Hello everyone. Yesterday’s Doom diary was delayed for a few hours, because I went to the dentist for a checkup (the first since before the pandemic). Fortunately, it didn’t turn out like that scene in Marathon Man.
It was actually safe. But as I sat there, I thought “I’m glad I’m getting it check-up while the systems that these checkups rely on are still functioning, that the systems can still provide highly educated professionals, sterile equipment, X-ray machines.” And I wouldn’t want to guarantee that for an 18 year old reading this blog post, that they’ll still be in place when they’ve reached my advanced state of decrepitude and pre-senility. Or am I just following the doom narrative? And at the moment, almost everything I do is almost behind the filter – like filming through gauze – with a question of “will this be the last time or one of the last times?” I guess if I had more time, I’d be reading about what it feels like to have a terminal illness. And there are really good books. I know I’ve read a couple.
In terms of articles and things I’ve read since yesterday, that touch on ‘the end of days’ , there’s a nice piece by Adam Morton, The Guardian Australia’s journo who does climate policy about how we’re all in denial to a lesser or greater extent. And I guess that’s what I want to talk about today. What it feels like to know that you are more or less complicit and more or less a beneficiary of systems that are literally rendering life on Earth less likely, and much less fun for future generations of our hairless ape monstrosity of a species, but also all the other ones we ‘share’ (ha ha) this planet with. And knowing that if you do speak up against that system, there will be consequences. The proverbial crabs in the bucket, the proverbial chimp reaching for the bananas at the top of the ladder, and being hauled down and beaten by other chimps, who themselves never experienced the cold water punishment. Being less complicit is not that difficult if you have some time and money, but it marks you out as a weirdo (which is fine). However, in my experience, it only offers a small and temporary reprieve from those feelings of guilt and inadequacy.
And you look at the papers and websites and presumably the television, spewing out an endless stream of distraction and nonsense whether it’s celebrities in a jungle or wannabe celebrities on an island or the Punch and Judy show that passes for politics. And you know that a “responsible” citizen keeps track of that, if only to be able to laugh along with the next edition of Private Eye. And it’s one of the ways that you convince yourself that it’s somehow isn’t your fault. complicity and guilt being tied that way. I’d say that the best way to think of this is the more room to maneuver – I wouldn’t call it freedom – that you have, the more education, the more time the more money the more insulation from consequences you have then the more responsibility you bear for your actions or inactions.
We are responsible, someone once said, for the predictable consequences of our actions. Well, it was predictable that the Juggernaut, the death machine, will continue if it wasn’t impinge unimpeded. And we chose not to impinge or impede it because it would be too difficult. See also the wonderful Cynthia Peters column, titled “Talking back to Chomsky” about this. I’m not saying it’s easy. If it were easy, we would have done it already.
Right about now I can hear my readers/reader saying, “Oh for goodness sakes stop being so narcissistic and solipsistic. Don’t you know that BP invented the carbon footprint to make you feel guilty? Don’t you know that that crying Indian wasn’t even a Native American. You have fallen for the neoliberal liberal trap of personalizing this.” And, to that, I say, Well, when we talk about collective guilt of Germans, for Hitler, that was long before the neoliberal thing got properly moving. And we do have responsibility when we are complicit in systems that benefit us. And when we have, even in theory, the means by which these systems can be changed. The fact that we have not used those means and not even really tried to use those means doesn’t lead us off the hook. But this blog series is supposed to be about the feelings and all I can do is throw out labels like fear, despair, fear anger, self-recrimination, fear, (did I mention fear?) hopelessness, horror. And I look at young people, I look at wildlife. I look at my beloved, albeit common, moorhens. And I think “you’ve no idea what’s coming. You didn’t cause it. But you’re in the bullseye.” And I wish there hadn’t been this way. I think as late even as the 1980s there was a chance to delay the greenhouse warming as the 1983 EPA report had it.
Not only have we not done that, we have accelerated global warming. We needed to put our foot on the brake and find a different way of getting from point A to B, than the ICE which can stand for both industrial combustion engine and international capitalist economy.
But we didn’t. We allowed them to conflate democracy and capitalism. We allowed them to conflate progress and growth. And we have accelerated all of the things that we knew that we needed to stop. We have thrown accelerant on the fire and now it is burning bright I didn’t throw much gasoline but then I didn’t throw much shade…
Right now, I am functioning. I am getting on with writing things I need to write. But that’s because I have cats, an amazing wife, a garden (not in order of importance). What is it like if you don’t have things to cushion the blows. I shudder to think.
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