(Updated below) Later in the day, the arena at the AHL hockey game rose to a Nuremberg pitch as the crowd creaked its way to its collective feet to celebrate the prearranged bare-knuckle fisticuffs between the veteran defensemen. Humans seem to thrill to violence at a remove, needing that adrenalized spectatorship to feel actually alive. WordPress tries to promote some similar geek contests with its comments feature, though “free-speech” Christian cultists on it unironically wield the power of canceling “disrespectful” commenters at the freer speech drop of an atheist rejoinder.
What’s there left to do but to try to entertain the masses with a good old-fashioned donnybrook? The Farmers’ Market was pleasingly situated, well-attended and expertly curated for its vendors, but there was no one at the climate activists’ booth that solicited interaction, and so the venture was undertaken. Let’s just see how this 1 v.1 goes…
Not well, not well at all. First the suggestion that “climate anxiety” should be re-titled “collapse anxiety” did not register; she asked if that referred to personal collapse, engineering collapse, etc. No, I said. Does “collapse” really need to be explained? I thought. “Collapse of … civilization, our world, that level,” I said, and we were off to the races.
One haymaker after another – probing personal questions from her, macrofutilist feints and jabs from me. How do I personally feel about there being no solutions? I don’t know – let me “interrogate” my synapses. How can “I,” the bundle of synapses now talking about the prior electrical interchanges of these synapses, represent in words what was going on in that nuclear power plant? What does it matter what these synapses “felt” – all of us humans live in a world that can please us while enraging us, and yet we still manage the awesome feat of keeping our shit together no matter which or how many anti-institutional thoughts roil our brains.
I had no intentions of being a jerk to her; I wanted to see what reactions macrofutilism produces in a religiously-committed activist believer, but I had to surmount the psychoanalytic pugilism from this actual college professor. The contest got around to the notion of “lies,” in that there were so many of them. “It’s all lies?” she queried. Yes, it’s all lies, I said, but some of the lies are good and necessary ones, such as the notion of the self, and then I tried to bring in the heresy of there being no free will, but the “it’s all lies” macrofutilist tenet hung in the brawling air.
Should I have enumerated the lies, the institutional lies, the profound and spirit-crushing lies that surround-sound our contemporary world? The lies of “progressive” possibility in electoral politics, now being staffed by mutant corporate adherents promoting a contest of senile dementia victim octogenarian vs. a psychotic, mentally ill and -impaired septuagenarian? Local politics, habitually won by climate denialists and religious freaks? The lies of advertising; the lies of corporate-endowment US higher education, the lies of ethnic pride boosterism; the lies of racist xenophobes; the lies of war profiteers; the lies of intellectual godhood reached by monkish book reading? “Lies, lies, lies, yay-uh,” as the 80s song goes.
No, it’s not “all” lies of course, but when the combatants are straining for every advantage, some excesses will be unleashed. Love plus sex is not a lie; science is not “all” a lie; and trying to do some good in this world before humanity extinguishes itself is not a lie. What did I wish would happen in a positive sense if a macrofutilist perspective gained currency, she asked, though not in those words. That’s a tall order for this most revelatory and quasi-revolutionary of philosophies, but I offered that humans would generally feel better when more truth was on offer with less pervasive lying even from those with admirable intentions.
Why did I disbelieve in so much? Where was my proof? she asked to wrap up the session. It’s in every piece of data available, every reading that’s anchored in observable reality, I said. Why didn’t I, or anyone who feels this way, run somebody over in the street if there was no hope for humanity, and it was all lies? We are ultrasocial creatures, and we are programmed to try to get along in our immediate surroundings. We should want to do “good,” even if that ignores all the connections to ultra-destructive fossil fuel reality each of us possesses. John Vaillant’s book Fireweather masterfully documents the unignorable destructiveness that humanity has unleashed in the Athasbascan tar sands that have powered American life, and its message was central to my attempt to puncture the interlocutor’s climate piety, but that’s not the book I recommended to her, but instead chose Dennis Meredith epic Climate Pandemic. From behind her mask, she was deeply offended to have a book like that suggested to her. “I’ve read more than enough books on this, thank you,” she concluded. Don’t ever try to out-book-recommend a professor.
From this unsuccessful encounter, I know that macrofutilism will never get on her “Street Team” recommendation list. Back to their disparate corners went the fighters, one forever destined to flail wildly about with an “All lies!’ trademark, and the other to hand out the name of Bayo Akomolafe and get her book ready for publishing by Hachette in 2024, winner by TKO, not even really close.
(Postscript): Here is what I could have quoted to the anti-futilist activist, from john Vaillant’s Fire Weather: A true Story From a Hotter World:
Our unprecedented success ( and emissions) are due first to our mastery of fire, nd second to our exploitation of fossil fuels in all their varied forms. In terms of implications for life on Earth, our historically brief experiment with a fossil-fuel-driven civilization is, in essence, a high-intensity carbon release project. Nature accomplishes the same thing with forest fires and volcanoes, but not nearly as efficiently, or as quickly, as we are doing now. Every year, this global industry releases ten gigatons of carbon in the form of coal, oil, and gas formerly sequestered in the planet’s crust…
Setting aside the ephemeral distractions of culture and civilization, modern humanity - Homo flagrans - will be remembered, above all, for building, and for being, the greatest combustion engine ever devised. In terms of heat, energy, and emissions, we are a super volcano representing the largest, most rapid release of combustive energy, carbon dioxide, and methane since the Permian Age.
John Vaillant, Fire Weather, (2023), pg. 299
Is it too much to ask that we, as species, start understanding this truth about our inheritance, our lives, our destiny? We as a ultrasocial species evolved to have become the ten gigaton beast, and that is who who shall stay being until the collapse starts us on the next observable path, the one that will have billions of us dying on the way to extinction. The pursuit of well-intentioned folly does not cancel out the reality of the fires this time from fossil fuel capital, nor the guaranteed progressive intensity of the hideous fires to come. Why can’t we speak and act with this most dreadful of curses upon our knowledge at the forefront? Lies have promoted our journey to this precipice of death, but if the truth is a terrible country, what are we then here to say?
MACRO-FUTILISM 