An Apocalyptical Anxiety

We as humans are historically fascinated with the apocalypse; we love it so much that we come up with several myths and stories to explain why it will come and how it will destroy us. When culture changed and religion gave away to pop culture, the end of the world followed suit; where you had legends and scriptures we now have inescapable millions of movies, books and comics about the end, and they are as terrifying as they are soothing; knowing that there is a stop to the horrors of everyday life is pleasing, in a certain measure; there’s an escapism to it all. We are fascinated by our own extinction, as long as it’s fictional; strangely enough, despite all warnings, meanwhile, horror crawls into reality, and we embrace it not with the climax of a suicidal cult, but with indifference and calm.

We all know that climate change is real, barred some ignorant and bad faith cases, and we all know what is causing it. Look around the news and there is a reminder of what exactly is expecting us should we continue in this path: large scale devastation, which will hit first the poorest and then everyone else but the very rich. Yet when it comes to connect this harm to the actual problem, namely that we as a planet are being held hostage by political and economical interests, everything else fades; in many ways, we have already resigned ourselves to this. We know these upcoming apocalypses are not a punishment of the gods, but man made suffering, and our reply to this a slight shrug.

Take the decision the Brazilian government took to allow for unprecedented devastation of the Amazon forest: it was seen not as a devastating act of harm to the whole of humanity, but as a mean gesture to wild animals and some flowers. President Temer ultimately backed out of it, but the fact remains that his administration could have harmed people across the world more than many tinpot dictators the media concerns itself with. But Temer himself is not the problem, a man that was made to be a Nosferatu-looking host to a bodiless conglomerate of backwards thugs; it’s the fact that though things continue to get worse, neither him nor his owners fear repercussion. More than that, it’s the certainty that even if the Brazilian left were to reach power, a shaky prospect at best, nobody would treat them in the way they deserve to be treated. This isn’t a Brazilian issue; these elites exist in the whole world, and nature will not be picky when it comes to consequences.

If it the tone of this might sound exaggerated and alarmist, then we would do well to remember that people are already dying because of climate change, in large numbers; ask the indigenous populations of Brazil, increasingly hounded by the beef caucuses in Congress if environmental racism is a laughable concept to them. There are whole populations which will be completely devastated as the myths used to tell, and this process is not a distant future, but takes place every day. Obliteration through hunger, disease and dried up resources is here, and not just to strange cultures in mystical and undiscovered woods as it would be tempting to think about — as though where you live made you less of a human — but to people living in cities, people that we know. This is what is killing us. Not the process but the acceptance of the process. Consider it for a moment: how many times, reading the news recently, have we realized in our heart of hearts that many of us would die with the coming years? We have made this calculation in the back of our minds, but we have not put a face to it because that’s the point where our apocalypse all becomes far too real: one of these people will, most likely, be you.

The magnitude of the task devours paragraphs, it makes metaphors small. People are overwhelmed by the immensity of the task. We already know what this text is going to say next: It will mention a frog slowly boiling to its death, and we already know how to block this from our minds. At a certain point syrens became background music; existential threats became a passing thought. But if we are walking towards a future that the majority of people won’t get to see — and it’s worth repeating that this is a possible outcome, not a delirious divination — and if people can’t even bring themselves to care about it, if catastrophe is certain and inescapable, if it is already too late, then all that’s left to do is to say is not like this and write anyway. Many doomsdays come and go with the all the softness of a sunny morning, and so many of our current anxieties might one day seem almost alien to generations to come. Hope is the notion we will live to remember even this without fear.

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