We’re all peddlers of the apocalypse

We’re all peddlers of the apocalypse is a self-implicating expression about how ordinary habits and self-interest persist during catastrophe. Rather than describing apocalypse as a force that transforms people into heroes, it insists that familiar social behavior continues inside the emergency: people bargain, seek favor, protect their belongings, and participate in the conditions they condemn.

The Scene Behind the Expression

The speaker recalls a collective farm chairman wanting two cars to move his family and their clothes and furniture. The Party organization also demanded a car in the name of fairness. Yet for several days there had not been enough vehicles to transport a group of nursery-school children. Even two cars could not carry all the chairman’s family possessions, including three-liter cans of jam and pickled vegetables; the speaker saw the family pack them the following day. The imbalance makes the apocalypse legible not through spectacle but through a contest over transport, in which children’s needs are left unmet while adults argue over whose possessions deserve space.

The speaker did not film the packing. The omission matters: the remembered episode survives as an image that was not captured, and the expression turns that image into a judgment on the people within it, including the observer who carries it. The speaker also recalls buying salami and canned food in a store, fearing it was unsafe to eat but driving it around rather than throwing it away. The small, unresolved act echoes the larger scene: fear does not erase attachment to things, even when their safety is in doubt.

Ordinary Conduct Under Catastrophe

The phrase gathers these episodes into a bleak account of continuity. Under apocalyptic conditions, people still gossip and ingratiate themselves with bosses; they still try to save a television and an unattractive fur coat. The list places social maneuvering beside the defense of possessions, making neither an extraordinary aberration. The speaker’s conclusion is that people remain the same, “until the end of time.” The force of the expression comes from its refusal to set ordinary selfishness apart from disaster: catastrophe exposes familiar conduct rather than guaranteeing moral transformation.

The Unmade Film

The expression returns when the speaker describes a long film held in memory but never made, composed of many episodes. The repetition turns the phrase into a frame for that unwritten record. Its episodes include concrete scenes that were not filmed, while the speaker’s remembered images preserve what the camera did not. The result is an uneasy form of testimony: the speaker indicts the social habits witnessed in the disaster but does not claim exemption from the ordinary human attachments and fears that the phrase condemns.