Apocalypse Soon
Yes, it’s time to start panicking
It took me a while to reach the conclusion that the world might be going to hell in a handcart. Fear of the apocalypse just isn’t the sort of thing you dwell on when you’re a kid, with all the sense of innocence and immortality a western upbringing affords.
It wasn’t that I remained ignorant to the tragedies that have bedeviled the human story. Over time, I came to learn about a world shaped by blood and conquest, discovered the countless times that people were led astray by dissembling leaders, of wars, violence, and atrocity unbound.
But for my generation — who learned their history and geopolitics in the years following the end of the Cold War — such turbulence belonged to a different time. Most of my life, I’ve adhered to the idea that for all the kinks and imperfections of the capitalist status quo, the present order of deeply interconnected trading nation-states has ensured a measure of stability unprecedented in our history.
And yet, over the past couple of years, with Trump, with Brexit, with the rise in temperatures both political and meteorological, that old complacency has begun to evaporate with alarming speed. Suddenly, everywhere, people from both sides of the political spectrum have found themselves gripped by the same anxiety, albeit for different reasons, of a chaotic…
