“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”
― H.P. Lovecraft
INFORMATION HURTS
Knowledge gained can be a painful thing - it necessitates personal scrutiny, highlights our own limitations, and reminds us with each new thing we learn that we were lesser before learning it.
Good news robs us of possibility; you got the raise you wanted, but now you have one less thing to look forward to in your career. It's been said that the worst thing than can happen to a man is to get everything they ever wanted - where is there to go from that point? Bad news is more evidently hurtful - at best it means that work must be done to avoid calamity, and at worst that such a calamity is unavoidable.
I've been thinking about the news a lot lately. I don't watch TV, but I follow a handful of daily news-based podcasts - mostly stuff from NPR, ABC's 538, Vox, The Verge, Axios, and The Guardian. Of those, I lean most heavily on the first and last, and check both webpages a few times a day. My sources all skew moderate-to-liberal, but they also report factual data rather than the trash on Fox.
The ever-faster decline of the Amazon rainforest, by people desperate to improve their stations in life at the cost of vegetation that takes generations to grow. As a planet, we're losing complex ecosystems faster than we're able to catalogue them. For what? Beef? Mining? Money? Ephemeral, useless gains we use as justification to perpetuate ecological rape. It's happening half a world away, but still has disheartening ties to the food I eat and the products I buy.
The slowly unwinding horrors of wars that are new in my life, both in Ukraine and in Gaza. "The war in Iraq" was a regular part of my childhood, and felt as though it would last forever at the time. Now in my adulthood, it seems like the seats have changed on a bus that's still trundling merrily along. "Terrorist" is a word that has lost all meaning. My own country is supplying weapons to Israel where they're used to murder civilians in Gaza. That might be semantically inaccurate - murder doesn't strictly apply during wartimes. But it's substantially accurate, in that innocent people are dying, killed by weapons, fired by other people who hate them. At the same time, we're scaling back and bickering over support for Ukraine, a democratic country under attack by one of our historically oldest sociopolitical enemies, Russia. How does a regular person begin to combat something like that?
The self-serving political system within the United States that keeps a small handful of influential people in power long after their effective usefulness to the people they served has run its course. We're a nation of more than 300 million people, but we're regularly presented with the same aging handful of established (house, senate, etc.) political candidates, forced every few years to choose the lesser evil in yet another existential race. We have a Democrat in charge at the moment - and honestly I don't think he's doing an awful job - but that hasn't stopped the decline of women's bodily autonomy, brought sanity to the inhumane treatment of immigrants to our country, or brought our climate aspirations any closer to reality. We're looking at a collapse of ocean currents with devastating ramifications for life on earth.
I wouldn't know about such things if I wasn't regularly consuming the news. It doesn't make me happier to know that China is still committing genocide against Uighurs. It doesn't "spark joy" to learn that a new small desert country is being manipulated into something against their best interests by corrupt leadership.
That information - that knowledge - is painful. It makes me feel powerless, tired, and overwhelmed. It throws the vitriolic response to climate science into stark, relatable relief. After all, who wouldn't rather live in a world where the oceans weren't rising, the ice caps weren't melting, and where the biomass of wild animals globally wasn't less than 6 pounds per human?
"Clearly that's wrong - otherwise it would be horrible! Clearly that train isn't coming down the track we're parked on, otherwise we'd need to move the car! So Fuck you, keep your hands off my cheeseburgers and my big trucks. Keep your brown people out of my country and let them drown in their own problems! It's more important that my life goes smoothly, certainly, than that people of the future have lives at all."
Belief in an existential problem requires action to avoid it. Without that action, there's no belief in the problem. A society that collectively refuses to take action against an existential threat must therefore not believe that the threat is existential. The civilized world, as a collective, doesn't believe that global warming poses an existential threat.
I've been thinking about the news a lot lately. I don't watch TV, but I follow a handful of daily news-based podcasts - mostly stuff from NPR, ABC's 538, Vox, The Verge, Axios, and The Guardian. Of those, I lean most heavily on the first and last, and check both webpages a few times a day. My sources all skew moderate-to-liberal, but they also report factual data rather than the trash on Fox.
It's a depressing echo-chamber though, and not just because of their liberal bias; it feels as though I'm watching the implacable decline of the free world to forces that cannot be properly considered, let alone defeated.
The ever-faster decline of the Amazon rainforest, by people desperate to improve their stations in life at the cost of vegetation that takes generations to grow. As a planet, we're losing complex ecosystems faster than we're able to catalogue them. For what? Beef? Mining? Money? Ephemeral, useless gains we use as justification to perpetuate ecological rape. It's happening half a world away, but still has disheartening ties to the food I eat and the products I buy.
The slowly unwinding horrors of wars that are new in my life, both in Ukraine and in Gaza. "The war in Iraq" was a regular part of my childhood, and felt as though it would last forever at the time. Now in my adulthood, it seems like the seats have changed on a bus that's still trundling merrily along. "Terrorist" is a word that has lost all meaning. My own country is supplying weapons to Israel where they're used to murder civilians in Gaza. That might be semantically inaccurate - murder doesn't strictly apply during wartimes. But it's substantially accurate, in that innocent people are dying, killed by weapons, fired by other people who hate them. At the same time, we're scaling back and bickering over support for Ukraine, a democratic country under attack by one of our historically oldest sociopolitical enemies, Russia. How does a regular person begin to combat something like that?
The self-serving political system within the United States that keeps a small handful of influential people in power long after their effective usefulness to the people they served has run its course. We're a nation of more than 300 million people, but we're regularly presented with the same aging handful of established (house, senate, etc.) political candidates, forced every few years to choose the lesser evil in yet another existential race. We have a Democrat in charge at the moment - and honestly I don't think he's doing an awful job - but that hasn't stopped the decline of women's bodily autonomy, brought sanity to the inhumane treatment of immigrants to our country, or brought our climate aspirations any closer to reality. We're looking at a collapse of ocean currents with devastating ramifications for life on earth.
