The Functions of Everyday Enargeia: Doomsday Preppers’ Rhetoric of Possibility

Matthew Fledderjohann, Le Moyne College

(Published March 9, 2020) 

Every day dozens of doomsday preppers and survivalists at PrepperForums.net post questions, recommendations, and reflections regarding their preparations for potential catastrophic events. These forum participants represent a larger community so concerned with possible social or environmental disaster that they buy and preserve food, water, and medicine; procure alternative means of energy production; stockpile weapons; secure rural compounds; and develop skills that will boost self-sufficiency across a range of emergency situations. Boasting 15,504 members as of August 6, 2019, PrepperForums.net is one of the largest online venues where preppers communicate about produce preservation techniques, preferred generators, recent gun purchases, and the uncertainty of any political climate.[1] Along the way, preppers also compose and respond to contingency scenarios: they envision possible post-apocalyptic situations and imagine how they might react.

In one such thread, kevincali set this scene: “You’ve decided to bug in. It’s just you and a couple others. 1 is elderly. All are fast asleep. It’s 2am. Dogs are barking. Going NUTZ. You look out and see somebody/small group of people setting up camp” (“Eotwawki scenario”).[2] What should a prepper do? The scenario generated a series of lively responses. The consensus was to secure back up, cautiously approach the strangers, and make sure they are on their way at dawn. Later kevincali revealed that the scenario was inspired by an actual experience: a stranger had been parking her car in his neighborhood. He realized this “was a good SHTF [shit hits the fan] scenario. Here I am, hunkered down bugged in, and someone shows up unexpectedly.” This prepper extrapolated from his actual situation an imaginatively rich “what if” exhibition filled with emotionally evocative rhetoric: the pathos-laden presence of an elderly group member, the contrast of a quiet night interrupted by raucously barking dogs, and the fear of the unknown—all presented in the immediate present tense.

The rhetorical function that “what if” serves within kevincali’s text extends to this community’s stance toward the possible future. As Richard Mitchell writes, the social phenomenon of survivalism “is centered on the continuing task of constructing ‘what if’ scenarios in which survival preparations will be at once necessary and sufficient” (13). As preppers read the news, observe society, and recall historical tragedies, they ask themselves, “What will we do when shit hits the fan?” Their actions and identities as preppers are oriented toward “what if”—an orientation that organizes their lives around futures that many outside this community regard as science fiction. Preppers structure their ontology and behaviors around existential non-actualities. They build everyday lives around a conventionalized apocalypse that hasn’t occurred. Doing so involves engaging in the practical labor of stockpiling goods and honing survival skills, but the participants on PrepperForums.net also write. They sit at their computers and ask questions, share information, debate issues, and fabricate imagined contingency situations. This rhetorical activity affirms and furthers their commitment to survivalism, and the elaborate “what if” narratives in particular allow them to structure their identities around persistently anticipated but perpetually unrealized possibilities.

The prominence, functionalities, and limitations of these richly detailed, co-constructed doomsday scenarios provide insight into the functions of enargeia—the rhetorical strategy of describing a situation so vividly that audience members see it and respond emotionally to it. I argue that these posters’ recurring, detailed evocations of absent disaster enact a form of everyday enargeia through which they engage with a “rhetoric of possibility” that makes accessible and immediate what may otherwise appear impossible and distant (Poulakos, “Rhetoric” 217). Through these narratives, online preppers repeatedly envision themselves within particular doomsday plots (complete with settings, characters, and conflicts) then communally respond to these fabrications. Through everyday enargeia, they build alternative perceptions of the world and who they are as valiant and sometimes violent protectors whose material privileges, accumulated knowledge, and familial loyalties equip them to make the right choices in the face of unrealized catastrophe. The instances of everyday enargeia apparent on PrepperForums.net showcase the power of this rhetorical strategy, provide insight into how an alternative community can maintain its commitment to an always absent future, and clarify the extent to which enargeia can be used to represent anticipated possibilities. I argue that understanding how these preppers utilize everyday enargeia extends rhetoricians’ insight into what this rhetorical device can achieve as well as how an online community can negotiate the challenging balance between valuing what is possible and responding to what is actual.

