Hobbesian Enmity and Resource Wars in Apocalyptic Popular Culture |
In the past two decades, stories of global disaster and destruction have surged in popular-cultural media: Moira Young’s YA (Young Adult) Blood Red Road novels (2011-2014), Naughty Dog’s game The Last of Us (2013), Chitwood, Ens, & Nichols’s comic Afterburn (2020-21), and Alex Garland’s film 28 Years Later (2025-26), to name few. With extreme weather events rising in frequency and impact, the legacy of Covid, and a surge in authoritarian politics and military conflict across the globe, it is not surprising that the popular-culture industry is tapping into an apocalyptic zeitgeist. The horrors in such narratives often revolve around cosmic catastrophes, pandemics, or runaway technology; yet some find the seed of destruction in the global economic status quo: the ever-ongoing race between powerful nations to own, extract, and control not only the staple foods that feed humanity but also the resources that feed the insatiable mass-production and consumption industry, like oil and rare-earth materials.
As Downey et al. (2010) explain: “because of their position in the world system hierarchy, core nations are able to take advantage not only of the labor power but also of the natural resource wealth of periphery nations, while simultaneously exporting many environmentally degrading activities to the periphery” (417). What is more, past colonial and present neocolonial practices have shown that “armed violence and militarism play [a structural role] in degrading the environment and securing core nation access to developing nation natural resources” (Downey et al. 2010, 418-19). Films such as Avatar (2009), The Colony (2013), and Dune (2021-2024), The Expanse novels by James S. A. Corey, as well as the graphic novel Travelling to Mars (2024), explore the challenges, dangers, and long-term social, environmental, and political impact of large-scale resource extraction to human civilization, often with grim predictions of near-future collapse.
Two recent entries in the economic-apocalypse subgenre are Chen Qiufan’s novel Waste Tide (English translation 2019), and the latest chapter in George Miller’s Mad Max saga: Furiosa (2024). Both texts foreground the social and political violence inherent in human resource extraction, production, and use; through harrowing representations of environmental and communal breakdown both texts suggest the economic apocalypse is coming not despite but because of the globalisation of neoliberal industrialism. Hall & Lamont (2013) point out that the global economic status quo has engendered “structural insecurity and rising inequality” (3) by championing “heightened competition in more open markets” (3) fuelled by “declining confidence in the capacity of states to allocate resources efficiently” (4) and growing “individualization of risk, responsibility, and reward” (6). Both texts narrate a race to the bottom between small-groups of like-minded and equally selfish people, aiming only to live in relative comfort and ease just that little bit longer than the rest, before the inevitable end. Yet in their different forms – an epic action-adventure story and a cerebral speculative fiction – Furiosa and Waste Tide present different attitudes towards the oncoming end.
On the face of it, Waste Tide and Furiosa seem to give the lie to neoliberal shibboleths such as the necessity to ever-expand global production and trade, to technologically innovate for maximum socioeconomic efficiency. Both texts imply that the neoliberal status quo resembles Thomas Hobbes’s “state of nature” in which everybody “endeavour[s] to destroy, or subdue one an other [sic]” in a persistent “warre [sic]… of every man, against every man” (1651 [1996], 87-88). I will argue, however, that where Waste Tide’s frequently surreal and reflective figurative language allows it to appeal emotionally to the reader’s moral sense and the need for greater altruism and less competition, Furiosa’s cynical acceptance of humanity’s innate enmity leads it to perform what Johan Galtung (1990) terms “cultural violence,” a mediated form of violent representation that “makes direct and structural violence look, even feel, right – or at least not wrong” (1). I am not saying that Furiosa glorifies this violence; rather the opposite is true: it is a tragedy that laments humanity’s enmity, but in its focus on physical and mental violence, themes of greed, torture, and revenge, and its despair concerning humanity’s fatal flaw, it also normalises the violence and destruction that result from it. There can be no other way with humanity, the History Man suggests at the close of the film: “there always was, is, and will be war” (117:40).
The latest “Mad Max” film’s ambivalent stance towards civilization’s collapse and its moments of cultural violence are shaped by what Niklas Salmose (2018) defines as “the action apocalyptic sublime” (1419), an aesthetic he contrasts to “the poetic apocalyptic sublime” (1422). In both modes of representation, “the sense of the apocalyptic grants the sublime an immediate existential angst where diegetic humans are not only observers but also victims” (Salmose 2018, 1418-19). But in the action mode “the apocalypse of the world is haunting and cool, supported by a pompous musical score” (1420), for instance. By contrast, the poetic mode is “non-narrative. It opens an opportunity for feeling the true angst of the destruction” (1423), which facilitates contemplation of the ethics involved in establishing the economic origins of the apocalypse. According to Salmose, the “potentially positive outcome” of any apocalyptic narrative “is severely diminished by [the] limitations of the narrative structure of the Hollywood mainstream adventure film” (1422), a genre to which Furiosa belongs. Such a film’s “spectacular, affective scenes” of apocalyptic events, “must … be placed within [a] generic adventure narrative” (Salmose 2018, 1424).
These stories feature ordinary, small, protagonists whose character arc allows them to develop into larger-than-life heroes or heroines who take on a David vs. Goliath struggle, are nearly defeated but ultimately achieve a moral victory, even if this comes at great cost. According to Salmose, “dependence on the formulaic release of tension and the victorious protagonist in the third act … diminishes audiences’ real fear of the apocalypse” (2018, 1424), which also validates the violent action to some extent as the violence leads to the evil being defeated, for now. The final victory, leaves the audience on an emotional high, feeling a proper resolution has been achieved, which hinders the development of critical reflection on the causes of the apocalypse and its relation to human institutions and........