It was the second decade of a new century. Humanity was recovering from a pandemic that had shut down and blighted the lives of millions. Imperialistic ambitions, zealotry, bigotry and unchecked greed had thrown the world into a fractured quilt of warzones. Sexual and social politics were cooking, and gender divisions were dissolving.
Gangsters, grifters, and corporate industrialists were riding high politically and their fabulous wealth had elevated them to near god-like status fanned by a fawning media. Authoritarians and populists were formulating their manifestos in the dark and although there was still an atmosphere of conspicuous hedonism in the public, it was tempered by a growing shadow of nihilism, a crisis of faith that surpassed the blanket of belief that religion and consumption had otherwise offered.
But this isn’t the roar of the Golden Age of the 1920s; this is Dystopia 2024. And, despite all the wonders of that time a century ago, its optimism, wealth, creativity, boundary-breaking, automation and technology, it ended gradually then suddenly in the Wall Street Crash and was followed by the Great Depression. Despite all the as-yet-untapped raw resources of the world then, grinding economic conditions and deep pessimism stretched on for three long years or more and reduced trade globally to one third of its pre-29 peak. Ironically the Great Depression ended with the start of World War Two.
Things clearly came to a head before the collapse of all civility but before that there was a wild party going on in the asylum before fire broke out. The question is, are we reaching peak insanity in our own Golden Age already by mid-decade? I’m pretty sure we actually surpassed it some years ago so probably, yes. Everything since that undetermined year has just been a selection of postures, revisions and rehearsals for the big event.
It’s an election year in large parts of the world — say it with flowers. Will it be a wreath or a bouquet? We are so primed for dystopias that we are almost inevitably waiting for the other shoe to drop at the florists. Or can we avert that authoritarian impulse and just wait for the whole edifice to collapse before we build back better with the same sticks and stones that we will be fighting WW4 with?
Certain markers have shown that we are primed for a fall. One obvious one is a war in Europe. The last one cost the world 65 million deaths and set the stage for the next showdown. In some sense or other, it has always been about opposing ideologies both competing for resource wealth and geopolitical power, as it was the US vs the Soviet Union and as it is now, the autocratic Russian Federation and its allies vs the Western alliance of democracies.
Of course, it’s highly simplistic to transform a complex weave of geopolitical interests into a binary equation of good vs evil. That said though, the similarities (and what are we but pattern recognition engines?) are disturbing and, knowing that time is cyclic and humankind subject to the lesser angels of its nature, it’s tempting to come to that conclusion.
And to be clear, the present war in Europe would be long over if not for the nuclear elephant in the room that was put there at the end of the Second World War. Certainly, the madness of mutually assured destruction is still on the table but loose talk about thermonuclear bombs is making everyone nervous after decades of accommodating a reality with the volume turned down low on that channel. Sure, we can all kill ourselves with conventional weapons, better still by climate change, but pound for TNT-equivalent pound, nukes will get us there much quicker, and how.
I was watching a very interesting documentary on the evolution of fission implosion bombs like the ones that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the horrendous ramp-up to fusion bombs just nine years later with the detonation of Castle Bravo on March 1, 1954 in Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean.
In less than four years, the destructive yield of the weapon had leapt one thousand times and led witnesses to state they felt as if ‘they were experiencing the end of the world’, which is probably an apt statement for any witness to such power, should the balloon ever go up. If you see footage, it’s simply monstrous. The Japanese, first witness to nuclear devastation, even invented a popular nuclear meme with the creation of Godzilla to embody an irradiated mutant force from the ocean that destroys whole cities.
I struggle to imagine what a nuclear cataclysm would look, sound and viscerally feel like but descriptions from that event suggest a light so bright as to be at the heart of a thermonuclear reaction on the surface of the sun, only brighter yet. Even at what was considered a safe distance from Bikini Atoll, sailors felt as if a blowtorch had been applied to their uncovered flesh. Some individuals obviously died at the time due to negligence (not forgetting the detonation as an act of gross ecocide), but more premature deaths, congenital deformity and cancer followed and was attributed to radiation poisoning among islanders as well as servicemen in the vicinity of the tests later.
No nation should be able to wield such power. These weapons simply should not exist — and yet they do. How ironic. No nation should even threaten their use, even as a deterrent — yet they do. How moronic. Add that to these facts and the doomsday clock ticks closer:
· The gross asymmetry of our times in terms of absolute wealth and absolute poverty,
· Our failure to understand one another as a single species, from a signalling point of view or as a failure of cultures and beliefs,
· Our love of hatred as a motive force
These inconsistencies, these permanent flies in the ointment I do not understand. Minds brilliant enough to discover the secrets of stars and harness their forces for both good and evil should already have discovered the formula for cohabiting peacefully on this earth. This should not be inter-ballistic rocket science.
Indeed, in the same decade, 71 years ago, Watson and Crick discovered DNA — the very code of human existence and yet genetic science, however advanced, still has much ground to cover. Ironic though, is it not, that the source code of all life on this planet entered the pantheon of knowledge at approximately the same time as the source code of destruction.
I’ve addressed the asymmetry of wealth in other blogs but these days it seems that the gilded rich are having a moment. From the 100 million USD prenup party thrown by the scion of the richest family in India recently (attended by equally rich, honoured guests) while the poor twisted and spun on the dirt outside, to the bespoke 260 million USD apocalypse bunker being built by Mark Zuckerberg in Hawaii (does he know something we don’t?), its vulgarity knows no shame.
Sure enough, Capitalism as a world ideology squarely beat Communism into touch — just ask any Russian oligarch whose vulgar wealth has been frozen in Western banks, but it too has led to a sorry state of affairs for the whole world; a state of environmental collapse, debt slavery for millions and a terrible disconnect between us and the natural world that supports all our endeavours.
Will the world go up in a choir of nuclear roars in our time? Quite possibly, even with the loaded dice of mutually assured destruction, mistakes can be made, and have been made, and catastrophes only narrowly avoided.
Prior to any madness of that type, it’s more probable that we experience a crisis of capitalism where supply chains that maintain our illusion of stability collapse and international money markets implode. Precedents have already been set. It’s hard to see the world metamorphosing into anything better without a major reset of one type or another. Like any self-regulating system, balance will be restored, but that may be measured not in decades, but millennia, with or without us.