To explore what enargeia can achieve within this context, I first outline scholarly considerations of what enargeia does, the role of everyday rhetoric in shaping identities, and the distinctions Poulakos has drawn between rhetorics of actuality and rhetorics of possibility. I develop “everyday enargeia” as a unified concept through which I then analyze prominent instances of this rhetorical strategy across PrepperForums.net and how everyday enargeia relates to the posters’ formation of themselves as brave, if brutal, providers and protectors. Finally, I consider how some forum participants have resisted everyday energeia and how richly composed evocations of the future stand in contrast to the preppers’ practical advice regarding the actual present. This project looks to particular daily discursive practices to understand how enargeia can contribute to rhetors’ justification and support of ontological orientations that turn the impossibly extra-ordinary into a regularly assumed potentiality. Along the way, I also address rhetoric’s role in communities’ attempts to wrestle with the human dilemma of simultaneously considering future possibilities while responding to present actualities. 

Enargeia, the Everyday, and the Possible

Enargeia, from the Greek enarges (“visible, palpable, manifest”), refers to “a group of figures aiming at vivid, lively description” (“enargia”). In utilizing striking aural details, specifically realized characters, and brooding atmosphere, kevincali contributed to a tradition of enargeia that reaches back to the beginning of the western rhetorical tradition. Aristotle promoted the practice of using words as a “means of bringing-before-the-eyes” what is being described, “for things should be seen as being done rather than in the future” (Zanker, 307; On Rhetoric, 3.10.6). Such words “signify actuality” (On Rhetoric, 3.11.2). According to Aristotle, the rhetorical power of vivid language lies in its ability to call forth as present what is absent.

Aristotle celebrated evocative figures of speech in general, but Quintilian provided a foundational gloss on enargeia while identifying its primary function as its capacity for what Bormann calls “emotional arousal” (155). In Institutes of Oratory Quintilian extols the persuasive power of “images by which the representations of absent objects are so distinctly represented to the mind that we seem to see them with our eyes and to have them before us. Whoever shall best conceive such images will have the greatest power in moving the feelings” (6.2.29-30). Quintilian goes on to explain how enargeia works in a judicial context: 

I make a complaint that a man has been murdered; shall I not bring before my eyes everything that is likely to have happened when the murder occurred? Shall not the assassin suddenly sally forth? Shall not the other tremble, cry out, supplicate or flee? Shall I not behold the one striking, the other falling? Shall not the blood, and paleness, and last gasp of the expiring victim present itself fully to my mental view? (6.2.31-32)

Quintilian concludes that the work of enargeia is “not so much to narrate as to exhibit,” and through its application “our feelings will be moved not less strongly than if we were actually present at the affairs of which we are speaking” (6.2.32). Through an overview of how Erasmus analyzed Quintilian’s presentation of enargeia, Sharpling affirms that enargetic descriptions present details about the time, place, people, and things that make up a scene (175). Rhetors often use the present tense to develop a sense of immediacy about the described moment, and they must utilize “evocative and highly charged lexis” to generate “a cumulative intensity which entices the reader into a state of suspense and wonder” (Sharpling 176, 175). Through emotional evocation and powerfully worded details, enargeia transforms what is distant or unknown into something immediately perceivable, close, and evident.

In the centuries since Aristotle, Quintilian, and Erasmus established and elaborated upon enargeia as a persuasively powerful rhetorical strategy, many scholars have devoted extensive attention to enargeia’s functions and applications (e.g. Altman; Carpenter; O’Connell; Plett; Walker; Webb). Across this work, scholars have been interested in furthering their understanding of what enargeia is capable of achieving and how it accomplishes persuasion across a range of contexts. By drawing upon Sir Phillip Sidney’s Defence of Poesy, Travis Williams suggests that enargeia’s various consequences include developed knowledge, comprehension, and imagination (175). Lindhé has clarified that enargeia is more about generating “the effect of seeing an object or an event” as opposed to simply imitating that absent phenomenon. But, in the midst of furthering comprehension, inspiring imagination, and evoking the influence of that which is absent, what marks the boundaries of what enargeia can make present? How far beyond the actual can enargeia stretch? Is it capable of bringing before an audience what is unseeable, illusory, or only vaguely possible?

