There's no denying that apocalypse has its gothic appeal (witness the popularity of various world-ending sci-fi movies and books), but some renditions of it have so obvious a political agenda that it kind of makes you smile. E.g.,
here's Oxford researcher Jorg Friedrichs telling us "what will happen when peak oil hits" -- apparently "the outlook is not good":
His conclusions: the world will have a “slow and painful” adjustment to peak oil lasting a century or more with the inevitable collapse of industrial society and the disintegration of free trade. How cheerful.
And why might we think that last sentence isn't sarcastic? Well, maybe because:
If he were to guess which countries would be the most stable during the collapse, Friedrichs concludes that “Countries with a recoverable authoritarian tradition are likely to work better than liberal democracies.”
The U.S. would have a hard time resorting to Cuban style local resilience because of the Western lifestyle. “When social glue and traditional lifestyles have eroded, they are not easily recovered,” he said, comparing the Cuban and U.S. societies. “After several generations of individualism and affluence, Westerners will have a hard time accepting that they need to rely on communities and must revert to a sustainable lifestyle...."
Yes, socialism may have failed everywhere it's been tried, but there's still hope, no? Y2K didn't do it for us, but if peak oil doesn't, there's still climate change, global pandemic, asteroid strike, ...
Apocalypse attracts so much energy because we project our inevitable individual demise onto the world at large. Chill, baby, its only you who are going to die, not the planet. In earlier times - like the 1940's when I was a lad - I remember cartoons of long haired old men carrying placards reading "The End is Nigh!" That was all that was needed to make people laugh - no caption required. It was a sort of fringe religious fashion in those olden times, but its the same unconscious impulse today. Supported by scientific committees and governments and serious people. I think we should all pretend to be serious persons and take it very very seriously. And go take courses in socialist resilience skills at the local university.
ReplyDeleteI think you make a good point, but I also think that a lot of apocalypse appeal derives from a kind of adolescent boredom with "bourgeois" existence -- the end of the world can be a way of getting out of this small town/suburb/neighborhood/school/etc. and injecting some survivalist grit into life -- assuming, of course, that you're one of the people still with a life (which you do).
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