The Fifth Element

Sunday Scaries #13: I have become Doomer, Prophet of Death in the Scariest One Yet. It's okay I make it semi-hopeful at the end though I promise.

Those of you who follow me on Social Media may have noticed I’m posting a lot less these days. I usually rant thrice every day. The reason why that stopped is simple: I’ve gotten to the point of political autism where I’ve realised that not only is the world about to imminently fucking end, but also that humanity as a species absolutely deserves it. Hell of a way to mark Rosh Hashanah, I know. If that beginning doesn’t warn you of the tone I’m striking in this piece, let me make it absolutely clear. We’re actually all completely fucked, and I am writing a lament for us.

Israel and Iran now being in a full-blown shooting war with each other ought to be enough for a rational person to start digging the fallout shelters. There is basically nothing preventing, and in fact everything encouraging, a rapid escalation of war leading basically to a nuclear detonation and at which point it’s all Doctor Strangelove. For those of you who believe I’ve skipped a couple of steps, honestly ask yourselves how this ends. Israel fires back at Iran, Iran fires back at Israel, Israel continues to kill kids in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and maybe even Iran itself, and Iran will continue to sponsor terror proxies in those places. All the while, the US will gleefully cheer on the rapid descent of the world into total war, and China will continue to do sweet fuck all. I’m not a diplomat or a military boffin so I don’t have a firm prediction of an exact chain of events, but I cannot for the life of me see a way out of the Yankee-induced death spiral. Where else could this go, but a continued all out attack on Israel that prompts the actual psychos in Netanyahu’s cabinet to believe that the world will tolerate their use of nuclear weapons when we have tolerated literally everything else?

I am not a rational person, however. I am a hopeless optimist. So all of this would not normally faze me, I would probably trust in some kind of divine intervention to save us. Unfortunately for me, I happened to watch The Fifth Element (one of my all time favourite films) on the same day as everything rapidly went to shit. There are some important running themes in the Fifth Element, which I highly encourage you watch while you have time, but one is the most interesting to me for our present purposes. At one point, the Supreme Being says to Korben Dallas “what’s the point of saving life when I see what you do with it?”. At that point, I realised the one thing I really wasn’t meant to: that not only is divine intervention not forthcoming to continue our fairly brutal existence, there is also no innate good within us that will stop us from falling over the precipice. Regardless of whether or not we could be saved, we really shouldn’t be.

If we take a balance sheet of human existence and examine it closely, we’ll see countless atrocities contrasted with all the love in the world. All the babies born to loving parents with all the kids abused, maimed, and killed. We’ll see famine and genocide versus Norman Borlaug’s Dwarf Wheat and the founding of the UN. And we’ll see the breadth and beauty of human achievement in art and science like the Pyramids at Giza or the discovery of penicillin, with the brutal realities of a history driven by conquest, slaughter, and rape. We will reckon the space race with colonialism and I think, unfortunately, once you also remember that the man on the moon was a Cold War era nuclear missile test as much as a scientific accomplishment, all of these things will come out short.

If we take a more Arts-y view of history, the verdict is more damning. If the story ends here, this year, what would an alien civilisation make of us? A species so profoundly hardwired to love and survive that we will do unspeakable evil in the name of preserving the iota of good that we latch onto, beyond all recognition of wider harm. A species that scattered itself, with groups settling hundreds of times in hundreds of places to build great things on the bones of innocents, only to then be conquered by disease and gunfire from the most brutal and psychopathic of these groups, who then had the audacity to spend a millennia talking themselves up as the sole bastion of decency and light in the world? The course of human history is a brutal, violent struggle by useful idiots and psychotic freaks to further the interests of a small selfish good; a family, or a nation, or an ideal. That impulse then drives people through to commit whatever unspeakable crime they can in furtherance of their chosen prize. If human history ended right now, it would be an entirely predictable and fitting end. Redemption and maturation would not only never have come, they wouldn’t have even been a theme that one could detect running through the story. Our tale would just end, predictably, as a warning against hubris and emotion for other intelligent life to learn well from.

When you think about it, this is the easy way out. I mean if not this now, then what else? Climate change, which we’ve made some promising progress on recently but will still make the world increasingly uninhabitable? Be honest for a second, and remember that the longer we prevaricate on action, the worse things get and the harder the job becomes, meaning even greater sacrifices which in turn increases the drag on action. What about other wars? Russia and Ukraine, China and Taiwan, India and Pakistan, America and whoever the fuck they decide has to go next? Plenty of other nuclear options to choose from. What about AI, which we’ve completely mishandled the rise of? A less commonly discussed one, the rise of superbugs and new diseases which cannot be easily treated… we are locked in an arms race with infinitely permutating nature and our only arsenal consists of a finite number of drug combinations held in the hands of evil pharmaceutical companies before we are like, obliterated by bacterium. Is there any vision of the 21st century where we end up better off than how we started the new millennium? Is there any scenario where we don’t, at best, survive to live in some kind of cyberpunk dystopia?

