39. Beyond Survival: Conscience and the Choice to Serve

“The first thing you do in the apocalypse is kill off all the bleeding hearts.”

The words appeared on my screen during a fierce argument in a preparedness group over the South Korean disaster film Concrete Utopia. What began as a debate about survival exposed a harder question: we had spent years preparing for catastrophe, but what kind of people were we preparing to become?

By then, I knew how fragile ordinary life could be. The question was no longer how much food to store or which escape route to take. It was whether fear would strip away our conscience when survival was at stake. That question would eventually lead me from preparing to survive disaster to preparing to serve within it.

During the pandemic years, the world seemed to grind to a halt. What began as a scattered outbreak spread across continents within months, and in March 2020 the World Health Organization characterised COVID-19 as a pandemic. Almost overnight, humanity found itself caught inside the same invisible crisis.

The systems we had long taken for granted quickly revealed how fragile they were. Flights vanished from departure boards. Borders closed. Trade slowed, supply chains fractured, and words such as lockdown, social distancing, and mandatory quarantine entered ordinary speech. Streets emptied. Airports fell silent. The light of office buildings gave way to the glow of computer screens in private homes. Work, time, and daily life all began to lose their familiar shape.

In those long months of confinement, when one day blurred into the next, the internet became a new kind of public square. By day, people worked from home through fear, fatigue, and uncertainty. At night, they carried their loneliness into WeChat groups and online communities. The pandemic shut each of us inside our own space, yet it drew me back towards a world I had been circling for years: the world of preppers and survivalists.

My interest in that world had begun much earlier. During my 2014 encounter aboard an extraterrestrial craft, one of the beings warned me that if humanity continued to destroy the Earth’s ecology, a chain of major disasters would follow. The words stayed with me like an alarm sounding somewhere below consciousness. In the years that followed, I joined survivalist groups in China and overseas, where members discussed food storage, emergency equipment, water-filtration systems, evacuation routes, wartime contingencies, and the practical mechanics of staying alive. We were a scattered community preparing quietly at the edge of an imagined collapse.

In the West, prepping had already developed into a visible subculture. In China, the number of people involved was far greater than outsiders might assume. Beyond the boundaries of official reassurance, they were building private systems of knowledge, vigilance, and control. The pandemic accelerated that impulse. Global lockdowns, grounded flights, and broken supply chains gave millions of people their first sustained glimpse of how easily the machinery of modern life could fail.

Preparedness groups expanded rapidly. Yet beneath the inventories, escape plans, and calculations of risk, another question was beginning to surface. If civilisation could unravel so quickly, survival would demand more than supplies. It would reveal what people believed, whom they were willing to abandon, and what remained of conscience when fear became stronger than social order.

I often felt that I was living in two realities at once.

In the prepper groups, I traded advice with my fellow survivalists about food reserves, water filters, emergency equipment, evacuation routes, and the practical business of staying alive.  Then, with what I now recognise was poor tactical timing, I would interrupt the discussion to recommend a book I had just finished, Zhao Sile’s Their Journey—my translation of its Chinese title.

I told them about the Chinese Communist Party’s systematic suppression of NGOs, human rights lawyers, and civil society organisations. I wrote about citizenship, moral responsibility, and the obligations that come with living among other people. I shared what I had taken from activist Li Qiaochu’s writing and work: that one’s life is bound to the lives of others, and that conscience carries duties beyond private survival.

To me, the deeper catastrophe had already begun. A moral and spiritual collapse had been unfolding for years, quietly hollowing out public life. It seemed strange to devote so much energy to storing food for a future apocalypse while ignoring the one already taking place around us.

The group responded with silence.

My concerns struck many of them as impractical—the earnest reflections of someone too literary, too idealistic, and insufficiently grounded in survival. In a community preoccupied with generators, tactical gear, canned food, and escape routes, civic conscience appeared almost embarrassing. It could not be packed into a backpack or stored on a shelf.

Their indifference reminded me of a darkly comic observation often attributed to the artist Chen Danqing: We do not have faith in the way Westerners do. Chinese people have a faith of their own “fuck everything else – staying alive is what matters”.

Crude as the observation was, it captured the moral logic I had begun to see at work. Survival had become more than an instinct. It had become a complete philosophy.

Once staying alive is treated as the highest good, questions of responsibility and the kind of future worth preserving can begin to look like luxuries. The moral horizon contracts. The self becomes the final unit of concern.

