Choose Your Own Apocalypse: Leave the World Behind, Foundation and The Last of Us

What our dystopian stories reveal about the cultural zeitgeist

Merry Christmas everyone! Thank you so much for your support and interest in 2023, both for this Substack and my book. Over the last year I’ve released 35 pieces, with a combined word count that would fill two books.

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This piece is inspired by the tradition of Christmas ghost stories. I’ve endeavoured to make it spoiler free, with very little plot information you won’t find in a trailer (aside from ‘The Matrix’).

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It once rained for two million years. Monsoons lashed Pangea and endless lightning crazed the sky. Half of all species went extinct, but when the cataclysm finally ended around 242 million years ago, it had opened the way for dinosaurs and mammals to rise. This happened aeons before humans discovered fire, but deep in our cultural memory, we understand that destruction brings regeneration.

The threat of cataclysmic destruction has been at the forefront of the zeitgeist in 2023: the devastation of Gaza, the ongoing war in Ukraine, the creeping spectre of the US election and a Cop28 summit compromised by oil interests. The idea that we’re facing a ‘metacrisis’ is leaving the fringes of the internet and morphing into the Davos-friendly ‘polycrisis’. Existential risk has hit the mainstream.

This shift is significant, because once an idea leaves the fringes and enters the mainstream cultural conversation, it starts to change how we behave. However, just as we’ve seen with many narratives around climate change, an awareness of what we’re facing is just as likely to lead to cultural nihilism as it is to drive us toward solutions. Ultimately, how we respond to the metacrisis will be determined by the stories we tell about it, and about ourselves. 

Unsurprisingly, it’s been a year in which post-apocalyptic and dystopian stories have caught our imaginations. Some of the most popular have included HBO’s The Last of Us, season two of Apple TV’s Foundation, Netflix’s eerie Leave the World Behind, and Paul Lynch’s vision of a dystopian Ireland, Prophet Song, which won the Booker Prize.

It would be easy to attribute the popularity of these stories to our growing anxieties around mortality, climate change and geopolitical instability. After all, we’ve always been telling apocalyptic tales, from The Book of Revelation and Ragnarok to War of the Worlds. However, to reduce them to this would be to miss something crucial, because woven into these tales are messages from our collective unconscious revealing ancient truths about times like this.

So as the earth darkens and we approach the solstice, I’m inviting you on a journey through the post-apocalyptic stories that have captivated the world this year, and in times past. You’ll traverse the psychology of dissociation and annihilated faith, see dragons turn into machines, walk through the arguing ghosts of Hobbes and Rousseau, and return right where you began.

Obliviousness

We can begin where many post-apocalyptic tales do; with utter obliviousness. This is a central theme in one of Netflix’s most successful films of the year, Leave the World Behind. It’s the story about a family who leave their busy New York lives for a last minute vacation to Long Island. Something happens that means no networked technology works, and after original owners of the house come for refuge, the film also deals with trust, misanthropy and the breakdown of the social contract.

They’re staring at something behind you

Everyone starts out utterly oblivious to the depths of their reliance on technology. The journey from obliviousness to rude awakening is a common trope in post-apocalyptic fiction. It points to an underlying fear in the collective psyche: that we are living on borrowed time, that our obliviousness can’t last, and that we might not survive waking up. This fear permeates modernity; we can find it The War of the Worlds, first published in 1898 with the opening lines:

“No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied … With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter…. Yet across the gulf of space…intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.”

Today, those envious eyes come not from Mars, but from our own devices. Our fear of annihilation and invasion is now projected into our technology and in particular the emerging, disembodied artificial intelligences that threaten to upend our lives. Ultimately, Leave the World Behind is a film that speaks to a strange double-bind: we’re reliant on a technology that cuts us off from one another, with all our hope for a functioning civilisation, which requires deep connection, ritual and human contact, placed in that same technology.

As our trust in technology dwindles, we realise we don’t trust ourselves or one another either. As the misanthropic protagonist Amanda (played by Julia Roberts) says in Leave the World Behind:

“We fuck each other over all the time, without even realising it. We fuck every living thing on this planet over and think it’ll be fine because we use paper straws and order the free-range chicken. And the sick thing is, I think deep down we know we’re not fooling anyone. I think we know we’re living a lie, an agreed upon mass delusion to help us ignore and keep ignoring how awful we really are.”

This ‘agreed upon mass delusion’ is central to the cultural zeitgeist today. In the film, Amanda’s pre-teen daughter Rose is unable to watch the final episode of Friends after her tablet stops working, an issue that takes on inordinate importance in the film. Another character, Ruth, provides a telling clue as to its significance when she criticises the show as ‘nostalgia for a time that never existed’.  

