The Future

It’s almost terribly sad. On November 9th 2016, we faced a moment when we feared literally anything our imaginations could envision. Now it’s January 6th, 2020, and after more than our years, the pandemic is the only thing exactly as bad as we feared it would be. Everything else was a disaster, but not a cataclysm, much less an apocalypse. 

 So at least if Trump was as bad as we feared he was, the wait would be over. We would know what it was like to experience unlimited tragedy rather than the dread of it, and having experienced it, we would have faced some of the unthinkable and know what it’s like for the next horrible time we have to face it, and we could grimly keep buggering on through all heroic terrors. But now, it’s put off, again and again, longer and longer, that sword above our heads, probably for at least another four years, maybe for another forty, while the last politician in America who remembers what America’s brief functionality was like has just enough time in his Presidency to dangle the possibility of its restoration, potentially the kind of president we’ve been waiting for since the Nixon administration, and before today, before the moment when the Republican party unmasked itself from being merely extremely corrupt to pure dictatorship, there might have been at least a 50% chance. But now it is no longer a test between integrity and corruption, but between democracy and dictatorship, and the lure of the new always trumps the comfort of the old. 

 But for better or worse, we are not that heroic generation, that will likely be our children and grandchildren who have to endure the tragedy of the unfinished work of our grandparents, whom they likely will never remember, while their own grandparents fell asleep at the wheel, a whole country of Clintons, Bushes, and Trumps engorged on their own pleasures, and our generation, rather than grow the stomach for the wheels and deals that let societies survive from generation to generation, our generation of AOC’s gave into nihilism which we convinced ourself was idealism, and sufficiently scared that unknown X generation between their parents and grandparents that the threat is ‘us,’ rather than ‘them.’ 

 Aside from 300,000 sick people, all this country has lost that it didn’t already lose was the sense we’ve always had, that whatever the problem, institutions and routine and time will work everything out. We’ve lost that sense because the safeties have been taken off, and that sense we have that nothing is right is exactly right. And so we wait, and work, and wait, and work, and we know exactly for what, but what we don’t know is what it feels like yet, and that terror makes everyone crazier, and only ensures that the eventual tragedy gets still worse. 

 Postscript: 

 It is what it is. To anyone who didn't see this coming already by The Great Recession, I don't know what to say. The time bomb was always going to go off. People said that Bush was the worst it could get, then were stunned that Trump was worse, and then they were stunned that when more than 50 million people dispute the election results, at least a couple thousand of them completely mean what they say. 

 The truth is, authoritarianism is just one more step on the green mile, and hardly the last step. For most people, life doesn't change that much. People who were already oppressed get a little more oppressed, people who weren't oppressed become as oppressed as those who were already oppressed in a democracy. What really terrifies me is war, famine, mass terror, not dictatorship, and those yet may come even if not for a while. 

 Life is a struggle, life is a battle with death, and like any other complex organism, the society grows old, and the tumors eventually find their way through the societal immune system and strike us exactly where we're weakest. Almost the entirety of human history has been exactly this or worse, what we were living in before was the exception, and contra what you and Clara say so often, Steven Pinker is absolutely so wrong about that - no differently than Fukuyama or Norman Angell before him. The sense of security that life is good is the exception that every prosperous nation feels, and so many nations have felt before us, even while living in circumstances that we would call squalor but they would call prosperity. 

 I would imagine probability would state that 25% of the time, life is basically secure, 50% of the time, life and death are in mortal combat, and the other 25% of the time, there's no question because death is the winner, and eventually everybody's number is called. That does not mean that life is worth being pessimistic or nihilistic about, but it does mean that the meaning in life is gained through our battles against death.