Decades of political indoctrination, combined with the relentless pressures of ordinary life, had taught many people to withdraw from public responsibility. Politics was dangerous. Civic rights felt distant. Collective action seemed futile. Speaking out could cost a person work, freedom, or security, while withdrawing promised at least the illusion of safety.

Prepping offered something more tangible. Food could be counted. Water could be filtered. Equipment could be tested. A locked storage room full of supplies gave shape to fear and briefly made it manageable. Civic courage offered no such reassurance. It required action without any guarantee of success and sacrifice without any promise of reward.

For many in the group, the conclusion was brutally simple: survival was urgent; responsibility could wait. Those tensions finally came into the open in the group’s response to the film.

The Ethics of “Kill the Bleeding Hearts First”

When the South Korean disaster film Concrete Utopia was released in 2023, it set off a fierce argument in one of my preparedness groups.

In the film, a massive earthquake levels Seoul without warning. Only Hwang Gung Apartments remains standing, a solitary block of concrete above the ruins, offering some protection from the brutal cold that follows. The homeless begin gathering outside, desperate for warmth and a place to survive the night.

The preppers watched the film as though it were a rehearsal for the future. The discussion took on an almost adrenalised intensity. Members dissected every decision, arguing over how the building should have been defended, which outsiders should have been turned away, which characters deserved their fate, and what equipment might have made the difference between survival and death.

The argument reached its peak over a brief scene at a doorway.

Myung-hwa, the female protagonist, is about to lock the door when she sees an elderly woman outside, shivering so badly that she can barely remain standing. A child is beside her, looking up in silent appeal. Both are grey with cold. They are unlikely to survive the night.

Myung-hwa knows that her household’s supplies are already limited. She hesitates. Then she opens the door.

That small act of mercy enraged the group.

Within moments, the conversation hardened into something larger than a debate about a film. One after another, members announced what they regarded as the first law of catastrophe, speaking with a certainty that left no room for doubt:

“The first rule in a collapse: never go soft. Mercy is suicide.”

“I can’t stand bleeding hearts. The first thing you do when society falls apart is kill them all.”

“Exactly. Bleeding-heart bitches deserve to die. Shoot them on sight.”

The calls for violence came thick and fast, carrying a strange note of satisfaction. The comments seethed with contempt for Myung-hwa’s moment of conscience, and at times with something close to hatred. People like her were cast as a threat: one compassionate person, they argued, could endanger everyone around her.

Beneath this cold arithmetic lay a profound fear of goodness. Compassion might consume scarce resources or draw others into risks they had never agreed to take. Fear clothed itself in the language of reason and emerged as a philosophy of survival.

Within Chinese prepper culture, the gendered insult shengmu biao - literally, “Bleeding-heart bitch”—originally described someone who lacked practical judgement in a crisis, used moral pressure against others, and endangered the group in order to preserve an image of personal virtue. Over time, its meaning widened and hardened. Anyone who chose compassion during a disaster could be condemned by the same label. In most of the groups I encountered, bleeding-hearts and bleeding-heart bitches had become virtually interchangeable.

Even the suggestion that the residents might ration their supplies more carefully and admit a few additional survivors was treated as evidence of dangerous naïveté. In these imagined catastrophes, characters with the strongest moral instincts became the figures that preppers despised most. Compassion was redefined as a failure of self-interest, and insufficient selfishness became the unforgivable sin of survival.

The logic was chillingly simple. Once survival was enthroned as the highest good, conscience itself could be recast as betrayal.

Eventually, I interrupted the group.

“Before everyone starts shouting, ‘Kill the bleeding hearts first,’ think about where you have placed yourselves in this story.”

By then, I was angry enough to let it show.

“You all imagine yourselves inside the building—with food, equipment, warmth, and the power to decide who enters. Almost no one imagines standing outside the door. In a real disaster, none of us can know which position we will occupy. You may be forced to abandon your home. You may lose every piece of equipment you have stored and become a refugee with nothing. When that happens, you may be the elderly woman knocking for help. You may never be Myung-hwa inside the warm apartment.”

Their confident survival exercises depended on a dangerous assumption: that they would remain among the protected. They placed themselves above the ruins, looking down at the desperate people below, as though fortune, strength, and resources would always remain on their side.

What unsettled me most was the ease with which the group used the phrase “bleeding hearts” as a sneer. The label reduced compassion to a defect and turned a human being into a category fit for contempt—and, in their imagined future, for elimination. After hearing the same logic repeated from one discussion to the next, I challenged them again.