I’m not quite sure how we got here to be honest. In the Fifth Element, evil wins when it stands in the place of good. Perhaps the Abrahamic eschatology was right that it all comes down to the return to the holy land, but that we weren’t morally ready as a species and as a result the world will end in fire and shadow. Maybe it’s because the world needs a small amount of good in the right places to survive, and we’ve let evil slowly corrode the bearers of hope into mediocrities who simply cannot withstand them, like in Lord of the Rings when the line of Stewards produces Denethor, the worst possible iteration of a leader, to stand against the greatest challenge his nation has faced. Every world leader today strikes me as much the same, every nation and civilisation disappoints me in my search for someone to root for. Perhaps the Nitzanim, those people randomly chosen as a sample of human good by the Lord so that he can test whether he needs to send the flood again, have failed us.

This is the part that makes me sad really. The idea that actually the vast majority of life on this planet, humans included, really didn’t do anything that obviously wrong. We were let down by a small few who we trusted far too much. Look, plenty of people are evil and crazy and I’m sure the majority of us are probably part of the problem. No one’s a saint, certainly not me. But do we all deserve to die for our sins? Certainly, everyone who sat idly by and watched the world end and didn’t do anything to stop it should be kicking themselves right now, if not for anyone else’s sake, then surely at least for Moo Deng’s. But the end won’t come because of the innate flaws of mankind as a whole or because we were all imperfect and nasty creatures. It’ll come, really, because while we recognised that we were flawed and crazy and in need of cooler heads to guide us, we trusted the wrong people to be better than us. I cannot help but really weep for those too young to have had a chance to form into real people, understand the world, or even prove that they could be better than their parents. My generation has actually had something of a shot to live as adults, but those younger than us? Forever will we wonder what they could’ve been.

If you’ve gotten to the end and are thinking “jeez man you’ve just written a suicide note for the species, do I need to call you and ask if you’re okay” I really am. I’ve just come to a despondent but clear-eyed realisation that even if somehow we make it out of this one, we’re fucked. And we deserve to be. I sit in a chair in my living room with the lights out but the sunshine streaming in, and I just have my head in my hands acknowledging all this. I challenge you to get in touch with me and try and find a way I’m wrong. Find a hope, a righteous cause, anything to dispel the dread. I want nothing more than to be missing something, but every way I look at the problem I come to the same solution. There is no force for good in this world capable of winning out, no heroic cause to champion. All the heroes are dead or lost, and mediocrity is our consolation. I cannot see a speck of light left for the species. The closest thing we have to hope is the centrist coward Kamala Harris, who increasingly looks like she will lose but boy she put on a show. And maybe it’s all wrong and we’ll be fine, but I refer you to the earlier paragraph where I talk about all the other things that can doom humanity. My entire political existence now boils down to a vain attempt to if not halt or delay the apocalypse, at least put on a hell of a show for the end of the world. I don’t want the ending to be this certain, this pathetic. A good tragedy should have a moment of almost-redemption.

In such times as these, one should be more introspective than anything. After all, the self is the only thing you have control over in a world gone mad. I’ll make amends to those I’ve wronged on Erev Yom Kippur, I’ll continue to see friends and loved ones for as long as we have left, and I will live my life as normal. I’ll continue to write more rants about things that really don’t matter that much to anyone but me, and call it a column. Personal happiness is the only hope, the only defiance, in these end times. Each of us has got to try as hard as possible to be our best selves, not just because judgment day is coming and you should clean up before the Lord’s rental inspection, but also because it may just be the only true hope we have left. It won’t work of course, but it’s worth a shot. Korben replies to the Supreme Being that the thing that makes life worth saving is the little parts of good in humanity, like love. Perhaps if we all try harder this new year to love and be better, like it’s our absolute last chance, it’ll have some kind of ripple effect. I have no clue how that would work, I’m just out of ideas and this is the best last ditch effort I can think of. Given the species is on the line, I hope you won’t blame me for going for a hokey Hail Mary pass.

But perhaps the pathway for that success is one of my readers is secretly one of the Nitzanim, born to carry the moral weight of mankind on their shoulders. I wouldn’t blame you for shrugging, dear faceless Atlas. But I’d ask that you stand just a bit taller, while you still can, for all of us who really didn’t do anything wrong.