I CAN'T TAKE THE STUPID ANYMORE, OR, ANNIHILATION BY ANNIHILATION

Over the last few months, I’ve been talking to you about the idea of annihilation. And now perhaps you see why. How quickly we got here: “a civilization will die tonight.”

If you imagined that I was speaking to you in abstractions, think again. I’m always trying to prepare you for what comes next.

Civilization and annihilation. This is where we are. We have given lunatics of every kind the power to annihilate. To annihilate us socially and culturally, which is the power the techno-barons have, to annihilate our democracies and economies, which is the power the demagogues have, and the power to annihilate our minds, which is what AI does.

We are at an existential point now. We stand poised on the brink of many annihilations. They already proceed around us, and we’re only dimly aware. American democracy was annihilated, and soon enough, Trump threatened annihilation on a country. It won’t be the last—it’s just the first. The oil crisis that ensued threatened to bring the global economy to its knees. And in all this, the world’s leaders were silent: annihilated, afraid to even speak out against Trump’s hyper-genocidal threats.

I warned you about this some time ago. That we stood at a civilizational turning point. And then I tried to teach you the stakes, annihilation, nothingness, the reduction to zero.

Me? I’m tired. Faintly amused. Sort of irritated. Maybe that’s scandalous. I don’t know. They always find a way to scandalize me, or maybe I do it to myself. I don’t know about that, either.

It’s sort of funny in a way to me now. Me, or maybe people like us. We waste our lives trying to help the rest of these idiots understand the stakes of what’s before us. They tell us we’re wrong, it’s not going to happen, they call us idiots, hysterics, alarmists, doomers.

And then they cry and whimper like babies.

When it all happens just the way we say it will, because, wait for it, we remembered what we learned in third grade. When people like you and me warned of fascism, what did the rest of them think it meant? Did they not get the “violent expansionism” or “genocidal warfare” part?

Why is anyone surprised by any of this?

Forgive me, I’m actually going to answer that question.

Because what we learned recently is that no matter what we do, people are, remain, are intent on being, fucking idiots. They are full of hubris. They don’t use their minds. They override what they know with what they feel. “It can’t happen here” or “it can’t happen to me” is a feeling, not a fact. And while I’m a romantic, very much on the side of feelings, to fail to think clearly at this juncture in history is the precise hallmark of a…fucking idiot.

I’ve been perusing the newspapers, their comments sections, forums. And you know what? They’re full of people who are surprised, startled, shocked, waxing indignant, outraged, etcetera. I sigh and I chuckle. Does that sound snide, arrogant, condescending? Jesus, forgive me for having read a goddamned history book and taken it seriously. What did these people think “the 1930s are repeating themselves” meant? Did they think we wouldn’t get to the “demagogues threatening genocide” phase? Hold on, let me answer that question, too. That’s exactly what they thought.

I’m tired of it, my friends. I can’t fight the fucking idiocy of the idiots anymore. Neither can you. We’ve tried. We’ve fought the good fight. We’ve spent the better part of our lives trying to educate, teach, guide, civilize these morons. Whether as teachers, artists, writers, psychologists, professors, scientists, journalists, doesn’t matter, add to that list as you see fit.

But these fucking idiots will not be civilized. They won't learn. They don’t care to, until it’s too late. Until that point, they’ll fight us tooth and nail, with their foolish, half-formed opinions, their manufactured love for fake debates, their two-sides-to-every-story-even-fascism-and-world-war, the way they’ve been conditioned by capitalism, violence, fear, and greed to just reject any semblance of truth because it’s too dangerous to hold for even one moment.

So I shrug. I chuckle. I try to…walk away. I barely write anything anymore. What’s the point?

See all those posts out there, all those columns, all those words expended? My God, how on earth is this happening? Let me issue the biggest eye-roll in the world. Call a fucking exorcist, I just snapped my own neck. Wow guys, what a mystery! Who would’ve thought that fascism, authoritarianism, a broken global economy, and rampant capitalism’s anti-values of inhumanism and narcissistic totalization would have ended here? Wait, only every single capable thinker of the 20th century, from Einstein to Jonas Salk.

Words fail to express my weariness with the idiocy that surrounds us now. The faint ripple of amusement I feel isn’t a thing of condescension, it’s aimed at me, for not getting how fucking truly stupid people are. The average person is more interested in “shape wear” and Ozempic than they are in the end of human civilization as we know it. Three days without oil, energy, electricity, etcetera and they’ll be crying and whimpering, asking: where did it all go? We were this close to that brink. We are this close to that brink.

I try to keep my chin up. I try to retain my faith in humanity. But I know it’s a lie. So I try to live this lie. I take Snowy for a walk, and smile at the girls at the cafe. They giggle. What a cute dog. They don’t say: how funny it is to see the cool guy in the leather jacket with a tiny white dog. The daily stuff of my life. It gives me a tiny window of light.

But the darkness surrounds me now. I watch people. At the cafe, on the street, at midnight, at 4Am when the city sleeps. Lovers and workers, nobodies and somebodies, junkies and addicts to the truer drugs of money and power. I observe them all. And in too few of them do I see any kind of light anymore. At least the kind that I need to see.

And so I ache from how tired it all makes me. I laugh at myself, the joke that I am now, this fool. I think that my days of trying to be a good and decent person are over. Not because it served no purpose. I’m a friend to futility. But for a deeper reason. I feel too old to care anymore. I’ve gone gray in the soul, somehow, as the world around us fell into this dark age. The light in me has gone out, too. I can’t see it anymore. Can’t find it. Maybe it was never there.

Where am I? Where are we?

The world doesn’t know it’s in a dark age yet. But idiot by idiot, the lights of the human soul fail. Harsh words. Perhaps they serve no purpose, either. I have no purpose now, I think. Maybe we don’t. What is the purpose of learned and decent people in a world, in a time, like this? Who are we now, any of us? You see, in the darkness, we can’t even see ourselves anymore.

Did I waste my life, I wonder, every morning? When I wake up, the question haunts me, glares at me like a demon. And I try to go back to sleep. Did I? Waste my life? Learning, understanding, knowing. Writing books, teaching, pursuing the idea of all ideas that something is truer than all this? I know the answer. When you have to ask questions like this, it’s only because you are trying to bury the answer deeper than the winter.

Of course I wasted my life. Look at where the world is now. Look where people like us are. Look how the worst among us crow and cackle and take what they want. Bodies to rape, countries to genocide, economies to pilfer. They’ve never had it better. Quick, let’s ask ChatGPT how much it stole today. Or should we ask Trump’s goons? But the truth is that I don’t think they’re really the ones to blame anymore. I think that the idiots are, the ones who let this happen, wanted it to, not just by commission, but by omission.

Annihilation by annihilation. Civilizations end this way. Do you see it yet?

So I mourn. Me, the life I threw away on the idea of a better world, the time I wasted, us, the future, now, civilization. Night after night. I try to mourn the ache away. Isn’t that what mourning is supposed to do? But the funeral only goes on, because the world around us is entering a dark age, annihilation by…

The morning beckons. I sleep until I can’t take the pain anymore. Or maybe I sleep because I can’t bear the agony anymore. I wasted my life. What do you do after that? What do you do with that awful epiphany? Snowy says: dad, wake up! Come on. Let’s go for a walk!

I smile at the little guy. Alright, buddy. Let’s go. Let’s go far, far away from here.

Love,

Umair (and Snowy!)