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- Picture this: you've just moved into your first home.
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You've overcome stagnant wages
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and staggeringly high property prices
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to finally enter the housing market.
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You are no longer at the whims of your landlord
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or eviction notices and you finally feel secure.
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In the background though,
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you start to hear reports of some sort of disaster,
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maybe a global pandemic, maybe zombies.
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These reports become more and more frequent
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until they suddenly stop.
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Lines of communication have been lost.
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You hear gunshots and screams but no police sirens.
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Society is collapsing.
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And all of a sudden, you no longer feel so secure.
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Without the police, courts or government there
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to help protect what is yours,
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what is stopping someone from barging into your home
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and forcing you out?
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You start to wonder whether it even means anything
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to say that you own your home.
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Whether, in this new world,
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only the strongest and most violent will survive.
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Now, this is a common scenario in post-apocalyptic fiction.
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But despite the fears that the scenario prompts,
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the majority of authors depict
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individuals and communities thriving.
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And this is because without the benefit
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of a third party stepping in
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to help protect their belongings,
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characters are forced to think more creatively
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about how to manage access to resources
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like water, food, and shelter.
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In analysing these texts,
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it is possible to identify new frameworks
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for the distribution of these resources.
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Perhaps based on who needs them the most.
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Perhaps prioritising those who act the most morally.
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Now these new frameworks are important
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because they can destabilise
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our reliance on old ways of thinking,
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sparking new solutions to non-fiction crises
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we are facing right now.
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In today's capitalistic society, we tend to think
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that we have absolute and unconditional rights
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to use what we own.
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We've paid money for something,
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therefore no one should be able to tell us
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what to do with it.
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But what if we could see the world
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the way post-apocalyptic authors do?
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If we could see ownership as more temporary or conditional?
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Well perhaps we might be able to recognise
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and respond to situations in which it is no longer just
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fair or even practical to insist upon this absolute
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and unconditional ownership.
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Where, for example, billionaires can control
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where their fortune goes after they die.
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This often just allows the same families
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to accumulate more and more of the world's wealth,
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further widening the gap between rich and poor.
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Alternatively, where insisting that a piece of land is ours
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means that thousands of climate change refugees
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will be left homeless when rising sea levels
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literally destroy their entire country.
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These issues have proved to be as yet unsolvable.
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So we need to look further afield for answers,
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and there's not much further afield
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than a zombie novel.
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(soft music plays)