Catastrophe! Heroism! Paranoia! The dangerous romance of survivalist stories

The Guardian

08-08-2025

The man who claimed to have coined the word 'survivalist' called himself Kurt Saxon. The sinister godfather of survivalism was actually born Donald Eugene Sisco, a former journalist who spent the 1960s floating between far-right groups in California before deciding that none of them were serious enough. Sisco's passion for making his own bombs, which he advocated using on student demonstrators, cost him the fingers of his left hand. He liked to say that he was the reincarnation of a soul whose previous lives included a Roman legionary, a Nazi stormtrooper and the revolutionary philosopher Thomas Paine.
Survivalism, or prepping, is experiencing a boom, from Silicon Valley billionaires to users of the Reddit board r/collapse. Elon Musk's entire career, for example, has been partly driven by apocalypse anxieties and his conviction that he alone can save the human race (details to be confirmed). The scenarios vary – climate catastrophe, renegade AI, another pandemic, nuclear war between authoritarian regimes – as do the responses. Some claim to be making rational preparations to survive in the event of civilisational collapse, while others seem unnervingly keen to see the world turned upside down. This can feel like a very 21st-century obsession, stoked by online conspiracy theories and the doomerism produced by 24/7 news, but Sisco was pioneering the doom business 50 years ago.
During the 1970s, rising crime and soaring inflation convinced Sisco that America was headed for an almighty crash and that he had better be ready for it. In 1976, he launched a magazine called the Survivor, which offered subscribers an unnerving combination of tips on self-sufficiency (how to make candles, blow glass, grow cucumbers) and ghoulish predictions of a cataclysmic event known as Collapse Day. 'America's irreversible collapse should be apparent to anyone by 1980,' Sisco wrote in the first issue. In an interview, Sisco summed up the survivalist's blend of excitement and genocidal misanthropy: 'I'm quite thrilled by the prospect of civilization ending. It is an adventure and a great culling that has to come.'
Yet despite Sisco's claims, the word 'survivalist' actually originated in fiction – specifically Giles Tippette's 1975 novel The Survivalist. It is the story of Franklin Horn, a middle-aged man with similar, though less fascistic premonitions of doom to Sisco. Horn believes that the city he lives in is on the verge of collapse and tries to convince his wife and friends to join him in building a fortress in the Ozarks (where Sisco would move in 1980). 'I'm not a humanist,' Horn says. 'I'm a survivalist.' When they decline to sign up to his paranoia, he goes it alone and finds himself stalked by an antagonist who raids his supplies and tries to kill him. In fighting back, Horn realises that man cannot live alone in fear and shamefacedly rejoins the civilisation he rejected. Tippette repudiated in advance Sisco's lurid fantasies of apocalyptic adventure.
Novelists have been imagining the challenges of survival for decades. If survivalism can be seen as a form of storytelling that consumes the storyteller, then fiction can help us understand the mentality and the dangerous places it can lead.
From Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe in 1719 to Ridley Scott's movie The Martian almost 300 years later, audiences have been captivated by tales of resourceful individuals who find increasingly ingenious ways to survive a hostile environment until they can return to civilisation. They are adventure stories in which heroism consists of relentless problem-solving rather than conflict.
The difference between a survivor and a survivalist is that one is a temporary condition and the other a permanent identity. The survivalist actively wants to be estranged from civilisation – craves, in fact, the destruction of civilisation itself. After all, it would be a waste of effort if society refused to collapse. In the 1970s, some called themselves 'retreaters', having in effect resigned from society. Though framed as an ugly necessity (people would try to steal your stuff), violence was part of the appeal of this bare-knuckle libertarianism. The survivalist is not content with maintaining a vegetable patch and whittling a bow and arrow to hunt for food. He wants guns, and people to use them on.
The survivor and the survivalist go head-to-head in William Golding's 1954 novel Lord of the Flies, about a group of schoolboys stranded on an island during a nuclear war. Their initial leader, Ralph, wants to preserve a skeleton of social norms and solidarity until help arrives. The fire he maintains is both a signal to rescuers and a symbol of civilised values: 'The rules are the only thing we've got!' His challenger, Jack, however, turns himself into a tribal chieftain, exerting power through violence, barbarism and superstition. For him, catastrophe is liberation. Why would he ever want to go home again?
