the end of not knowing. When the world ends, what ends is the world that existed before we learned what we know now. What ends is the people we were before we saw what had been concealed.

Stay safe out there, dear reader; I have no idea what conditions are like where you are, but I hope you’ve got shelter and supplies during the apocalypse.