Look me in the eye and tell me there is no reason to be concerned with the eminent destruction of civilization as we know it. If you are suffering from depression, please don’t read any further as I am exposing the darker recesses of my brain. Dante’s inscription above the gates of hell seems like an appropriate warning.
…abandon hope all ye who enter here…
We are warned of several looming existential crises, be it the climate crisis, or the state of international or domestic relations, or the latest AI . We maintain “hope” as the antidote to actually doing something. Hope that it’s really not that bad. Hope that we will magically engineer our way out of any negative outcomes. There’s little need to expound on the status of climate change as you are being appraised of it by your favourite news channel. The AI menace is being covered by many talking heads, where they are calling for guardrails on the apps, with little understanding of the algorithms behind neural networks.
I prefer to focus on the current state of our group psychology. There is one thing we have in common with each other and all the lesser species in the chain. It is the survival instinct. The interpretation of “survival” in modern societies will bring about an extinction event and I don’t see it being avoidable. Since we are endowed with a “rational” brain, we have the ability to redefine survival of ourselves and our progeny. We have built a civilization around economic principles since the dawn of agricultural societies.
Survival no longer means escaping or avoiding predators. Survival is some arbitrary point on the economic ladder we select for ourselves. We seek the good life, where, as free thinkers, we get to continually evolve the definition of “the good life”. With each step in this evolution, we consume more of earth’s resources per person, AND we keep adding more people. We need more people to have a growing GDP, a current positive measure of world economies. India is slated to soon be the largest economy mainly because they keep producing more people. In the West, where “native” (euphemism for white) populations are stagnating, the system is propped up by immigration. China, with a controlled population, is suffering “demographic collapse” and the slowing GDP growth is seen as disastrous.
With our survival now redefined, we now have to reevaluate justice in the context of economic strata. Whereas the right sees those on the lower rungs as being necessary to support economic stability, the left interprets it as a grave injustice that the one percent end up being the main beneficiaries of thriving economies. However, there is always this nagging doubt that continuous growth is inherently unsustainable, yet we can’t get off the treadmill. We will climb steadily until the precipice. The eventual fate of humanity is that of the reindeer on St. Matthew’s Island.
https://www.geo.arizona.edu/Antevs/nats104/00lect21reindeer.html
I’ve included a link above if you want to look further into the details, but I would suggest that 1944 represents the dawn of agriculture based societies and the 1960 is the start of the industrial revolution. On that scale, we are likely in 1964 right now, with the drop-off being now to the end of the century. Notice the herd did not go to zero. There will be survivors, though I couldn’t tell whether those would be from the one percent or the “Poor” living off-grid.
My Dante moment came from observation of the mass psyche and our inability to avoid the ladder. Lest you view this as a high-minded sermon on the mount, I include myself possessing this mass suicide pact based on our living the dream! There are always the bears and the bulls, but we all behave like the bulls even when we read the situation as bearish. In some ways, my limited available runway is a blessing as I will miss the worst of it.