“According to your reasoning, anyone like Myung-hwa must be removed because her compassion might cost the group resources. Suppose you succeed. Suppose every person still capable of mercy is gone, and the world is left to those who calculate only for themselves. When your turn comes to stand outside the door, no one will remain to open it.

“Our positions in life are never secure. Today you may be the survivor inside; tomorrow, the refugee outside. Be careful how quickly you condemn those who reach out in a crisis. Once every person willing to open the door has been driven away, the door may remain closed when you are the one knocking.”

The backlash was immediate. The chat erupted.

“Forget morality. Supplies are limited. She should never have opened the door.”

“Even if Myung-hwa uses her own food, she’ll run out sooner. She’d better not come begging from the neighbours afterward.”

“Taking people in would endanger the whole building. That isn’t kindness. It’s putting everyone else at risk.”

One part of their objection deserved to be taken seriously. When food, shelter, and danger are shared, one person’s generosity can impose costs on everyone else; mercy without judgement can become another form of irresponsibility. What unsettled me was the speed with which this legitimate concern hardened into contempt for compassion itself—and into fantasies of eliminating compassionate people. I could not know how many of them would act on such words in a real disaster. Still, cruelty had become a badge of competence.

I watched the comments gather momentum, each one reinforcing the same unwritten law of catastrophe.Any possibility that resources might eventually have to be shared was rejected in advance, even when no one had asked for a grain of rice or a drop of water. To guarantee their own safety, they felt compelled to eliminate every imaginable claim before it could arise.

Stripped of the language of strategy and risk management, the principle was brutally clear: my access to resources must come first; another person’s life comes second.

Anyone who challenged that hierarchy was immediately recast as a threat and branded shengmu biao. Beneath the insult lay the fear that governed the entire argument: your compassion may expose me to danger. Your conscience may one day cost me something.

The debate surged across the screen, line after line, as though repetition could make cruelty sound reasonable.

A collective psychology began to take shape before me. In the imagined chaos of a future collapse, people clung fiercely to whatever might keep them alive. Even the smallest act of compassion appeared dangerous if it threatened to reduce their margin of safety. What frightened them almost as much as death was the possibility that decency might leave them vulnerable.

Their answer was to remove that vulnerability in advance. They tried to silence the part of themselves that might hesitate, pity, or open the door. Tenderness had to be sealed away before disaster came, as though a person could survive more securely by becoming less human.

In this way, “kill the bleeding hearts” became a form of symbolic self-defence: discredit kindness before it could make a claim; attack conscience before it could demand sacrifice. Indifference became armour for a fear too deep to acknowledge openly.

Under enough pressure, the moral world can contract with frightening speed. The grand phrases repeated by the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda apparatus—among them, “a community with a shared future for mankind”—invoke a common destiny while leaving the harder question largely untouched: what do we owe one another when sharing the burden carries a real cost?

Watching the group retreat so quickly into self-preservation changed my understanding of apocalypse. It may begin long before the earthquake, famine, or ruined city—whenever ordinary people withdraw responsibility from one another, close the door against conscience, and make survival the final measure of what matters.

Its first ruins are moral; its earliest wasteland lies within the human spirit.

Within that climate, the books I had recommended and my appeals to civic duty had probably already been dismissed as another form of bleeding-heart thinking: an untimely moral seriousness, naïve at best and irritating at worst. In a community devoted to calculating how long a person might survive on the bare minimum, talk of citizenship, responsibility, and the obligations we owe beyond ourselves could only seem extravagant—too lofty, too costly, too far removed from the coordinates of survival.

I had begun to understand citizenship more personally: no life is entirely private, and the world beyond my own door was also, in some measure, my responsibility. Civic consciousness began there—in the recognition that freedom creates obligations and that the fate of others enters, however quietly, into the meaning of one’s own.

The instinct to treat compassion as a danger extended far beyond prepper culture. It had taken root in a society where trust had been steadily eroded and acts of kindness often carried a cost. People had learned that helping the vulnerable might expose them to trouble, while looking away usually felt safer. Goodness came to seem foolish, naïve, even suspect—something to ridicule before it could make a claim on anyone.

Once that logic becomes ordinary, the habits that hold a civilisation together begin to weaken: responsibility, mutual aid, and the willingness to bear another person’s burden. At least as I had come to understand it, the true apocalypse begins when a community collectively turns against its own capacity for mercy.

When fear governs the moral imagination, the person willing to open the door can come to seem more dangerous than the catastrophe outside.

