When speaking about the current and future state of affairs in our society, the politics, the economy and the culture, I see in most people a kind of resignation in face of the apocalypse we're collectively heading towards.
source: YouTube
Where many opinion makers, influencers and thinkers speak about the nihilism apparent in many segments of our society, I see something much more ominous: fatalism. It's not that people don't care about what's coming in the future, it's that they believe, truly believe, that the future they fear is coming is inevitable. According to Wikipedia, "fatalism" is "a family of related philosophical doctrines that stress the subjugation of all events or actions to fate or destiny, and is commonly associated with the consequent attitude of resignation in the face of future events which are thought to be inevitable." Yes, if you believe in fate, there's nothing to do. And yes, if you've been duped by the incessant and all-encompassing propaganda of individualism, personal responsibility, self-empowerment, and have therefore lost the belief in the power of collective action, there's nothing to do, because you can't change the world by yourself.
I publish a post every day, and I've done so for approximately five years now. That's pushing on 2,000 posts about any subject that fancies my interest any given day, but most of them, by far, are about all of the inherent faults and failures of our sociopolitical and economic construct based on capitalism. The hyper-individualism I've mentioned above is one of capitalism's most destructive features, and is intimately linked to the fatalism, nihilism and resignation mentioned above as well. You see, we've been fed a version of "Great Man" history for as long as societies have existed.
It used to be that a chosen few people were special because of their blood-lineage. Kings, queens and emperors justified their position of immense power by one of their forefathers having been chosen to be God's representative on earth. That's why religious and secular leaders of the time were bound by class-consciousness; they needed each other to justify their positions of power over the 99 percent. "You keep them stupid and I'll keep them poor said the king to the priest," is little joke that perfectly describes this relationship. For hundreds of years these "special" people had their excuse ready, and to the common folk it was easy to see that they were special, living in richly furnished castles and all.
Between this long age of feudalism and the current age of capitalism, we had a short interlude with mercantilism; this was when, helped by exotic products obtained through colonization, the merchant class started to rival the wealth of feudal lords and kings. But they were still just mere mortals, they lacked the "divine right" endowed upon the royal families by God through the clergy. And that's where the curse of our time was born; these merchants had only one way to make themselves "special", and that was to claim to be men of superior personal merit. Without God to justify their extreme wealth (and power), without the divine to brand them "special" they simply said that they were more hard working, more intelligent, more talented, simply better than the rest/ But without God's special permission needed, it also meant that anyone could become as special as they were, which had and has much appeal among all the not yet special people.
There's even a saying for poor and middle class people who advocate against social welfare programs because they believe they'll become special and rich in the future: they're "temporarily embarrassed millionaires". Anyhow, from the birth of mercantilism and capitalism on, the belief that history is shaped by a few exceptional persons has been ingrained in our collective psyche. Next to the belief that we're all individually responsible for our successes and failures, this makes a deadly poison of the mind. We see this belief propagated everywhere and all the time; whenever you're told that you have to be careful about your personal "carbon footprint", know that you're being made personally responsible for a systemic problem. Asking from and expecting billionaires to donate to charities, is asking them to be personally responsible to remedy systemic problems.
All this has nurtured in our collective conscious the fatalism I started with. We can't change the future on our own, we've forgotten how to organize to leverage collective power, and we're waiting for the Great Men who shape history to solve the problems for us. It's this hyper-individualist mindset and the ingrained capitalist realism that makes the fatalism inevitable, and what I've been writing about almost daily for five years now. It's the so called Great Men who are responsible for the future we dread; they're not going to solve climate change, healthcare, education or poverty. And even if we all reduce our carbon footprints for 75 percent, we won't even make a dent in the carbon footprint from the 100 companies who are responsible for more than 70 percent of global emissions. It's a systemic problem caused by capitalism's wastefulness. So, I'll leave you with a short video proving that final point, again. And I'll ask you this: if you agree, spread the word. It's difficult to try to overcome the attitude of resignation as well as the blind belief in capitalism's blessings, I know. But try anyway; solving a problem starts with the acknowledgement that there is indeed a problem, and the belief that something can be done about it, collectively.
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