The Progress of this Apocalypse

It's not a secret that my views on the apocalypse have been shaped by reading John Michael Greer.

There is one prediction in human history that has *always* turned out to be wrong: the idea that the end of the world is soon upon us, ushering in either utopia, dystopia or a suitable combination of both.

So why is it so common?

At least in modern times, I think the explanation is its peculiar alliance with a seemingly opposite notion: the Western idea of Progress. There are of course hard line optimists who don't believe in any apocalypse at all, just as there are perennial pessimists who believe that everything will just get worse and worse until Jesus finally saves the faithful remnant. Often, however, the two ideas seem to co-habit rather nicely with each other.

Apocalypse is what will supposedly happen if there is no Progress. Or Progress might come through Apocalypse. Or both - as in Marxism. Even people who oppose Progress accept the symbiosis. To them, Progress itself is the Apocalypse. One thing that long baffled me, however, is the popularity of secular apocalyptic narratives with no happy ending. I think I just realized how at least one type of such reasoning works.

Why is the idea of gradual decline often more controversial than the seemingly more crazy idea of Apocalypse? Obviously because a long decline challenges the Western monomyth of Progress. It shows that there is nothing special about modern civilization. Like all other civilizations in human history it's born, lives and dies. And whatever replaces it cannot (by definition) be better. This is why people who lose faith in Progress so seamlessly transition into doomers. If modern civilization cannot have a unique life, let it at least have a unique death!

In reality, the "end of the world" is really a metaphor for the end of a very specific political-economic regime: the globalist system which isn't older than the 1990's. Note also the curious fact that the end will come around 2030, which corresponds roughly to the time most Boomers will be dead! At the moment, climate change plays the role of Boomer-doomerism, at least in more sophisticated circles. The more pedestrian version casts a certain Donald J Trump in the role of Anti-Christ. That we are dealing with metaphors is also obvious from the fact that *other* crises aren't used in this fashion, such as the migrant crisis or Muslim fundamentalism.

But what if humanity will survive both climate change, Donald Trump, the death of the Boomer generation, the next pandemic, the next great depression or indeed Brexit? What if modern civilization itself will muddle through, badly bruised perhaps, but just enough to still be livable? And what if it manages to muddle through precisely because it rejects the virus of globo-liberalism?

Perhaps a swift death is preferable to the present propagandists than this...