In Buddhist language, I had begun to think of our time as a Dharma-ending age—an era clouded by moral confusion, exhaustion, and spiritual decline. In such a climate, kindness could carry a real cost, and refusing to abandon conscience could itself become an act of courage.

I had come to see the same courage in citizenship: accepting some responsibility for one’s community and for lives beyond the walls of one’s own home. Where institutions offered little protection and society little encouragement, that responsibility often had to be sustained by inner conviction—a clear recognition of the age one inhabited and the kind of person one was still prepared to become within it.

Yet when I turned the same scrutiny on my own judgement, I began to see the deeper exhaustion beneath that instinct. What looked like indifference was often the residue of repeated defeat. Withdrawal had become a form of self-protection: people stopped believing that change was possible, stopped expecting rescue, and no longer dared to imagine a genuinely better world. I may have judged them too harshly.

The age itself had driven many people back toward the most primitive demands of survival. Keep your head down. Protect your family. Tend to what lies within your own walls. In such circumstances, simply keeping a household intact could consume all the strength a person had. Civic responsibility and social conscience became costly choices, carrying the risk of material loss, social punishment, and political danger.

Within that structure, many people in China were never given the conditions in which citizenship could fully take root. They learned to move through society as solitary units of survival—managing danger, narrowing their hopes, and enduring whatever came next.

The warning I had received years earlier suggested a wider meaning of preparedness. It was not enough to brace for the worst while refusing responsibility for the present. As long as the future remained open, preparation also meant acting where action might still alter its course.

Without that responsibility, preparedness could become another form of surrender.

That, I began to think, might be one of humanity’s deepest failures of vision. We invest enormous energy in surviving the darkest future while resisting the cost of changing its course. Preparation for the ruins can become easier than responsibility for preventing them.

As I scrolled through the group’s layered inventories of tactical gear, survival skills, and escape plans, two harsher questions emerged behind them. They reached deeper than the mechanics of staying alive.

If chaos came, was survival truly the only thing left worth protecting?

And if I believed myself spiritually awake, what would that awakening mean when fear entered the body? Would I still recognise the voice of conscience, and would I have the courage to obey it?

These were not questions for moral performance or idealised versions of ourselves. They carried the weight of the age. In a time of spiritual decline, they were practical questions—tests that sooner or later might demand an answer through action.

They were questions for anyone who still wished to live by conscience. In an era of accelerating change and radical uncertainty, none of us can assume we will remain on the safe side of events. Without warning, we may be thrust into Myung-hwa’s position, with no time to trace every consequence and no room for prolonged deliberation. The decision may arrive in a single instant:

Will we open the door?

And if we do, how much of the burden are we prepared to carry?

***

An Extraterrestrial Test of Conscience

That night, the questions followed me into sleep.

I found myself aboard an extraterrestrial spaceship.

The walls gave off a soft silver-white light. The cabin was so still that I seemed able to hear my own breathing. I could not make out the features of the humanoid figure standing before me, though I perceived him as male and sensed his presence with unusual clarity: gentle, composed, almost compassionate.

“You can call me Andrew,” he said.

After a while, Andrew left the cabin and returned with two others.

The first was a small, childlike being whom I perceived as female. She had the manner of a kindly guide.

“We are extraterrestrials,” she said gently.

Then she gestured towards the taller figure behind her, whom I also perceived as female, and introduced her with quiet gravity.

“She is a doctor. She is kind.”

Their faces remained indistinct, yet I could perceive something of who they were beyond physical appearance—the texture of their presence, their intentions, the quality of their consciousness.

After a body scan and energetic examination similar to those I had experienced before, the atmosphere changed. The stillness deepened. I had the unmistakable sense that a test had begun.

The question came without words.

They communicated through a form of contact that seemed to pass directly through the heart centre. Images, knowledge, and emotional meaning entered my mind at once, inseparable from one another.

The meaning came to me as a whole; what follows is my closest rendering of it in words.

A wall of water struck Sydney without warning.

The harbour and surrounding coastline disappeared beneath the sea. The first wave rose to the height of a nine-storey building. People were swept away before they had time to run. Water surged inland through the city, reaching as far as the central business district near Sydney Tower.

Then came a second wave.

It was even larger, rising almost four-fifths of the way up Governor Phillip Tower. I stared at the vision in disbelief. What kind of catastrophe could generate a tsunami of such scale?

Another message reached me, gentle in tone but carrying an authority I found difficult to dismiss.

“As we have warned you more than once, this city will face two great tsunamis. And during that disaster, you will encounter your own moral dilemma.”

The warning carried the unmistakable quality of a test.

