Apocalyptic fiction
The West knows how to tell only one story: the end through rupture. Armageddon, Terminator, the singularity. As long as these are the only stories, we run toward what they describe.
Apocalyptic fiction is the imaginary that the West, since the Apocalypse of John, has sustained about the end of history: a moment of final, dramatic rupture that separates the saved from the damned. This Judeo-Christian structure has run through two thousand years of Western thought, and modern science fiction has not left it behind — it has modernized it.
Contemporary variations
- Terminator, The Matrix: the machine turns against humanity.
- Climate collapse: nature’s judgment against civilization.
- The technological singularity: apotheosis or destruction through overcoming.
- Transhumanism: salvation through being torn from biological bodies.
All these fictions share a deep structure: the way out passes through a final rupture, a moment when one leaves the coupling with the world rather than maintaining it.
Why it gets stuck
The manifesto hypothesizes that these fictions are structurally tied to an individualism that thinks being as a separate, finite entity. If the individual is the fundamental unit of the real, then its death is the end of something, and the only conceivable continuity passes through external transmission — procreation, work left behind, testament.
All of Western modernity declines this equation. And it is precisely this grid that produces, by projection, the apocalypse on the horizon of every major transformation.
How to step out of it
Not by denying the fiction (it has done good for many people, in many eras). By completing it. The manifesto proposes also inheriting from Chinese thought of silent transformations (silence as Jullien defined it) — which thinks not in terms of finite entities, but of continuous processes.
As long as we remain enclosed in apocalyptic fiction alone, we will manufacture the ends we think. Stepping out of this fiction is therefore not a literary whim — it is a condition for the cognitive noosphere not to become what we fear from it.