3 ms·
There's two claims in this piece I think. 1. We're not in a 'special' point of history, crises happens all the time 2. this is validation for some sort of lib
by Barrin92 5y ago
There's two claims in this piece I think.
1. We're not in a 'special' point of history, crises happens all the time
2. this is validation for some sort of liberal technocratic, moderate program, systematic critique is misplaced.
The first one is true. Crises do indeed happen all the time. The entire problem is just that this is not an argument for the second claim. Nations collapse, people go to wars, the WW I trenches were certainly worse than Donald Trump's presidency, what have you.
The big problem is just that the fact that carnage is normal doesn't make the carnage any better. It's not a validation of the system as it is, it's a testament to the constant brutality and chaos and cycle of violence that is normal throughout history, and I don't want to live through anything that's even just a tenth as bad as the second world war. This is what Adam Curtis called hypernormalization, the numbness to complete and utter destruction, rationalized as a sort of ordinary state of affairs. Just look at it this way, this is a blog post warning of crisis mongering, while, in the US as an example where the author is from, over half a million people died of a pandemic. He's right that in two years everyone will have forgotten it. He's wrong in that he doesn't recognize how insane and terrifying that fact is.
Someone made the observation that in the last two thousand years, no empire has lasted more than 300, I'm pretty sure plenty of moderate reformers had the exact same attitude in any of them as the author. It's true that people throughout history have loved doomsday scenarios. The problem is just that most of the time, they were right.