The Paralysis of It All

 For days I've been staring at the screen, wondering what I should write next. There are just so many issues to deal with that the world itself seems to come to paralysis. 

And the paralysis is the nub of where we are. We've all reached the point of exhaustion.

It's not even emotional exhaustion: our generation knows we will probably deal with existential problems for the rest of our lives, and each of us, in our own way, is gathering strength from our guts and our feet for whatever comes, so that when our children reach their dotage, they will know the security we only felt as children. 

It's intellectual exhaustion: we've lost the ability to trace problems to their root, we've lost the ability to be shocked by developments we don't understand, we've lost the thread of where it all went wrong. One problem causes the next, which causes the initial problem to expand, they persist in compounding each other, and problems that used to grow arithmetically grow geometrically now. What is the point of studying problems during a moment when you don't know if there will be a half-dozen bigger ones by the end of the summer? We're past the point of understanding them, we're past the point of solving them, we're at the point of simply dealing with them. 

When you can't deal with the problems of today, you have to replenish yourself: not just with gratitude for what's right (though that's always important), but with the wisdom that comes from questions that transcend any era. More on that in a future essay...

Some people remain doggedly optimistic as a practice. I respect them, many of them deeply, and I always try against my better judgement to keep an open mind about why they may be right. Optimists were proven right plenty of times in the past, and I pray they're proven further right again and again. But speaking for myself, I'm pretty willing at the point to 'call it.' No series of policies can save us now. We are now in a state of triage. Global warming will not be solved, AI will not be solved, internet surveillance, income inequality, pandemics and global health, nuclear proliferation, mass migration, democratic collapse: all of these problems will probably hit the world with seriousness far greater than how we think of them today. 

Believe it or not, we may yet be rid of Trump. We may yet be rid of Netanyahu. Rumors have abounded of Putin's imminent death for ten years. All of the world leaders who are worldwide threats to democracy are over 70: Xi, Erdogan, Orban, Modi, they're all gerontocrats. They'll all be gone in fifteen years, probably even Xi, but their overweening ambitions and corruption are just the beginning of a generations long worldwide slide. 

The world did what it does when times are relatively good: it got complacent. When we were kids, the world had just emerged from a seventy-seven year struggle that began with World War I and went all the way to the collapse of Soviet Communism. Every person in the world was exhausted of dealing with problems, so they convinced themselves that the problems weren't pressing enough to confront--and in some senses they were right. Even the most horrific crises of the 90s: Rwanda, Somalia, the Balkans, were smaller than crises in every decade of the 20th century before them since the first, and even if they were gargantuan even so, they were far away, in countries that had little impact on our daily lives. 

Relatively speaking, times were good, and we were feeling generous: not to struggling people mind you, but rather, to people who had social stations as high or higher than our own--people who could compromise our quality of life. Against what now seems an obvious mountain of evidence, when the middle class world looked at Newt Gingrich and Dick Cheney at home, at Vladimir Putin and the Chinese Central Committee abroad, we assumed they didn't mean ill. And even if we assumed they meant ill, we were too prosperous to identify the right villains. We depend on the right for vigilance on national security, but they chose to believe terrorism was the priority threat. We depend on the left to monitor our well-being, and they chose to believe neoliberalist capitalism was the priority threat rather than the American conservative philosophy that enacted what we now call neoliberalism. 

That was the time to stop these problems, and it ended with the stock market crash and Great Recession of 2008. Once the economy fell out from under the world, it was a given that the economy could only be rebuilt by making our biggest assets more secure: our banks, our oil companies, our corporations, our tech sector, our insurance companies, our pharmaceuticals, our billionaires, and all their governmental minions. They had already so kidnapped our system that rather than hold these actors accountable for creating an unstable situation, we rewarded them.

Et voila. Nous sommes la. 

We needn't feel too bad about it; not about this at least... It is human nature to face problems only when they become too urgent to be ignored. This is exactly what art and history is about, or at least it is when it's done well. The specifics change from era to era, country to country, but human folly will stay ever the same. Folly is built into the very fabric of existence. Every action in existence has causes and effects, and the effects are usually unintended. Even if AI comes to life and solves a trillion problems every second, every one of its solutions will cause new problems. AI will be subject to the same existential folly as its human progenitors, and on a far more cosmic scale. 

And yet it's also from unintended consequences that come unintended solutions. After World War II, nobody thought the 'cold peace' between the US and USSR could hold, and yet hold it fundamentally did for 46 years. Yes, the price was absolutely lethal in what--thanks to the Cold War--we now term the 'third world', and was particularly awful for China, but while China lost a hundred million people, the world got up every day for fifty years with the expectation that a billion of them would sometime be wiped out in the span of a day. As for China, for good or ill it emerged from its suffering as the potentially dominant power of the 21st and 22nd centuries (one could make a similar argument for Jewish suffering in the Shoah leading to Israel's prosperity, but I digress). 

Reciprocally, people always point to the gains of 1960s Civil Rights as a reason that we should maximally agitate against society's denial of rights, but what they neglect is that in the 1960s, civil rights and great society programs were procured by death. The American consensus reasoned that if blacks and the poor bled as Americans in wartime service to their country (and to a disproportionate extent), then they should be accorded the full rights of Americans. It unfortunately stands to reason that those who agitate for further gains in civil rights will only be able to effect it through a similar blood sacrifice. 

An existential problem is existential because it threatens your existence, and there's a good chance the threat will be carried out. So I'm sorry to say we have to switch our mentality. These problems are too overwhelming to solve before they hit us with the force of 15 kilotons of TNT. We have to move to triage: trying to save as many and much as we can in the face of imminent problems that can dwarf the wars of the last century. 

Just as in the 1990s we could solve the problems of most humans had we tried, in the 2020s, we can still save most humans from their problems were we to make provisions that work around governments that refuse to work for us. They want us to rely on private enterprise? OK, then it's up to private companies and entrepreneurs to make the solutions that governments will eventually be compelled to embrace. They want us to provide charity rather than government help? OK, then we have to not hesitate about donating our extra dollars to our causes. They want to defund our colleges? OK, we take our educations to the internet and put our educations in the hands of credentialed professionals we trust. We can still volunteer our time to the causes we prioritize. We know exactly what all the problems are, we just have to get up off our JD Vance couches and do things about them.

Will we do them? Probably not. It's human nature t...