Why Some People Want the World to Burn
Welcome back to PsyberSpace. I'm your host, Leslie Poston. And today, we're stepping into the fire. Some people live in fear of the end of the world, and others seem to crave it. Whether it's religious prophecy, societal collapse, or full blown climate doom, apocalyptic thinking has gone mainstream.
Leslie Poston:You're starting to see it everywhere in the headlines, in TikTok videos about prepping, in billionaire bunkers, in crypto libertarian manifestos, even in our government policy. But here's what's fascinating. This urge to watch it all burn isn't just a cultural quirk or an Internet meme. It's rooted in real, measurable psychology and sociology. And here's the kicker.
Leslie Poston:Apocalyptic thinking often thrives not just in despair, but in power. The people pushing hardest for collapse often expect to survive it. That's what we're unpacking today. Why some people want the world to burn, what that desire tells us about trauma, power, belief, and brain function, and why understanding this psychology might be the key to stepping back from the brink. Let's get into it.
Leslie Poston:Apocalyptic thinking isn't new. The desire to see the world wiped clean and start over has haunted human consciousness for millennia. From the mythical Noah's flood to Ragnarok, from the book of revelation to modern zombie movies, we've always been fascinated by the stories of endings. Religious movements like millenarianism have promised violent resets for centuries. The wicked punished the faithful rewarded.
Leslie Poston:The Taiping Rebellion in nineteenth century China killed 20,000,000 people when it was driven by a man who believed he was the brother of Jesus Christ. During the Cold War, nuclear annihilation felt inevitable. Gen Xers certainly remember hiding under our desk doing nuclear drills. Some people found that strangely comforting, the certainty of it. In 1999, it was y two k.
Leslie Poston:In 2012, we were freaking out about the Mayan calendar. These moments come with a strange mix of fear and anticipation, both terror and excitement, because endings promise clarity in a way that messy, ongoing life never can. Sociologist Emile Durkheim called this anomie, the psychological disorientation that emerges when societal norms break down, when people lose their sense of meaning, purpose, and connection. Anthropologist Victor Turner described these periods as liminal spaces, times when society is between stories, vulnerable to new myths. That's when apocalyptic belief surges, when people feel they've lost the script.
Leslie Poston:But here's what's important to understand. Apocalyptic movements aren't just about fear. They're about control. They promise that chaos has meaning, that suffering has purpose, that the faithful will be vindicated. In a world that often feels random and unfair, that can be intoxicating.
Leslie Poston:Apocalyptic belief can be passive, waiting for the rapture, stocking up on canned goods, or watching for signs, but it can also be active, which is where accelerationism comes in. Accelerationism is the belief that society should be pushed to collapse, to force radical change. It's a philosophy of things have to get worse before they get better or sometimes just let it all fall apart and see what emerges from the ashes. On the far right, this manifests in violent ideologies like those of the boogaloo boys who wanted to trigger a second civil war or white nationalist eco fascists who believe in environmental collapse as necessary to rebuild a racially pure society. They don't fear chaos.
Leslie Poston:They weaponize it. On the techno libertarian side, you see it in e slash ACC, effective accelerationism, where Silicon Valley types want AI, crypto, and deregulated technology to outpace governments and social institutions. We're living through that one in real time. For them, collapse isn't a bug. It's a feature.
Leslie Poston:Creative destruction. Move fast and break things even if those things are democracy, economic stability, social cohesion, or the health of your fellow man. There's even left accelerationism, the idea that capitalism should be pushed to its logical extreme to hasten its collapse and enable true socialism, though this tends to be more theoretical than tactical. What unites all these flavors is a shared belief that gradual change is impossible, that reform is futile, and that only catastrophic disruption can create the conditions for their preferred future. Accelerationism is seductive because it makes chaos feel like control.
Leslie Poston:It transforms helplessness into agency. You're not a victim of circumstance. You're an agent of destiny. Burning it all down becomes a form of meaning making. But here's the dark irony.
