tomorrowmustburn

[tomorrowmustburn]

Personal responsibility

Author’s note: This is very stream of consciousness, very argument with myself. I do think every step of the way is interesting, and needed to be there at least for me, but it is not exactly “A+ for coherency and structure” stuff.

Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism made the rounds as an object of discussion when, I wanna say, I was in my late teens. It’s always stuck with me as an interesting intellectual object because while it seems to essentially be a weird capitalist misreading of Nietzsche, I have always felt like there is something there. Now, I should be clear: I’m not aligned with the psychos who think receiving help makes people weak, nor do I subscribe to any great man theory of history. However, if you really squint, I think you can make out the outline of an answer to some thorny moral problems.

‘The Golden Rule’ is baby’s first good go at moral reasoning. Not quite treating others well because of their own inherent value, but an attempt at explaining empathy to a child, or perhaps an appeal to reciprocity to a grumpy adult. The maybe next step is of course actually seeing others as possessing innate value and dignity – let’s call it universalism. It offers both solutions and new problems: On the one hand, there is the fairly necessary recognition that people might be different, but on the other hand, it inherits the troubles of navigating that difference. A lot of moral problems revolve around navigating this conundrum of respecting and affording each other’s value and dignity.

But, axiomatically granting value and dignity to most solves more problems than just difference. It also sets a higher baseline than the golden rule, best exemplified by the old philosophy of “I had to suffer, so todays kids should too”, or “being beaten wasn’t bad for me and actually builds character”. You could argue that the golden rule can be wielded against these well enough, but to say that people end up accepting and justifying bad situations they are or were in is not a stretch. It runs the risk of being patronizing, but sometimes it is simply correct.

I think this marks perhaps a great hidden innovation of universalism as moral principle: If everyone has value and deserves dignity, that includes you. In this particular regard, Universalism is nearly all benefit, no drawback, because the golden rule does not make any case about self worth, it simply takes it as assumed. But more than that, this is where universalism creates the fewest new problems. There are far fewer hurdles between affording value to oneself and acting on it than there are between affording it to others and acting on it. And while self knowledge has its limits too, it has fewer limits than knowledge of others.

If we extrapolate from this fundamental imbalance, we arrive at some virtue of selfishness by way of universalism. It doesn’t stem from any great man theory or disdain for others, but from pragmatism and necessity: People should look out for themselves because they deserve good treatment, and because they are in the best position to give it. Bracketing more political /  revolutionary / human rights readings and implications, I am interested in (to paraphrase Scanlon) what we owe to ourselves. How do we act when we owe ourselves dignity? How do we act in accordance with our value as human beings? How do we give ourselves the recognition and respect only we can offer?

While there is a chance for this to go wrong by way of veering into bootstrappy ideology, crass commercialism or something of the like, or something else equally distasteful, ignoring outside influences on personal success on wellbeing and telling people to blame themselves is not a novel way to be stupid. After all, I am arguing that these ideas are implied by universalism, and perhaps a good way to stand against their natural limitations is to argue that everyone deserves to be empowered to take care of themselves.

No, the truly pernicious way to read this is about guilt and failing oneself. If you have a great responsibility to yourself because you are in the best position to care for yourself, it is natural to feel guilty when you fall short. Few things instill guilt more than failing to deliver on your responsibilities, I would say. But at the same time, we do it all the time. We fail to live up to our own expectations, our standards, our dreams, we fail our current selves, our past selves, and our future selves. Failure is not so much par for the course as it is the course, and moreso, we tend to focus on it.

But the point is not to find new and exciting ways to feel bad about and angry at yourself. That would truly be the most pernicious conceivable way for my plea to extend universalist value and dignity to ourselves to play out. No, we need to consult another pragmatist school of reasoning. Where pragmatist universalism tells us about the great head start we have in knowing how to recognize value and work on the dignity of ourselves, pragmatist justice should be our guide for exercising that value of dignity. First things first: we can never truly abdicate the responsibility we have toward ourselves, and we can never stop failing it. No concept of justice which treats infraction as aberrant or deserving of stigma will be helpful.

