The Age of the Breaking of the Human Spirit

What Did We Learn From the Last Decade? Enough To Shake Our Faith in Civilization Itself

Image Credit

Yesterday, you couldn’t open an American newspaper without being chided against pessimism. Today, “doomerism” hasreplaced pessimism.

And despite the fact that scolding “doomers” is increasingly a way for certain kinds of elites to pat themselves on the back, and go on seeing themselves as sober and serious thinkers — there’s a very good reason that dark views about the future have begun to go mainstream.

It’s not just the obvious one. We live in an age of breakdown — scratch that, we used to live in an age of breakdown, now we live in an age of meltdown. Nothing works. How hard is it just being a…normal person…these days? Trying to make ends meet on an honest day’s work? While almost comically villainous billionaires hoover up the gains in the economy, and malign forces, from fascism to theocracy, batter sledgehammers of hate and ignorance and rank idiocy at society and politics? Nothing works: economics, polities, societies. Social contracts, political parties, financial systems, the upwards trajectory of progress, the steady rise of living standards — all broken, from America to Europe to China.

That’s not the reason, though, for the reason that dark views about the future have begun to take hold.

Will we have a planet? Democracies? Will people just be reduced to scraps, on a dying planet, from which crazed billionaires are fleeing, into bunkers, and on spaceships? Will summer just be Fire Season? How long is the water system going to hold up — and what about food? What’s going to happen to my grandkids? Do they have a future? Do any of us? These are just some of the questions people have begun to ask. I know this because they ask me, every day. I have a friend who feels she can’t bring children into such an unstable world, because she doesn’t know just how messed up the future is going to be. 

So these questions are different. Of a different order. They’re not just yesteryear’s pessimism. Those questions were more like, “Will we have a recession? Will politics get a little less paralyzed? Whew, I don’t like those conservatives or liberals. I wish my society worked a little better — things aren’t great right now. Man, these bills are beginning to mount. This level of inequality’s really beginning to worry me.” 

See how different these sets of questions really are? Back then, back when, we weren’t biting our nails about fascism on a boiling planet — reducing the rest of us to fighting over scraps for existence. That’s yesteryear’s everyday pessimism — and today’s concerns are a far, far cry from it.

So what’s the reason for this sudden…vibe shift? A change in mood, sentiment, atmosphere? Why do things feel so bleak now that we’ve crossed a kind of Rubicon into Existential Concerns like will we have a planet, democracy, food, water, air?