“Soz, Virginia, there is no Sanity Clause” (given that it’s almost Atheistmas)

DEAR EDITOR: I am 8 years old.
Some of my little friends say there is no Sanity Clause,and therefore humans are going to destroy the conditions for their continued existence before they can stop themselves. And that I will die young.
Papa says, ‘If you see someone say “WE ARE DUN” it’s so.’
Please tell me the truth; is there a Sanity Clause?

VIRGINIA O’HANLON.
115 Degrees in the shade, WEST NINETY-FIFTH STREET.

VIRGINIA, your little friends are right. They have been lucky enough to absorb the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They have been paying attention since before they were born, understand the Keeling Curve and are thus scared out of their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect – as his lack of DOING ANYTHING ABOUT THE CARBON DIOXIDE WHICH WILL SURELY KILL US ALL, as compared with the not-quite-so-boundless-as-we-thought world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge. But, as has been said of late, by allegedly responsible men, ‘we’ve had quite enough of experts.’

Soz, VIRGINIA, there is no Sanity Clause. It doesn’t exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion probably won’t exist in your grim meathook future, so you might as well enjoy highest beauty and joy while ya got ’em. Alas! how terrifying is the world since there is no Sanity Clause. It would not be as dreary as if there were no VIRGINIAS – you will in fact curse your parents for having been breeders, by the time you are my age.. Now would be a good time to get rid of childlike faith then, though, you know, keep the poetry and romance to make tolerable this existence. You ain’t gonna have so much enjoyment. A heads up – the eternal light with which childhood fills the world is gonna be extinguished.

Believe in Sanity Clause!? You might as well believe in fairy tales like infinite growth on a finite planet, or that humans can be rational for more than five milliseconds at a time ! You might get your papa to hire men to blow up all the chimneys on Christmas Eve and replace them with solar panels, but you won’t catch a Sanity Clause. Nobody sees Sanity Clause, and that is – Heisenberg notwithstanding – a pretty good sign that there is no Sanity Clause. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see – like the doom-laden build up of carbon dioxide that we have known about for literally decades – before your grandparents were born, frankly and about which we absolutely refuse to do ANYTHING. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world. Unless you count Dave Keeling’s handiwork, and then plot it on a curve. THEN you can conceive and imagine our IMMINENT FUCKING DEATHS.

You may tear apart the baby’s rattle, looking for something to eat, a la Cormac McCarthy’s cheerful and entirely prescient novel “The Road.” And you may see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Except, you know, the collapse of the food and energy systems, not far hence, will definitely help you strip away the veil of “civilisation”. That’s for damn sure. You can take your faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, supernal beauty and glory and all that – it won’t be worth a bucket of warm spit. Is it all real? Ah, VIRGINIA, in all this world there is nothing real and abiding, it’s all atoms and flows, and the wrong atoms are flowing to the wrong places.

No Sanity Clause! Curse Gaia which lives, and will lives forever, unless we tip the planet into a “full Venus” shituation. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, alien archaeologists will puzzle of the thin layer of oil, plastic and blood that was us. So it goes..

Original text cheerfully Ctrl C & Ved from here.

See also

“A Few Bad Men”