Eucatastrophe

For all my life I have been told that I, along with my generation and the world at large, is fucked. No sugar-coating or dancing around bushes. Simply, we are fucked. How fucked? Totally fucked. Pandemics lessening our population to bits, wars taking care of the rest, romantic impossibilities for those without 6/6/6 or plastic everywhere, economic collapses across the developed worlds, transhumanism reserved for the elite, the cosmos explored by the strong, resources plundered from the developing worlds, the planet as our only home exploding due to nuclear warheads launched by tyrannical dictators or rogue AI agents.

What a state for the world, for Humanity. It could be said we are in dyscatastrophe, a word coined by J. R. R. Tolkein describing when everything seems to be at its most hopeless, lowest point. Consider this moment that we are living through right now.

I have often wondered why Humanity chooses to engage in these extracurricular activities. Is our world not complicated enough? Almost like we are working towards something otherworldly, but I will not step on Professor Jiang’s eschatological heels. When I find myself in conversation that revolves around any of these existential topics, the main emotion I encounter in myself and others is fear and uncertainty; fear of the uncertainty, uncertainty of how much they should fear. Activated nervous systems galore that drown themselves in neurotransmitters and neurotoxins. Young people and older generations arguing over trivial issues when the goal should be to utilize the wisdom of the elders and the energy of the youth to build out new solutions to an advancing, decaying species.

You know the strange feeling we get when we walk towards a high balcony or bridge or cliff and wonder with increasing curiosity, “What would happen if I threw myself off?” I think we are encountering that curiosity en masse about the cliff our civilization is about to walk off. We all see it, feel it, know it. No one in power wants to address it or course correct. Those that talk about the abyss (or what lies beneath) are labelled conspiracy theorists or paranoid. The few that bring up receipts documenting their predictions on us reaching this cliff are labelled…whatever they are labelled.

At this point, everyone wants off the ride. I think, in all honesty, that most people would trade richer futures and the land of plenty described in every utopia-porn-esque story or vision for something simpler, stabler. Notice the uptick of young people who do not want to own companies but instead want to own farms. Keep in mind the massive upswing of people (not just younglings) that do not want to explore outerspace, instead preferring to take care of their home planet first before repeating the same mistakes elsewhere. There has been a change of heart in our species that I would like to begin documenting. We are slowly but surely moving away from the external and finding love, belonging, belief, and power in the internal. We have been told that the four dimensions (length, width, height) plus time running forward we exist in physically/externally are the only ones that matter. Not true, and it was never true, but now we have finally found the power and the moment to say it ain’t so. Now we are learning how to have conversations and produce media and art that acknowledge the multi-dimensional infinity that we inhabit inside ourselves, and learn to harness and wield that power. Even cooler, this is not the first time our species has achieved a fluency in understanding these dimensions of internality. More on this for another time.

In similar fashion, whenever someone tells me we are fucked (a lot of people constantly say this still, to this day!), a similar proportion will say, “yes, but Humans always figure it out.” I used to subscribe to this and I still do, somewhat. But with now a very clear nuance. The traditional viewpoint of “figuring it out” had to do with the external yet again. Polluting the oceans? Lets create technology in order to clear it up, forgetting that this technology needs funding, factories, and energy which are all still scarce and contribute worse to other problems around the world – read up on Daniel Schmactenberger’s Meta-crisis for a deeper view on this. The same can be said for resource scarcity solved by interstellar exploration, biological mortality killed by transhumanism, crime and injustice reduced to an AI surveillance state, and on and on. These solutions will solve nothing because they are based on the same principles that got us into this mess. Why would you apply a band-aid with the same knife that caused the original cut? We need a different, softer, more humane approach. We need a civilizational hug. And we were good at that before we got so caught up in our extracurricular activities.

Along with dyscatastrophe, Tolkein described a turnaround in the story that has more hope, more inspiration: eucatastrophe. A sudden, incredible turn of events that saves our characters from certain doom. Indeed, we are not there yet, but we can always begin to construct our eucatastrophe. Just because I have been told all my life that I am fucked does not mean I must identify with that statement. Yes, I understand that right now, it feels like we are fucked. But if we do not do anything about it, who do we have to blame? Certainly not just the people involved. We are all involved. For this is our story. We get to decide how it ends, and more beautifully, how it continues.