I'm So Sick of Stories Blaming Humanity for The End of the World
Photo by Catalin Pop on Unsplash
For as long as I can remember, movies have been telling me that the world was going to end. I saw it in disaster movies where the planet was wiped clean by storms and earthquakes. I witnessed it in alien invasion movies where cities and countries were leveled to the ground. I watched as zombie hordes consumed all of civilization. Over and over again, the world was destroyed, and I saw it happen.
It's not hard to understand where this angst is coming from — the planet is dying. Terrible people have been running things for a long time, and they have constructed systems of power that are f@cking everything up. Our feelings of hopelessness are externalized in films where we can revel in the end we feel coming. For the briefest of moments, we watch as brave protagonists triumph against it (or cathartically end up dead).
In recent years, some disaster and post-apocalyptic movies have used this premise to come to a startling conclusion. The inherent problem in many (though certainly not all) of these films is that they often blame the source of that disaster on humanity itself. It's a message that equalizes the blame, making it a component of human nature, rather than the narrow set of elite actors who actually cause disasters.
This takeaway ultimately fosters a form of detached nihilism that is unhelpful for combatting climate change, wealth inequality, and the other deadly problems plaguing our world.
The disaster movie comes in many forms. The quintessential one is that of a natural disaster leveling entire towns, countries, and even the world. Los Angelos is a favorite target for screenwriters, wherein films such as San Andreas (2015) and Volcano (1997), wipe Tinsel Town off the map. Worldwide disasters usually show up at iconic landmarks like the Eiffel Tower or the Great Pyramids, and in some cases just as cataclysmic fireballs rippling across the face of the Earth.
Amongst the carnage and CGI horror, humanity is blamed for these disasters. "For years," begins President Raymond Becker (Kenneth Welsh), after superstorms caused by global warming have devastated the developed countries of the world in the film The Day After Tomorrow (2004), "we operated under the belief that we could continue consuming our planet's natural resources without consequence. We were wrong. I was wrong."
While The Day After Tomorrow, does a great job of highlighting some of the institutional barriers that prevent reform from taking place (e.g. politicians more interested in short-term gains, over long-term threats), this speech at the end places the moral blame on all US citizens. Never mind that most Americans are trapped in an economic system that provides them little opportunity to cut emissions while obtaining the resources they need to survive. Becker moralizes to viewers about the need to take climate change seriously, flattening the issue's complexities into a "we are all in this together" mentality. The world ended because developed nations as a whole let it die.
This theme of blaming segments of humanity, or in some cases all of humanity, for disaster, comes up a lot. Human war destroys the Earth in the original Mad Max series (1979–1985). Our wasteful ways make it uninhabitable in flicks like WALL-E (2008). Pollution cause plants to turn on us in The Happening (2008). And of course, our arrogance and destructive nature lead our robotic children to try to cull us in movies like the Terminator (1984) franchise.
Even when humanity is not blamed as the source of the cataclysm, they are often viewed as a distraction — a mob waiting to happen. "Telling the public we might all be dead in eighteen days achieves nothing but panic," says the president (Stanley Anderson) in Armageddon (1998) shortly before he instructs our protagonists to board a spaceship to blow up an asteroid heading towards Earth. He keeps the information secret until it cannot possibly be hidden from the public.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals, and you know it." says the character Agent Kay (Tommy Lee Jones) in Men In Black (1997) as his justification for why their secretive organization doesn't share the existence of aliens with the public. During this series, aliens threaten to annihilate the entire Earth several times, and the public is never told. "There's always an Arquillian Battle Cruiser, or a Corillian Death Ray, or an intergalactic plague that is about to wipe out all life on this miserable little planet," quips Agent Kay. "And the only way these people can get on with their happy lives is that they DO NOT KNOW ABOUT IT!"
In both of these situations, the public might have benefitted from this information, especially in Armageddon, where bits of the asteroid break off and end up decimating cities. The people in charge might have also benefited from the collective brainpower of the human race. However, the fear of public unrest was seen as a higher priority than harm reduction or innovation. Humanity is depicted as a detriment to the work that our protagonist must do. We are a burden, not a resource that can be used.