What we need is a logic of rehabilitation and restoration. Rehabilitative justice concepts forego metaphysical weighing of punishment and crime, and instead focus on making offenders more functioning members of society, and similarly restorative justice concepts focus on accountability and restoration of damage done as far as possible. And if we are to hold ourselves responsible for the impact of our actions of ourselves, we are bound to a relationship so lasting and cyclical that no approach other than one which puts doing better the next go around first, be it through restoration, reflection, accountability, as well as forgiveness where necessary and caution with finding fault where none is.

Furthermore, no man is an island and justice and accountability are worth little without a community to situate them. This is another aspect where a pernicious road lurks: Holding people responsible for moral crimes against themselves seems more than anything like the domain of inquisitors and conversion therapists. Indeed, anyone’s responsibilities to themselves should absolutely never be wielded by any outside party, but inviting others to offer perspective and help in maintaining accountability should be good uses of one’s community.

This is where, structurally, a conclusion should be. But the truth is, I stand unconvinced by myself. I started playing with these ideas a couple of months ago, or perhaps years upon years ago. The “objectivism has a point if you squint” thread is, ironically, the one I’m prouder of, and I haven’t genuinely formulated it with as much substance as I’d like.

The long and short of it is this. You are, as elaborated, in the best position to look after yourself, so you’re if nothing else the first instance for, well, doing that. It doesn’t just have to be dour moral duties either. Just, making sure you have a good time and are taken care of. Sometimes you stumble, and if things go right others will help, but you are the first instance.

Secondly, the weird angle of the best thing you can do for others is succeeding and putting yourself first. Take away the weird Randian vocabulary of selfishness here, and translate it into a wholesome inspiration post style. Let’s say “By becoming the best you you can be, you’re giving the world the greatest gift you can give”. Because, let’s face it, the best you you can be probably isn’t a mad men guy sitting on a golden throne in the penthouse of a skyscraper, it’s someone who is part of a community, someone who gives of themselves generously and is received gladly, and appreciated greatly. We are social and communal creatures to a fault, and it takes a truly monstrous, perverse outlook to envision a best self which stands apart and insular. Virtue in selfishness, as I see it, is working on the part of a community that you know best; yourself, and making the whole better for it. I know it’s an aggressively charitable misreading of Rand, but there is something enchanting and affirming about seeing yourself as a gift to the world, but I hold it true and dear.

Having formulated that better on the second go, it now reads like an odd companion to the dour moralist take on applying universalism to yourself. They are odd companions, but I think they need to be together, and they complement each other well. However, I have to confess that, while I believe both intellectually, my heart’s not entirely in it. I’ve just crossed two years of unemployment, turned down a job offer very early on because I thought I’d earned a break after my degree, and haven’t had any since. I thought I’d just really enjoy my time off, but I’ve done less than I’d like with it, and especially now that it’s no longer voluntary, I’m not even wasting time in a pleasurable way. The biggest positive changes for me weren’t about thinking about my responsibility to myself, but about adjusting my environment, cancelling a course I wasn’t doing much for or getting much from but always feeling bad about, and nuking my ability to idly watch Youtube with a vengeance (First throwing it off the TV, then a browser extension that blocks any and all Youtube recommendations on the PC).

While I’m trying for a good faith take on personal responsibility philosophy, it clashes with the experience of the last year. I haven’t been negligent, I’ve applied for jobs gruelingly and extensively. But if I take from that that I’m just in an unlucky spot and I need to keep trying, I’m fucking up too, because there probably is something bad about my approach (I’m going back to uni for language qualifications that should really help now), and the first and foremost person who’s affected by how well I manage the shitshow is me. Personal responsibilities, like the ones I have toward myself right now aren’t any grand moral duties, but primarily about mitigating the ways systems are failing me. It’s the dumping ground for the debris of disassembling social contracts and relations. I don’t think a philosophy of personal responsibility should really care about making sure people don’t drive themselves mad over things they can’t control, or blame themselves or each other for them. These are stupid questions for babies.

Personal responsibility is a great thing. Thinking about how you can act responsibly toward yourself, and others, are important questions. But consider the spider man quote. With great power, comes great responsibility. It’s true, it’s self-evident, it’s common sense. But to act responsibly, you need the power to act at all. And any question of personal responsibility which does not begin by asking how you gain enough control over your life to be responsible for anything beyond how you react to what happens to you has missed the point entirely.

