I have some unfocused feelings about how much we need to banish the idea of the Apocalypse Man, the Hatchet Child, the Survivor Contestant, and other sorts of He-Man Survivalist archetypes from our collective consciousness.

Humanity survived and thrived because we are social animals who help each other, not because we have a lot of individual Supermen who the rest of us latched onto and pray don't Go Galt on us.

But 2020 has shown us that America at least is just diametrically opposed to social cooperation and wants to embrace regressive Darwinism where the "strongest" survives because of his good genes (in other words: eugenics) and apocalypse training.

And, yeah, you get the phenomena of Can Opener Dad who justifies abusing his child because it's training her for the apocalypse and also she needs to be able to ferret out the meaning of all tools from scratch whilst hungry rather than be shown a simple demonstration.

There's probably some aspect of him who genuinely thinks he's teaching her something useful, and that aspect has been lied to by our entire culture of zombie films and survivor reality television.

We're in the middle of something approaching an apocalypse RIGHT NOW, and the thing keeping people afloat is societal compassion: food banks, financial aid, and masking in order to protect each other.

Things like being able to solve complex tools from scratch rather than consult someone who knows isn't actually a useful skill in this or indeed any other realistic crisis humanity is likely to face.

Like.

You're not going to survive global warming because you're able to survive in the wilds with a hatchet.

If we survive this climate change, it'll be because we humans start cooperating to fix/address it.