Why might we want to retreat into a time that never existed? To understand that, we have to look deeper into the psychological function of dissociation. 

Collective Dissociation

Dissociation is the process by which we cut off from different parts of our own psyche. Some clinicians view it as a natural defence against unbearable pain or fragmentation of the self. This could be traumas that are so painful we can’t go near them, truths that disrupt our self image.

Leave the World Behind points to the sense of ‘unrealness’ that many people feel today; a sense of not being embedded in the world, but being caught in a false reality mediated through social media and endless entertainment. Examining this unrealness as a collective psychological defence is revealing, because it can point us toward how to get out of it. 

Ryan LaMothe, a professor of Pastoral Care and Counselling, examines this phenomenon in his paper Where Are You?” Defensive Dissociation and Fragments of Annihilated Faith. LaMothe describes a patient, Nancy, with a severe history of childhood sexual abuse. During their sessions, she would often go silent and completely blank. After waiting for a long time, LaMothe explains, 

“I would say, ‘Where are you?’

A flicker of recognition and she would reply without feeling, “Nowhere.”

Nancy’s need to be nowhere or her shelter against the horror of ‘being there’ falls under the category of defensive dissociation… the moment of trauma when the self and more broadly subjectivity are obliterated. Where there is no-self there is only non-experience (Blanchot, 1995), which is paradoxically a way to preserve a remnant self and subjectivity.” 

When someone goes through severe trauma, their sense of self often becomes fragmented, and dissociation may be a defence against the unbearable reality of that fragmentation.

Just as individuals dissociate to defend against the agony of internal fragmentation, cultures may dissociate for the same reason. Since the advent of social media in particular, the fragmentation of the social fabric has increased dramatically. In the first scene of Leave the World Behind, Amanda looks out her window at New York city and declares that she ‘fucking hates people’ and wants to be somewhere else. The title of the film is telling, and the whole narrative takes place ‘in the middle of nowhere’.

But dissociation isn’t the only response we might have to fragmentation. We only need to look back to the most successful post-apocalyptic films of the 1990’s and 2000’s to see how much our attitudes have changed. Films like Armageddon, Deep Impact, Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow all told heroic stories of a small group of people dealing with the threat of annihilation through supreme acts of agency and global collaboration. 

It is hard to imagine an eerie, uncanny and dissociative film like Leave the World Behind resonating with Western audiences in the 1990’s. In three short decades, we’ve entered a multi-polar world of competing interests, rising authoritarianism and instability. We’ve been beaten down by our machines, our agency stripped away until we’re lost, disoriented, and dislocated. 

Crucially, a loss of agency is a hallmark of defensive dissociation in individuals. As LaMothe explains,

“… non-experience means that an event, in this instance a traumatic event, is not woven into the person’s sense of self and experience of self-organization. There is no I, no person to interpret the experience… This absence of an interpreting subject includes a loss of agency. The overwhelming sense of powerlessness and helplessness of severe trauma, in other words, annihilates a person’s sense of agency.” 

Culturally, we are nowhere. We don’t have a sense of who we are or what we’re doing collectively. In 1998, audiences were happy to watch Armageddon and cheer as Bruce Willis dealt with an asteroid by going to space and kicking its ass. Today, the idea that we can exercise our collective agency to meet problems like climate change or war feels remote. As LaMothe argues, fragmentation can lead to ‘annihilated faith’; we lose touch with our sense of a greater order, or a sacred purpose, that makes us feel at home in the world.

It’s the inevitable result of turning dragons into machines.

Dragons and Machines

There is a common trope in post-apocalyptic stories of losing control of our technology. We see it in Leave the World Behind and in movies like Terminator, Ex Machina, and countless other stories where our technology gets the better of us. But the fear of being overwhelmed isn’t unique to our time and place, it’s a universal human fear. What’s changed is what we’re afraid will overwhelm us.

In his book An Instinct for Dragons, anthropologist David E. Jones argues that dragons appear in so many cultures because they combine three predators we feared in our distant evolution; snakes, birds of prey and big cats. The archetype of the dragon holds powerful associations for us as a feared predator, but also as a source of power and transformation.

This is what happens when you disturb his slumberbatch

As technology began to outpace our ability to understand it, and became ever more powerful, it transformed into a receptacle for all the mysterious, powerful and destructive energy in our unconscious that used to be projected into the dragon.

It was Carl Jung who first articulated this dynamic, and expressed it to his friend and medical assistant Helton Goodwin Baynes after a visit to New York City in 1936, as recorded in the book The Earth Has a Soul: C.G. Jung on Nature, Technology & Modern Life. Below is an excerpt from their conversation, where they discuss technology, cities and automobiles:

Dr. Baynes: …the modern man knows that with engines, we are on top. We can make them.

