Just read your post on explaining end-stage capitalism, and "Nobody wants to be the actual generation that lives through the fall of capitalism, because it’s going to be cataclysmic on every level," - do you have thoughts on how much longer its going to be until this happens? I'm mostly just curious if our generation is going to be the one it hits
...aha. A cheery question (if a totally understandable one).
To be honest, I would say the odds are....good. People have noticed some rather pointed similarities between the first few decades of the twenty-first century, and the first few decades of the twentieth century. Fascism on the rise, surrealist art, a focus on personal pleasure, Europe in turmoil, an ongoing war (the War on Terror in our case), etc etc. It goes without saying that something major in the economics department happened in 1929, and the country only recovered because of World War II and the need to stimulate wartime production. In the meantime, the Great Depression wiped out the savings and net worth of most of the country, and while the iconic images are the Dust Bowl of the Midwest and the popular myth of stockbrokers jumping out of windows on Wall Street, it was a serious and worldwide event that, as noted, only ended because of an even worse calamity. That is...not something to aspire to.
2029 would be just under ten years from now, though we hope history isn’t THAT on the nose (also, we fucking never learn. Anything. Ever.) That matches rather well with the outer limit of the time we have to save the planet from runaway climate change, and frankly, it all depends. If Trump gets re-elected in 2020, I... honestly think we’re fucked. We’re already fucked as it is now, but I just don’t see a way in which the present system could cope with another five years of this (shudders, throws salt over shoulder, spins in a circle). We’re already well down the Nazi checklist as it is. The prospect of allowing that to go on for another half a decade is.... let’s just say I don’t think there’d be much of anything recognizable as America at the end. Not that there’s much now.
I also think that as is always the case, middle-class and marginally middle class people (especially white ones) will probably miss out on the worst of it. It’s already the case that climate change and global poverty and this kind of thing most affects the people who are safely “out of sight, out of mind” for the complacent West. After all, WE aren’t the Bangladeshis getting flooded because of climate change, WE aren’t the kids in Chinese factories forced to spend 18 hours a day, 7 days a week making iPhones, WE aren’t the immigrants from Central American countries getting caged at the border and being thrown into concentration camps, so on and so forth. These things are already happening, but American/European/etc people with a certain amount of privilege are still able to remain insulated from that. If there was to be a comprehensive collapse, then even people who have been able to minimise the effects on themselves until now would be caught up in it. The world has changed to such a degree that if there was another Great Depression, it wouldn’t happen in the same way, but we already saw what the financial crash of 2008 did (and it in fact came very close to wrecking the global economy permanently). Plus, think of how much of our possessions/money/etc are now virtual. Most of us don’t get a physical paycheck anymore (it’s all direct deposit) and rarely carry cash. Our savings are just some numbers in a database in a bank’s computer system. There’s no such thing as privacy, corporations own all our data and personal information, and you can’t opt out of this system or boycott Amazon because they literally own too much of the infrastructure to make that realistically possible. It would basically take one good crash of the internet to leave a lot of people destitute, and our current civilization is a very fragile thing.
I.... really don’t know. I’m not sure I have anything necessarily optimistic to say, and that’s a struggle. You have to live in a state of hopeful nihilism, because if you focus on the big picture and how chaotic and nightmarish things are on the macro level, you’ll go crazy. You can’t control that, you will give yourself anxiety over it, and you will miss out on what you can do on a day-to-day level. As one person, you can’t fix this by yourself. But you can still make choices about what you do and how you interact with people and what you value and how you behave even in this comprehensively flawed system. We don’t know if we’re all going to die, it’s true. But nobody in the history of time has ever known that, and the human race has gotten through some pretty tough scrapes before. We don’t know. We really don’t. And despite /waves hand/ ALL THIS, we’re... still here, for now. Many of us have things that make us happy. And those mean something. It’s not all chaos and nightmare. As Samwise Gamgee would say, there’s good in this world, Mr. Frodo, and it’s worth fighting for.
In short: yes, the world is very probably fucked, and I can’t rule out the possibility that a major collapse affecting even the privileged groups/people who have the luxury of avoiding the worst of it happens in our lifetime, or even within another ten years. I worry constantly about not having enough time to have a real life, as I think a lot of people of my generation do. But I have also had that stare-into-the-abyss-and-decide-what-I’m-going-to-do-about-it many times, and I don’t think it’s worth just giving up and deciding that nothing matters and etc etc. I think it’s worth going on with your life in the day to day, small-thing moments. I think it’s worth having things you enjoy and things you dream about and those seemingly wildly impossible dreams about what you’ll do when you’re old and the idea that any of us will in fact get to live a real life. There is still goodness, and kindness, and beauty in the world. Because we’re plugged into the constant bad-news-from-everywhere power hour in terms of the internet, we miss that.
Anyway. This has turned into a ramble, and it explains the weird state we live in of trying to be personally optimistic even when we know things are shit, and how hard that is, but is still the only thing we can do. And honestly: the future isn’t set. Our destruction is not inevitable. We’re in the darkest timeline now and we seem to have been in it for a while, but even that can end. Enough people just have to decide that we’re not putting up with it anymore, and act accordingly.
We are many. They are few. It’s always been the case. They have a lot more than we do, materially speaking, but it’s still possible. It always is.