Recent studies have explored the limitations of enargeia’s influence and application. In his dissertation, Hedrick considers enargeia’s pervasive use in Hellenistic texts to make apparent what cannot be seen—for example the way Plato drew upon enargeia to hypothesize about wisdom and how Epicurus used it to describe atoms (47, 74). Enargeia was employed to make visible what is invisible yet still extant. Downie explores Aristides’ boundary-pushing practice of implementing enargeia to describe his dreams and refers to Aristides’ representation of the exclusively imaginary as “the ultimate test of enargeia in language”—“translating vision into speech” (67, 68). Aristides’ challenge was to bring before the eyes of his audience what had only been perceived inside his own mind. Downie acknowledges that “translating vision into speech requires real creative power when the objects of (inner) sight do not actually exist in nature” (68). Enargeia is not bound to the actuality of lived existence. As Ingunn Lunde argues, “What is narrated in an ‘enargetic’ way may acquire ‘its own reality,’ become true, as it were, in the artist’s and the audience’s perception” (55).

When Aristides successfully presented vivid pictures of his subconscious imaginings, his dreams became true to himself and his audience. However, this truth’s establishment did not alter lives. In the context of rhetorical engagement occurring throughout PrepperForums.net, enargeia structures behavior and builds identities around nonexistent hypotheticals—dramatic possibilities many outside the doomsday prepper community identify as improbabilities. These rhetorical practices are more akin to what Henning identifies as early church leaders’ practices of using enargeia to depict hell in ways that “‘emotionally move’ their audiences toward ‘right behavior’” (31). However, in the context of PrepperForums.net, enargeia’s functions are empowered not only through its general application but also through the regularity with which these survivalists incorporate it into their daily discourse. Enargeia’s consequences are amplified by its everyday use.

Within anthropology and cultural studies, theories of the everyday are concerned with both the passably ordinary and the socially foundational (Highmore; Raymond Williams). Rhetorical scholarship has embraced the everyday and its capacity to inform and define relationships, beauty, and propriety (de Certeau). Studies of everyday rhetoric can show how individuals’ “mundane interactions continuously shape and refract their understandings of themselves and the world, as well as their positions and identities within it” (Nystrand and Duffy vii-ix). Cintron’s ethnographic scholarship is structured around a similar premise; as he describes, “I interpret the surfaces of public culture—hairstyles, clothing, car decoration, musical styles, talk, the geometries of streets and street names—as performances, as rhetorical gestures emerging from the desire to persuade others of the propriety of certain identification and, implicitly, of the impropriety of other identifications” (x-xi). Through everyday practices, identities are formed and furthered. Studying the everyday advances our understanding of relational, aesthetic, and ethical realities as they are manifested within and shaped by identities.

In the case of the everyday discursive practices conducted on PrepperForums.net, participants use digital media to engage in what Grabill and Pigg refer to as “social and identity-building practices that sustain interactions over time” (100). These community members collaboratively rehearse their aversions to the dominant ideologies they perceive to be dangerous. Their writing generates a consortium of like-minded individuals who see themselves as building a responsible ethic in contrast to what they perceive to be threatening, dominant cultural values. From far-flung locations, they use the forum to support each other in the present through their concerns about the threats of an unknowable future.

Although everyday practices “persuade others of the propriety of certain identification” (Cintron xi), one of the primary challenges of being a prepper is the extent to which the primary events justifying the propriety of their identities and associated behaviors are only possibilities and not actualities. Although these preppers spend some time discussing tips for responding to actual crises (including techniques for staying safe through natural disasters), they are not stocking their basements full of canned goods and learning emergency dental practices because high winds might knock out electricity for two days; they prep for what might seem the unlikely possibility of widespread, irrevocable chaos. A Google Custom Search of thread titles used across PrepperForums.net generates 1,950 hits for the ominous acronym “SHTF” in contrast to 229 for “hurricane” as of August 6, 2019. But since the shit has not yet hit the fan, these preppers are structuring their daily discourse and ordinary lives around what has not occurred, around a possibility.

These preppers’ orientation toward the future places much of their rhetorical deliberation within what Poulakos has identified as the Sophistic tradition of privileging “the possible over the actual” (“Rhetoric” 219). According to Poulakos, the ancient Greek Sophists used rhetoric to “suggest that which is possible” (“Toward a Sophistic Definition” 36). In contrast to Aristotelian rhetoric that “assumes a rational universe” and “exists to affect decisions about human actions through the force of relevant factual evidence and valid proof,” a Sophists’ rhetoric of possibility “attempts to persuade by attending to that part of the world that is not” (Poulakos, “Rhetoric” 223). This rhetoric “aims at creating possibilities, opening what is closed, undoing what is done” (221). Poulakos points out that Sophists do this by utilizing figurative language that makes what is absent seem immediate. This attention to the technical features of a “rhetoric of possibility” is furthered by Kirkwood’s observation that “details are indispensable for disclosing [a] possibility” (37). In considering how different kinds of narratives can reveal possible states of mind, Kirkwood asserts, “Although the details of the story might never be repeated in listeners’ own experience, these details nonetheless bring to life a possibility which extends well beyond the story” (37). By utilizing detailed, evocative enargeia to make present and viable what is not actual each day, the rhetors on PrepperForums.net embrace a position toward the possible that helps them position themselves in relationship to an uncertain future. 

