There's something reassuring about all things teleological. Sure, we'd like to there's the tidy ending. Not necessarily Cinderella and Prince Charming living happily ever after, but we'd like to think that even after Rick convinces Ilsa that she can only be happy if she gets on that plane, he can still turn to Louis and tell him that this will be the start of a beautiful friendship.
And yet paradoxically, the teleology doesn't have to be positive to be appealing. Hell, there's something more appealing, in our time, to a more fatally pessimistic mode of thinking. The firm belief that apocalypse is inevitable, or civil war, or some other catastrophe. The belief that we are coming to an end of some kind, whether it is the redemptive, millenarian, phoenix-from-the-ashes kind, or a final nail, an endpoint for humanity – the conclusion that a species unfortunate enough to attain consciousness will inevitably self-destruct.
Apocalypse is – so the think pieces in the Atlantic tell me – a deeply seductive thought process, and one to which I've always been prey. Perhaps this planet, it always seemed to me, deserved a mercy killing.
It's a pretty typically teenage, typically edgelord way of evaluating the world, and in the angst of adolescence, against the background of Iraq and the Patriot Act and the rising seas, apocalypse presented itself as the only logical conclusion. This thought pattern was reinforced by the way in which I saw the general populace, rightly or wrongly, as optimistic on the balance. And so to think the opposite is to imply that one has access to a sort of divine gnosis, a realization that you see the world how it really is. Wake up, sheeple, and all that. I read Nietzsche. I pored through the various 9/11 and JFK conspiracies. I ate magic mushrooms and watched televangelists in rathole apartments, burrito wrappers fallen behind the radiator, because at the end of the day, we're ALL fucking hallucinating, aren't we, man?
Yet it seems that this strain of thought has become more and more widespread, even among the ostensibly adult among us. Find the pattern of your choosing, erect your own mind palace – and since the Internet has become all-pervasive, more and more blueprints for individual mind palaces have become accessible. Boom, you're one of the few whose third eye is on its way to opening.
And naturally this extends to apocalypse.
This kind of nihilism on principle is generally though of as something that ought be put away along with the other childish things. It is expected that one grows older, one grows wiser. One gets some actual skin in the game, learns to love, raises and protects children, and then it's not a mercy killing anymore. It would mean the death of the creatures you brought into this world, whose cribs you look down on in your darker moments and in whom you see light, whom you want nothing more than to protect, mind, body, and soul. And so it is a thought that must be banished. Life must go on, because it simply must. Sure, plenty of people operate from a default cynicism, but when I talk to be-child'd friends who have that same default cynicism, a lot of them have taken a sort of Pascal's Wager or William James will-to-believe approach. Even if this is not my natural cosmology, I choose to believe it.
One is an asshole if one cites the problems with both Pascal's and William James' theories in these situations, so since I'm not in one of those situations, I can air a simple version now. Both nihilism and anti-nihilism are, of course, irrational positions, which does not mean they are bad, but simply that they are not rational. Rather, they are articles of faith, sets of axioms that one uses to frame and interpret everything else.
It would be the height of arrogance to assume I'm somehow exempt, a 2014-era Youtuber presuming to be an infinitely and supremely rational individual thinker. So I have to ask what my articles of faith are, what axioms I use. I am another nightcrawler struggling in the polystyrene cup, fighting in the mud and shit and praying that I'm not the next one on the fishhook. Just like you.
And so if I take everything I see into consideration, the only thing I can anticipate – to the extent I can anticipate anything in this tesseract – is a long trudge towards oblivion, no totalizing wars, no grand epistemic shifts, just everything slowly, almost imperceptibly falling apart, the pain and insecurity of previous eras reintroduced, without the Medieval sense of community and purpose, or the Enlightenment sense that things must get better, to palliate the suffering and horror. Destruction as a slow loss of radio signal, without the ever-so-satisfying clarity and certainty of Gehenna.
The sense is omnipresent. The other day I saw two girls of maybe seven or eight, running along the street in front of their mothers, giggling hand in hand and I suddenly felt awful for them, and for what future lay ahead of them.
The only thing that remains is hope, which is in and of itself irrational too.
That's why it's always been the hero of fairytales, from the last creature in Pandora's box to the Disney canon, hasn't it? It's almost an overarching truly irrational and truly universal thing. In one part of the world it's a hope of liberation from being bounded to the endless entropy of the world, in another the promise of undying love. Even Emily Dickinson found it in her morbid heart to pinch its cheek and call it a “thing with feathers.”
Am I the only who's a bit bummed that there's a clinical Adult Hope Scale?
Like so many psychological tests, it's a bullet-point list of statements, each of which one is supposed to agree or disagree with on a sliding scale, and the clinician is supposed to tally up the scores in a particular manner. It's not hard to predict what's on there.
I energetically pursue my goals
My past experiences have prepared me well for my future
But notice the trick? The minimum score (0) would be a confident disagreement with all statements, while a maximum (64) would be a confident agreement. A middling “kinda sucks” would be right in the middle, even if that might seem just as painful, a condemnation to eternally kinda sucking.
Never mind the fact that this purely focuses on personal perspective, and more strangely goal-setting. Never mind that one having not done something in the past does not necessarily dictate their future outlook. Never mind that there might be very real problems of poverty, war, environmental destruction, and legitimate terror.
Is there anything more of a bummer than being told about how dark it is before the sun rises, how everything happens for a reason?
Cinderella and
the prince
lived, they say, happily ever after,
like two dolls
in a museum case
never bothered by diapers or dust,
never
arguing over the timing of an egg,
never telling the same story
twice,
never getting a middle-aged spread,
their darling smiles
pasted on for eternity.
Regular Bobbsey Twins.
That story.
- Anne Sexton, with whom I have a parasocial relationship, Cinderella
Because to me the truest of hope is that which is fundamentally irrational. That which only exists as a vague and barely held notion, one that you try not to interrogate too much for fear that it might disappear. Not a light at the end of the tunnel. Not a rainbow shown to Noah to indicate his covenant. No. It is the flicker of a face in the crowd, half-seen, on the long subway ride home.