Carl Jung: Yes, but suppose an age when the machine gets on top of us. Then it would become a dragon… and when you look at New York, it really is on top of man. He knows he has done all that and yet it pulls him down…. In building a machine we are so intent upon our purpose that we forget we are investing that machine with creative power… We have ideas about the godlikeness of man and forget about the Gods…after a while, when we have invested all our energy in rational forms, they will strangle us. They are the dragons now… slowly and secretly we become their slaves and are devoured. Why do we have psychology? Because we are already strangled by our rational devices. (p. 149)

Jung argued that under this kind of technological strangulation, painfully disconnected from a deeper sense of psychic wholeness, the unconscious rebels and starts acting suicidally. And this presents us with perhaps the most uncomfortable element of post-apocalyptic fiction: it is a yearning, not a nightmare.

Beneath the surface of our collective unconscious, we crave annihilation. We want our technological nightmare to end, for our agonising disconnection from nature and one another to be washed away by cataclysm rather than bear the fragmentation a moment longer.

But nothing is only one thing in the depths of our minds. As we’ve seen, cataclysm opens the way for growth, evolution and regeneration. Annihilation is a reckoning full of potential, and knowing that we will all one day die, it also carries with it something that neoliberal culture finds it almost impossible to stomach: inevitability. 

The Social Contract

One of the most prevalent themes in all post-apocalyptic fiction is the sense of inevitability.  As Josh Schrei points out in his AI episode of The Emerald podcast, the reality of being powerless to forces beyond us is incredibly confronting to a society based on individualism and self-determination. The Enlightenment told us we could enact our will on the world and thereby know it fully. All mystery would be stripped out. There is no place for things that can’t be tamed through reason.

And yet, we are moved by those forces every day. The idea that history moves us deterministically is a key theme in one of the year’s best shows, Foundation. Based on the Isaac Asimov books, Foundation tells the story of a brilliant mathematician who develops a model called Psychohistory that predicts that the galactic civilisation will inevitably collapse. 

This goes down badly with the galactic dynasty, ruled by an emperor who has cloned himself to rule in perpetuity. Three versions of him are always alive across thousands of years, Dawn (a young man), Day (the middle-aged man who rules) and Dusk (the older man who used to rule).

I hear North Korean scientists are feverishly recruiting a child and and old man to rule with Kim Jong Un after watching a poorly translated version of the show.

This plays on a perpetual fear that we’re moving toward a more authoritarian world. It is the inverse of unconscious forces overwhelming us, and instead a fear of intense egoic control repressing everything. With the invasion of Ukraine and prospect that China becomes the new global superpower, these fears are close to the bone.

Foundation has parallels to a non-fiction book that came out this year, Peter Turchin’s End Times, in which he uses a big data approach to history called cliodynamics which accurately predicted the time of upheaval starting in the 2020’s. It points to a historical trend of social collapse or revolution occurring through the combination of popular discontent combined with too many elites competing for positions of power, a situation Turchin argues we are living through today. I explored implications of Turchin’s book in my piece Pride of the Elites: Political Correctness, Identity Politics and Class War.

What drives the narrative in Foundation is an attempt to minimise the length of the dark ages that will come after the galactic civilisation has fallen. The trope of a return to darkness is a prevalent theme in dystopian fiction, and often overlaps with the idea of ‘the social contract’.

This notion was popularised by philosophers of the Enlightenment, particularly Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau. The perspectives of Hobbes and Rousseau are particularly relevant to our modern anxieties around civilisational collapse. Hobbes held a vision of human beings in our original natural state as brutish, anarchic and driven by self-interest. Civilisation and the contract we make with one another is the only thing standing in the way of ‘might is right’ dynamics taking over. Rousseau held a different vision, one that saw humans in our original state as pure, healthy, free and innately noble. For Rousseau the social contract was a way to sacrifice some self-interest to expand our freedom and work toward a common good.

Most dystopian tales lean toward a Hobbesian vision. The moment civilisation stops working, chaos ensues. In novels like The Road, by Cormac McCarthy (who passed away this year), we see this taken to an extreme; a world defined by rape, cannibalism and unspeakable violence. One need look no further than the war between Hamas and Israel, or Putin’s aggression, to see the savagery waiting beneath the surface of civilisation.

What stories like Leave the World Behind or The Road suggest is that culturally we aren’t convinced by the idea that if you were to take away the social contract, we wouldn’t revert to savagery. Nor do we believe we have the collective agency to find a way out of the mess we’re creating.