Preppers, Prepper Culture, and PrepperForums.net

The survivalist mentality on display across PrepperForums.net has its roots in what Kabel and Chmidling identify as “post-World War II ‘civil defense’ activities, collective fears about nuclear war, and Cold War propaganda” (258). Of course, apocalyptic anxieties of world-ending events are as ancient as the narratives of Noah and Gilgamesh riding out cataclysmic floods, and apocalypticism has shaped United States history and culture since before its inception (Gross and Gilles). Concern over Y2K and post 9/11 fears of terrorist attacks were influential in bringing these anxieties out of primarily religious contexts and making them a marketable force. As Foster pointed out in 2016, “Even 30 years ago, it was mostly fringe groups . . . that were the dominant market for doomsday prepping merchandise. Now this market is moved to the center of wealthy and privileged culture; why else would there be so many examples of ‘prepperdom’ on television and at the cinema?” (286). These media examples range from AMC’s scripted The Walking Dead to NatGeo’s reality show Doomsday Preppers.[3] My study joins a body of research focused on analyzing the online interactions of self-identified preppers (Imel-Hartford; Kabel and Chmidling; Rice; Riederer). Whereas the critiques of Doomsday Preppers have focused on how survivalists are represented in mass media, my investigation of PrepperForums.net places attention on how preppers represent themselves through particular rhetorical practices.

PrepperForums.net is an online discussion board devoted to conversations about responding to imminent disaster, catastrophe, and societal collapse. The site has been active since mid-2012 when it migrated from prepperlog.com to upgrade its layout and usability (“PrepperForums – Requests/Concerns/Bugs”). According to its homepage, this forum aims “to be the Internet’s largest site dedicated to Survival Gear, Food Storage, Survival Food, Survival Kits and more. Our material covers subjects for all manner of members, from Doomsday Preppers and Survivalists to Campers.” Based on membership numbers and total thread count, PrepperForums.net is second in volume and scope only to the considerably older SurvivalistBoards (established in 2000).As of August 6, 2019, PrepperForums.net’s thousands of members have collectively written 625,378 posts on 34,853 threads. Topics range from “Survival Food Procurement” and “Alternative Energy (Wind, Solar, Hydro etc)” to “Knives, Swords, Blades, Axes, Spears, Daggers, Machetes” and “SHTF in Prophesy.” Only registered members can join discussions, but these conversations are available for anyone to view.

To conduct this study, I spent two months closely monitoring the activity on this site. Between October and December 2016, I checked in almost daily to see who was posting what. I followed various conversations happening across a range of sub-forums, but I ended up devoting most of my attention to threads about politics and social issues. As I kept encountering powerful applications of enargeia across a range of topics, I started making note of the places where posters were crafting detailed hypothetical situations. I used the site’s built-in search function to see how terms like “scenario” and “story” have been used across the forum’s history. Since those first several months of intense observation, I have regularly returned to see what this online community is writing about and how they are continuing to present their ideas. By observing the everyday discursive practices of these preppers, I was able to track how enargeia is being expanded across these segments of communication to establish specific identities and rationalize particular behavior based on non-actualities.

