Maszlow's Heirarchy gets beat up a lot by professionals for the same reason Freud does: people are too fucking literal. It's useful from a psych 101 standpoint, though - you aren't gonna care too much about TikTok followers if you don't have a roof over your head.

The day-to-day life of a Puerto Rican whose routine can be disrupted by hurricanes and earthquakes is going to be different than the day-to-day life of a Haitian whose routine can be disrupted by hurricanes, earthquakes, civil unrest, famine and disease. Both of them have a very different outlook than a USPS branch manager in Illinois whose day-to-day is largely going to be impacted by emails from the district office.

Gonna level with ya. I hate zombie movies. A rant I wrote against zombie movies got famous in certain corners of the internet a long time ago. And what I realized then and what I still believe now is that all the disaster-prep bullshit this country leans into so heavily is "commuter syndrome" - that display of unbridled rage against strangers for venial sins.

The thing about survivalism is nobody ever fears clever bad guys. It's always stupid bad guys. During the Cold War, we mostly feared totalitarianism. Maszlow's Hierarchy again - hard to get tweaked out by your neighbors when the Reds could end the world at any minute. The minute nuclear annihilation was no longer on the table, though, the concerns shifted from "V" and "They Live" to tearing down mutherfucking society.

I find Alan Moore's criticisms of superheroes to be cogent - they represent an abandonment of civil society in favor of vigilantism and that, much like you need to be nuked to invent kaiju, you need doomsday weapons to lean so heavily into superpowers. The difference between Batman and Duterte is the costume. Superheroes, kaiju and strongmen all get their strengths from the same place - a fear of complexity. Why investigate the causes of addiction when you can just murder dealers in the street?

I had a buddy in high school who longed for the apocalypse. Why? it meant guns and simplicity. No more worrying about why this girl didn't like him, just go shoot a mutant. There's an othering that's central to survivalism and zombie movies - the former compatriot who tries to eat your brains. Better shoot them before liberal thought causes them to support transgender bathrooms! And ultimately, the dark heart of survivalism is an embracing of otherment. "things will be better when I can shoot anyone coming after my Patriot Pantry."

Yeah. It's definitely about zombies. Uh huh. That's why it wasn't a disease that made everyone "zombies" during COVID, it was wearing a mask and getting microchips injected.