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There has been a profound change lately in the nature of my conversations with younger people. (These days, 99.9% of the people I talk with are younger, but never mind.) Admittedly I don’t talk to many people at all, so this is hardly a valid sample. Still, I am struck by a new emotion that frequently appears these days when young people talk about the future: fear.
Fifteen years or so ago, at a social gathering, a lovely young woman I had just met asked me what I was working on. I told her I was writing a book (Brace for Impact) whose thesis was that industrial civilization was in the process of an inevitable and irreversible collapse. “Oh,” she said, “is this where I bat my eyes, smile brightly, and edge away?” I assured her it was not necessary, that I could converse on other subjects.
I have been writing from that point of view ever since and for a decade and more, the argument simply bounced off most people. I and the handful of people with similar views were classified as “doomers” and relegated to the far reaches of Reddit. It was easy for them to dismiss us, in part because that’s what every single political hack in the overdeveloped world told them to do.
It’s different now. The American West is burning, ravaged by wildfires that no longer have a season but rage all year, each one seeming bigger than the last; it is parched by unprecedented drought and sweating under unprecedented heat waves, as is the Midwest. The East is sinking beneath the waves of a rising ocean, and along with the South is lashed by ever-more-ferocious hurricanes and tornadoes and derechos and microbursts. The same sorts of things are happening to most of the countries on the planet.
This torrent of actual events has done what decades of predicting them failed to do — it has broken through into the consciousness of young people. And they are afraid. It has become a Named Thing: Climate Anxiety, the subject of scores of articles in the mainstream media.
I say good. Fear, like pain, is a signal that something is amiss and requires attention. Where did young people ever get the idea that they could live a life devoid of fear or pain?
Wait, wait, don’t tell me; it was their parents, crooning to them they they were special, they could be anything they wanted to be, they deserved an ornate champion’s trophy just for showing up, that life was going to be an eternal festival of overconsumption and self-indulgence.
Across hundreds of thousands of years of human culture, until just the day before yesterday, our ancestors had a far different mantra to pass on to their children. The famous Franciscan theologian Richard Rohr has studied initiation rites — the way all cultures once passed on essential lessons to their children as they transitioned to adulthood. He found that for all their differences of detail, initiations all conveyed five essential lessons:
- Life is hard. You will experience much pain, and to get you used to that idea we are going to inflict some now.
- You are not that important. Except as a part of your clan and the People, there is nothing special about you. Fr. Rohr says that all clans, through all time, recognized that narcissism was a great enemy of the People.
- Your life is not about you. To put it in modern terms, life is not a car you get to drive wherever you want to go, it’s a huge excursion bus that you were lucky enough to be able to board, and that will let you off at a time and place not of your choosing, because
- You are going to die. And
- You are not in control.
Just as all people die, so all cultures collapse. It is time for the pampered young people of the Age of Infinite Indulgence to confront the existential threats that surround them and then to carry on, living the best life they can, doing what they can to save themselves and their families, with fewer panic attacks and less whining.
” … people with similar views were classified as “doomers” and relegated to the far reaches of Reddit.”
That would be my “trajectory.” Unfornately, the one sub that I found worth a damn on reddit, r/collapse, has been taken over.
Who took it over, I don’t know, forces let’s call them. I just know it started during Covid, when by about May of 2020 only one greater narrative was allowed, and any post that even questioned a single aspect of that greater narrative was pulled (without exception), and then, about two or three weeks before the war in Ukraine started, new mods suddenly poured in, at least a dozen, and they just starting pulling posts left and right for not being collapse related.
By the time the war started, r/collapse was down to two subjects, Covid, and climate change. All the old acceptables, peak resources, biological annihilation, even lightweights like politics and inflation, you name it, became taboo, and the war itself, was given its own thread, a black hole if ever there was one, and all posts on the subject were sent there to die.
Interesting, no?
So where is a doomer to go these days, is a question I often ask myself. Put it this way, if you’re not careful, you old charmer you (I see the way you talk to the ladies), you just might become the only remaining action in town.
To quote the philosopher Willie Nelson: “I don’t want to be the last man standing. Oh, wait, maybe I do!”
Tom, this is a splendid article. Perhaps I think so because it mirrors my own experience. I’ve been toiling in the vineyards of doom and collapse for quite some time, and being the bearer of bad news encounters a response of “I don’t want to hear it.” I think you remind us of something important in our collective failure to properly initiate our young. Richard Rohr’s initiation rites are succinct and perfect.