#personal responsibility #essay

[tomorrowmustburn]

Adam Tooze and Stoicism against the end of the world

On a German independent interview program called Jung & Naiv there was a guest this week, the illustrious Adam Tooze. While I haven’t seen that many interviews in my life, this was probably the best. Bouncing between personal history and broad strokes political discussion, it ends up being about climate change in a way that I on this blog(?) try to think about it, or at least, it brushes against it. The gist is this: On the one hand, Tooze brushes off questions of whether billionaires should exist with nonchalant agreement (that they obviously shouldn’t) like they are tablestakes, on the other, he talks about addressing climate change with what he seems to consider to be a grim but morally vital realism.

I’ve been thinking about stoicism a lot recently, prompted by the video essay on it by Abigail Thorn of Philosophy Tube. Your emotions are real, but they are not reality, and they are no particularly powerful tool for accessing reality. (Except, perhaps, your own inner world.) Mulling this over, I’ve come to think that Stoicism is kind of table stakes. Of course there is value and virtue in seeing the world with clear eyes. But that’s not the challenge, is it? The challenge with stoicism, as I see it, is getting any serious handle on reality. Aligning yourself with it, frankly, is the easy part.

I was introduced to the notion of crackpot realism via Adam Tooze. It is, I think derived from realism as an international politics concept which makes a virtue of cynicism because at some point, it comes down to dog eat dog, law of the jungle. There is merit in it: Countries which continue to exist tend to have armies because if they didn’t, they would find themselves being a different country sooner rather than later. When Gorbachev paraded around the international stage hoping to secure credit to liberalize the Soviet Union into something akin to Swedish social democracy, the US saw an enemy on the ropes and gave no quarter. Crackpot Realism, a term which is never self-describing, is simply when this kind of thinking becomes entirely idiosyncratic and preparation for war to prevent war leads to war.

Adam Tooze more or less professes to think that, in order to mobilize a green energy transition, a devil’s bargain with capital is necessary: Offer returns on investment of the right size and reliability, and capital flows will be directed toward it. Can it genuinely be done? There’s no guarantees, because an energy transition has literally never been done, but it’s our only shot right now. Despite myself, I think he’s right.

What can be done in five years, Tooze asks. It’s his killing argument against grander, more egalitarian visions of climate transition. He’s touching a sore spot, a thought I’ve been having: The fossil fuel companies have run out the clock. It’s ironic, in a way. Their business was never a candidate for making it over the line into the new world, but they have both created the need for and made impossible massive social upheaval to go with climate transition. It seems like there had been a moment in the 70’s, where if everything had gone (supremely) right, climate change would have been an expert problem, something dealt with by bureaucrats. Certainly an industrial challenge, but perhaps technological development could have been redirected before the sources of our trouble had become too entrenched and orders of magnitude of fossil fuel consumption had been added for us now to redirect. In that time, capitalism likely could have been redirected. Then came the time when capitalism and fossil fuels became utterly married, so that imagining the end of climate change became very synonymous with imagining an end to capitalism. Now, more time still has passed, and we must strike a bargain with capital, because it is the only game in town. Capitalism has successfully stalled all other avenues, and remains alone.

Yet, as the options grow worse and more narrow, the urgency of the matter rises with every fraction of a degree. Tooze has the ear of the establishment to some degree, and he stands at a bizarre intersection of jamming a crowbar into every crack he can find to widen the spectrum of the politically possible while also downright insisting on remaining violently constrained by it. His cause, first and foremost, does not seem to be climate justice. It is wrestling any degree of contact with reality into a politics and culture of denial; denial of the scale of problems and solutions, denial of the problems themselves. Tooze seems to be a dedicated stoic in the extreme: Promoting a painful, distasteful compromise with the realities of power and capital out of conviction about its grim necessity without sugarcoating what he thinks it is: A desperate gamble on a future which is not entirely apocalyptic and a deal with the devil to get a chance at even making that gamble. But while he is restraining himself through stoicist reasoning, he seeks to employ it as a means of salvation for the world around him. Only he, the individual, is restrained by social reality, but politics is its creator, and a stoicist politics, which takes seriously the challenges and tools at hand, must be fought for.

