Bring On the Apocalypse
On the need for hope, heroism and denial in a disintegrating world
Sitting here feeling the push to write up the umpteenth story of bad news, I have finally come to realise that what I have been detesting the most for all those years was being stuck in a tunnel. Year after year after year, the same news cycle: climate heating is accelerating; more species are disappearing ever faster from Earth; the political climate is getting more and more antagonistic; obscene wealth is accumulating in fewer and fewer hands; and lately, total surveillance and the most basic and even intimate aspects of everyday life, such as chatting, shopping, or even medical advice, channelled into computerised and totally standardised on-line procedures. But nothing I can really do about it.
While undoubtedly the climate and nature crisis have been accelerating despite decades of good intentions, I believe that the most demoralising aspect of our current way of living is not the increasingly deteriorating environmental conditions, but how the feeling of helplessness is spreading like the Black Plague, spurned on by ever increasing inequality. Not long ago – and I am thinking Chengis Khan or Al Capone – amassing wealth and power had its natural down sides. The more you had, the more energy you had to invest into keeping it, which meant you had to be either shrewd and ruthless to the bone, or get murdered before you could count to ten (or your money).
Nowadays, however, all you need is a bank account (and some patents or other intellectual property). Of course, the violence and injustice haven’t gone, they just have been institutionalised and monopolised by the state. And so, as the tentacles of monopolist market capitalism slowly but surely invade our privacy and our very sense of who we are and what we desire, we are confronted with the biggest lie of neoliberalism: that it is supposedly about privatisation. In reality, we live in an age of extreme state monopolisation, where one of the most basic functions of social organisation - to look after your own ‘stuff’ - has been ‘in-sourced’ to an all-encompassing and globalised legal system. Just imagine the lengths to which the tech billionaires and other super-rich had to go if they did not have state violence at their disposal to guarantee titles of possession, with essentially no questions asked about the moral integrity of their origin. Just imagine someone with autistic leanings like Musk or Gates having to command an army of guards! This essentially free service (the tax rate of the super wealthy, as we know, is lower than that of almost any average consumer) is of such a horrendous value to the wealthy and privileged, we can only conclude that we live through the times of the most gigantic nanny state for the rich that ever existed in human history. In this system, which is entirely human-made and actively supported by our political class, there is no principle upper limit to the amount of wealth a single human being can command1.
I entered climate science well over three decades ago, and even at that time, I remember I was under no illusion about the ability of climate scientists to stop a society whose consumption patterns were getting thoroughly out of control. But what I was not prepared for is the level of anxiety that would pervade my life, in particular my professional life. During the later years of my active career in academia (I finally left in 2020), I suffered from severe sleep deprivation when travelling for work. There was something fundamental that my unconscious mind was rebelling against. As Caroline Hickman, the international expert on climate anxiety and youths, repeatedly pointed out to us when we worked together for Faculty for a Future, climate anxiety has nothing to do with climate. It is an interpersonal condition, a result of specific human relationships. Climate anxiety is created by a feeling of utter helplessness. And for a climate scientist, this feeling is also in stark contrast to a public image of ‘expertise’. With the result of not only feeling helpless, but also exploited.
There is a close correspondence between the way humanity is ever more encroaching on the natural world, and the way wealth and power of a small sub-group are encroaching on the agency and freedom of expression of the rest of humanity. Just as overexploitation of natural resources directly impacts and disempowers non-human, non-domesticated beings2, the majority of human beings are being disempowered by ever more extreme concentration of wealth and power. Directly because the political process and societal debates are increasingly controlled by moneyed interests, or indirectly through ever increasing violations of privacy (nowadays, you cannot buy a car that does not spy on you). So while the cancer of overexploitation is spreading and encroaching on our ability to survive, I believe it's the cancer of obscene wealth and power affecting our social fabric that has the most direct impact on our psychological health.
It has been just one and a half years since I realised that I, too, suffer from climate anxiety, when I sensed the enormity of the natural forces at work, caught in the wake of the most extreme rainfall event ever recorded in Europe. From then on, with my sleep not significantly improving despite of having left academic research for good, my temper only got worse until today, when I finally realised – bingo! – climate anxiety is not about the climate3. But once that realisation sets in – what are the consequences? Isn’t the sense of being disempowered entirely realistic? Is there anything I can do with that knowledge?