This means a lot coming from you, Surly, your Doomer creds are impeccable.
Boomers are no better. Sure, we had The Fear until the Berlin Wall came down, but since then we have relaxed into a sublime complacency.
Our Fear was created by the (crazy) military-extinction / political complex, while their Fear is created by the (crazy) profit-from-anything-including-extinction / political complex. Plus ca change. Wonder if they’ll be any more successful at changing things than we were.
My parents were members of the Greatest Generation; the Depression and WW2 were primary among their formative experiences. They grew up in tough times, but also in a bountiful land possessed of a generally cohesive populace.
I’m a first-year Boomer. By then, substantive changes in the general cultural focus were afoot: suburban expansion, Rock and Roll, more cars and with bigger fins, pointy bras, liberation movements of various stripes, environmentalism, war protests – great fun!…Sure, there were challenges, but we were optimistic that they could be met through civilized means: protests, voting, consumer choices and the like.
My daughters are Millennials (I was nearly 50 when they were born) and they have had to deal with an entirely grimmer set of circumstances than my generation faced. They grew up watching planes fly into buildings on TV, and having to figure out how to navigate the mysteries of the dawning computer age (I was no help in this area), and enduring a financial recession unlike anything my generation had had to experience as youngsters.
In fact, my daughter – then in middle school – asked me, “Dad, can you sign me up for the free lunch program at school”?
I was aghast, “why do you want to get free lunches? We’re not poor.”
Her reply, “but all my friends are getting free lunches, and I feel left out.”
This was a middleclass school in a good neighborhood!…can you imagine?
Then came the smartphone and the accompanying alienation it engendered…One day, years later, while I was driving one of my daughters to her classes at her university, we passed a bus stop where we spotted eight or ten waiting students, all gazing into their devices. There was zero interaction among the group. My daughter commented, “Smartphones are the cigarettes of my generation.”
Now entering their 30s’ Millennials are faced with an ongoing environmental train wreck, a still-active pandemic, a growing domestic fascist movement, shortages of a whole range of basics including affordable housing, a real possibility of nuclear disaster, and, well the list goes on.
It is no wonder, then, that they are an anxiety-ridden lot, that, for them, there isn’t much to look forward to in their lives. In truth, the tattoo epidemic could easily be seen as a symptom of this lack of future orientation that seems to characterize the Millennial mindset.
I view the Millennials’ many trials and troubles as unique to their generation, and will, therefore, refrain from passing judgement.
I think if the five essential lessons were all that one could fall back on, fear would lead eventually to despair and actually hasten a civilization’s demise — the opposite extreme from the modern industrial mindset which views us as the Masters of the Universe (and I’m not talking here about the cartoon series starring He-Man and Skeletor, though I loved it). According to contemporary scholar Maria Giulia Franzoni, an ancient Greek dictum actually had it that it’s “best never to be born.” My strong suspicion in this regard is that it constituted a major reason why Greece basically ran out of steam after falling to the Romans. After all, if life is so hard it’s best never to be born, what can justify having kids? But what if we choose never to have kids at all?
In the pre-modern European mind, while we may not be in control, God is. It was this belief that sustained the West for centuries, never mind for now what defects it had. But during the 16th and 17th centuries certain people collectively known as the Hermeticists came up with various ideas that the Church found threatening, so it opposed them with ideas of its own which stated that God is external to our world and situated far and away, and that He’s under no obligation to play by any rules (!!). These ideas ironically led to an increasing skepticism about God, and eventually to His virtual disappearance from the Western milieu. Descartes saw the danger — to which he himself actually contributed — and sought to circumvent it in his Meditations. But later developments in Western thought demolished his attempts.
The West was therefore left, like Yeats’ falcon, facing a spiritually void Universe. And what a coincidence it was that it was also at this time that the Pandora’s Box of fossil fuels was opened; the enormous power unleashed by fossil fuels could easily have offered an illusory sense of compensation for the terrible feeling of finding no falconer. “Who needs God? We’re in control now!”
The rest, of course, is history. Except the fossil fuels (and many other resources too) are now running out, and we’re slowly realizing we’re not that much in control after all. And we can still see no falconer.
Whew! – succinct yet comprehensive; for what it’s worth, I really like this comment.
Thank you. :)
Yup, ditto. The history of Western Civilization in 250 words or less. An extrapolation on the treatise is our current civilization/society does not understand the underpinnings of their practices and mores. Some can be hundreds of years old, or even thousands of years. i.e. the pervasive Puritanism still predominate in American society. (Although it does share many aspects with other cultures).
