Getting Used to Everything Falling Apart

Calling Palestinians “animals”, Israel’s defence minister announced a full genocidal siege against the citizens of Gaza. Western leaders unanimously supported the “response” to the Hamas attack on Israel, and the US pledged military support. Western governments announced airlifts to rescue Israeli civilian refugees, but none for Palestinian refugees. 

Over the past five years, the news has grown steadily worse — CoVid-19, ecological collapse and its extreme weather and disease manifestations, brutal wars (mostly of attrition) flaring everywhere, economic and political collapse, the abuses of extreme untrammelled capitalism, and the end of the illusions of democracy and the fair distribution of wealth. One thing after another.

Collapse is picking up speed, and there is nothing we can do about it. That’s really hard to accept, when you see its horrific consequences in all of the above events. The sense of helplessness as everything slowly (and sometimes not-so-slowly) falls apart. The feeling of everything being out of control. The fear that the loss, the poverty, the violence, the death and illness and precarity, will soon be on our doorsteps, and not just, mostly, many miles away.

My sense is that there was a time — before communications and ‘information’ media became so powerful that we can now read and view distant horrors, sometimes even in real time — when we didn’t much concern ourselves with news about things that were either happening far away, or which we could do nothing about. We weren’t expected to have an informed opinion on everything happening in the world. It wasn’t our job, or our responsibility, to know and deal with things personally that we couldn’t possibly know enough about to do so intelligently. We relied on people who we expected to know more — health and medical professionals, economic experts, diplomats, wise elders, and those with enough experience to provide nuance to their theories and to support their proposals — to take appropriate actions and to advise us to the best of their capability what we should do, if anything.

One of the consequences of Everything Falling Apart is that we no longer trust anyone, least of all governments and anyone in public service, to take those actions and to give us sound, unbiased advice. So we feel we have no choice but to “do our own research” and learn enough to make our own judgements and decisions on everything that is happening in the world, since nothing seems isolated to one place anymore.

But we really do not have a clue. The issues we are dealing with are massively complex, and no one — especially the political ‘leaders’ and experts and pundits — has a fraction of the background, experience and depth of understanding needed to even have a well-informed opinion on what is happening and why, let alone to be able to knowledgeably and competently recommend appropriate courses of action.

So those with enough power and wealth to be able to take actions that would have any impact at all on these issues, now seemingly feel obliged to pretend to understand the issues, so well that they can pontificate sensibly about events that only just happened, and which mostly were decades or centuries in the making, when in fact no one has even a basic understanding of what has happened or why.

And in many cases, in the fog of war or the confusion of the panicked moment, we can and will never know what really happened, or how, or why.

But decisive action is called for! So our ‘leaders’ draw on their superficial understanding, their simplistic models, their incompetent advisors, and the groupthink of those around them, and absurdly declare the unquestionable truth of the situation, the performative action that they are immediately taking, and what the rest of us ‘should’ think, believe, and do about it. It’s a circus act, with the clowns running everything.

It’s going to get worse. This is what collapse looks like. This is the new ‘normal’ as Everything Falls Apart. There is no ‘fixing’ the situation. This is what we, and our ‘leaders’ have been conditioned to do, all our lives. This is how humans behave in a situation of growing chaos. We cannot know what to do, but something has to be done, we think, so we do something, anything, based on the flimsiest and most flawed of premises, the most threadbare and unsupported theories, the result of which is, more times than not, to make the situation worse. Sometimes much worse, as substantially all of the political and military interventions in other countries’ affairs over the past 70 years demonstrate all too clearly.

This is the politics of the lynch mob, the economics of oligarchy and robber barons, and the philosophy of “doing anything is better than doing nothing”.

In times of chaos, doing nothing is seen as weakness, stupidity, ignorance, cowardice. Where in better times, doing nothing is often exactly the best tactic, and sometimes even the best long-term strategy. Don’t make the situation worse until it’s known more fully what the situation is and what the options are. Don’t send in the army (or equip another’s army with WMD) until you know the consequences of doing so. Don’t organize a coup until you have reasonable assurances that that won’t make things worse. Don’t deregulate unless you fully appreciate why the regulations were put in place and why there is no risk in doing so. Don’t cede control of essential goods and services to private industry unless you have a simple means to renationalize them when it’s necessary. Don’t deindustrialize your country by offshoring all your manufacturing, unless you appreciate the extreme vulnerability of such a strategy. Don’t geoengineer the atmosphere until you are absolutely sure that the consequences of not doing so vastly exceed the staggering risks of doing so.

In short, don’t fuck around when you have no idea what you’re doing. Even if you’re goaded. Even if your advisors tell you there’s no downside and everyone is on board.

This generally becomes obvious to all of us when we first try it as children, like the first time we play with matches, or mix stuff together in chemistry lab.

But in times of collapse and chaos, we feel we no longer have the luxury of inaction. That is the way the simian brain apparently works. And this is how, as the flood of overwhelming events and horrors created by industrial civilization accelerates, we have conditioned each other to respond. We have no choice. 

So we take hostages (advisors, friends, the media) and we respond to each new unfathomable (at least in the moment, without the time or effort to understand how things got to this stage) crisis, by fucking around. Take sides, send in the troops, overthrow their government, try this new chemical on our crops, tell everyone to drink bleach, throw metal filings into the stratosphere to block the sun, use the sick or the poor or the homeless as guinea pigs for this new experimental treatment. Just do something. Show you’re a person of action. It works in Hollywood!

It is easy for me to say, with my enormous privilege of birthplace, heritage, caste, circumstances, education and conditioning, that it makes more sense to confess our ignorance and acknowledge and accept the inevitability of collapse and, as much as possible, do our best not to make the situation worse. And then do our best to adapt ourselves to the ever-changing circumstances. Most of the people in the world, including almost all of our ‘leaders’, do not have that privilege, and they’re going to act out their conditioning like the true simians we all are — facing chaos with rage and fear and sorrow and distress, and doing the human equivalent of throwing rocks and feces at the supposed enemy.

So, I am not going to tell anyone that they ‘should’ ‘get used’ to Everything Falling Apart. And I’m not going to assert that my predilection for caution, inaction, hesitation, and attempted equanimity is a ‘better’ way. I’m just as much a product of my conditioning as everyone else.

But as we slide into collapse and chaos, this is what is going to take up more and more of our time and attention, and it’s going to get closer and closer to home.

Can we just ‘get used’ to that? Of course not. That is not in our nature, or in our conditioning. We humans get angry, fearful and violent when we get stressed.

And if there’s anything that we can safely predict about our precarious future, it is that it is going to be more and more stressful. And unlike Hollywood, Everything Falling Apart is going to happen unpredictably, over decades, with no heroes and no clarity about where in the Long Emergency we are each day. And no deus ex machina happy ending.

Deep breath. Here comes the next thing.