#adam tooze #stoicism #climate change #apocalypse

[tomorrowmustburn]

Wrapping my head around UBI - Part 1. UBI as redistributive policy and economic stimulus

To my complete and total surprise, wrapping my head around UBI isn't a project of few words. However, these are the ones I started with. More to come, when I try to conceptualize the labor market (and subsequent economic) implications and maybe the social implications.

I’m not a MMT guy, but I am sort of generally interested in the fundamental flows of money. An idea that has stuck with me from a Natalie Wynn piece (I think she, in turn, takes the idea from Piketty, maybe?) is that wealth is more or less about control about what gets made. However, my fundamental interest in economics, while predating covid, was very much jumpstarted and molded by the economics of the pandemic and the subsequent inflationary surge.

Before the deeper dive, I was simply a proponent of UBI. Its fundamentals appeal, particularly to someone who grew up in Germany. Moving away from a vision of welfare that has been shaped by a malignantly pessimistic view of human nature has its appeals, and so does the idea of benefitting from it: Fully Automated Gay Luxury Space Communism was the utopian cry, and UBI represents the simple idea that, because we do have enough for everyone, everyone should be provided for, and this fundamentally aspirational article of faith in simple decency has, I think, serious political weight. Better things are possible! We make the world every day, and we can choose to make it differently.

I want to be an idealist, and these ideas are deeply compelling to me. Basic income experiments back up the core reasoning of the proposition: When people do not fear for their daily livelihood, they are happier. This probably translates into health outcomes, higher economic activity, and this and that good metric. However, this all elides a grander point about the fundamental ideas and assumptions which are built into the organization of society.

Is your job secure? What about your retirement? What about your children’s livelihoods and futures? What would you do if they were? What would it be like to live in a society where, if worse came to worst, you would be taken care of as good as possible? We are social creatures, and having a baseline assurance of care and dignity steer the way a society meets people would likely genuinely alter the way many people see themselves and the people around them. At once, two of the biggest sources of stress and anxiety for most people – economic insecurity in the moment, and the future – could be resolved, and the resulting release could be rapturous and beautiful.

However, politics of resentment are politics against redistribution, and any impactful and substantive amount of universal basic income would be politics of severe redistribution, and thus be fought tooth and nail by the factions which have whittled down current redistributive systems by wielding resentment and mistrust. I could easily imagine those who are above the “line” where they pay more in tax than they receive from UBI becoming embittered against the measure, though many of them would likely still benefit more from the state financially than they were contributing. Though regressive, non-income taxes like VAT would shift this line upward substantively.

If, then, UBI were to stand as a genuinely feasible political proposition, say because the income distribution works out to produce majorities for it, or because resentment against supposed moochers is already exploited to the most, what would a practical implementation actually look like? The first instinct might be to swing for the fences. Create facts, if you will. Implement it, bang, done. If people want to move against it, they will need to repeal it, and if the numbers are worked out well enough to produce a substantive political majority, you nail it in place.

That would take care of the politics. Which only leaves the other problem: How could you stop the economy from disintegrating?

There are layers to that problem. The probably most obvious is inflation in the most broad sweeping sense, as in, how do you pump a livable amount of money times the number of citizens into the economy without printing money? The obvious answer is to increase the progressive tax rate sharply. Put money in, take money out. Though modern inflation targeting happens through central banks wiggling the interest rates, even someone who actually believes that system to be good will likely not think that it could wrangle such a gargantuan cash infusion which is spread so broadly throughout society.

However, the simple math of put money in, take money out should be obvious humbug to anyone who has paid attention to the recent inflationary woes of the world. Even fully tax-mitigated UBI would still result in more money chasing consumer goods, because it would then be a fundamentally and radically redistributionist project, and implementing a redistributive project through purely financial means would, at least in the moment, require the machineries of production to follow suit. There is an optimist scenario here: Globalization works in good ways, facilitating the realignment in purchasing power and absorbing if not dissipating price changes. Perhaps consumer behavior would change gradually enough for there to not be a proper shock. Of course, that would only be possible for economies up to a certain scale. If the entire lower classes of, say, the US suddenly had their ability for consumer spending more than doubled (a serious UBI would, after all, would surely be on par with the “living wage” which many people there lack), it would without question be a shock too large to dissipate.