BTW, for the doomer discussion with a high level of cognizant capacity we used to have The Oil Drum. Although the primary function was Peak Oil, discussions would cover a broad range of topics. Because, well…, oil is used everywhere?
I’m not suggesting that the five essential lessons for young adults were the entire basis for a culture. Yet the tribes who settled North America, and who obviously relied on them, flourished for perhaps 20,000 years without any signs of angst. When they succumbed it was to smallpox and lead poisoning. Our industrial culture, on the other hand, is coming apart after a few hundred years.
Sorry if I misunderstood your article.
Regarding the natives of North America, I’m sure they had an alternative falconer — what the Lakota spoke of as Wakan Tanka, often translated as ‘The Great Spirit’ or ‘The Great Mystery’. For them the Cosmos was still spiritually charged. It wasn’t a disenchanted void, unlike what the modern Western mind faces.
I wonder if there’s any way Western man can recover his sense of the Universe as divine, or under the aegis of something divine. Certainly contemporary scholars like the American philosopher-theologian David Ray Griffin are trying very hard to bring this about.
“…without any signs of angst”…? Native Americans (Asian immigrants) were no more immune to human competitive impulses than any other group, be it tribe, town or civilization. Without competition – and its accompanying anxiety – humanity would have dead-ended several million years ago.
Early European immigrants took advantage of the warlike nature of numerous tribes, pitting one against another, as well as against competing European interests in the New World. Consider the French and Indian war. In fact, George Washington used Indian tactics to help defeat the British forces during the War for Independence – tactics that he had learned as a British major in his Ohio campaign during that earlier war.
It’s easy to assume that pre-civilized peoples are innocents, with their quaint attire, simple technologies and ‘natural’ lifestyles. But as Margaret Mead found out after the publishing of her book ‘Coming of Age in Samoa’, all that glitters is not gold. The scandal that followed damn near ended her nascent career. Counter to Mead’s thesis, latter studies confirmed that the Samoans were every bit as screwed up as any other grouping of humans – perhaps more so!
Like Enkidu the wild man or the naked youths of the Garden of Eden, the Noble Savage is a myth – a prayer to return to an ideal past that never was.
You got me! Completely blinded by their “quaint attire, simple technologies and ‘natural’ lifestyles, I bought into the whole Noble Savage mantra. (I think it was their quaint attire that got me.) Although in seven books, 13 years of blogging and countless magazine articles I have never said any of that crap, feel free to berate me as if I had.
Good Lord, Tom, all I’m saying is that if you think computer glitches, traffic jams, and the antics of MAGA goofballs are anxiety producing, try running about the savannah half-naked, working to wrest carrion from a pride of hungry lions. You’ve got stones, pointy sticks and a well-practiced routine of leaping, shouting and raising as much hell as possible in order to drive the lions away from their well-earned prize. In addition, there are hyenas, wild dogs and other human tribes competing for the booty. If the lions cower away, you’re fine. If not…well then…A horrible death by dismemberment. Anxiety perhaps, mortal terror – most likely. Think of the PTSD and the ghastly nightmares endured by or ancestors. I mean, these guys were only human.
Perhaps I lack self-restraint in my comments. I’m originally from Baltimore. We are a contentious lot, prone to purple prose (think of Poe and Menchen). In any event, I apologize. I most certainly would not be following your blog if I thought you lacked qualification.
But I did not say that “computer glitches, traffic jams, and the antics of MAGA goofballs are anxiety producing.” I said that the imminent, existential threat of climate change to wipe out the human species is anxiety producing. And yes, when faced with the existential; threat of the white man, I’m sure the Native Americans felt much the same anxiety. But we did this to ourselves. And while they lasted, by the latest estimates, up to 20,000 years, we are tits up after 200, Give them some credit.
It’s interesting how some seem to have this hair-trigger oppositional response to anything suggesting that those following the hunter-gatherer way of life may have something we can learn from.
We have entered the Anthropocene where there is no escape hatch. I’m a non breeding tree hugger that has been told I was crazy by the normies most of my life. Now that overshoot is fully incorporated I feel no elation from seeing this ahead of time. We’re all losers now. Extinction is guaranteed.
There is a certain peace that is offered knowing there is no future as we stand abreast the Void. We have no future, we have no ego, we have only the Eternal staring us in the eyes.
Maybe this is the paradigm we need to understand. After all, there is no compound interest and resource depletion in the Void. Only Being.