The world isn't going mad. It always was.

From the witch burning to the spanish inquisition to worlds wars and the great leap forward, the human species was always stark, raving mad. For millenia, people have philosophied about why it always goes like this. Why does democracy contain the seeds to its own destruction? Why do all civilisations collapse? Why do people flock to dead-end ideologies? Why can you lead a horse to water but not make it drink?

The cognative sciences are making slow inroads on how the brain really works, while other thinkers approach from the opposite direction via darwinism to explain why certain traits were heavility selected for, eg. the fear of ostracisation, which explains ingroup conformity, the bane of much reason and cause of much strife.

Nobody thinks they're a bad person. Insane, evil people like Peter Theil and the Koch brothers and Kim Jong Un are acting perfectly good and rationally, to themselves. Oligarchs and dictators and dark money-funded think tanks are doing God's honest work, with God being some interchangable concoction of pure imagination.

Our highly subjective viewpoints are some result of nature and nurture. One can discuss the various influences ad nauseam, but it all plays out quite predictably and unavoidably, really. And so a few academics sit around discussion things like darwinism at the group selection level and how social evolution has outpaced biological ditto, and creatives write books like the still unparalled Last and First Men (Olaf Stapledon, 1932) that envisions how the next two billion years could play out for our species and the various biological, sociological, technological and civilisational iterations it might go through. (Worth a read.)

The recent devolvement into 19th-century style imperial attacks on sovereign nations is terrifying not only for the victims, but for the entire world, knowing full well that each day we are rolling the dice on possible nuclear Armageddon. I even wrote a post about that sooner-or-later guarantee, with the disconcerting conclusion that it's not even the worst threat, because we have countless trajectories accelerating us to unavoidable collapse and possible extinction. We might get lucky avoiding nuclear war, but both our ecological and behavioural trajectory is both baked in and locked in for a host of reasons, and nothing anyone can do can stop it now.

As adults, we all wake up to the fact that, clearly, nobody knows what they're doing. We realise the youth and pets and friendships and grandparents and summers that went on forever and the myth of an infinitely progressing and improving world, bought at infinite cost by the neoliberalist motto of party now, pay later, all had expiration dates, each and every one. Well, most of us do. Quite a few practice zero self-reflection and just barrel ahead until it all goes splat. How absurd is it that a holocausted people is gleefully perpetrating a genocide?

After millions of years of hominids, one of them mutated into something clever enough to optimise their short-term future, stumbled upon a one-time inheritance of magic energy and finite resources, and squandered it all in an orgy of consumption. We know this for a fact, but vast hordes of the clueless bacteria hysterically chant that the Earth is six thousand years old while falling into a dead-end ideological trap their grandparents literally fought a world war to prevent. The ignorance is truly mindboggling. What monkeys we are.

We're riding the crest of the human species experiment. Some of us have peeked into the abyss and seen what is coming, but can't override the delusions of the rest enough to convince them to take their ethical responsibilities to their very own children seriously. Some of us grow nihilistic and misanthropic and truly feel it will be good riddance when we wipe ourselves out. Some of us are highly sensitive people whose heart bleeds for life on Earth, sacrificing their lives and sanity to keep fighting the maelstrom of nonsense that engulfs them.

Most of us, deep down inside, know everything is wrong, but draw a blank on solving the greatest collective action problem there ever was. What can one do? There is no solution to a predicament. And so we put our heads down and focus on parochial concerns and withdraw into apathy, numbing our attention-hacked selves with stupid little screens optimised for human fracking, with too little willpower to leave to walk away, or simply too bullshitted to tell what reality even is anymore.

I’ve been pondering this stuff for a long time now, and I’ve got nothing on how to reach Collapse - Part 5/5: Acceptance of a mad world.

Best I can come up with is to hug someone you love, wrest yourself free from all nonsense and do something meaningful with the time you have left. There are still pockets of beauty and kindness left in the world.

Contribute to that.