#153

It may be that the great delusion of our time is grandeur, even though what almost anybody talks about is insignificance. The death of this and the death of that*. The most advanced and self-aware accretion of individuals who ever lived getting off on how powerless they are, as though they were not indispensable and active participants in the transformation of the planet.

*

Oh, but Joseph, we are killing the planet! Everything is tits-up and it's all our fault! And the world wide web turned out to be a huge mistake! We need to go back to simpler times!

Let me stop you there, hypothetical. You're not wrong, but the very fact that you're capable of grasping this situation is itself revolutionary and astonishing. The fact that you can feel psychologically responsible for the situation is also phenomenal. You represent a paradigm in human self-understanding, and that is reason enough to be optimistic.

Simple times ain't comin back, though. Nothing works that way.  

No doubt, it's a bad situation. Stuff got complicated and threatening fast, and it seems like it was better yesteryear. But it's just a simple evolutionary problem, and it is the same one as it has ever been: are we smarter than we are rapacious? Are we capable of having enough collective discipline to curb our collective excess? Do we have the guts and the brains to keep riding the edge of chaos? We are not going to stop destroying or consuming. The best we can do is create more than we kill.

If we're able to balance the shit that refuses to get right with the the ideals we can never quite achieve, we keep on going. If we can't we very likely go extinct, or undergo a total change in our ecosystem niche. And if it's just civilization that collapses, then it is literally no big deal. That happens all the fucking time, and while of course it seems like the end of the world when it's happening, it hasn't been yet. We are all the inheritors of the spoils of hundreds of dead empires.

Like I say, the stakes feeling higher than ever before doesn't change the fundamental problem. All we can to is try every day to keep the world going, just to see if it does, until we can't. No use wallowing in how futile it seems. Pathetic to pretend you're above it all. Just do what you can think best to do, every day. Push your thinking in that matter as far as it can go. Do what you can to follow through for real and materially.

*

Personally, being well-satisfied with reality, I am not optimistic. As I said, too many delusions of grandeur, regression fetishes, and post-nihilist death-fixations out here; I think most people would happily welcome the apocalypse just to say that they were right all along and that someone else was to blame, managing to still feel guilty over their complicity. I mean, what did you expect them to do, change their lives?

However, some people that are much smarter than me are optimistic; they trust their reasoning, they are hard at work, and there are a lot of them, so I am at least relaxed enough to enjoy watching it all happen, gut-wrenching as it can be. I hate seeing a sea turtle covered in plastic with a gut full of the stuff to boot as much as anyone.

Also if we haven't blown each other to final perdition yet, at this point I really think it'll be an accident if we do. Small comfort, but, not being an optimist, I can make do with very scant comforting. A cactus only needs a little rain.

--JL

*Irony never dies. It is a fractal.