Existential dread. Nietzsche was right to be concerned with the "death of God". People have a very hard time dealing with the inevitability of our own death an

Existential dread. Nietzsche was right to be concerned with the "death of God". People have a very hard time dealing with the inevitability of our own death and the fundamental meaninglessness of our existence. Even people who think they are comfortable with these concepts tend to still have many tactics of avoiding this reality. For most of human history we solved this problem by pointing to the past (e.g. "when I die I become one with my ancestors") or another world (e.g. "when I die I will leave this vale of tears, and find myself in the world I belong in"). For most of modern society we have replaced this with finding salvation in the future (e.g. "My life is meaningful because my work is contributing to a better future for humanity"). I think most of us, striving to work on hard technical problems, imagine ourselves as ultimately being a small screw in the generation ship that will send humanity into the stars. Or, at the very least, most hope to live on through their children. Catastrophic climate change challenges that fundamental system of meaning many people have established to resist this terror of existence. If society as we know it has no future, this is roughly the same as telling a devote Christian that their is no heaven. No matter how much evidence you gather for this, at a deep level they will be unable to accept this. And if they are able to accept this, it will only because there has been an alternate method of meaning proposed. This is why Nietzsche was so sincerely concerned with the death of God. We can't simply go back to being a world that derives meaning from ancestor worship, or from religion. Sure some subset of the population might "find God", but realistically we can't trivially go back. Nietzsche saw how fragile our systems of meaning had become and worried what society will look like when they start to break down en masse. Nietzsche was write, these climate deniers and many other similar radicals are near perfect representation of Nietzsche's "Last Man" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_man