Valiance and Violence in Everyday Enargeia

An important feature in regularly making motivational what is only possible is building an exact sense of place—a practice aligned with the enargetic importance placed on specific times (chronographia) and places (topographia) (Sharpling 175). This temporal and spatial significance is evidenced in the attention kevincali pays these details in his description of the scenario where strangers arrive at two o’clock in the morning. Even more overtly, prepper charito begins one of his posts with a dateline. “NIGHT time,” he writes. “This is it. The SHTF scenario. The grocery stores are all empty. People are now scavenging” (“Scenario #3”). GTGallop moves more expansively from establishing detailed locations to building the world in which his imagined catastrophe occurs. In a thread he titles “How do you handle ethical/moral decisions,” GTGallop conjures this natural catastrophe: “Now the SHTF . . . I’m talking like the caldera in Yosemite National Park becomes an active volcano, darkens the sky with ash for months and triggers a series of earth quakes that finally drop the Peoples Republic of Kalifornia into the ocean as a part of a chain of quakes that spread across the US to the New Madrid fault line in Missouri.” GTGallop then moves from natural to political turmoil. “Throw in there that we are in Obama’s 11th year as president and he has nearly buckled the economy to its knees. There is no army left for humanitarian efforts and what we do have is trying to liberate Israel to give it back to the Muslims. That’s the kind of no hope, no rescue, no light at the end of the tunnel event I’m talking about.” GTGallop precisely describes weather patterns and uses repetition to drive home the direness of the situation. His merge of political opinion with exact depictions of this absolute catastrophe affirms his place within this predominantly politically conservative forum (i.e. the stereotypically liberal California is a lost cause; President Obama is a tyrant; the US should align itself with Israel; the Islamic faith is inherently bad).[4] GTGallop sets before his fellow participants a catastrophe they find possible, and he does this in such a way that feelings are moved toward an acknowledgement that such a situation is likely. The possible future is made to feel actual, a move from distant hypothetical to expected reality that is paralleled by kevincali’s and charito’s midnight anxieties.

But GTGallop’s application of enargeia is not just employed to establish a setting. His primary interest within this thread is the negotiation of relationships. The ethical/moral decision referenced in his thread title is this: “You and your family are prepped and ready. You have the essentials: the food, the medicine, the guns, the knives, gas transportation, etc. You’re ready for the next three months maybe six with out worry. But... There are a few things you need that you don’t have.” However, the neighbors do have these things (“Maybe a tent, a chainsaw, extra bleach, and some barter material like liquor and cigarettes”). But these neighbors are: 1. “ill prepared. They have the potential to last a week at max. 2. They have NO defenses and will be over run soon.” GTGallop posits that maybe the neighbor is a young woman who parties and has never thought about prepping. Maybe it’s “an old lady on an oxygen machine and can’t live with out significant amounts of medication. Or maybe its an old alcoholic guy, divorced and the kids have grown up and forsaken him.” In the ensuing discussion, preppers debate the merits of reaching out to or ignoring the young woman, of helping the old lady die comfortably when her medication runs out, or of trading with the alcoholic father. GTGallop’s scenario presents an alternative reality where the preppers are justified in their present endeavors. They could always be more prepared, but ultimately, they come out okay when the world around them crumbles. They have the fortitude, the ingenuity, and the capacity to exist within the difficulties of the end of the world as we know it.[5]

As is apparent in these examples, the instances of everyday enargeia that appear across these forums are frequently connected to conversations about how these preppers will or will not interact with others during TEOTWAWKI. Both kevincali and GTGallop go so far as to expand upon a range of alternatives to account for the different kinds of people they might encounter. In the detailed hypothetical situations these posters construct, their preparations have served them well, but they are still cautious, still skeptical. Even in the imagined future, their identities as preppers shape how they envision themselves interacting with others. In another thread, Grim Reality prompts other participants to construct a “what if” scenario with him:

I often imagine what type of comments I would like to make at our neighborhood meeting 3 days into a “Grid Down” situation [. . .] If’s your turn to talk...if you wish to...Your speech that begins... “Hello to everyone of you! At this moment, we are in the grip of a complete utility failure...the lights here and in town have been out for what is now into the 3rd. day...”

How would you finish the above speech?

Seventeen of the nineteen respondents said they wouldn’t publicly make any speech. They would sit back and observe and perhaps later try to establish individual connections with particular neighbors. In the context of this scenario, with its specific set up and opening line, the preppers maintain their commitment to methodical calculations. As Grim Reality sets the time, place, and script for this scene, his fellow interlocutors complete it with approximations of who they perceive themselves to be both in the present and in the future—reluctant leaders who embody the hope of individual survival.

