Pessimism

I keep trying to write a post about how pessimistic I've gotten about the prospects for our species. But I keep getting too depressed by it to continue writing or putting effort into adding some good research to my points. I'll try again today.

The bottom line is that as far I can see, everything is fucked. The "Western" world's way of life is devastatingly unsustainable, which as a recent TomDispatch piece points out, is linked to three related impending crises: energy, agriculture, and global warming. And furthermore through NAFTA and the IMF and various other fucked-up neoliberal globilization efforts we've forced the impoverished part of the world to restructure their societies to meet our needs, destroying their way of life so we can maintain ours, the continuation of which is certain to result in suffering and death on an unimaginable scale, threatening the existence of human civilization and maybe even human existence.

I just don't see how there's any hope that any of this will be happily resolved. The leadership structures we have in place are incapable of addressing these matters; it simply isn't what our failed institutions are built to do, and it isn't what the people who occupy leadership positions are interested in doing. Rather than address these problems that are certain to devastate us without systematic changes in our day-to-day life, they continue to escalate the problematic policies (continuing to subsidize terrible agriculture practices, half-heartedly pursuing retarded alternative energy strategies, continually delaying meaningful carbon emissions regulations, advocating more oil exploration and resulting environmental damage) , and instead invest massively in genocidal resource wars.

It is hard to predict what the exact form of the impending devastation will be. (Somewhere in this doomsday rant I feel like I ought to mention that I'm obviously distinguishing here between death and destruction on the usual scale and on an even larger scale. Presumably the functional distinction is that the latter actually personally touches privileged people like me.) We're already watching the US economy crash as oil price soar. Tens or hundreds of millions of impoverished people are being driven the edge of starvation by rising food prices. We're seeing unprecedented natural disasters on a seemingly regular basis, but nobody is willing to explore the connection to global warming, yet alone use it as motivation to restructure our fucking societies around sustainable food and energy practices. And the ruling class in the US is threatening yet another war, this time with Iran, and belligerently mentioning nuclear weapons all over the place. Wars could well destroy everything before those other things get a chance to. Shit, we have nuclear arsenals in the hands of insane fanatics in North America, the Middle East, all over Europe and Asia.

I read Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed a few years ago, in which he documents how over and over in human history, people have been unable or unwilling to change their unsustainable ways to prevent the collapse of their own societies. I was thinking about rereading it. But maybe I shouldn't bother. I can just watch it in real time.