Speed-Running the End of the World
We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.
~Ursula Le Guin
Some things make you stop and think.
This quote Bernard Hickey highlighted this morning from Rachel Donald’s piece Letting Go In A Crisis gave me pause for thought. I’m still thinking about it.
My first reaction was simply that the end of the world seems more likely right now. Nine countries possess nuclear weapons and nearly all of them are mad at each other. Global warming is proceeding at a rapid pace. Billionaires are building rockets and self-driving cars when history and their own actions would indicate that billionaires often become billionaires by cutting important and necessary corners that can backfire in spectacular ways. In fact, for this particular billionaire, he has explicitly stated that these casualties are all part of his calculations and are in fact necessary for the greater good.
But I think this over-complicates it.
There have been several points in time where someone has sat in front of a button that, when pressed, came with the not-insignificant likelihood that it would destroy the world. And someone has pressed the button every time.
Yet we’ve never come anywhere near that close to overthrowing capitalism.
Some things make you stop and think.
Sentences or artworks or ideas or understandings that lead to a shift in mentality or perspective.
Understanding capitalism and understanding politics often feels like a never-ending series of these realisations. More often not, it seems, the realisation is a bad one. Earth-shaking knowledge is exhausting to experience on repeat, and no matter how attentive and world-weary you are, there’s somehow still always another shitty thing around the corner.
Where were you when you learned about ATLAS and its influence in New Zealand?
ATLAS was not news to me when word of their movements in New Zealand started to spread. I was already familiar with them from their influence overseas. They aren’t unknown entirely, but you generally have to be quite politically savvy to have heard of them or be at all familiar with the extent of their influence. Talking about them, especially in a post-Trump world, makes you sound a little bit conspiracist. When everyone is worried about shadowy organisations controlling and influencing your media, politics, legislation, corporatism… well, your particular concerns start to blend into the background.
But this type of thinking was a trap. I never stopped to consider that ATLAS could be resisted here when other countries had failed. Not until I saw someone else do it first.
If you don’t already follow Mountain Tui, who somehow has become the default anti-ATLAS voice at first on reddit and now on substack, this is your signal to do so. Yesterday they posted about how ATLAS has already brought the kiwi edition of project 2025 to our shores, and while it won’t be news for anyone who follows the subject, it’s a good overview of where we are and how we came to be here. But it makes for a bleak prognosis, and reading about ATLAS’s goals and how well they’re being effected by our government right now can make it feel like there’s little to be done.
Mountain Tui posting about ATLAS reminds me that already more people know of this right-wing think tank network than I ever dreamt was possible when reading about their first forays into NZ. Indeed, the right initially rushed to paint it as a conspiracy and make out that Tui was crazy for believing it so ardently. They made memes about it. (Unfortunately Tui deleted their account so most of their posts were lost, but there are still threads on r/conservativekiwi dismissing Atlas as the same as unions and the like).
That time was a weird mashup of political discourse, subreddit drama, left-right trash-talking, and what I still believe to be some amount of genuine political interference from the right. But the lesson I cling to overall is that sometimes it really does just take one person who won’t shut up.
That’s a strategy that’s worked very well for conspiracists recently, but it’s worth noting that the same is true in reverse. When people talk about things, when they make a lot of noise and refuse to let injustices happen unnoticed, change can be effected. And a huge part of that push for change comes from that continued awareness of and vocal objection to these objectionable things.
New Zealand has a long history of political activism. That’s part of why AUKUS is so controversial. It harks back to another previously tense time in domestic and international politics, when left fought furiously against right over racial politics and our nuclear free status, and Robert Muldoon’s nightmare of a government was ended by snap election when Marilyn Waring crossed the floor.
We seem to always be slightly out of step with the rest of the world, a beat behind if you will, though still marching obediently to the international tune. But despite that, we do still manage to carve out a place for ourselves, to plant our flag in the sand and say, “Actually, we say differently.” From giving women the vote to the nuclear free movement to the smoking ban we ourselves are repealing (but not after other countries have begun adopting it too), New Zealand is the global example that one small island nation can stand, arms crossed, and say “No.”
Some things make you stop and think. The stories of J Robert Oppenheimer was one of these things for me, long before its silver screen retelling last year. His belief that a nuclear bomb was inevitable, and my belief that he was right, is the sort of shift in perspective that shapes how you see the world.
Oppenheimer is just one of those many men who has pressed one of those many buttons that could have ended the world in a blink. Luckily for us, it didn’t. And luckily for us, ever since then, people like Marilyn Waring and Oppenheimer himself have worked to make it so the world has a few less of those buttons, and a few less of those situations that lead to those buttons being pressed.
Two men who built the buttons.
I am no longer certain that human beings are a good judge of what is inevitable.
Some things make you stop and think.
We must repeat those things until we’re all thinking.