The answer, I believe, is yes. There are a couple of points that we should get our heads around that will help us confront this double crisis of the natural and human environments:
First of all, nothing is certain, and intuitive knowledge is decisive, and well-heeded if we keep a critical eye on it and know where we can be seduced and manipulated. There is no solid evidence either for eventual failure and a bad ending, nor against. Or any other combination of bad and good news. The idea that we can somehow predict the future is the result of a privileged upbringing in a society that vastly over-emphasises objective knowledge, while at the same time eagerly embraces all sorts of wild speculations about the present and future.
There has been a lot of talk about the climate crisis lately, but it really is just a symptom of a much wider crisis of humanity's place in nature. All the symptoms have one thing in common: we know intuitively that things cannot continue this way. But we don’t know what will come next, or how we can influence things. That’s why the same denial mechanism pervades all of them. So if you think of climate, also think of species extinction, degraded soils and waters, colonialism, racism, fascism, genocide, chemical poisoning, or AI weaponised for warfare, surveillance, or making people dopamine addicted.
We have been able to observe for a long time that money-based societies have the inevitable tendency to concentrate wealth and power in a few hands, until either money is reset (called jubilee for ancient societies), or power is wiped away by violent uprising or external conquest, often by the disenfranchised themselves. At the moment, nothing of the sort of a jubilee is on the horizon, so we are looking either at a violent or a slow collapse. Short of that, nothing essential will change.
In the current state of affairs, for some, immediate survival will be the foremost priority. For those of us not immediately threatened, however, it should be our priority to look after our psychic health. And that means, first of all and against all odds, regaining a sense of agency. And that requires a radical realignment of the way we have been looking at the crisis. Essentially we need to move from pre-realism denial to post-realism denial. Pre-realism denial is about shutting out any information needed for a realistic appraisal of the situation, but too painful. Post-realism denial comes after embracing the pain. Once we have fully confronted the possibility of our own failure, we are free to see the journey ahead as possibly the greatest adventure of human history. States and civilisations have fallen before, but never has this happened at the global scale. Yes, there will be pain, and it will be ok to shut it out. Because there will also be a lot of heroism.
The last point is the decisive one. Heroism and hope in these times are only possible against a backdrop of total relinquishment to the possibility that we won’t be able to control our own fate. But on a deeper level, this will be the way for us to reconnect with our origins, to become one again with the natural world. If we give up our psychological – call it spiritual, if you will – dependence on consumerism and the illusion of safety, the big price to win will be regaining a sense of belonging and of intuitively knowing the meaning of life itself.
Many people have commented on how someone closely observing a collapsing world could ever choose to have children. To me, that never made sense. Scaling back and despair are the first, natural reactions to the lack of agency that the modern world dictates. The answer, however, is going fast forward:
live consciously, even if you have to make compromises;
look out for like-minded people and network;
value money as a means to build resilience and freedom, but don’t risk either by becoming dependent on it;
decouple as much as you practically can, learn practical skills;
don’t rely on the state or big institutions unless forced to (subsidies, tech-heavy solutions etc.);
and so on, it’s easy to think of more examples. If you follow such or similar catalogs, the world will again be this wondrous, fascinating place. We may be looking at an East Asian age, or an African age, who knows. Just imagine 500 years of European and Western dominance ending, turning into something completely new. Who knows what is in store, and what kind of world our kids and grandchildren will inhabit. If they survive, but that’s how it has always been.
Just think for a moment of ants that can lift up to 100 times their own body weight. What is the equivalent, but state-enabled, ability of the extremely rich to ‘carry’ more wealth than they could ever consume? So suppose you could sensibly consume $100,000 in a single year, several billionaires have the state carry for them more ‘worth’ than they could consume in ten thousand lifetimes!
Pets and livestock are a different story.
Thanks for this post, Wolfgang, there's a huge amount that resonates in the way you describe your experience and the place that you've arrived at.
One detail, in case it's something you want to enquire into further – as well as the Jubilee traditions of debt reset, there are also cases of monetary systems that work quite differently to the one we currently take for granted and don't produce the same tendencies. Bernard Lietaer's The Future of Money is worth reading on this.