Even in the optimist scenario, however, it’s only the flows of consumer goods where globalization could conceivably dissipate the shock. Inflexible markets would invariably feel it, housing being the prime concern. Rents, the cynic says, would simply increase by an amount close to the basic income across the board, and that would be that. There is no easy way out of this, but perhaps some positive effect on the housing market could be observed if livelihoods are not quite as closely linked to workplaces. However, there is a more foundational tension to be identified here, one which goes beyond UBI: Relying on a market to supply basic needs invites rent-seeking, and holding out on purchasing basic necessities is the last resort of the desperate at best, even more so if switching costs are tremendous and the necessity, like housing, is not fungible and in ill supply more or less everywhere. The guarantee of basic needs as stateside policy is one of the lower bars to meet for having a remotely functioning society, but to do so by underwriting purchasing power from the private sector without leveraging the collective bargaining power of the unit of people who is actually underwriting the payments is opening yourself to the most egregious rent-seeking conceivable. However, how to keep rent-seeking at bay, or indeed just managing affordable housing, is not a new problem, nor is it one unique to figuring out UBI. If providing a universal housing guarantee is possible (see: finland), then housing under UBI must be possible.

Barring any immediate collapse of the economy due to UBI, the question remains of what it actually is. I previously mentioned the very MMT take that, if you put that much money into the economy, you would simply make sure to take it out again, and while there surely is some truth to that, it is woefully simplistic. To put it simply: Redistributing drastically to have more money in the hands of more people as opposed to fewer will not just juice consumer demand for particular commodity groups and so on, with people switching to better food or whatnot, but it would broadly increase consumption, period, because while there is a range in income where any increase will simply go to recurring expenses, eventually, money goes into savings accounts, assets, houses, stock. Redistributing from people whose money flows into assets to people who are a ways away from their desired level of basic consumption will both change consumption patterns as well as change sheer consumption volumes. Keynsian stimulus, in other words. More money for more consumption. More money for a different type of consumption. Is that a good thing?

The short answer is yes. People tend to generally do things which are good for them and make them happier and healthier when they can afford it, and gearing the economy toward catering to these needs is a good undertaking. Simply giving people solves a lot of information problems which more punitive and distrustful welfare systems can and potentially do not want to address to the same degree. Even utterly frivolous spending may be superior to a targeted intervention if the frivolous thing can be seen as an expression of liberty, while even well-meaning specific help will struggle to shake the stench of draconian paternalism.

The long answer is, of course, contingent on a multitude of factors. Fundamentally, we live in a paradigm which has fully moved past Keynsianism (though  some say that a new ideology called productivism is under way, and is well poised to revive some notion of economic / industrial policy). Neoliberalism and globalization unleashed capitalism inward and outward, respectively, and we are now left in a world without frontiers to ravage. Capital has lost its edge, and all agreements to share spoils are void, as mutual growth has become secondary to siphoning money off into the asset economy so that valuations may grow eternal. Perversely, this isn’t a bubble, but asset price inflation. Because corporate power rules so supreme, labor and consumers have no ever-deeper pockets and disposable income, but rather, as real wages have stagnated, the business of catering to broad masses has become a zero sum game (a proposition quite built into, say, tech startups looking to ‘disrupt’ are looking to cannibalize existing industries and services with apps rather than offering anything substantively new). Yet, as the amount of money leeched out of the economy ever increased, we entered our current time of the price for capital, for extracting money from the stagnant pie, ever increasing. This gave us a generation of questionable startups, but more importantly it has given us astronomical asset prices from houses to stock.

I am proposing, essentially, that western economies are stalling because workers’ share of economic profits has been stunted, both on a local and a global level, and that the ensuing stagnation of purchasing power has resulted in a stagnation in purchasing has resulted in a stagnation of the economy™. The argument here is less for UBI in particular and more for redistributive stimulus fundamentally: Nothing will jolt growth back into the economy until customers have spending money again, and until they do, everyone is just fighting for scraps.

