tijaco

why we are doomed.

Inspired by: Collapse of Society | Neel + Jordan

There is barely any ambiguity in my mind at this point – identity politics is a symptom of complacency, which in turn causes the ends of empires.

Many people talk of Australia being a complacent nation, most notably Kevin Rudd. But this complacency seems to have plagued the whole Western world. Identity politics seems a symptom of this complacency. Instead of looking forward, looking to create something bigger and better than ourselves, we are inwardly focused. We focus on our own identities and how they might be benefited. We focus on politics only when it affects us, or our perceived identity. If we were focused on building something greater than ourselves, we wouldn’t be so enamoured with these identities.

Society seems like a shark in this way. We must keep moving forward, otherwise we will fail.

But society has kept moving forward. Technology is changing and progressing fast than it ever has done before. But this progress is being done by a particular few. The rest have stagnated and become self-obsessed, perhaps as a result of those significant few engaging in the progress of humanity. The complacent majority, those who feel they have no social mobility and no path towards building a better future, become indulgent in their own identities.

Rather than focusing on ourselves and our own feelings and desires, we should be looking externally, towards building something greater than ourselves. But in order to build something greater than ourselves that is constructive rather than destructive or ambivalent, we need to understand ourselves first. This understanding is separate from self-obsession. It is simply an acceptance that we are here and that we have choices.

This is a form of minimalism. We need to accept that we are here and that we have choices, but not much more. Rather than attaching our identities to parts of ourselves or our communities that we can never change, we should attach our identities to the choices that we make. Not the choices that we have made or that we will make, but the choices that we make in the present.

The decline of societies is characterised by a destructive tendency to focus on ourselves rather than something bigger. This was the case in the Roman Empire, and it took over a thousand years to get back to the opulence that once was in ancient Rome. Today, we could not fathom our world being set back twenty years, to a time before smartphones were ubiquitous and the world’s information was in our pockets.

Climate catastrophes are present in many societal collapses from Easter Island to Scandinavia. Today, we can see a global climate catastrophe a few decades out. We can envisage path around it that will come at very little societal cost. In fact, the path around it will provide us with many societal gains. And yet so long as we are focused on our own identities and continue our self-obsessed ways, we will make little progress.

Identity politics has been around for decades, on both sides of the nonsensical left-right divide. In the last decade, it has gone to a new level. People so obsessed with the colour of their skin, the parts between their legs, the people with whom they want to sleep that they forgot to look bigger. Identity politics even plagues the biggest issues of our time. People taking climate action for the approval of the tribe is cancerous.

There are actions people can take in subverting the climate catastrophe that are far more effective and far less visible. But to take these actions is to expend real effort to help build something which is bigger than yourself. If you are too self-interested, you are more likely to show up to an ineffective protest without real demands and without any real answer for why you are there.

In a society with the luxuries that we have, there is time to be complacent. It is almost inevitable that we will be complacent short of some leader to move us in the right direction. Societies rise and fall, but if you are in the society itself, it’s difficult to determine which is occurring. A good indicator is the focus of the population. Are they building something bigger than themselves, like the Chinese ethic to build a better China? Or are they focused inward, engaging in parades of self-worshipping pride marches and self-pitied unorganised outrage?

It is clear which nation is rising and which is falling. It is clear which is motivated, and which is complacent.

To turn this complacency around requires vision and a rallying of the population around a common cause. This common cause is best characterised by symbols of well-defined meaning. Nazism executed this well, and there are always lessons to be learned from the greatest atrocities.

Some individuals will move towards ideals and others tend to move away from ideals. To create some vision of a better future, we should define what exactly we move towards and what exactly we move away from. What these things are is up for debate and is a worthy debate to have. My two cents would be that we move toward a world in which people are focused on bettering the society itself and that we move away from a world in which people are focused on themselves, i.e. their identities.

If the society was founded on such a principle, it would be more resistant to these times of complacency and self-obsession. Instead, there would always be a mindset to make the world better. There would always be a floor to be raised and new stairs to climb.

I am afraid that the ecological collapse might already be unstoppable and that the self-obsessed populous will get in its own way in trying to avoid it. If we look to the past and map our own society on to previous experiences through history, our future looks bleak. But perhaps we can turn it around. That is my only wish.