Subsequent catastrophe novels such as John Christopher's The Death of Grass (1956) and Charles Eric Maine's The Tide Went Out (1958) proposed that most people thought of themselves as noble Ralphs but would soon turn into brutal Jacks once the going got tough.
The fictional survivalist who first expressed the ominous politics of survivalism appeared in HG Wells's 1890s phenomenon The War of the Worlds. Amid the chaos of a Martian invasion, the narrator meets an artilleryman with a plan: humanity will regroup and rebuild in underground sewers and tunnels in order to wage guerrilla war against the invaders. The artilleryman is drooling with anticipation because he is a eugenicist and – 20 years before the fact – a fascist. He contrasts 'able-bodied, clean-minded men' with the 'weak and silly' who deserve to die: 'It's a sort of disloyalty, after all, to live and taint the race.' Decades later, in a 1982 interview with the Sacramento Bee, Sisco argued that anyone with an IQ below 110 should be sterilised to save America from degeneracy.
Survivalism went mainstream during the first half of the 1980s. Newspapers profiled survival businesses and the isolated communities they served, finding characters much like the artilleryman. Their lurid fears included nuclear war, foreign invasion, environmental disasters, race war and food shortages due to overpopulation.
The sociologist Richard G Mitchell Jr spent more than a decade talking to survivalists for his 2002 book Dancing at Armageddon: Survivalism and Chaos in Modern Times. He found that most of them felt impotent and overwhelmed in their day-to-day lives and were empowered by imagining themselves the main characters in a greatly simplified world without rule of law – or WROL in survivalist parlance. 'Survivalism,' Mitchell observed, 'is a way to accomplish the creative renarration of the self and often one's companions into tales of aesthetic consequence.' It gave their lives meaning.
It was in 1981 that Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior popularised the hitherto obscure word 'post-apocalyptic'. 'Mad' Max Rockatansky is not technically a survivalist, because he never expected or wanted society to collapse. A former police officer, he sides with the vulnerable neomedieval community rather than the feral biker gang. But the movie inspired a more aggressively rightwing genre that the writer Mike Davis called 'armageddonist'.
That same year, Jerry Ahern began publishing The Survivalist, a series of pulp novels about John Rourke, a former CIA officer who battles Soviet invaders, mutants and cannibals in the aftermath of a nuclear war. Ahern published as many as four volumes a year (titles included The Doomsayer, The End Is Coming and The Savage Horde), which tells you something about their quality. More notable for the loving attention Ahern gives to various firearms (he later founded his own gun company) than for their characters or ideas, they sold millions of copies.
At the same time, survivalism merged with the far-right militia movement to produce hundreds of real-life John Rourkes. The far-right, anti-government militia group the Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord conducted an End Time Overcomer Survival Training School – and practised assassination skills on its 224-acre (91-hectare) armed compound in Arkansas – before one member killed a Black police officer and attracted the attention of the FBI.
A related white nationalist group, the Order, murdered the Jewish radio host Alan Berg and was also shut down by the FBI – a story told recently in Amazon Prime's The Order. All of this overt Nazism and homicidal violence made survivalism a dirty word, leading Sisco to insist that real survivalists do not shoot police officers. 'A survivalist is simply one who anticipates the collapse of civilisation and prepares to survive it,' he protested.
One peculiar product of this fraught period was The Survivors, a flop 1983 comedy starring Robin Williams as a paranoid dental supply executive who joins a survivalist camp in Vermont. A more serious one was David Brin's 1985 novel The Postman. Brin's hero, Gordon Krantz, dons a dead postman's uniform and delivers his abandoned mail to bring a little hope and order to post-apocalyptic Oregon. His foes are a 'loose, macho, hyper-survivalist' militia called the Holnists, whose antisocial savagery he blames for America's desperate state: 'It was the same solipsistic philosophy of ego that had stoked the rage of Nazism.' Brin was rebuking the violent, self-aggrandising survivalism that ran through post-Mad Max fiction and spilled over into real life via the Covenant and the Order. In The Postman, society is something priceless that should be mourned and rebuilt, not a sandcastle to knock down.
