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It seems as if there will not be any “wake up” moment, (something I have long told other activists not to expect!). I t seems to me that we have inoculated ourselves and the “boiling frog” thing, although no one ever did boil a frog, does in fact work well enough as a metaphor sort of. A I think, scratch the surface of so called apathetic and certainly inaction and you find a whole lot of people who do know, more or less that we are in very deep shit but who also know on some level – or believe on some level 0 that efforts to clip the claws of the beast or cage the beast (to use Cynthia Peters analogies in the article Talking back to Chomsky) will not work
And if you’re not going to gain and nobody is going to gain a benefit – then if you have a choice not to why would you try to do anything? And we in the West certainly the people who could ironically who could make a difference – the middle-class people with disposable incomes and access to elites – usually//often do have ways not to be involved and reasons and excuses for not doing more.
And I guess the problem comes in how do you find of getting middle class energy for more than the most minor of reforms? Traditionally, what happened is the bourgeoisie used the proletariat as a battering ram against the entrenched political power of the aristocracy. And anyway, I’m getting a little bit Marxist now, which is not automatically a bad thing…
But back to feelings, because this doom diary is supposed to be about feelings for me. And I definitely include myself in this, by the way, most activists or would-be activists have forgotten what it’s like to believe that nothing can be done, because we’ve become seduced by the slogans of “our power”. And we can recall times when either we felt powerful or activism won victories. Now, of course, pretty much everything that makes 21st century 20th and 21st century life pretty cool, whether it’s public health, or medicine, or freedom of speech, or freedom of assembly, decent education, the vote etc. these were fought for and won. But once they’ve become established, it’s forgotten that they were fought for and won. Or to be more precise, the fact that they were fought for/had to be fought for is thrown down the memory hole. And instead, the narrative of “inevitable progress” or even more sinister, “the benevolence of our Lords and Masters” is promulgated.
And so I think, activists could be said to be forgetting how other people feel powerless Or, to flip it round, all the other people are right, and the activists are wallowing in the delusion of their own efficacy or potential efficacy. I say that primarily, for the sake of argument, because I do believe, still, that in theory, if you had millions of people who “got it”, and were able to coordinate with each other, you could do things that would make life in the first half of the 21st century less fucked up. And you might, if you’re really lucky, even bequeath more than a slag heap to the humans and other species of the 22nd century. And no, I’m not telling you what I’ve been smoking and where I got it.
But right now? Right now it feels as if none of that is even imaginable. Because civil society isn’t on its knees, it’s on its face. And our Lords and Masters have already pumped a couple of bullets into its skull. The corpse will twitch you know. and there will always be resistance but also we’re on a burning platform that’s no time so it just feels like there’s no way out it just feels like we are had an opportunity in the 60s and 70s and they weren’t able for reasons of their own to sustain that
The other thing that is interesting about living in what may well be the end times is there isn’t any change to day-to- day life and it reminds me of something I read I think in the Guardian of a young woman who was dying of motor neurone disease and she made the point that just because you know you’re dying doesn’t mean you suddenly start squeezing the juice out of every minute you if you were a procrastinator and dilatory writer before, you will be later and so it seems to be true.
We shall see. It’s also this question of what posterity would it be for? I’m not convinced that we would learn anything and that we have the capacity to do things any differently. It seems to me as if we’re caught in a rut (its sides carefully built and reinforced by those enjoying the ride). We’re in the tunnel as my friend Leo wrote 15 years ago, with his customary verve and prescience.
I’m working on an ‘golden opportunity’ argument to try to persuade people. ‘Once in an epoch’ sort of thing. The dinosaurs couldn’t choose not to be struck by a giant meteorite. But the opportunity that is busily passing us by right now will still be visible in a few years time – visible, but out of reach. I’m thinking of evoking the idea that we are just about to plunge humanity into a dark tunnel from which there is no return; we’re still in the sunshine now, with amazing views all round, and a whole lot of different paths to choose from. the trouble is powerful momentum is speeding us along a track that leads into the mouth of that dark tunnel. Other pathways zip past on both sides as we gather speed. Once in the tunnel, we will be looking over our shoulders at the light of that opportunity as it swiftly recedes into the distance behind us. then we will have only the darkness, and a single narrow path which we must travel to our final destination.
marchudson.net 
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