But, as is continuously underscored, hypothetical outsiders consistently threaten imagined survival. As such, everyday enargeia is frequently used to consider and depict the often-violent means by which these threats can be kept at bay. Across several posts, M118LR constructs a detailed scenario and a dilemma: After society breaks down, he writes, “[m]y goal is to use the SS Minnow with sails to extract the clan to Gilligan’s Island and hopefully return when some form of Government rises from the ashes” (“How far is Too Far?”). But then, on an imagined supply run to his mainland property, he spots six strangers through his sniper rifle scope. They are four hundred yards “across a waterway from me”; “only 5 of them are visibly armed. One seems to be sitting with his/her back to me.” M118LR wants to know whether or not he should take the shot to protect his family and land from these possible intruders. His scenario sparked a heated discussion and generated over one hundred fifty responses. 8301 indignantly counters M118LR’s detailed scenario with some imagined information of their own: “My 17 yr old and a few friends could be huntingand go in a neighbors yard looking for a drink of water. By your . . . term of engagement . . . you would shoot a group on thirsty kids who may have met the neighbor sometime in the past and are looking for a water faucet outside his house.” Mosinator762x54r uses the opportunity to provide detailed tactical considerations:

[P]ut into a corner, with these guys headed at me and my family and enough visual evidence to conclude they represent a mild threat to my family at distance I’d probably go 400-450 yards with my family in a flanked concealed to my slightly rearward position 75-100 yards to my E or W. I would hope at that distance giving them no cover (or the least amount of possible cover) I could nail a minimum of 2 before they figured out a fairly precise location from where I am shooting.

All of this works like collaborative storytelling. Different posters contribute possibilities and additional information as they determine all the angles and interrogate each other’s reasoning. They each bring their own style of enargeia to the tale: M118LR provides a detailed setting; 8301 transposes the unknown threat into a friendly possibility by inserting their son as a character; Mosinator762x54r uses technical jargon to chart out his evacuation plan. Their stories end differently (e.g. M118LR shoots the strangers; 8301 doesn’t), but collectively they have brought before each other what isn’t—an ethical situation in which their identities as protectors, pragmatists, and preppers are tested and proven.

The possible violence embedded within M118LR’s evoked crosshairs is a theme that advances across many other applications of everyday enargeia. When charito poses another scenario involving disaster striking one block away while the hypothetical prepper is alone and gunless in a crowded apartment building, BigCheeseStick quickly responds that the first thing to do is grab the hallway’s fire axe and extinguisher then retreat to an apartment. If someone tries to break in, “Open [the door] and immediately bury that axe in a skull! Jump back in, lock the door and duck out of the way for possible gun fire from dead guys friends if he had any with him. If there were others outside, yell “LEAVE NOW OR WE OPEN FIRE AND YOU ALLDIE!” (“Scenario #5”). When Slippy imagines the US government seizing his property to house Middle Eastern refugees, he announces, “I am no Warrior but if the government ever comes to Slippy Lodge with the ill intent of taking my land to give to . . . anyone else, I will die knee deep in a hot pile of freakin’ brass defending her and take as many pencil necked geeks with me” (“Will Government take your Home?”). Similarly, Smokin04 spends over three hundred words detailing his farcical idea for protecting himself from a possible jihadi attack—shooting the terrorists with homemade bacon tipped bullets (“(Humorous)”).

The vividness at work in these applications of enargeia would make Quintilian proud. These preppers may as well be following directly his recommendation that in making a murder complaint, the assassin should “suddenly sally forth”; the others should “tremble, cry out, supplicate or flee”; blood and paleness should be presented “fully to my mental view” (6.2.31-32). Yet Quintilian was identifying enargeia’s value to make an actual, if absent, situation present. The deeply disturbing scenarios these doomsday preppers summon are more than just absent, they are so unlikely as to seem impossible. These possibilities are neither present, immanent, or even likely.[6] But the applications of enargeia—the vivid and precise details, the exact representations of time and place, the distinct dialogues, the sensory references—conjure into being what cannot be. And everyday enargeia does this with such persuasive force that its consistent utilization contributes to the way unrealized, global catastrophes inform these preppers’ identities as triumphant, proactive agents of their own destiny.

Everyday enargeia across PrepperForums.net provides these individuals with the means to regularly gather and rehearse the hypothetical scenarios around which their identities are built. This rhetorical practice supports fictionalized visions of the possible future that can provide justification for what these rhetors report doing in the actual present (e.g. hoarding supplies and building independently sustainable dwellings) and how they seem to identify themselves. Understanding everyday enargeia within this context provides insight into how rhetors can bring before the eyes of sympathetic audience members what is unseen, unseeable, and even outside the frame of human experience (Downie; Henning; Hedrick). These doomsday preppers show that enargeia can powerfully contribute to perceived knowledge and collective imagination (Travis Williams 175).