They fell silent and watched me. Their gaze seemed to pass through the surface of who I thought I was and reach something more hidden: my fear, my weakness, the capacities I had not yet been forced to summon, and whatever remained most true beneath them all.

“When the moment comes,” the question entered my mind almost as a whisper, “what will you do?”

Time seemed to dilate. Each second carried a suffocating weight.

I saw myself standing inside the disaster. Seawater was surging through central Sydney. Streetlights and shop signs vanished one by one beneath the dark water. Cars overturned and drifted through the streets. Timber, luggage, and broken glass collided in the current. Crowds were torn apart by the force of the wave. Some people disappeared almost instantly. Others clung to floating debris and fought to keep their heads above the flood.

I found myself at a point where no choice was clean. To remain and help meant risking my life in water that could kill me at any moment. To turn away meant choosing my own safety while the city was still being swallowed.

This was the moral dilemma of collapse made real. It was also a test of everything people in spiritual communities spoke so easily about—light, love, courage, service. When order failed and fear took command, would I possess the moral clarity and inner maturity to accept the consequences of my choice?

I knew the beings observing me would see everything. Would I stay and join the rescue effort, trying to save as many lives as I could? Or would I retreat towards safety and protect myself first?

I understood their message as a form of preparation. They seemed to be asking me to confront the decision before circumstance made it for me—to begin, in advance, the inner work required for a future crisis in which conscience would have to act faster than fear.

Then another message came through the heart centre, grave and expansive.

“Human beings often conceal their true motives even from themselves. Only the tests and crises of life can bring the nature of the soul into view. Just as any instrument must undergo repeated trials before its reliability can be known, the human soul must also be tested. Through adversity, it becomes possible to see whether conviction has taken root, whether goodness can endure, and whether a person is capable of carrying moral responsibility when the cost becomes real.”

I understood them to be saying that they were searching among humanity for people capable of steadiness, responsibility, and sustained goodness—those who might help lay the foundations of a different future.

What mattered, as I understood it, was not a claim to spiritual distinction but the steadiness to carry responsibility when it became costly.

Before returning me to my room, they conveyed one final message.

“We will not choose for you. But we trust that a soul of genuine moral character will make a wise decision in the hour of danger.”

The words continued to reverberate after they had finished speaking. They seemed to sink through the layers of my consciousness until they reached some darker, less examined place within me, where they kept sending out slow circles of unease.

When I awoke, I was left with a powerful impression that the argument in the preparedness group—the calls to “kill the bleeding hearts first,” my defence of civic responsibility, the contempt shown towards mercy—had somehow been observed. What I received aboard the craft felt like a measured reply. Its language left room for choice, though its direction was unmistakable.

It seemed to me that they were less interested in debating morality than in creating the conditions that would expose what remained when language fell away.

What stayed with me was the possibility that the test would not remain in the realm of language or belief. One day it might arrive as an event—immediate, physical, and irreversible. Then I would have to answer with more than words. My actions would reveal whether the convictions I claimed had become part of me.

Over the next few years, the question stayed with me. I could not decide in advance what I would do when the water came, but I could decide how I would prepare. I began to move beyond stockpiling supplies and studying the mechanics of survival, undertaking formal rescue training and redirecting my preparation towards community service.

I joined the Can Too Foundation to strengthen my swimming and water-safety skills and volunteered with the New South Wales State Emergency Service. Outside work, training and community service became part of how I prepared.

This decision carried no guarantee that I would act courageously when danger became real. I could make no promises for the person I might become under mortal pressure. Fear remains abstract until it enters the body; only then do we discover where it may drive us.

All I could do was begin shaping myself before the test arrived. Through discipline and repeated action, I could move closer to the person I hoped to become—someone whose conduct remained answerable to her convictions, and for whom civic responsibility extended beyond words typed safely onto a screen.

By then, I had come to distrust any form of awakening that left the way I lived unchanged. Civic consciousness had to take practical form. Without service, I feared that calling myself a “lightworker” could become another consoling story I told about myself. The harder question remained: when fear closed in, could I still recognise the claims of conscience and act when another life depended on me?

Perhaps only then can the “light and love” spoken of so often in UFO and spiritual communities cease to be comforting language and become something embodied—tested and made real through a human life.

I did not know what the future would bring, or what I would ultimately prove capable of. I wanted to prepare honestly, strengthening both practical skill and the inner steadiness I might need. Should I one day find myself in chaos, I hoped I would still be able to leave a door open for someone in the dark—and have the courage to bear what followed.