Leslie Poston:Accelerationists rarely plan to suffer through the collapse they're trying to create. They fully expect to be the architects of the new world, not one of its casualties. One of the most dangerous accelerants in American politics is Christian nationalism, especially its relationship with apocalyptic theology. This movement believes America is divinely ordained and that fulfilling biblical prophecy, including the end times, is a political mission. That's where it intersects with Christian Zionism, a belief system held by millions of American evangelicals who support the Israeli state not out of solidarity with Jewish people, but because they think Israel's existence is necessary to trigger Armageddon and the second coming of their Christ.
Leslie Poston:Let me be very clear about something here because this gets weaponized constantly. Judaism and Zionism are not the same thing. Judaism is a religion, an ethnicity, and a culture. Zionism is a political ideology. You can be Jewish and anti Zionist like Jewish Voices for Peace.
Leslie Poston:You can be non Jewish and Zionist. And anti Semitism, real harmful prejudice against Jewish people, is wrong and must be condemned wherever it appears. But here's what's disturbing. There are more Christian Zionists in America than Jewish ones. Pollings suggest that 25 to 30% of American Christians believe Israel must control all of the biblical holy land to fulfill prophecy compared to much lower levels of support for territorial maximalism among American Jews.
Leslie Poston:This is not theology in service of justice. It's ideology using sacred belief as a political tool, and it's currently pushing us toward a global conflict. This conflict benefits those who think destruction brings salvation. Research by Jonathan Haidt shows how sacralizing politics leads to extreme moral disengagement where harm to others is justified in service of a higher cause. When your political goals become religious obligations, compromise becomes heresy.
Leslie Poston:And when you believe your god wants certain people to suffer, their suffering becomes holy and difficult to stop. This psychology doesn't just drive foreign policy. It's shaping domestic politics as well. Christian nationalist movements often embrace authoritarian leaders because they believe democracy itself is an obstacle to divine will. If the majority doesn't choose their righteousness, then the righteous must choose for them.
Leslie Poston:It's accelerationism wrapped in scripture, and it is incredibly dangerous. Of course, you don't need theology to fall in love with collabs. Sometimes it's just exhaustion. In The United States, endless war has normalized destruction. From Iraq and Afghanistan to Syria, Yemen, Somalia, from covert drone strikes to proxy conflicts, Americans have been conditioned to see violence as permanent background noise.
Leslie Poston:We've been at war somewhere constantly for well over two decades. This creates what we call collapse fatigue, a numbing effect where people stop believing in peaceful solutions because peace seems so impossible. Violence becomes the default. Destruction becomes expected. This echoes Freud's concept of the death drive, Thanatos, a subconscious pull toward destruction when life becomes too unbearable or unresolvable.
Leslie Poston:When the tension of existence exceeds our capacity to process it, we sometimes prefer the finality of ending to the uncertainty of continuing. Susan Sontag wrote brilliantly about how metaphors of illness reflect societal rot. She warned that when disease becomes moralized or romanticized, when we talk about cancer in terms of battles to be won rather than a condition to be managed, it actually prevents actual healing. We see the same thing in how war becomes, quote, freedom or bombing becomes, quote, liberation, how surveillance becomes safety, and how inequality becomes opportunity. This language obscures the reality, making violence seem noble and collapse seem necessary.
Leslie Poston:Authoritarian leaders, both abroad and at home, exploit this psychology ruthlessly. When collapse feels inevitable, control seems like the only alternative. When the world is ending anyway, why not let a strong leader decide how? This is how democracies die. Not in darkness, but in the glare of a promised false salvation.
Leslie Poston:What makes people vulnerable to apocalyptic thinking? Well, trauma for one, but more specifically unprocessed collective trauma that gets mistaken for wisdom. There's a body of research called terror management theory that shows how humans respond to mortality salience, the awareness that death is inevitable. When we're reminded of death, we cling harder to belief systems that make us feel safe, meaningful, or immortal through legacy, even if those systems are destructive. Add to that learned helplessness Seligman's research showing that repeated exposure to uncontrollable pain or failure causes people to stop trying even when escape is possible.
Leslie Poston:And you get a perfect recipe for fatalism. And then there's system justification theory, which we've talked about before. Developed by Jost and colleagues, it shows how people will defend unjust systems if they perceive no alternative. It's psychologically easier to rationalize the status quo even when it's harming you than it is to face the cognitive dissonance of admitting it needs to change. But now we have a biological layer that's a little bit chilling.