However, for UBI to actually function as stimulus, the money needs to stay local. Commodity spending does go some way there, and it is competing with more upper class spending patterns, which are unlikely to be more local than basic living expenses. But if globalization should rush in and prevent a demand shock, it would just as much prevent localization of stimulus. There are likely qualified people who have wrestled with the question of retaining the effects of economic stimulus. It certainly helps understand why there is a preference for investing in businesses, who at least make the effort to promise that they will spend the money locally on jobs and such.

Still, with some assurance that the stimulus is not entirely dissipated externally, a universal income which guarantees all are provided for is more or less definitionally is going to be a more substantive economic stimulus than any business-side intervention can be. If an economy is near stalled because purchasing power is stagnant, nothing but adding free purchasing power can break the rut and create growth without cannibalizing the existing economy. In turn, a serious broad increase in purchasing power in the classes which will reliably employ it (and are thus the people you want to give that stimulus purchasing power to) will create inflationary pressure. There is a good chance that a simple “money in, money out” calculus couldn’t even stem this: If the increased funding were to come from, say, progressive taxation, and the “money out” column was in actual fact mostly asset money, there wouldn’t so much be a redirecting of resources toward serving the needs of the many, to steal a phrase, but a fundamental demand for the marshaling of more resources.

Now, the worst case here is that you just get very material bottlenecks. Salad and bakery bread become massively more expensive as people try to move up in consumer class. The sort of middling scenario is that the demand goes after something closer to, say, citrus and chocolate and movie tickets. The double edged sword there is that it’s a globalized economy that the stuff is coming from, so the inflationary pressure can be dissipated, but the money doesn’t stay in the local economy. The sort of best twin best cases is that the money goes after local activity that’s more resistant to bottle-necking, and local economic activity is stirred because there’s more money in the system. There is a contradiction here, because economic activity becoming more locally captured implies non-centralized activity, which is not necessarily where you expect economies of scale to come into existence, since hiring craftspeople to put up a new porch or putting on a local theater production are both not exactly in the realm of economies of scale.

There seems to be sort of a broad contradiction here between keeping stimulus local and dissipating demand shocks globally and ameliorating inflation. Returning here to the question of whether upping the money out column via progressive tax in an equivalent quantity to the money pumped into the system via UBI could be stabilizing or whether it might not even be enough, if bottlenecks turned out to be manageable, that kind of pressure would be necessary simply for the sake of fighting currency based inflation, since as consumer level money outflows would go up substantively, the currency would come under pressure, so monetary outflows for more luxurious goods and capital assets would need to go down to keep the currency stable and keep inflation at bay. However, if fear of inflation led to purchasing outside assets (even just, say, dollarization), another vector of pressure would actually start applying to the economy. This might not be a real threat though, since I believe “smart” money by and large resides mostly in assets already, and “dumb” money would be facing the prospect of buying assets with a decreasing currency. There would be a threat of a stampede (indeed the same would go for consumer goods), but barring that the countervailing incentive of the depreciating currency might do enough to keep money “in”.

Now, stimulating consumption proper would have been uncontroversial at some point when Keynes was the biggest name in the book, but while austerity might (hopefully) be on its way out, consumption isn’t exactly back in. Climate change must be reckoned with, and while re-configuring the economy so it serves more people is good and cool, more consumption tends to mean more emissions. Alas, we no longer have the luxury of solving problems one at a time, so any UBI would also have to be treated as a stimulus, and any new economic stimulus now has to come with bounds which prevent it from growing or just sustaining greenhouse gas-intensive practices and instead bound the possibility space so that the stimulus can only energize carbon neutral practices. In other words, bottlenecks are more or less guaranteed. However, if an economy is going to re-engineer itself toward carbon neutrality, and you manage to make that change coincide with altering the economy to more surely address the needs of the broader population at large, you are going to avoid a serious amount of switching costs.

Yet, while I think it’s very fruitful to view UBI as a redistributive program, I want to switch gears to a truly macroeconomic perspective for a moment. The assumption thus far has been, more or less, that economic output would not change, at least not for the worse. This is because, while on an individual level, the imperative to work would fall away, ‘the stuff’, broadly speaking, would still have to be made.