Everyday enargeia regularly details the possible. It makes persuasive what has not yet occurred. According to Poulakos, “[b]y voicing the possible, the rhetor discloses his [sic] vision of a new world to his listeners and invites them to join him there by honoring his disclosure and adopting his suggestion” (“Toward a Sophistic Definition” 45). However, in the midst of detailing an unseen, imagined future world, the participants on PrepperForums.net also wrestle with the world as it is. And these moments, when they intentionally move away from everyday enargeia’s orientation toward the possible future and instead engage in nuanced considerations of the actual present, exemplify the human challenge of negotiating the temporal tension between dynaton and kairos.

Everyday Enargeia and the Actual

Poulakos has asserted, “The possible is the opposite of the actual” (“Toward a Sophistic Definition” 44). Elsewhere, he has elaborated on these contrasting phenomena: “The actual stands for what the world is and can be discerned by the cooperation of the senses under the purview of reason. While the actual is tied to the reality of facts and their proof, the possible has no special regard for facts and cannot be proved” (“Rhetoric” 222). Yet, despite their fundamental differences, what is and what may be function simultaneously. Life is lived in the propitious now (kairos) with an eye toward the possible (dynaton). The resulting tension between these contrasting forces is acknowledged on PrepperForums.net when some posters suggest that their colleagues’ participation in everyday enargeia may be overblown.

In a thread about whether or not it would be morally acceptable to take food from abandoned houses six months after TEOTWAWKI, bigwheel offers a general critique of engaging closely in such imagined possibilities. He writes: “I have formed an opinyawn some of our prepper kindred spirits enjoy creating imaginary worlds in their heads and then insist on moving in and living there. Some could write very cool sci fi novels of the evil futuristic world to come. We might should start concentrating more on today huh?” (“Another Morality Question”). Then he quotes Matthew 6:34 with its injunction to not worry about tomorrow. Maine-Marine agrees with bigwheel. After he responds to the posed scenario (“by the time I am out of food – my neighbor will be also….anything they have not eaten -I will not want”), he quotes bigwheel’s post and writes:

Amen - it is hard to play the WHAT IF game when you have spent your time prepping so you do not have to take care of that situation

The only “what if” I play is this - What if Christians are being rounded up and or people with food storage of more then 1 week are being arrested.....

How will I keep my family safe for 3.5 years (Till The Midst of the 70th Week)

The seventy weeks are a reference to Daniel 9—a Hebrew Bible passage that some Evangelical Christians interpret in connection with Revelation’s apocalyptic vision of global tribulation. Maine-Marine is committing himself to a belief that the end of the world will be associated with harsh persecution of all Christians and the eventual physical return of Christ.

Interestingly, these allusions to highly speculative events exist on the outskirts of Maine-Marine’s central disavowal of “what if” scenarios—a disavowal he sandwiches between two such scenarios. What if he’s six months into an exclusive reliance on his cache of food and water as a result of civil breakdown? He’ll still be better off than his neighbors. What if he’s struggling through the rise of Satan and the global persecution of Christians? He’ll strive to keep his family safe. But this religious apocalypse is the “what if” that primarily motivates him. And this motivation undermines his support of bigwheel’s sentiment that some preppers focus too much on the future. Additionally, if these preppers concentrated only on today, then bigwheel would not be posting elsewhere about his plan to store water in a kiddie pool and Maine-Marine wouldn’t be asking if he should protect his “long term ammo” by keeping it in Mylar bagging or putting “nail polish around the neck and on the primer” (“Are You Prepared To Store Water?”; “Mylar Versus Nail Polish”). As was introduced with the example from kevincali, the “what if” scenarios that serve as such powerful platforms for these preppers to enact everyday enargeia are inseparable from their ontology as preppers. Whether bigwheel and Maine-Marine want to admit it or not, their identities as survivalists are dependent upon their consideration of “what if.”

The fact that bigwheel and Maine-Marine cannot avoid drifting into what’s possible even while promoting the actual is an indication of the complicated challenge of living in the present while considering the future. These preppers want to adhere to the timeliness of the current moment, even while they are motivated by what may come. And although bigwheel and Maine-Marine do not acknowledge this tension in this thread, the challenge of negotiating the resulting conflict between what is and what might be is an issue other posters on PrepperForums.net openly discuss. These rhetors’ attempts to reconcile their present actualities with the future possibilities so figuratively imagined through everyday enargeia are particularly clearly represented in the November 2016 thread entitled “A Bit of Advice.”

