What if another end of the world were possible?

After Monday's blackout, the country was divided between the preppers and those of us who were n't prepared. As if the fable of the ant and the grasshopper had come true, a bunch of preppers came out to tell us how much fun they had with their doomsday backpacks. I've always hated that fable. It's specious and reductionist, and I think ants are complete jerks.

Because material conditions aren't the same for everyone , and sometimes, even if you want to be an ant, your minimum wage isn't enough to even save a couple of cans a month. The day of the blackout, I thought about my precarious friends, their half-empty refrigerators, and how if this were truly an apocalypse, we would have been the first to die. The blackout caught us all in our underwear and without survival kits, not because we were lazy or unbelieving, but because a generation that's barely alive in the present can't possibly think about the future. Congratulations if you can think about it, my prepper friend. That means you're not living in the uncertainty of today.

But I came to talk about the moment when all of us who weren't prepared went out into the street and celebrated each other's triumph as if it were our own.

In Another End of the World is Possible , Pablo Servigne , Raphaël Stevens , and Gauthier Chapelle propose that we accept that we are already in a world on the verge of collapse and that we must move toward a philosophy of collaborative action . For this other end of the world to be possible, we need fables that are not moralistic but fraternal. That is, death to the ants and welcome to the little pigs who open their doors to their siblings. Because, they say, future survival will not consist of staying alive individually but in being able to rebuild a society from the ruins that remain.

All the people who could and went out onto the streets on Monday are the people I'd want to be with in a future apocalypse. Those who shared radios and candles and invited you to cook at their homes. Those who stayed locked inside with their backpacks and the next day wrote about how clever they were to prepare—these are all the people I wouldn't be interested in surviving with for a minute. As psychologist Carolyn Baker says, "At its core, could a society of emotionally myopic budding survivalists produce anything other than a terrifying, inhumane culture akin to Brave New World?" On Monday, if any light was shed, it was in teaching us that the future will be communal, or it won't be at all.