Better the Devil you know...

For all her multitude of sins and truly unprecedented sanctimonious lies, the Pax Americana was a period, by and large, of global calm and economic growth... despite the occasional NATO led gang rape of a country here and there. When it is gone as the 800lbs gorilla in the room, resource wars will almost certainly start immediately between almost all nations. The global order that was established during the post-WWII dust settling and then reinforced during the long decades of the Cold War is hardly ideal, but it is at the very least defensible as being better than the late colonial period that preceded it. 

Of course, America also made the period when Capitalism basically took nature out back and shot it in the head repeatedly possible, which is obviously the worst thing humans have ever done by a long shot. The free market definitely delivers the goods, that can't be challenged at this point, but at what cost? Short term, the costs seem acceptable to everyone but the working class I suspect; and even a good chunk of them can probably be persuaded to sign on if drugs of some sort are made readily available and they can at least feel like their lives are better than those of their parents. The long term however, which is what we are finally getting into, the cost seems to rise exponentially. I think the saddest part to watch unfold is people sullenly accept that nature will die, we killed it, and we will continue to beat a dead horse for some years to come. 

This all makes for a strange time in human history. When we started cutting down all the trees and causing a mass extinction event on par with the previous ones. I'm pretty sure it wasn't done deliberately to murder all the other creatures and trees, but rather just to make our lives easier and to spread Empires. At this point however, we clearly know what we are doing and collectively don't care enough to stop; basically the mentality of an abusive alcoholic. I think that says more about the evolution of modern humans mentally than all other behavior. Hard for me to honestly even fathom how people can feel at all positive about human progress with that fact so indisputably omnipresent. All the great forests will be felled, the rivers damned, most species made extinct... probably in many of our lifetimes.  

Given this setting, it is fairly understandable why so many people are choosing to focus on the far more familiar drama of national and international politics. I sort of get the feeling at this point that virtual reality of some slightly more advanced form than what we got now with social media will come out just as the collapse really kicks into high gear and that civilization will collapse simply because everyone just dives into the alternate reality we have created rather than deal with the trainwreck. Whether you want to focus on racism in America, global pandemic, the triumphant return of fascism or just good old fashioned national rivalries... 2020 is a time for retro drama rather than actual reflection on the pickle we've gotten ourselves in as what is left of the forests and our social contract burns.  

The Great Virus of 2020

So this little virus that looks like the solar corona has taken the world by storm. I personally, as an historian, am basically loving this very retro era of quarantines and travel restrictions. Perhaps it's a bit cruel to take so much pleasure in a time that is causing so many such trouble, but I can't help it. We were already sprinting off the cliff of abject environmental collapse, so this unexpected pause seems hardly worth lamenting. The big surprise for me is how cohesive late Capitalism is when facing such an existential threat to the grand project of Globalization. I guess most are all in with this gambit and an unexpected curve ball from nature is hardly enough to concoct an alternative trajectory. The only part of the whole thing that I find at all disturbing is that this flashback to pre-vaccine life has caused conspiracy theory proponents to increase their number many times over. The war against reality has really kicked up a notch and all because people just don't seem to comprehend that science is complicated and far from infallible. I am starting to almost wish the world had stayed religious, just so those archaic con men could calm the excitable masses, channel their stupidity towards the imaginary God-head. Oh well, those days are gone and now people have the internet so an increasingly large segment of the world is heading towards the strange fan-fiction of the modern conspiracy theory; even the most complicated of which is still far easier to grasp than the slippery fish of reality.  

The real storm cloud on the horizon is the impending American election in November. BLM protests becoming the biggest mass movement in the US since the Great Awakening has of course triggered the dominant white masses big time on both sides of the political spectrum. Then add to all that Trump and his followers seemingly genuine belief that he is only hope for America and that the aforementioned protests are aiming to end white supremacy, all seems to point towards a confrontation. The old is dying and the new is not yet ready to be fully born it would seem. Unless he wins outright, which is completely feasible, there is no way I can imagine the Don going quietly into that good night; he will rage, rage against the dying of his might. If the Dems had been able to put up someone respectable, or at least not a vacuous career politician like Biden, I wouldn't be too worried, but they decided to go for the ignorant old white vote, which although demographically sound electoral thinking, I believe it is a very bad choice for this situation. Trump and his supporters have a clear narrative and the ferocity of hundreds of years of white supremacy, aka the status quo, on their side. Compared to the incoherent and blatantly hypocritical propaganda that the DNC is trying to push, Trump's message is shockingly clear and extremely deeply programmed into much of the country's psyche. The rest of the world still can't challenge the US militarily, so this election will have huge ramifications around the world, especially as the dollar has soared in these uncertain times. I'm just personally grateful that Trump isn't articulate, for if he was at all a competent orator America would probably be seeing goose-stepping in the streets. 

Our 8 billion strong experiment is entering into a galvanizing crucible. Will we make it or break it? Only time can answer such a question, so stay tuned.   

Perhaps

Perhaps it has always been this way. A thought like this can stop your thoughts like a rock going through a glass window. When I look at the insanity of the world in which we all live my first instinct is to consider it the curtain call on a truly glorious nightmare, but it could also have always been this way.

It occurs to me often that all that has really changed is that people now have the means to broadcast their perspective into the abyss, like Hitler’s radio waves into space. There is nothing holding many back anymore, no more reasons for rationality and its sidekick, plans. The raw fact that we have probably damaged the world so badly that it will cease to support us and that the social system we have erected is little more than an entertaining suicide pact must surely gnaw on the nerves of us all. Just as the atomic bomb surely psychologically altered all those who could fathom its existence in our world, so too does the doomed twilight in which we now live. Still I must suppose that it could have always been this way.

Surely the miracle of life and its startling brevity has always occupied the minds of us humans, at least when we weren’t preoccupied with dodging death for another day. I find myself wondering if perhaps we humans can’t actually care about the extinction of our species, or the end of what we confusingly categorize as civilization. It would be interesting to see what people would do if they were told having another 5 years of this modern world was possible, but after that all human life would cease; would it change anything? Has it always been this way?