#economy #UBI #universal basic income #essay

[tomorrowmustburn]

apocalypse

In our age of climate change, I have a deep sense of apocalypse. I don’t think I’m alone in this, but it’s too heavy a topic to really have a broad handle on, since you can’t just ask people and it’s a hard topic to google. Regular statistics seem more geared toward figuring out what people think will happen to the economy, and if god forbid I search about whether people’s outlooks have become more optimistic or pessimistic, those results are glutted with literature on optimism or pessimism, which are apparently heavily SEO-targeted terms.

The perspectives on the topic I most despise are the flavors of denial: Techno-salvationism as well as climate doomerism, and that ineffable glassy-eyed ignoring of a topic which just seems a bit impolite on the face of it. It’s that familiar sense of loathing which I can only muster when I see things in others which I despise in myself. But while all these kinds of denial are or have been close to me, my poison is a bit different.

As I understand it, the truth, in the broadest of strokes is quite simple: It’s already bad, and it’s going to get worse, far worse than governing institutions will acknowledge, billions of livelihoods are on the line, but just how bad it’s going to get is not just unpredictable but very much contingent on the current moment. The moral thing, I used to think, should be to throw myself into climate activism with everything I can give and then some. I still think this, but there’s a couple of things stopping me. I don’t think I could do it, I don’t believe I would accomplish much even if I somewhere know that extraordinarily dedicated people can have massive political impact, but more than anything, I feel like, if I started to learn more about it than I already know, and I would start to feel worse rather than better. I’m working on another, less navel-gazy, more analytical/academic piece about the role of corporations in climate change and general ecological decline, and pretty quickly I started to think about writing it as “going to the bad place”, because writing it means genuinely confronting many deeply pessimistic things I believe, and thinking them through to some truly unpleasant conclusions (I have come to believe that capitalism presents a greater threat than climate change to human civilization).

However, at least this particular piece isn’t really about unpicking those reservations. The fact of the matter is that, whether I get off my ass and organized or not, I have to wrestle and deal with the tangible possibility of genuine civilizational collapse in or close to my lifetime, and the absolute certainty of decay, crumbling, and upheaval. Morally, the case is clear: No matter what, every single inch matters, is worth fighting for, because every fraction of a fraction of a degree less warming will save so many livelihoods, their magnitude escapes conceptualization. This is true, and it is important. It is an iron incantation; everything possible must be attempted, relentlessly, for generations. What this relentless imperative avoids purposefully – it is meant to be an antidote to doomerism first, I think – is lingering on the immensity of what is already lost, what and what will already be lost that we know, and the losses we have not yet realized are already inevitable. This is denial, too, in a way, the kind of denial needed to keep moving in a crisis: Grieve when there is time to grieve. I don’t know if I’m doing it justice, mind you. I’m not a messaging specialist, or analyst, or anything.

Maybe it works, is what I’m saying. Maybe it animates an important number of people to do important things. But I feel trapped in the middle. I’m not good enough at denial to push these things away, nor do I want to, but I’m not animated by the morally righteous memory of the necessity for action either. In my mind sticks the image of a flagellant monk, who cries out for the world to repent (I’m not religious, but I used to be). Liberating truth, liberating acknowledgement. My sense of apocalypse is heavy, but I do my best to face it and feel it fully, to do so feels honest. Pain is one of the many certainties of life, and sometimes all that’s needed is to feel it entirely. But what stunts me is my inability to share it, it’s living in a world that it grates against. My family is car people, all institutions I know seem blind or cowardly, and where climate’s awful realities go acknowledged, they seem more or less necessarily accompanied by fatalism or frenzied call to action, or perhaps sublimated into gallows’ humor.

I don’t think the world will end, properly, but I know the world as I know it can’t go on for much longer. Perhaps this makes me an optimist, and I have overlooked the gravity of one climate tipping point or another, or am failing to appreciate the threat of the ongoing mass extinction. But already I live with my sense of apocalypse which no one seems to share, or wish to acknowledge sharing. But maybe, if we were less alone, our world wouldn’t be ending.