The constant funneling of resources from ever-emptier pockets into the hands of a new capitalist royal class. People (you can guess who) are making millions of dollars an hour, while educators are resorting to sex work - not out of choice - but to pay for school supplies or pay their college loans. Jobs that pay for an agreeable wage are disappearing, or are being outsourced to countries that put up nets to prevent employee suicides. We used to have an economic framework in the United States that supported the idea of a single income that would pay for a family of dependents, but that framework is substantially dead.
KNOWING IS DEPRESSING
KNOWING IS DEPRESSING
I wouldn't know about such things if I wasn't regularly consuming the news. It doesn't make me happier to know that China is still committing genocide against Uighurs. It doesn't "spark joy" to learn that a new small desert country is being manipulated into something against their best interests by corrupt leadership.
That information - that knowledge - is painful. It makes me feel powerless, tired, and overwhelmed. It throws the vitriolic response to climate science into stark, relatable relief. After all, who wouldn't rather live in a world where the oceans weren't rising, the ice caps weren't melting, and where the biomass of wild animals globally wasn't less than 6 pounds per human?
"Clearly that's wrong - otherwise it would be horrible! Clearly that train isn't coming down the track we're parked on, otherwise we'd need to move the car! So Fuck you, keep your hands off my cheeseburgers and my big trucks. Keep your brown people out of my country and let them drown in their own problems! It's more important that my life goes smoothly, certainly, than that people of the future have lives at all."
It's the sort of irrational, infuriating cacophony of ignorance that has led to the stoning of intellectuals through history, be they astronomers with new ideas about cosmic geometry, writers who refused to be silenced in the face of religious pressures, or women - branded witches - cursed only with the courage and gall to treat those who came seeking their aid. It's the song of of ignorant hate in defense of what was, what we used to have, and the rejection of what the future might be.
Belief in an existential problem requires action to avoid it. Without that action, there's no belief in the problem. A society that collectively refuses to take action against an existential threat must therefore not believe that the threat is existential. The civilized world, as a collective, doesn't believe that global warming poses an existential threat.
I'm no better - if I were, I'd spend all my time and energy combating climate change. I'd quit my job, I'd campaign against the plastic and oil industries, I'd stop buying clothing that was made without care for the environment, and I'd be less of a hypocrite. But I like soft materials, fresh food, internet access, and the other various comforts my participation in the climate apocalypse affords me. All that said, at least I'm aware of that participation. I can write about it. A few people might read about it.
New York Daily News, c 1888
ACCESS TO INFORMATION IS OF EXISTENTIAL IMPORTANCE
The news, however painful, is critical. Knowing what's going on is the only way to make informed choices when wielding what power we as citizens of the world still can. In the United States, that power is through voting and political action. In other parts of the world, it's through taking up arms against your own militarized police force. Action without information is guided by the hands of whoever's already in power, for reasons unknown. Correct action hinges on real, true information, and folks in power don't want that information to be out in the world.
I opened this post with a quote from HP Lovecraft. He was a racist, bigoted asshole, but I also believe his fiction was decades ahead of his time, and I'm immensely grateful that his writing is freely available to me today. Should his writings be banned because of his disgusting and racist opinions? Absolutely not, though I'm sure that hard-liner religious folks would disagree. We are talking about the father of the Cthulhu Mythos after all, full of elder gods and dark sacrifices. The quote I sampled was intended to hint at maddening knowledge of secrets at the edge of our perception, but I'm using it here to draw a distinction between the pain and chaos of knowledge as compared to the relative peace of ignorance.
We live in an age when censorship is being wielded like a political cudgel to keep the minds of the underprivileged ignorant of their place in the world. There's a clear and obvious reason that conservative voices smear the "fake news media" as though it were butter on toast. If you want to control a population, one of the best ways to do it is to take away their understanding of what's real.
In the face of ignorance, the strongest weapon we as people of the world have is education. A free press. Access to knowledge of the world around us, painful and horrific and repulsive as it might be. Every book that's banned, every URL that's flagged as inappropriate, every topic viewed as unsafe to discuss in mixed company, is a piece of wisdom denied to future generations.
In the face of ignorance, the strongest weapon we as people of the world have is education. A free press. Access to knowledge of the world around us, painful and horrific and repulsive as it might be. Every book that's banned, every URL that's flagged as inappropriate, every topic viewed as unsafe to discuss in mixed company, is a piece of wisdom denied to future generations.
So as painful as it is to know what's going on, read. Check sources. Support free journalism. Support your local library. Keep books in schools. Keep the internet free and open. Talk about it. Write about it. Share it on social media. Participate in the organized opposition of those who seek to silence young voices. Seek out the translated works of writers with whom you don't share a language.
It hurts. It keeps you up at night. You should probably get a therapist so you don't end up raving on the streets, because the world is a dark place sometimes. Spend time with people you love. Give people (but not organizations) the benefit of a doubt. Go outside. Try new things. Whatever helps you to balance the horror around you. Then, when you're ready, keep reading.
It's easier, and emotionally cheaper, to watch TV. Board rooms full of executives have focus-grouped a wide array of palliatives to keep you comfortable on the couch. That way lies the slow and peaceful death of truth in a new dark age, but you do you.
It's easier, and emotionally cheaper, to watch TV. Board rooms full of executives have focus-grouped a wide array of palliatives to keep you comfortable on the couch. That way lies the slow and peaceful death of truth in a new dark age, but you do you.