image by AI; my own prompt
In a time of growing chaos, precarity, scarcity, anger, obscene inequality, economic and ecological decline, and untold war-mongering, fear-mongering and suffering, when we’re fed a firehose diet of context-free soundbites, incompetent ‘leader’ hysterics and histrionics, and unsupported, outraged opinion masquerading as journalism, it’s probably not surprising that a lot of people will glom on to anyone and anything that says the future will be (or can be) bright and wonderful (“if only we all…”).
Even if that positivism is utter nonsense.
I wrote a song satirizing that kind of thinking called Everything Is Fine.
In his most recent lead article in Harper’s, Pankaj Mishra cries foul on the denialists. He writes about the demise of the preposterous predictions about “the end of history: a place homogenized by [White Empire] where capitalism coexisted peaceably with liberal-democratic institutions”:
Now, as the ‘end of history’ itself comes to an appalling conclusion, and demonic hatreds erupt across the “free world” and beyond, it isn’t only that the liberal-democratic order has been exposed as a sham, a grossly iniquitous economic system in which the few beneficiaries wield power over its numerous victims. The participation of Western elites in genocide abroad accompanied by savage crackdowns at home has revealed that their power depends on old structures of domination that they no longer try to hide or justify through invocations of universal values…
Brutal disappointment is our fate, as so much writing garlanded with praise upon publication stands revealed as shockingly feeble, even venal, confirming that our time had been darkening for decades before Donald Trump took power.
But we believe what we want to believe. So collapse denialism and other forms of blinkered ideological positivism are thriving, producing a flood of born-again-optimist writers and celebrities, which Pankaj calls “normalizers of everyday atrocity”. And he names them (bet you’ve got some of their books in your library): John Rawls, Francis Fukuyama, Samuel Huntington, Ian Buruma, Avishai Margalit, Bernard Lewis, Niall Ferguson, plus “the self-portrait and many accounts of Barack Obama as audaciously hopeful; a report card on universal moral progress by Steven Pinker; and a stout defense of liberalism by Adam Gopnik”.
For these “normalizers of everyday atrocity”, there’s even a brand name for their ideology: Abundance. That denialist word has been used as the title of not one but two recent best-sellers: The 2012 version by technotopians Peter Diamondis and Steven Cotler (subtitle: The Future is Better Than You Think) lauding the promise of tech heroes like Elon Musk(!); and the remake in 2025 by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson (subtitle Moving Beyond Scarcity), whose blurbers are a ‘who’s who’ of unshakable optimists and deniers of reality, and which has even spawned a whole ‘movement’, shifting the stifling ideology of forced positivism from the corporate boardroom to our society as a whole.
Pankaj’s summation of these writers and thinkers:
These paeans to the ideological status quo achieved the authority of thought largely by ignoring the portents of our age (gormlessly imperialist and lecherous presidents, arbitrary war-making, genocidal nationalism, legitimization of extrajudicial execution and torture) that had been emerging since at least the Nineties.
Of course, denial of reality, and of the dire hardships we will be facing over the coming decades, is nothing new. Everyone wants to believe the world of our children and grandchildren will be bright and beautiful, and not the world of collapse and struggle we are (with the best of intentions, mostly) leaving them.
Pankaj, focused mainly on the current political mayhem rather than on economic and ecological collapse, looked for an antidote on his bookshelf, and found one in journalist Patrick Smith’s 2010 Somebody Else’s Century, an analysis of three Asian cultures (Japan, China, India) and how they had coped with endless invasions from the West of all types (economic, military, political, ideological, technological, cultural, propagandist, social, corporate etc). When he wrote it, Patrick had spent three decades living in Asia (including in Iran), and his book describes the psychological and cultural tension that today’s Asians feel (in many different ways) about their situation and role in our war-torn, angry, struggling world, and their ambivalence toward Western culture.
Patrick’s view of the West is, understandably I think, quite critical. He describes Western culture as hyper-individualistic, hyper-masculine, aggressive, uncaring of ‘others’, including community and our environment, unreflective, and somewhat emotionally stunted. [Sounds like a portrait of Pete Hegseth, doesn’t it?]
His contrasting view of the Asians he has spent most of his adult life with is more nuanced, perhaps because he sees their cultures as more nuanced: Having a modern, Westernized surface (economics, dress, institutions, habits) coexisting with a persistent traditional core (values, memories, identity). His key thesis is that this Eastern culture is now learning to come to terms with this ambiguity, and is learning to synthesize these cultural elements so its people are ready to face the future.
Meanwhile, our Western culture remains entrenched in its established, ‘successful’ habits of hyper-individualism, hyper-masculinity, hyper-aggressiveness etc, which are rapidly failing on all counts. The Western Empire is only just beginning to come to grips with the utter catastrophe of the pseudo-democratic neoliberal individualistic endless-progress capitalist system it’s trying to foist on the rest of the world.
Instead of trying to conquer and homogenize the planet in its failed Western model, what Patrick and Pankaj are hoping for, I think, is that Westerners will begin, at last, to see the East not as an enemy, but as the source of a new, more complex, more thoughtful, more considered, more attentive, more adaptable way of being and acting in the world, exactly at the time such a new mindset will be needed to cope with accelerating collapse.
I’d like to believe that could happen, but until and unless we reach the stage in our transition from aggressive unipolar Empire to accommodating multipolar world (which will not come easily, if it comes at all before economic+political+ecological collapse are upon us), I don’t think Westerners will listen, and Easterners are not going to waste their breath, even if they can explain coherently what they have learned.
And I’m not even sure denialism — about all of our collapsing systems — is a uniquely Western phenomenon. Western denialists might be more fervent and vocal in their beliefs (just read any headline in the NYT these days, or any article in the New Yorker or the utterly ruined Atlantic, if you think that denialism in all its forms is not now dominant in Western thought). But those in the East will believe what they want to believe as well.
I’ve been writing about the collapse of our global civilization and all its systems for over 20 years now. And I see no evidence that collapse denial has in any way lessened over that time. Sixty years since Silent Spring and we’re still unwilling to let go of our foolish beliefs in our exceptionalism and capacity to overcome any obstacle. Likewise a look at the current stock market betrays our utter denial about the finiteness of our resources and the Limits to Growth.
Denialism just seems to be in our nature. The game is over. We tried our best. We lost badly. We failed terribly. But here we are, acting as if it’s all still going on, as if there’s still a chance. We couldn’t have been wrong, surely?
