Living In Our Own Worst Interests
How and why we are badly prepared for our likely future
For four out of the last eight days we’ve been pretty much without power here.
I charged the mobile in the car and also thought about plugging the laptop in just because I was feeling electronically deprived in typical spoiled-Westerner fashion. An old fondue kit and some smokey lamp oil served to boil water because I absolutely had to have my tea. Such are the priorities we imagine really matter within our comfortable lifestyles.
A few outstanding jobs were done to fill the hours — but really just because the normal things were impossible. However, at one point I realised how presumptuous it was to take for granted that the power would definitely return sooner or later. What if it just didn’t? Was I prepared in the slightest for such an eventuality?
Having a bore-hole with electric pump, water would be one challenge. Cooking and heating would be a bigger issue for many. What about washing? And although many high-tech gadgets are hardly essential, we now rely heavily on them for communication and an understanding of the outside world. An absence of news could only nurture chaos and panic — including unfounded rumours. It’s easy to imagine the return-to-instincts mentality that might spread quickly once no one was sure what was happening with food and other essentials, and once people began to think only in terms of immediate survival.
Unbelievably, it turned out that the staff at our newish medical centre — could not even open their doors without power. The security system is so secure that without electricity it is apparently inoperable. Did the planners really fail to realise that certain catastrophes simultaneously cut power and demand extensive medical aid? Just how poorly are we prepared for real incidents, never mind long-term problems?
One supermarket seemed to be open whereas another was definitely not and, presumably for food hygiene reasons, had completely cleared its shelves of fresh foods when it reopened today. Would this be an affordable policy if food was getting scarce? Current food supply systems rest perilously on various forms of energy for both transport and storage.
The last thing I read before the lights went out a couple of days ago was Collapse of the First Global Civilization — one man’s take on our impending doom and its apparent inevitability within just a few decades. If he is even vaguely correct in his assumptions, it seems that our inability to act intelligently in relation to what he predicts will only be further compromised by our reflexive idea that things will necessarily revert to normal at some point. On top of whatever future challenges are already locked in, our failure to be rational and accept that there may in fact be no return to normality will only make things even worse.
The idea that failure in one area of society will impact other areas, and that the overall structure will then progressively disintegrate, is just not something anyone wants to think about, never mind discuss. Even as we scrape along the iceberg, we choose to believe the ship is unsinkable.
Like fools leading fools, the naivety of the popular outlook will likely only be compounded by what we can be sure will be the deliberate understating of problems by those in authority. The desire to keep the public complacent in the face of real threats may be every bit as irresponsibly stupid as the idea of a stout table offering protection against nuclear attack, but those at the top have never been open about their failings to avert the worst.
What we see instead is that relatively minor threats such as politically-useful terrorism are wildly exaggerated to keep the public suitably distracted and malleable, whilst the interests of ruling elites are quietly prioritised. There is no reason to imagine that such stratagems will not go into overdrive once governments realise things are seriously coming off the rails. Let’s not forget, they already enjoy much enhanced levels of protection compared to the rest of us, and we can be sure they will continue to act ruthlessly to secure their own future first and foremost.
Ordinary citizens will be more neglected by governments than ever, at the very time when human cooperation will be of greatest importance. Whatever lessons in human kindness and common decency may be learned, they will certainly not be taught from on high.
I wonder how many initial readers of this article will have abandoned this doom-and-gloom picture paragraphs back. After all, who really wants to sour today worrying over the apparently inevitable awfulness of the future? But that is exactly our weakness: we generally choose to look the other way until the only option left is to panic over that which we have foolishly ignored.
The fact that the unthinkable remains literally something we stubbornly refuse to think about only makes us all the more vulnerable. In short, not processing bad news can only make matters even worse.