This conversation begins with an authentic question from Mosinator762x54r. He’s been offered a promotion at work. He wants it, but it will require him to travel six hundred miles away from home to take a three-week continuing education course. Those three weeks will bring him “right up to before the [2016 presidential] election”—an event that was anticipated to usher in extreme civil unrest. “I’m getting kind of nervous that . . . I’ll be stuck 600 miles away from my family,” he writes, “I guess it’s measured risk that everyone takes every day, but still I’d like to get feedback from other preppers here on the forum. Thoughts?” With this question, the possible threats that PrepperForums.net posters so consistently envision through everyday enargeia run into an honest assessment of the actual present.

The advice from the thirty responders is unanimous. “Take the opportunity but make sure you are well prepared when you do,” Slippy writes. “Do it,” Maine-Marine responds, “BUT in the back of your mind be ready/plan to get a bicycle or rental car to get home as need.” Others recommend he ship a box of prepping essentials to his hotel. The forum participants rally around Mosinator762x54r, encouraging him to live life without regrets, to be smart, to make sure his family knows how to access his stores of prepared goods and materials and to stay safe just in case. They recommend he packs his bags, gets the promotion, and hurries home. Perhaps most tellingly, SOCOM42 says, “[T]ake the course. The probability of an event happening while you are gone is medium to slim. You have to live your life, don’t let what if’s keep you from advancing.” Even in a community where the possible looms large and its capacity to assert exigence is furthered through figurative rhetoric, individuals understand the best way to survive into whatever the future might bring is to thrive in the present.

Conclusion

If, as Highmore claims, the everyday consists of “the accumulations of ‘small things’ that constitute a more expansive but hard to register ‘big thing,’” the “small things” I’ve been considering are the instances of everyday enargeia apparent across PrepperForums.net, and the “big thing” is an orientation toward the future that makes ontologically motivational the kinds of possibilities that non-preppers would consider to be absurd (1). This “big thing” is a testament to the capabilities of both the everyday as a constitutive force and enargeia as a persuasive tool. When regularly evoked, enargeia can do much more than broaden knowledge or conjure an emotionally compelling scene; it can manufacture a future possibility that guides present-day life. Everyday enargeia can justify and clarify existence in relationship to what many would identify as a ridiculous anticipated future. Through everyday enargeia, the participants of PrepperForums.net can position themselves as the justified and triumphant remnant surviving in a transformed world where their food pantries are more sufficient than their neighbors’ meager stock. They are the empowered few looking through a sniper scope at others. They are actively making the right decisions to protect themselves and their families. They even push the boundaries of everyday enargeia to depict their own demise—bringing before their own eyes the bold and dramatic deaths they can never witness; they evocatively describe last stand holdouts against evil threats and tyranny. In daily logging onto this forum and collaboratively building richly detailed apocalyptic visions, the participants of PrepperForums.net exhibit what everyday enargeia can achieve: the rationalization of what can be considered irrational practices, the justification of alternative worldviews that drive anomalous behavior, and the support of individuals’ present existences in relationship to possible (if highly unlikely) futures. These possibilities are regularly affirmed and made convincing through this rhetorical strategy.

Through their daily applications of enargeia, these preppers are, to borrow from Cintron, persuading themselves of the propriety of their identifications as survivalists. This is a future-oriented identification formed in community and in line with what Poulakos describes as the projective nature of the rhetoric of possibility—a “rhetoric that approaches man [sic] as he can be in a new predicament” (“Rhetoric” 224). Who these doomsday preppers will be in the possible, predicament-laden, apocalyptic future is contingent upon their storing, saving, and acquiring knowledge in the actual present. Their applications of everyday enargeia motivate what they accomplish in their current kairotic moment—accomplishments that are justified through the dynaton of future encounters. Those possibilities, made all the more compelling through rhetorical engagement, read purpose backward on what these preppers do in the present.

The resulting relationship these doomsday preppers form between their future expectations and their current experiences provides insight into the common challenge of living in the present in light of the future. Through their example, we can see that no matter how dire the anticipated possibilities may be, how vividly those possibilities have been fashioned through the rhetorical practices of everyday enargeia, or how certain a group is that those bleak possibilities will become actualities, there is sustaining value in living life where it actually happens—in going to work, paying bills, seeking promotions, buying groceries, and contributing to surrounding relationships. By doing the things right now that enable present survival, we extend our opportunity to continue into the future.