Leslie Poston:New neurological studies have shown that repeat COVID-nineteen infections, whether they are symptomatic or asymptomatic, mild or severe, erode cognitive function, damage risk assessment, and blunt empathy responses. We're talking about research from around the globe showing measurable changes in brain structure and brain function after COVID nineteen infections. The more infections you allow yourself and your children to get, the worse your brain function declines. Think about the implications of that. A virus that's been spreading through the global population for four plus years isn't just harming our lungs.
Leslie Poston:It's rewiring how we feel, think, and respond to complex situations. Making us worse at judging risk, worse at imagining other people's pain, worse at adapting to nuance and uncertainty. In other words, it's making us perfect targets for apocalyptic messaging. This isn't just mass burnout or a trauma response. It's mass neurological erosion happening in real time, and nobody's talking about it because acknowledging it would require admitting that our public health failures have created cognitive vulnerabilities that make democracy itself more fragile.
Leslie Poston:When your brain can't properly assess risk or feel empathy, authoritarian certainty becomes more appealing than democratic complexity. Let's talk about how this psychology gets amplified and monetized online. On TikTok, YouTube, Reddit, Twitter, you'll find entire subcultures aestheticizing collapse. It's called the black pill, a nihilistic worldview that teaches nothing matters. No one can change anything, and the only rational response is detached cynicism or accelerated destruction.
Leslie Poston:The aesthetics are slick. Glitchy visuals, synth wave music, neon lighting, apocalyptic imagery. The vibe is Blade Runner meets Doomer. Twitter meets Incel forums. It's designed to make despair look cool.
Leslie Poston:Prepping culture has evolved from survivalist subcultures into mainstream identity performance. You're not just buying freeze dried food anymore. You're curating an aesthetic of preparedness that signals both your awareness of coming collapse and your superiority to the unprepared masses. Social media algorithms love this content because extremes get engagement. Researchers like Tufecchi and Lewis have documented how platforms feed people increasingly radical content, not necessarily because of deliberate intent, but because of perverse design incentives.
Leslie Poston:Anger, fear, and outrage keep people scrolling. Hope and nuance are so boring online. Collapse becomes clickable content. Now here's what's really insidious. These platforms don't just reflect our psychology.
Leslie Poston:They shape it. When your daily information diet consists of crisis, conflict, and catastrophe, your brain starts to adapt. You start expecting disasters, planning for them, maybe even hoping for them because at least then the waiting would be over. The algorithm doesn't care about your mental health. It cares about your attention.
Leslie Poston:And nothing captures attention like the promise that everything is about to end. Let's be honest. The climate crisis is terrifying. We've talked about that in a previous episode. The science is clear.
Leslie Poston:The timeline is urgent, and the political response has been criminally inadequate. Climate anxiety is real, rational, and increasing. But some people have gone past fear into climate nihilism. A belief that it's too late for anything to matter, so why bother trying? Studies have shown that climate anxiety is surging, especially among Gen Z and millennials.
Leslie Poston:Young people are postponing having children, questioning the point of long term planning, and experiencing genuine grief over the future they thought they'd inherit. Here's where it gets toxic. Despair is being commodified and weaponized. We're told to recycle our bottles while oil companies pump out climate disinformation. We're encouraged to offset our carbon footprints while billionaires take private jets to climate conferences.
Leslie Poston:We're lectured about personal responsibility while fossil fuel companies spend millions to delay systemic change. This creates a perfect condition for nihilistic detachment. If individual action is meaningless and systemic change feels impossible, why not just embrace the collapse? Meanwhile, the richest among us aren't fighting climate change. They're planning to survive it.
Leslie Poston:Underground bunkers in New Zealand, private compounds in Montana, seasteading communities, space colonization fantasies. They don't fear collapse. They expect it. And they plan to watch it unfold from a safe distance while the rest of society burns. That's not climate denial.
Leslie Poston:That's climate acceptance with a twist of social Darwinism. Let the weak perish. Let the unworthy suffer, and the worthy will endure. Eco fascism with a tech bro aesthetic. And it's gaining traction among people who've given up on the possibility of collective action.