#apocalypse #climate change

[tomorrowmustburn]

Tamat

Wordhippo.com lists three meanings for the Malay word ‘Tamat’. As a verb, it can mean expire, as a noun it can mean the end, and in a more nebulous way it can mean to bring to an end, or, briefly, to end (something, presumably). It is also the name of a single released yesterday (at time of writing, anyhow) which announces, and likely previews the next album of the same name by the Singaporean band Paint The Sky Red, named so because it is to be their final album. I do not speak Malay.

Yesterday, sitting on an old but improbably comfortable couch I bought after the first waves of covid had broken, when flights were starting up again and my roommate was returning from his covid exile out of the country, I saw two notifications that two smaller bands I follow on bandcamp, Paint The Sky Red and DYAN, had released new singles. I was watching a youtube livestream from darksouls no-hit runner GinoMachino, who was doing a fairly casual run, and after the bi-weekly trashfuture stream, both of which were pleasant enough and kept me from listening to either release that day.

I am an early riser these days, far before my other flatmates – I might catch one of them still awake, if anything, but not today, and after listening to the new release of trashfuture’s podcast, from which I was kept in much the same way yesterday as I was kept from those newly released songs, I play DYAN’s new song on my phone. It’s a delight, reminding me enough of St. James, my favourite song of theirs (hers?) though it is six minutes, and my attention span is pretty shot despite trying to disengage from social media by and large, so my mind does wander. I follow a lot of smaller artists on bandcamp, more or less always expecting them to never be heard of after any given release, or even knowing for a fact that they’re long disbanded when I find them, so it’s always just a delightful surprise when one of them puts out something new. DYAN’s song is wonderful, but my phone doesn’t usually do her justice, so I move to my tiny room in which I have crammed a PC setup which finished its transition from fairly cutting edge to a bit ramshackle when I dashed a great curved monitor while setting up an ill-conceived loft bed which is sure to be an obstacle in future dating and missing one screw to really fasten its ladder. The monitor’s replaced with a 25€ one I got from a guy in some suburb via blocket (Swedish e-bay), and the price of those savings seems to be that it routinely cuts out by now. I can’t blame the guy because he had the presence of mind to throw in an adapter so I could actually wire my HDMI cable to the monitor and have it function, and someone like that wouldn’t knowingly sell me a failing monitor – it’s simply time’s toll, I think. What this setup does still include is one of those pretty good lower middle tier 2.1 logitech speaker systems – this one I got in person, they’re not substantively cheaper online – and thus this is the best justice I can to Tamat. I get ready to listen and read the description, where I see that it is to be their last album:

'Tamat' is both the name of our latest single and our upcoming album. It is a word from our native language, Malay, which means 'the end', 'completed' or 'finished'.

In late 2020, when the pandemic restrictions were being lifted, we immediately started working on new material for what would eventually be our last studio album. The decision to make it our last was something we had considered for a few years. Ultimately, the circumstances in our lives made us all agree that it was time to start writing the end of our story.

Thank you for your kind support all these years. From here on, each opportunity to perform or showcase our music will definitely be cherished as if it's our last.

Every journey has its end. Tamat.

It’s about 7:30, I’m in my room alone, and I spend the entire song sobbing, and just looking at the message again is making me tear up again. Listening to DYAN again is like a warm hug, though. I try to remember that it’s a bit of a gift that they’re doing another album, and them ending on their own terms is something to be cherished, but it doesn’t stop the cramped sobs, and though for one moment I remember that I could compose myself if I wanted to and almost involuntarily do so, they start singing – they’re almost if not entirely instrumental usually – and I let myself be carried off by the opening floodgates again. I hope my roommates don’t hear, so I try to be quiet – the vents carry weeping eerily well – but the music should drown it out, and listen a second time, sobbing just the same. I’m trying to play trackmania on the side – I’ve played it since I was a kid, and I think it’ll focus me enough to let me actually appreciate the music, but I’m sobbing all the same. I could compose myself enough to not weep through it, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to listen to the song properly anytime soon.

I was thinking, a while ago, about the strangeness of people who have some great revelatory moment and alter the course of their life, their outlook, or something, and it doesn’t make much sense to me, and I’m sure it’s a lot of self-narrativizing. But I could use a change, I want this moment to mean something, and I’ve got a ton of notes on stuff I want to write about laying about. Here’s to making sense of living in a subdued apocalypse.

#apocalypse