We see it every day. More and more reports of climate catastrophes and broken records, political unrest and riots, random acts of violence as people become more unhinged. We see these things politicized to promote agendas, or dismissed as noise in an increasingly-connected world. The world has always been burning. We have always been at war with Eurasia.
The simple truth is that human beings, like all animals, are not designed to think on the scale of decades or centuries. Our myopia is by design. The disciplined few among us may have long-term , but we remain fundamentally incapable of assessing the harm of a cigarette or a calving glacier. Our risk/reward neurons simply don’t function on that kind of timeline.
My educated, liberal friends will readily concede that climate change is real, but virtually all of them think that the worst effects won’t happen in our lifetime. Even those that may not explicitly say this certainly behave like that is the case. They continue their mindless consumption, because the earth they are scorching is someone else’s problem and, anyway, humans are smart and resilient and science will fix it before it’s too late.
Even among the more socially-aware leftists circles, I constantly hear repeated the trope that individual actions don’t make a difference and only five corporations are responsible for 95% of carbon emissions and blah blah blah. Any excuse not to be accountable. Any excuse not to sacrifice the slightest convenience in the face of certain doom.
We expect that our elected stewards will take action when necessary… if they’re not panicking, things must be fine and it must all be sensationalism and hype. The media reports juuust enough to keep the masses in fear, but not enough to convey the truth of the dire situation we face. Everything is fine, go about your lives.
Beyond the realm of climate and ecology, the amount of worker exploitation that is required to satisfy ever-increasing consumption is reaching a breaking point. As I write this in the midst of the so-called “Great Resignation,” we still see the effects of lifelong capitalist indoctrination in the lack of empathy, the crossing of picket lines, the regurgitation of the lie that a Big Mac will cost $20 because workers have the audacity to demand a living wage.
Wealth is created and immediately consolidated through artificial scarcity and propaganda. Cryptocurrency was proselytized as the slayer of giants, the great equalizer; we are only now beginning to see that it was a long con, another commodity to be manipulated to pluck the ducats from the plebes.
Mass shootings, interpersonal violence, suicide, chronic depression and anxiety… all of these are trending up, even before they were all exacerbated by an ongoing global pandemic. The modern world is increasingly incompatible with mental health. From macro causes (like the aforementioned incipient collapse of the planetary ecosystem) to the micro scale of TikTok-induced brain-death, our global population is rapidly coming undone at the seams.
Eight billion people on this planet are either struggling to survive or are so enslaved by the comforts of capitalism that no one is compelled to make the necessary changes. Like , we have proven that we won’t act before it’s too late; actually, we simply won’t act at all. Although there’s plenty of profit in fear, there’s no real profit in panic. The most interpretation of this is that the ruling class knows exactly what is coming, but they’re simply content to let it play out. Because, really, what is the solution?
Do we immediately grind to a halt the wheels of global consumerism? Stop the manufacture of all the unnecessary, disposable garbage that immediately finds its ways into landfills and the ocean, while simultaneously reinventing the global economy such that it won’t be affected by millions of newly-idle hands? Convince or coerce the world to stop eating meat? Guillotine Elon Musk?
Okay okay, that last suggestion would have a limited scope of benefit.
But I vote we do it anyway.
Do we start with the most entitled swaths of the global north, the ones who took up arms at the suggestion of wearing a piece of cloth on their face to stop millions of needless deaths? Those guys? Or do we further degrade the quality of life for those in the global south, who lack the luxury of eco-consciousness but whose sheer numbers and lack of infrastructure amplify their harmful impact?
Or do we quietly concede that it’s too late and delude ourselves into pretending that switching from burning fossil fuels to strip-mining rare-earth metals for batteries is somehow a net positive? So what if Nestle owns all our water and the world’s two richest assholes are busy building escape pods? Everything will probably be fine.