Leslie Poston:Here's the thing about the end of the world. It's not free. Someone's always selling tickets. From military contractors who profit from conflict, to media companies that monetize our outrage, to tech giants who benefit from digital dependence and disaster capitalists who buy up distressed assets, Collapse is profitable for people positioned to exploit it. Naomi Klein called this disaster capitalism, the systematic exploitation of crises to push through policies or extract wealth that people wouldn't otherwise accept.
Leslie Poston:Hurricane hits, time to privatize public services. Pandemic strikes, time to transfer wealth upward. Democracies weakening, time to consolidate power. Authoritarian leaders love collapse narratives too because they justify powers. Normal democracy is just too slow, messy, and constrained by rights and procedures.
Leslie Poston:Crisis demands decisive action, strong leadership. Temporary suspensions of civil liberties that somehow always become permanent. Here's what's important to understand. The people pushing hardest for collapse rarely plan to suffer through it as we talked about. They still expect to be the architects of the new world, not the casualties.
Leslie Poston:Sociologist Rebecca Solnit offered a powerful counter narrative based on decades of disaster research. In most actual disasters, people don't panic. They don't turn savage. They cooperate and share resources. They help strangers.
Leslie Poston:Ordinary people display extraordinary solidarity. But the elite among us expect violence and chaos from the public because they're projecting, and projection is real. They assume others will behave as selfishly as they would. It's why they hoard wealth, which we'll be talking about next week, build bunkers, and isolate themselves from the communities they claim to serve. Their fear isn't of collapse itself.
Leslie Poston:It's of accountability and having to face the people they've harmed when the systems that protect them fall away. So where does that leave us? Are we just doomed to burn while the wealthy watch from their bunkers? No. But we have to stop pretending that collapse is destiny or that accelerating it will somehow lead to justice.
Leslie Poston:Richard Tadeshi and Lawrence Calhoun introduced the concept of post traumatic growth. The idea that trauma, while harmful, can also lead to transformation, deeper connection, and moral clarity. Not because suffering is good, but because humans are remarkably resilient and adaptive when they have community support. Bandura's research on collective efficacy shows us that when people believe in their shared ability to affect change, they actually do change things. The belief becomes self fulfilling, not through magical thinking, but through coordinated action.
Leslie Poston:But the path away from apocalypse is slow, messy, and hard. It requires mutual aid instead of individual prepping, civic engagement instead of withdrawal, listening instead of shouting, accountability instead of scapegoating and compassion instead of contempt. And it requires resisting the dopamine hit of despair, that seductive simplicity of just giving up. Hope is not naive. It's a choice.
Leslie Poston:We've talked about that before as well. It's deciding that the future is worth fighting for even when you can't guarantee the outcome. It's choosing to plant trees whose shade you may never enjoy. And hope is understanding that apocalyptic thinking offers emotional escape, not real solutions, and collapse doesn't bring clarity. It only brings suffering, especially for our most vulnerable.
Leslie Poston:It's tempting to let go, to decide it's all too much or to root for the asteroid, to embrace the aesthetic of decline and just tell yourself you're being realistic. But collapse doesn't bring the cathartic resolution that apocalyptic thinking promises. It brings hunger, displacement, violence, and death disproportionately for people who did the least to cause it. The psychology of apocalypse is seductive because it offers false simplicity. You're right.
Leslie Poston:They're wrong. The end is nigh. No more uncertainty. But we don't have to surrender to those impulses. Stay in the mess.
Leslie Poston:Stay in the complexity. Stay in the hard daily work of building the world we want to live in instead of waiting for the world we hate to end. We can acknowledge that the problems are real, climate change, inequality, authoritarianism, technological disruption without concluding that destruction is the only solution. We can choose connection over isolation, cooperation over competition, and repair over replacement. Hope is not naive.
Leslie Poston:In this world that wants us to give up, choosing to care is radical. Choosing to stay engaged is revolutionary, and choosing to believe that we can do better is the bravest thing we can do. Because here's the truth the accelerationists don't want you to know. We don't need collapse to create change. We just need each other.
Leslie Poston:Thanks again for listening to PsyberSpace. This is your host, Leslie Poston, signing off. Remember to stay curious and stay connected. And don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss a week. And if you like this, send it to a friend you think might like it too.
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