Everything Must Go: A Review

Dorian Lynskey’s Everything Must Go is a fascinating tour through humanity’s long obsession with the end of the world. Part literary history, part cultural criticism, and part catalog of catastrophe, the book explores how people have imagined apocalypse across centuries of novels, films, religious movements, political ideologies, and scientific speculation.

The scope of Lynskey’s research is astonishing. He moves effortlessly from the Book of Revelation to nuclear war fiction, from H.G. Wells and Mary Shelley to Hollywood disaster movies and modern climate-change narratives. Along the way, he introduces a seemingly endless parade of prophets, novelists, filmmakers, cult leaders, scientists, and doomsayers who have tried to explain how the world might end—and what that ending would reveal about humanity itself.

What emerges is less a history of apocalypse than a history of human fears. Every era imagines destruction in its own image. Religious societies envision divine judgment. The Cold War generated visions of nuclear annihilation. Today, environmental collapse, pandemics, artificial intelligence, and technological disruption occupy the place once held by biblical horsemen. The details change, but the fascination remains remarkably constant.

One of the book’s strengths is Lynskey’s ability to treat these visions seriously without surrendering to them. He understands that apocalyptic stories are rarely just about destruction. They are often expressions of hope, warning, wish fulfillment, or moral judgment. The end of the world becomes a way of talking about the world we currently inhabit.

At times, however, the book can feel almost too comprehensive. The sheer number of books, films, historical episodes, and personalities discussed occasionally creates the feeling of reading an encyclopedia of apocalypse rather than a single sustained argument. Readers looking for a strong central thesis may find themselves overwhelmed by the abundance of examples.

Yet that abundance is also the book’s achievement. Lynskey has assembled what is likely the most exhaustive survey of end-of-the-world imagination available in a single volume. Even when the discussion wanders, it remains engaging because the subject itself is so endlessly inventive.

In the end, Everything Must Go demonstrates that humanity has spent centuries imagining its own extinction. The details differ, but the impulse is universal. We seem unable to stop asking how the story ends—and what that ending might say about who we are. 

Apocalypse Now??

Last night I talked with my best friend from the Army back in the 70s. We were talking about the future and he was more depressed than a cat in a room full of rocking chairs. He said we can't pay off the debt--"we" meaning all of us Americans--and he started to bring up all the troubles around us. I hadn't thought of this before but I am in the middle of reading the Gulag Archipelago:  a book of almost 1400 pages about Russian labor camps and the politics of the Soviet era in the Soviet Union.

I asked my friend, "If you lived in Hamburg Germany in 1943 and looked around you at the firebombing and and the black cars that came in the middle of the night to take people away who never came back and you knew Jews and others were being slaughtered by the tens of thousands per month what would you think then? What would the future look like? Would you think the German economy would be one of the strongest in the world and that Germany would be one of of the freest and most peaceful nations on earth within 20 or 30 years? No you what you would think the Apocalypse is coming and it's got a come soon just like you hear from misguided preachers and from TV and talk radio.

"And what if you lived in Japan in 1945. Your country has a completely wrecked economy and two smoldering nuclear waste sites with more than a hundred thousand dead in each one. What would you think that with that economy come back to be the third strongest in the world with that country have better health in general than most countries on earth?"

No there is no way you would think that.  

But it is true.

And here we are with the most abundant food the best healthcare and still one of the strongest economies on earth ever in his history and some people can do nothing but BITCH.  

You might think because I read about Soviet gulags that I would be as depressed and worried about the apocalypse as Survivalists in Idaho. But it's the reverse.  Reading about the horrors of the Soviet Union--the horrors it visited on its own citizens--and reading about the slaughter that was World War II and how little any of the armies, even ours, cared about its soldiers that I am so thankful I live in America RIGHT NOW.

it's true about people in every country in the world at every time in history that those who have the best circumstances bitch the most. Who files the most lawsuits? Rich people. I've served in both the Air Force and the Army. In my experience airmen bitch way more than soldiers. And I'm sure Marines bitch less than either the Air Force or the Army. So it just makes sense that the bitchiest country on the planet would have the most food the best healthcare and and still think the world is coming to an end.

If you still believe that you are stuck in the worst place in the history of the world in the hopeless situation please shut off your television and turn off talk radio and ignore Facebook for a while. Read what life was like in Moscow in 1937 or in Berlin in 1945 or in Beijing in 1970 or in Nagasaki in 1945.  Those people could have been hopeless.  They weren't.  They rebuilt their shattered world.  

Each one those places is 1000 times better than it was at its worst.  And if you are a Believer, how much worse that you profess eternal Hope and can't be as optimistic as non-believers in in the rubble of World War II.

We live in a great country and those who think otherwise should find something else to fill their fantasy life.