Spend time in any online chat room or try to have a conversation about social change and a common trait of our species becomes evident. Pessimistic comments on our shared political and economic disaster dominate the interaction: nothing can change, we’re headed inevitably toward some sort of corporate state, welcome to the machine, resistance is useless, the list goes on. People get on their soapboxes at that point to tell everyone they saw it coming.
Ruin, they say with ghoulish glee, is inevitable.
I can’t articulate how annoyed that comment makes me, even though at times the tremendous pressure of the seemingly general agreement that we’re all screwed makes giving up seem attractive.
I am more than aware of the emerging pattern, but as a student of history and of human behavior, I’m just going to say this: the idea that this is the end and that we’re headed toward mutual extinction is not new.
The end of the world is a cottage industry for would-be prophets; it has been decreed at the turn of both millennia since year zero, and about four times a year in the United States.
We have a preoccupation with doom, and someone usually manages to profit from that preoccupation: Dog-watching services for the devout, movies, businesses that call your heathen loved ones to tell them you made it to heaven and they didn’t. It’s amazing what people can use to make a dollar.
Technology has made current conditions seem unique because of the pace at which events happen, the volume of information we can (and can’t) obtain on events, and because of a general ignorance of history. While technology is itself unique, the idea that we are powerless in the hands of some faceless entity is not.
Through my studies of history, I have found the end-day talk to be a product of the increasing influence of bureaucracy and institutions on individuals — the Industrial Revolution and influence of even far-away events, thanks to the volume of information and the interconnected world, have made the process of making decisions more influenced by outside conditions. Trying to make decisions is a risky process; it can potentially affect everyone.
It’s difficult for people to know who they’ll affect and who will affect them. Who and what should they trust to help them to make decisions? It’s incredibly difficult to know.
People will sometimes withdraw because of this, or because of their own stress from keeping up, and decide nothing will ever change and that there’s no point in trying.
If the factors that cause people to throw in the towel are risk, ignorance of history and information saturation, who stands to gain from it?
That’s an easy enough question to answer: they are the ones who gain from things staying roughly the way they are. In some ways, everyone benefits from stability, even if that stability is also rotten for many. Stability, or at least resignation, gets it appeal from society’s fear that things will only get worse.
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There’s also a certain pessimistic satisfaction in thinking that you are living at the end of time and should get yours before everyone else does. After all, if everyone else is doing it, why shouldn’t you?
Sometimes I think the larger fascination with the impending zombie apocalypse or biological catastrophes is that when the world ends, through our wits and will we can escape and finally be alone again.
To which I respond: dystopian science fiction makes for a poor history, in which no one survives save the hero/heroine. As much as I like Blade Runner and Neuromancer (don’t get me started), I’d rather live in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. At least Robert Heinlein gave his characters the will to resist.
