Read Time: 10 minutes
Imagine you’re from the future. Not only do you know all the great achievements awaiting on the horizon; you know all the perils. Witnessing each of the little events you know will lead to such perils, though harmless to those in the present, has for you a magnitude that is hardly bearable.
Who would take you seriously for warning them? No one would know the signal from the noise. Doom and gloom forecasts are a dime a dozen.
People fall into two camps:
For most, it goes in one ear and out the other.
But some become obsessed.
People in the latter camp are just like Future You. Each day that passes unaccompanied by apocalypse culminates with increasing mockery and scorn. But those who laugh only do so because, as we know, hindsight is 20/20.
In our personal lives, we know this all too well:
“The writing was on the wall.”
“I saw all the red flags but ignored them.”
How can one tell red flags from regular adversity?
Think of instances where, based on experience and repetition, the odds are good that a thing will happen. In either of the following scenarios, you know what’s coming:
A UFC fighter gets his bell rung and is ‘on skates’. His opponent smells blood, stalks forward, fists cocked.
A student sits down to take the exam they’ve been dreading, knowing the material is over their head and they did not prepare.
To what degree is failing to prepare, preparing to fail? Sure, it’s a clever turn of phrase, but isn’t there something to learn from it? What about long-term forecasting? The more moving parts, the more complicated, and thus more difficult to predict. Failure to prepare seems inevitable when there’s no possible way of knowing how.
What is Inevitable?
Imagine you’re from the future again. Except, this time, in a way, you don’t have to imagine.
That which has unfolded over the course of the 20th century is the same to you now as what Future You knows will unfold in the next. Your knowledge of the history of the past century is as salient as Future You’s knowledge of this one. Not a memory, but more like a dream, invading your mind and temporarily possessing it. And like a dream, the further you are from it, the harder it can be to recall, let alone convey to others.
When we think of our collective future - as a society, a nation, a species - it’s bound up with historical precedents. These are reference points. To see human progress as an ongoing, unwavering recalibration of direction based on what can be learned from previous experience suggests that human progress is an ever-upward slope.
In the aggregate that may be the case. But more acutely, isn’t it more like peaks and valleys? Is it a cycle? Does history, as they say, repeat itself?
It can be hard to know if a cultural landscape has shifted for the worse. It could just as easily be one’s perception. (The older generation complaining about the younger comes to mind as an example of this.) Besides, when the comforts we’ve always enjoyed are still there, when the winds are calm and no giant storm clouds loom, why worry?
How many emergencies or misfortunes would it take to turn your life upside down? For some, the answer is not many, and that storm cloud looms large. Things are fine until they’re not. And for people with little to lose, even if things are quiet, they get loud fast.
How many removes are we from struggle sessions on college campuses laying the groundwork for a Maoist cultural revolution? When friends and family are encouraged to viciously dehumanize the other on social media, how close are we to the ominous propaganda machine taking over the radio waves to foment the Rwandan genocide?
Sounds alarmist, I know, but consider that a third of Americans are worried that their political views could cost them their job. Sixty-two percent of Americans self-censor for fear of expressing the wrong idea, and that number goes up to 77% for conservatives. That’s a lot.
I have liberal friends who would view that as a net good. But anyone on any end of the political spectrum who thinks things would be better without the other need only look at the history of the 20th century to know where that leads and just how naive it is.
Granted, alluding to the present moment as a parallel prelude to historical atrocities may be equally naive. Fair enough. And some would argue that a focus on such depressing aspects of life has little merit and only serves to bring people down.
I’m not convinced. Putting our heads in the sand strikes me as a risk that could prove far too costly, as it has for many before us who told themselves the same things. Moreover, seeing the writing on the wall may be our only hope to change course.
So, what exactly is the writing on the wall?
Unchecked Power
In a piece on the pulling out from Afghanistan, Chris Hedges paints a stark picture of an empire stretched thin, doomed to wither away like the rest of them, into the annals of history:
Empires at the end are collective suicide machines. The military becomes in late empire unmanageable, unaccountable and endlessly self-perpetuating, no matter how many fiascos, blunders and defeats it visits upon the carcass of the nation, or how much money it plunders, impoverishing the citizenry and leaving governing institutions and the physical infrastructure decayed.
The death blow to the American empire will be the loss of the dollar as the world's reserve currency. This loss will plunge the United States into a crippling and prolonged depression. It will force a massive contraction of the global military footprint, making the ugly, squalid face of empire familiar at home. The bleak economic landscape, with its decay and hopelessness, will accelerate an array of violent and self-destructive pathologies.
Unchecked Depravity
Some of that pathology is already among us. I’ve put together some snippets from Matt Taibbi’s Substack article examining the state of present-day morality. Weaving together his reading of Nabokov’s Lolita, the current Cuomo case, and the Amy Cooper Rashomon, his picture of a culture failing to discern false positives from true evil is a great read:
The news for years now has been obsessively interested in taxonomic surveys of Good and Bad people, constantly separating one from the other and galvanizing the former to attack the latter.
Morality in this sense has become a pass/fail exercise, with everyone divided into just two categories, viable and disgraced. Which of the two one lands in depends entirely on how high levels of public disgust and emotion reach at the peak of viral mania, versus how entrenched the target is or isn’t.
Not only are we totally uninterested as a society in concepts like redemption, we revel in the careless, emotional quality of our judgments. People are just Bad or Good, and the Bad are all Bad.
Unchecked Greed
Writing from Greece, Aris Roussinos asks, “How many millions will be forced to uproot themselves from everything they have ever known so that the world’s richest can enrich themselves even further, insulated from the consequences of their consumption?”
Every bomb dropped on an illiterate Afghan peasant, every carton of ice cream or air conditioning unit shipped to a desert in the middle of nowhere over the past twenty years of failed warfare represents a gigantic distraction from the threat facing us all, a colossal waste of resources and effort that surely has no parallel in all human history.
Instead of a concerted, World War-like effort to find technological solutions to the coming disaster, we were given an explosion of unnecessary consumer goods, whose assembly underwrote China’s rise to industrial dominance.
The entire world’s richest 1% is responsible for more than twice as much carbon emissions as the 3.1 billion people who make up the world’s poorest 50%. But not only that, they are responsible for more carbon emissions than the entire population of the EU, one of the richest and most industrialised societies in human history. How strange then, that Davos and the World Economic Forum insist we should all eat insects, own nothing and reduce our individual consumption of plastic straws or flights or car journeys while having nothing of note to say about this grotesque imbalance.
BLAST BEATS:
WELCOME TO PORTLAND: Video of Antifa members assaulting families gathered for a religious event at a Portland park.
PRIVACY LIMITS: Apple making efforts to stop child sexual abuse by scanning iPhone apps and expanding parental controls.
WHO WANTS TO BE A COP? Excellent series from Tampa Bay Times documenting new recruits in the academy and their journey.
JANUARY 6 SHOOTER: The Capitol cop who shot Ashli Babbitt ambushed her without warning, according to the lawyer.