But now look what’s gone and happened. These themes have suddenly materialized out of the murk of abstraction, and into the harsh light of what for the sake of convenience we must call reality.

At an early stage of my research into the doomsday prepper scene, I bought a book called “Just in Case: How to Be Self-Sufficient When the Unexpected Happens,” which I left on a shelf and pretty much forgot about. Earlier today, I found myself taking it down and flicking through its index — “handcranked lanterns”; “pandemic”; “panic, avoidance of” — in a manner that felt remarkably different to how I had flicked through it in the past. The themes and motifs of the prepper movement are having a moment in the mainstream.

Like everyone else, I am finding these new days painful and uncanny. I feel as though I am dreaming a weird and sad dream from which I can’t seem to awaken, a dream in which a mysterious force has hollowed out the substance of human life, where people must keep their distance from each other at all costs. The world feels empty, and strange, and wrong. No matter how much it may seem that way, though, it is not the end of the world. This is just the sort of thing that has always happened to humans. Perhaps the more painful thought is not that we are witness to the end times, but that we are just on the business end of history’s business-as-usual — that we are in no way special.

In the original Greek, the word apocalypse means simply a revelation, an uncovering. And so there is one sense in which these days are truly, literally, apocalyptic. The world itself is being revealed with a startling and surreal clarity. Much of what is being revealed is ugly: the rot of inequality in the bones of our societies, the lethal inefficiency of free-market capitalism, the bewildering cruelty and stupidity of many of the people in positions of apparent leadership. But there are beautiful things, too, being revealed with great clarity and force. Of these, the one that gives me the most hope in this sad and frightening time is that despite the damage done by the presiding ideology of individualism, there remains a determination to act out of a sense of shared purpose.

The doomsday prepper vision of the world is unapologetically bleak: society as a fragile edifice, a thin veneer of behavioral norms over the abyss of greed and violence that is human nature. Among preppers, one of the preferred ways of reacting to a severe crisis is to batten down the hatches and retreat to one’s home, which is lavishly stocked with food and supplies and, in many cases, weapons. This is referred to as “bugging in,” a measure taken to protect oneself and one’s family. There’s an obvious way in which this is precisely what many of us are doing now. But there is also a crucial difference, one that is ethical and deeply political.