After the militia movement was associated with atrocities such as the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, survivalism's reputation sank further. But in 1998, one user of an internet message board about the Y2K bug introduced the synonym 'prepper'. It sounded more modern and more reasonable than 'survivalist', with an emphasis on the practical details of preparation rather than daydreams of post-apocalyptic gunplay. The National Geographic series Doomsday Preppers, which launched in 2012, became the channel's most watched show to date.
Despite the rebranding, preppers are still usually treated as sinister or absurd in 21st-century fiction. Closer in spirit to Tippette's The Survivalist than Ahern's The Survivalist, these stories puncture what Brin called 'little-boy wish fantasies about running amok in a world without rules'.
Cormac McCarthy's crushingly bleak 2006 masterpiece The Road is often praised on prepper websites but it presents survival as a gruelling slog rather than an adventure. 'There were few nights lying in the dark that he did not envy the dead,' McCarthy writes of his unnamed protagonist. The most acclaimed episode of HBO's The Last of Us meanwhile features a misanthropic survivalist (played by Nick Offerman) who admits: 'I used to hate the world and I was happy when everyone died.' But his hard shell is cracked open when he falls in love with an unexpected visitor and is reminded that people matter after all.
While Offerman's character represents the old-fashioned hermit survivalist, other stories satirise the new billionaire preppers: people like Peter Thiel, who spend vast amounts of money on luxury bunkers, private islands or refuges in New Zealand. While traditional survivalism is a power fantasy for the powerless, this version is an escape route for elites who are partly responsible for the social and environmental instability that terrifies them. 'Why do people who are envied for being so powerful appear to be so afraid?' asked the economist Robert A Johnson in the New Yorker. 'What does that really tell us about our system?' They are retreaters.
The popular suspicion of the survival industry dates back to the fallout shelter craze of the early 1960s, when The Twilight Zone showed neighbour turning on neighbour in The Shelter; Stanley Kubrick's Dr Strangelove ranted about creating a postwar master race in the mineshafts; and Bob Dylan mocked bunker dwellers in his song Let Me Die in My Footsteps. The shelter business all but collapsed within a year when most Americans decided that not only would they probably not survive a nuclear war but that they would not want to.
Subterranean shelters are ripe for parody once more. The recent satirical TV series Fallout, based on the hit video game, contrasts the suffocating conformism of the Vaults with the perilous freedom of the wasteland. In American Horror Story: Apocalypse, a billionaire socialite and her entourage shelter from a nuclear winter in the luxurious bunker Outpost 3 but the situation turns nightmarish as food supplies run out and paranoia flourishes.
In season three of the post-apocalyptic sitcom The Last Man on Earth another socialite hides out from a pandemic in her dead friend's well-appointed bunker and slowly loses her mind. Whether it is the menace of desperate companions, a sinister regime or maddening solitude, an apparent refuge becomes a prison to be escaped.
We sympathise with Robinson Crusoe or Matt Damon's character in The Martian because they have been forcibly estranged from the human race and are desperate to reconnect. But from the Ozarks compound to the New Zealand bunker, survivalists choose to sever themselves from humanity at large. No wonder we enjoy seeing them fail.
All stories of catastrophe and survival contain a verdict on human nature. Most texts about survivalism, from prepper handbooks to The Road, promote a Hobbesian view of humanity: civilisation is a thin skin stretched over an abyss of animal brutality. 'Men have always had urges towards dominance which are basically stronger than urges towards cooperation,' John Christopher said when asked about the pessimism in The Death of Grass.
But is this true, or does survival fiction encourage us to believe the worst? While nobody knows what would happen if everything collapsed, Rebecca Solnit demonstrates in A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster that in the aftermath of real catastrophes the looters and marauders are vastly outnumbered by people trying to help and save each other. Far from being a liberal delusion, mutual aid is a powerful human instinct. 'Everybody was your friend and you in turn everybody's friend,' recalled one survivor of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. 'The individual, the isolated self was dead. The social self was regnant.'
Whether for political reasons or simply the need for narrative excitement, conventional survival fiction endorses the idea, as David Brin put it, 'that humanity in general is dreadful and therefore only individual heroes matter'. But in novels such as Pat Frank's Alas, Babylon (1959) or Emily St John Mandel's Station Eleven (2014), post-apocalyptic survival is achieved instead by solidarity and collaboration. Problem-solving is a collective endeavour and selfishness spells doom. These stories are worth telling, too, and they may be closer to reality.
Dorian Lynskey is the author of Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World