This distrust in people especially applies to the fall of society, once those "mobs" have taken over. In post-apocalyptic flicks, people are depicted as more harmful than the cataclysmic incidents themselves. For example, the biggest threats to our protagonists in The Walking Dead series (2010–2021) aren't the zombies (called "Walkers" here), but dictators such as Negan, Alpha, and the Governor. The protagonists in the series Sweet Tooth have to contend with the speciesism of General Abbot (Neil Sandilands). And of course, in media like The Road (2009) and The Last of Us (2013), human bandits can be far more destructive than radioactive fallout or zombie terrors.
That cynicism in humanity often morphs into full-blown misanthropy, where humanity's end is depicted as a good thing. "Nature doesn't want us back," explains Aimee Eden (Dania Ramirez) in the post-apocalyptic TV show Sweet Tooth (2021 — present) on why humanity should accept its obsolescence following a devastating virus. "We never gave her a good reason to keep us around in the first place," she continues. "If you look at the whole life of the planet, we, you know, man has only been around for a few blinks of an eye," lectures Sergeant Farrell (Stuart McQuarrie) in the zombie film 28 Days Later, "So, if the infection wipes us all out… that is a return to normality." "The Earth is evil," calmly states Justine (Kirsten Dunst) in the wake of our planet's impending destruction in Melancholia (2011), "we don't need to grieve for it. Nobody would miss it."
More than any cataclysm or super virus, humanity is the true villain on the Silver Screen. They are the harbingers of our destruction, or, at the very least, the people who make the aftermath that much worse. We are a toxic force that protagonists must struggle against — the barrier to be overcome. Our society has a very bleak outlook of the collective in media, and unfortunately, these pop culture stories are merely a reflection of our greater culture.
When we talk about real-world threats such as climate change, humanity as a whole is often blamed for them. On the Internet, this sometimes comes in the way of a Matrix (1999) quote by the character Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving). "Human beings are a disease," he laments, "a cancer of this planet. You're a plague, and we are the cure." It's a meme shared all over the Internet. Wherein the movie, this perspective comes from a robotic overseer who paternalistically thinks that humans must be contained and culled; the people on the Internet are saying that about themselves.
Another place in the cultural zeitgeist we see this logic resurface is the "Thanos was right" hashtag on Twitter. Thanos was the galactic tyrant in the MCU who decided to genocide half of all sentient life. Some fans of the series viewed him not as the villain but as a person who had a point. As JV Chamary writes in Forbes:
“Fewer people ought to mean more food and less hunger, and might lower the risk of an epidemic when overcrowding enables the spread of disease. Human activity is driving a loss of biodiversity, with about 25% of animals and plants now threatened with extinction, so halving the population would help other species. As a consequence, you could conclude that by eliminating 50% of all humans, Thanos did the Earth a huge favor.”
These perspectives are looking at recent problems like industrial carbon emissions and claiming they are intrinsic to the human condition — something that we cannot help but do because pollution and overconsumption are how we operate. "Wow…Earth is recovering," remarks one infamous tweet that received over 200,000 likes during the early days of the pandemic. "Air pollution is slowing down. Water pollution is clearing up. Natural wildlife returning home. Coronavirus is Earth’s vaccine. We're the virus." This misanthropic outlook is everywhere in our culture. The disgust for humans as a collective doesn't start and end with tweets and poorly-reasoned articles, but can translate into disastrous policy during real-life disasters.
For example, the response effort to Hurricane Katrina (2005) has been largely decried as an instance of political leaders placing property rights over preserving human lives. The image initially portrayed by those in power was a dire situation of uncontrolled mayhem, depicting a scene of over ten thousand dead. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin infamously went on The Oprah Winfrey Show (1986–2011) and claimed that evacuees were hurting each other within the Superdome (the place refugees from the storm were being housed). Mayor Nagin said: "They have people standing out there, have been in that frickin' Superdome for five days watching dead bodies, watching hooligans killing people, raping people."