Birth and Regeneration

However, the story doesn’t end there. Most post-apocalyptic fiction points to some hope of regeneration, because it makes the story tolerable. It does so because it points to a fundamental truth; we have the tools of our transformation with us at all times, even when the world is darkest. So how can we reclaim the powerful, creative energy that can help us regain our collective agency? The clues might lie in the very stories that warn us of the consequences of losing it. 

One of the most popular post-apocalyptic films of the last three decades is the Matrix. It’s a prescient film, because it shows humanity captured by a technological matrix it has lost control of.

The etymology of the word ‘matrix’ is also telling; it means ‘womb’.  YouTuber Chris Gabriel has argued out that programmers in tech companies today, for example those building the next generation of AI, are unconsciously recreating the nurturing ‘mother’. Tech companies swaddle their employees so that the company becomes like a motherly home; they do your laundry, arrange your food, give you places to nap. Our technology seeks to do the same, aiming to meet every need and desire we might have. But unlike a healthy mother, who eventually supports us to individuate from the merged state and be free, our technological matrix offers no escape. It promises protection and nourishment but extracts and exploits and suffocates without end. 

He’s trying to figure out which one of them signed for his UPS package

But the human will toward growth and freedom isn’t so easily crushed. If we look at our post-apocalyptic stories through a Jungian lens, we can see many as an expression of overcoming our blind egoic rationality by reconnecting to a deeper source of humanity and life-force. Neo ultimately becomes ‘The One’ with the power of Trinity’s transformative love.

It’s not just love that transforms us, but embodiment. Regeneration comes not from our ‘rational devices’, but from re-embedding ourselves into what transpersonal psychologist Michael Washburn calls ‘The Dynamic Ground’ of our being, the source of our essential humanity which is embedded in the natural world and accessed through our bodies.

It’s no surprise that waking up from the matrix in the film means waking up into your actual body. It is here we find all the wisdom we could ever need, and where we access through touch, ritual, dance and laughter the truly regenerative force of human intimacy and connection.

In our stories, this regenerative force is often represented as the life-giving feminine aspect. We see this in the brilliant dystopian movie Children of Men, set 18 years after a global fertility crisis means no new humans have been born. The story begins when it’s revealed that a woman has become pregnant, and the protagonists go on a quest to bring her to safety.

We see this theme repeated in another of the year’s post-apocalyptic stories, The Last of Us. Set almost two decades after a fungal infection has turned most of humanity into zombies, a hardened survivor, Joel, takes teenage girl Ellie across a broken world in the hope that she might contain the healing, regenerative potential to end the infection. It is a world in which nature has taken over, where the creative power of nature is on full display, with cities taken over by trees, and zoo animals roaming free. 

Somehow this gets onto HBO but my screenplay ‘Zombie Giraffes and Explosions’ does’t even get a reply email.

However, the true symbol of regeneration is the love between Joel and Ellie, or that between two side characters, Frank and Bill, which I explored in my piece Broken Men in a Broken World. 

We see this message told again and again in our stories because somewhere we understand that the way to navigate cataclysm and despair is the transformative power of grace and love. The question then becomes how to enact that same ancient wisdom in our day to day lives. How could we infuse Cop29 with the regenerative power of the divine feminine? Or render the smug chatter of Davos mute with a symbol of nature’s awe-inspiring creativity? It seems as improbably as a bunker full of canned food in a barren wasteland. But there may be a way, hidden where we least expect it.

A Forward Escape

Deep in our DNA, perhaps we remember that time 250 million years ago when thunder split the sky and torrents soaked the land. That to be part of this world is to be embodied, and embedded in a mystery that is wild, chaotic, creative and destructive. Our post-apocalyptic stories, particularly the more modern tales, point to a growing awareness that when we mistakenly project this energy into our technology, we strangle ourselves until cataclysm is the only outcome.

But our post-apocalyptic stories also remind us that we always find the transformative, regenerative power we need by coming back to our humanity, embedding ourselves in an embodied reality, and deepening our intimacy with one another. They also warn of the dangers of losing the civilisation we’ve taken so long to build, and the social contracts that allow us to collaborate and thrive together.

We would do well to draw strength from those messages, because at this time in history we are being asked to do something as wild and powerful as the dragon itself. We’re asked to somehow retain our embodied wisdom, genuine community and human intimacy while we learn how to use technology that is more powerful than we are.

We’re being challenged to initiate ourselves into a new world, one in which we learn how to return to our bodies while the technological dragons we’ve created transform us. It can seem impossible; but our dystopian stories remind us that no matter how impossible things seem, no matter how cynical or bleak, there is a force greater than us that finds a way to shine a light to a better future.