Minutes to Midnight
The world is teetering on the brink. The doomsday clock is now 90 seconds to midnight, closer than we’ve ever been. By any likely estimation, we are closer today to WW3 breaking out than ever before. Though you wouldn’t get that feeling from watching mainstream media, or from scrolling through social feeds.
As a culture, we are unwilling or unable to contend with the real world. It is too psychologically demanding on us to face the darkness that lurks within ourselves or to face the consequences of abdicating our responsibility for authenticity.
So we have become obsessed with trivialities like chasing the dragon of structural racism and sexism and clamoring to reduce the concrete reality of women into a subjective and indefinable feeling and yet celebrating men who claim ownership of that feeling.
Then we have the elites who have again launched into grandiose utopian thinking with their ill-fated efforts to redesign the world with anti-prosperity measures under the guise of climate protection and pushing an anti-liberal agenda under the guise of combating ‘fake news’ and hate speech. We can see it in the multinationals rushing headlong into developing AI tech driven along by a transhumanist paradigm.
We can see it in those who are unable to think in anything but black and white, because it is too stressful to dwell in the nuances. But reality is not black and white. Russia invaded Ukraine, and NATO has been provoking Russia. Ukraine is nobly defending itself and it is also corrupt and authoritarian and being use as a puppet by the West. The West should’ve immediately negotiated a ceasefire, but it seems the highest levels have also been infected by this flight from reason, seemingly willing, as Sam Harris put it, to play chicken with the forces of chaos.
Instead of us being stricken by the notion of thermonuclear war and shocked out of our stupidity, it seems that a part of us is longing for this ‘return to terror’. But we do not desire terror for its own sake. ‘Man, from the depths of his unconscious, seeks an ontological confrontation, to confront the real. If man seeks war, he does so only because he seeks transcendence.’ If we do not enlighten the darkness ourselves, terror will do it for us. Yet whatever road we travel down, humanity wins in the end.