This statement would later be deemed an untruthful exaggeration, but this perception of "looters" negatively impacted the response effort. The private security force company Xe (now merged with Triple Canopy, and formerly Blackwater) was contracted out immediately by the federal government to "secure the city." As if during wartime, they were armed with automatic rifles and deputized by the Governor of Louisana to make arrests. The number of armed forces occupying the city would only increase as the National Guard, as well as private security forces hired by the wealthy, entered the fray. According to ProPublica, the police were also given orders to shoot looters on sight, and by many accounts, they did.
These private forces were an active detriment to the relief efforts in the days and weeks following the storm. Officers detained and, in some cases, harassed citizens distributing supplies. Vital space on boats and helicopters was often reserved for armed escorts. Very early into the recovery, the Mayor ordered the police to deemphasize search and rescue efforts to prioritize an end to the “looting.” The Mayor would later admit that reports of looting were exaggerated (and years later would eventually be convicted of corruption for an unrelated kickback scheme), but that initial perception of “mobs” cost lives.
Many leaders still treat people this way during disasters. When Hurricane Ida hit New Orleans this year, the police were very quick to assemble an anti-looting task force, yet not nearly enough effort was placed into recovery efforts. As one activist told the publication Grist: "I'm really pissed off that the most visible recovery 'effort' I have seen is a bunch of army boots with machine guns sitting in front of stores. They couldn't bring us food and water yet, but they have guns."
When we treat people as an intrinsic threat — like a virus, a plague, or simply as evil — rather than as human beings, it impairs our ability to develop proper solutions. During disasters, the real threat to people often comes down to breaks in supply chains (e.g., a lack of water, plumbing, heating, health care, shelter, and food). These are the services that need to be resumed if you want to stop people from "looting." On a wider societal level, they are also the services needed to help mitigate crime in general.
The idea that people are viruses needlessly consuming resources not only strips people of the context for why they need those resources in the first place (i.e., to survive), but it's ultimately ahistorical. Humans existed in a better equilibrium with nature for thousands of years before industrialization. And some, such as many indigenous groups, continue to do so now. The "humanity is a virus excuse" is convenient for those who don't want to think too deeply about how maybe our systems, rather than humanity itself, are what's making our Earth unlivable.
Indeed there are countless positive examples of "humanity" doing more than simply consuming resources. Hurricane Katrina was filled with acts of mutual aid. In one example, a group of activists and healthcare practitioners came together to form the Common Ground Collective, which formed a makeshift medical clinic and distributed food and other supplies to thousands of residents. In another, a makeshift flotilla of boats dubbed "the Cajun Navy" rescued thousands of people from their stranded rooftops. We see this reality also in films in the way survivors start to band together to rebuild San Francisco in San Andreas, or how workers and the rich come together in the film 2012 (2009) to rebuild society.
Both in film and real life, a competing narrative certainly exists, but it doesn't seem to be the dominant one. We are a society stuck in a rudimentary debate over whether people are "good" or "bad," and life is more nuanced than that. The people in the "humanity is a virus" camp use this simplistic logic to demonize everyone so they can sidestep the necessary work of examining our society's systemic problems (e.g. wealth inequality, patriarchy, systemic racism, capitalism, etc.).
If the world ends tomorrow, it will not be because of all of us. Most people are just doing their best to survive. There are monsters, to be sure (and some disasters movies do reflect that reality), but this trend of laying the blame for disasters — both systemic and immediate — on all of us is unhelpful. It reflects a culture that has not done the work to root out those people and organizations who are truly at fault. For its easier to blame everyone than to start holding those who maintain oppressive systems accountable.
The world ends all the time in media, sometimes wonderfully so, but if we want to avert our own apocalypse, we need to stop blaming humanity as a whole for its potential fall. Now more than ever, we need stories that focus less on misanthropy and more on modeling genuine accountability and justice. Ones that lay the blame where it needs to be (i.e., on the institutions preventing change) and show their viewers a potential path forward, away from disaster.
For in truth, the virus isn't humanity. It never was, and it's only through our collective humanity that we can indeed save the world.