What’s Left When the Myths Are Gone

Following is a somewhat edited version of a reflection I shared with my friend Paul, about the proliferation of the “We all need to…” posts that I satirized in my post yesterday.

I should note that, for at least the first half of this blog’s 19-year life, I was one of the worst offenders on this score. My writing was full of idealistic, naïve prescriptions for, well, How to Save the World. And I was in my early 50s then, certainly old enough to know better. But I didn’t. So I should say up front that the unending stream of “We all need to…” posts, speeches, op-eds, films, and books doesn’t annoy or anger me, and I certainly can’t blame their authors for their naïveté or their zeal.

The feelings they stir in me are more akin to sorrow, a sadness that their writers so fervently believe that what they are saying is true and urgent and useful. And a sadness that their readers and listeners hope, almost desperately, that they are too. Both sides are inevitably going to be disappointed, frustrated, and wonder why things aren’t how they should be or could be, or might have been, if only…

With that preamble, this is what I wrote:

I get really saddened, and sometimes frustrated, by articles that say, in a million different ways: “All we have to do is…”, or “We really need to…”, without any appreciation of the massive size and complexity of, and millions of moving parts in, the systems that would have to be, by some magic stroke, radically changed in order for these things to actually happen.

This is true for CoVid-19. It’s true for the slide of the US (and other countries) into ideological fascism. It’s true for social injustice and gross inequality and endless acts of genocide. It’s true for climate collapse. We could have a 100% unanimous agreement on “what needs to be done” and that would get us precisely 0% closer to actually getting it done. That’s not how complex systems work.

Meanwhile, our almost wilful, head-in-the-sand naïveté about the workings and unchangeable momentum/inertia of massively complex systems allows:

• • politicians and other ‘leaders’ and their apologists to say they’re doing all they can and that it’s (enter scapegoat/opponent/enemy here)’s fault that change isn’t happening;
  • righteous citizens (and bloggers and podcasters and op-ed simpletons) to say it’s not up to them, and that it’s up to politicians who are (enter vilification — corrupt, incompetent, stupid etc. — here), to get off their asses and do “all we have to do”;
  • idealists to go on creating if-I-were-in-charge fantasy scenarios of what “might” be done, and to go on believing that designing and articulating such theoretical pipe-dreams is actually contributing something useful to the messes we’re in; and
  • everyone to continue reacting with helpless anxiety and righteous indignation about what’s happening, and to continue nevertheless with business as usual, because no one is mandating (that’s a dirty word now) that they do anything differently, and/or because they don’t know what else to do, and besides they’re just a small cog in the machine and it’s not their job.

But if you dare tell people this — that the system is massively too large and out of control to change — you get the Margaret Mead-quoting idealists tut-tutting that you’re a defeatist and hence part of the problem that they have provided the diagnosis of and/or potential solution to, and that you should shut up and get out of the way.

No one wants to hear the truth — that no one (and no powerful group) is in control, that the current dysfunctional and collapsing systems are no one’s “fault”, that when systems get too large and sclerotic to be sustainable they almost always collapse because they are too big and complex to reform. And that instead of railing against idiots and incompetents and evil-doers for this dysfunction and for our ongoing collapse, we’d be wiser to accept it, psychologically prepare ourselves for it, learn from it, learn new things to help us cope with what might be coming next, and enjoy the time we have. We’re all doing our best, though in most cases that is, arguably, badly.

It’s a shame that our dream of rapid global vaccination was impracticable and doomed to fail for a dozen different reasons. But it’s not that “we have no excuse” for not doing so, it’s that we live in a world where magical thinking and idealistic designs and ‘Plan B’s’ and pipe-dreams and other forms of intellectual fappery actually have zero effect on what happens or could happen in the real world.

And it’s likewise a shame that for at least 7.9B reasons we’re doing essentially nothing to address or even gear down to prepare for climate collapse, even though a huge proportion of us know that the shit’s going to hit the fan and this inaction will have devastating consequences. But we’re careering so fast off the edge of the cliff that no amount of steering and braking would prevent collapse, even if it were possible to get everyone to agree today and act to do so (which it isn’t).

But, we believe what we want to believe. And for most, that’s anything but “We’re fucked and it’s no one’s fault”. That’s too dark, too hopeless, too shameful.

I wonder now if it isn’t this subconscious shame — that at every turn this supposedly unprecedentedly intelligent species has fucked things up so badly — that is at the heart of our foolish beliefs, even more than our naïveté about how the world works and how things happen and how they change (or don’t).

It’s actually worse than shame, because it’s an acknowledgement of failure to everyone, including our children and grandchildren and our ancestors.

And it’s completely misplaced. We have nothing to be ashamed of. We did our best. We didn’t know any better. It was the system, damn it!

But we can’t accept that. Our global cultural myths (reinforced by Hollywood) are all about inevitable progress and miracles and heroes who at the last possible moment save the day, and about happy endings. We can’t countenance the alternative as anything other than failure.

But over the next few decades, we’re going to learn to see past the myths and the shame, and see that there is no success or failure; there is only the trying. Only the doing our best, the only thing we could do, leading to the only outcome that could have happened. I’m going to witness that shift with unrestrained joy.

Here’s a really lousy analogy: You visit the doctor with concerning symptoms and she tells you that you have a terrible disease, that you have at most six months to live, and that those last six months may not be comfortable. It’s a disease strongly associated with poor diet and lack of exercise. What do you feel? Anger of course. Denial, probably. Shame, for not eating better and exercising more, probably. Bargaining (“How do we fix it, mitigate it?”), almost assuredly. Depression, maybe. (No I’m not going to do a Kübler-Ross five-stages thing on you; the ending is not happy.)

But I’d suggest that you’re most likely to do one of two things: The best you can, or assisted suicide. Wild creatures are smart: that’s what they do. When the situation is clear, we can be pretty smart too. Dylan Thomas exhortations notwithstanding, my experience has been that in a crunch, people figure out how to do the best they can pretty quickly. The sticking point, most often, is not about their acceptance, but about the implications for other people. Their shame is that they didn’t buy life insurance for their descendants, not that they didn’t exercise. Their grief and shame is for those left behind, far more than for themselves.

And that’s where the analogy between personally having six months to live and our collective human incapacity and acknowledgement of ‘failure’ and collapse breaks down. The myths and the shame of our perceived failures as a species are purely collective. When push comes to shove, we can come to grips with and move past our personal shame, but we can never live down the shame we perceive in the eyes of others. I would argue that collective shame is what is behind a lot of wars, and has been since our civilization began.

And it is this collective shame that I am going to delight in witnessing the evaporation of as our civilization enters its final decades. We are all going to have the startling realization that we have all done our best, all our lives, and that we have no one to blame, including ourselves, and nothing to be ashamed about, for our species or ourselves.

We’re going to let go of the illusion of control, and forgive ourselves and everyone else (yes, even him!) for doing the only thing any of us could have done. We are going to struggle together to deal with some really harrowing and dangerous situations, because that’s what humans do. We’re going to reconnect with our species in a tribal, open, compassionate and mutually supportive way, not because “We all need to…”, but because we have no other choice.

Getting there is not going to be easy. We could wreck it prematurely if nuclear war arises, and in any case we’re going to witness some ugly and devastating displays of shame and blame and grief before we get there. But then I think we’re going to see something that those who have aged well, and the ‘experts’ in dying, and all the more-than-human creatures on the planet, know about, but about which our myths are silent. As we finally come to accept that our civilization is ending, I think we’re going to show some true collective style. And maybe even some grace. I can hardly wait. We’re going to surprise ourselves. It’s not going to be awful. It’s going to be awesome.