I have a strong misanthropic and nihilistic streak, in case anyone had any doubts at this point, after reading most of the stuff I write–especially recently. I think that humans–as resulting from our status as a consciously advanced species born through the horrific collective trauma of evolution–are generally vile, horrid things focused on breeding, with small minds and little empathy for any collective self. I think that the mountain of historical evidence indicates that we, as a species, tend towards societies and civilizations which rest on foundations of cruelty and oppression. Even before this election, I thought that we were existing in not just the twilight of the American empire, but in the twilight of human civilization, if not the human species. All this to say, I have never held out much hope that humans, in general, would do the right thing when given the chance. Our survival, on an individual basis, is generally predicated on doing the wrong thing. Evolution has constructed the perfect Prisoner’s Dilemma we can’t escape, and we have yet to create a social or political system which can effectively manage our own capacity for selfishness.
I am relieved this election is over, which isn’t to say I’m happy with the results (I did vote for Clinton), but the relief! This last year and change has been one big ball of stress for me. It was clear, from a year ago this time, that Trump was going to win the Republican nomination, which has left me wondering, since then, just how terrible we Americans would prove to be.
I thought Clinton would win narrowly in 2016, and then expected her to lose in 2020 to a cleaner, more palatable white nationalist demagogue who would take Trump’s playbook, expand his appeal with white women and white gay men, and dominate that election. That said, here we are–it turns out people have lower standards than I thought.
But the ending I see in all of this is larger than an end of an era or an end of democracy–either nationally or internationally. This, along with so many other trends and movements globally–signals to be the twilight of our entire species, and I am so glad for this. We are all terrible beings, and we have proven our poor instincts to be both intrinsic and unconquerable. At this point, our collective death could be soon, since we have just put our nuclear codes in the fist of an unrepentant narcissist, but even excluding nuclear war, it will happen eventually. This planet is dying, and we lack the collective imagination to escape it’s wrath in any way which doesn’t set our civilization back millennia, either through ecological repairs or through space colonization. I don’t think it had to be this way. I think humanity is capable of overcoming it’s evolutionary tendency towards self-delusion and self-destruction, but we’re in a race against a clock here that’s only speeding up. I suppose there’s a chance we still could, but the window is becoming impossibly narrow, and we have gotten exactly none of our shits together to make it happen.
All that said, however, isn’t this kind of exciting? I feel a bit of excitement, I admit it. I spent most of the morning at work giggling to myself over this, while I listened to riotous queer punk to get some of it out of my system (Bottoms’ “Goodbye” EP + Against Me). We’re teetering at a cataclysm, with a gun to our collective heads. There’s always been a certain beauty, for us, in collective death, an obsession with our own self-destruction. When I turned on my computer this morning, my PC had the ruins of Rome as my lock screen, and that seemed so charming, in the context of this. Look at us, who thought we’d learned anything. Here we are again, back at the precipice. It looks deeper this time, and were those jagged rocks at the bottom before? We dimly recall how much this hurt, the last time we did this, but if we weren’t meant to hurl ourselves off the edge, why do we place ourselves there over and over, like it’s our own, corrupted design?
Bracken's Corner 