You’d be forgiven, these days, for feeling a sense of near perpetual anxiety about a future melting away like an Antarctic glacier. Your anxiety is trying to prepare you for something. It’s going to be a tough decade. Maybe a few of them. Climate change, mass extinction, skyrocketing inequality, global economic stagnation, elites totally out of touch with what to do about it, and fascists, authoritarians, and extremists, of every stripe rising in the void, from America to Brazil to India to China. It’s not a pretty picture.

And yet one of the great challenges in this grim, dystopian we face — at least a challenge for those of us who wish to be sensible, thoughtful, decent people — as as invisible as it is demanding. Can our empathy survive? What about our decency? How about our courage, strength, grace, generosity, humility? Can our consciousness — battered and bruised as it is — withstand the end of the world as we know it…which is what we’re currently living through?

Let me explain why I ask, if you can’t already guess. Increasingly, more and more of the human race is going to become people fighting desperately for survival on a dying planet. (Please — don’t college leftist me. Sure, maybe that’s what most of humanity’s “always been that way.” Or is that just what they teach you in that lofty Ivy League lecture hall? Yet climate change is going to hit poor countries hardest. Maybe you get the drift. Insert “fighting even more desperately for survival” if you like.) Those of us who are comfortable now will not stay comfortable for long. It’s only really the richest 0.1% of the 1% of the richest 10% of people in the world who can afford not to dread the future — and that’s by design: they’ve gotten rich by preying on everything else, from the planet to the rest of us. They’re going to escape the end of the world by fleeing to Mars, I hear. Thanks, capitalism.

People fighting desperately for survival on a dying planet. That’s going to be approximately 99% of humanity in the near future, if it isn’t already. Now, funnily, I’d bet it you’re American, you think that’s an overstatement. That’s ironic — because Americans are the canaries in the coal mine. They’re already people fighting desperately, bitterly, relentlessly for basic survival — and yet according they’re supposed to be the world’s richest and most powerful people. Why is it, then, that the average American dies in debt, worries about his kids being shot at school, and lives one emergency away from bankruptcy? Perhaps you see my point. Even the most powerful, richest societies in the world aren’t immune to becoming little packs of people fighting desperately for survival on a dying planet. That is the future of all of us, except the predatory 0.1% whom capitalism made kings and emperors of…a dead world.

But what happens to people fighting desperately for survival on a dying planet? The bitter, difficult quest for self-preservation takes over. It soon enough becomes combat, a battle, a zero-sum game — I live, you die — a kind of war. Maybe even literally — though we don’t have to go that far. You don’t need bullets and bombs to fight a war — not really. Americans have been fighting each other for as long as I can remember. They kill one another by taking each other’s healthcare and safety and retirement away. What’s the difference, ultimately? Packs of wolves are packs of wolves, my friends — and that is what we all risk becoming as the future crumples in on itself and winks out into a dystopian bad dream.

So just as America’s grim collapse teaches us that riches and fairy tales and remote controlled killing machines offer no safety at all from a nation simply becoming…packs of people fighting each other desperately for survival on a dying planet, so too the story of just how America collapsed teaches us that people don’t need to fight each other with missiles and tanks to ruin one another. The quest for self-preservation just needs to become a kind of endless, relentless battle, waged with denial, withholding, complicity, hatred, subjugation. People just need to deny one another basic human rights, democracy, functioning social contracts, the necessities — bang! Self-preservation turns into annihilation of the weak, unwanted, hated, just as it has in an America where nobody, really, cares that concentration camps literally operate right out in the open. How could they? Americans only care about themselves — they barely have the resources to do even that. The quest for self-preservation is the only force that is allowed to operate in society at all. How sad. But more than that — how telling.

Now, I want you to really understand the meaning of this great and terrible set of forces. So let me try to crystallize it a little bit.

The idea behind the world we tried to build after the last World War was this. Every life shouldn’t just be trapped by the crusade for self-preservation, because that quest so easily turns into annihilation. Instead, people must be allowed the quest for self-expansion. To better themselves, to realize their fullest potential. The American left hates those words — how foolish its is. It doesn’t know history, and therefore is impotent. What those words mean are this: Europe therefore wrote constitutions where, for the first time in human history, advanced human rights were at the core — rights to healthcare, education, media, income, transport, even dignity, became everyone’s. Social contracts had to be written to provide them. Governments and businesses both were responsible for them. That is why a miracle happened. In just one human lifetime, European living standards rose the ashes of war, to reach the highest levels in human history. While America, precisely because people had no such rights, collapsed (in hard terms: American incomes, life expectancy, happiness, and savings are all falling, and there aren’t social indicators bigger than that.)

So those words: “people should be free to realize their potential” mean something. Something much truer and vaster and more beautiful than American thinking, which mocks them on the left, and denies them on the right, can bring itself to admit. They are what — for the first time ever in human history — stopped the quest for self-preservation from becoming the only thing allowed to happen in a society for the vast majority of people. Because people had the basics as human rights, they could devote themselves instead to a quest for self-expansion instead of self-preservation.

And that is why Europe became a peaceful place. Because people focused on self-expansion are gentle, humble, thoughtful. No, of course, not always, and not all of them. But certainly much more so than people focused on self-preservation — who must take bread from their neighbors just to survive, which is what Americans are made to do by denying each other healthcare, or each others kids college and lunch, and so on.

So. What does the divergent example of Europe and America teach us? It illustrates precisely what happens as the quest for self-preservation takes over. People lose something — the best things in them, in fact. They lose their empathy. They lose their decency. They forget how to care about bigger and better things — whether values, norms, ideals, or rules. Who has the time, energy, resources to care for those, when life is a battle for daily survival? They lose their dignity, and so have none to give, either. They lose their courage and wisdom. Even truth itself stops mattering, as it has in modern day America. Who cares about things like truth when today’s ordeal — just like yesterday’s — is just making it to tomorrow?

And that is how humanity itself becomes a luxury. Think about America again. I don’t say any of this to be mean. Just to think clearly. When you take a hard look at America, what do you see? People can’t afford the best in themselves anymore — empathy, wisdom, courage, defiance, truth, meaning, higher purpose. They have to sacrifice all that just to go on. Nobody will hire you, pay you, reward you for any of those. The more cynical, cruel, heartless, ignorant, and short-termist you are, though — the more money will be thrown at you. Humanity is a luxury that Americans can ill afford, and that’s why the world’s jaw drops when tales of America’s surreal cruelty are recounted — like people crowdfunding insulin, or the elderly living in their cars and working shifts at Walmart, or arming teachers.

Humanity itself becomes a luxury when self-preservation takes over. Then safety is only found in the nearest tribe, submitting to the most violent one you can find, and hoping for his protection. As self-preservation takes over, societies implode into groups of wolf-packs, ripping and snarling at each others’ throats. Maybe wolf-packs is too kind, though — because wolves don’t commit genocide: only humans do.

That’s the story of every fascist collapse, in a nutshell. There’s a collapsing middle class — one that was promised that a life of industriousness and hard work would be rewarded, at least, with status, possessions, safety, prosperity. That in return for playing by the rules, they’d have a home and a nice car and family. Poof! All those things begin to vanish.

What happens nexts? Even the good people begin to sour. Their hearts curdle. Their minds grow blank. Fear and anxiety and dread take over. Nobody can think anymore. Nobody can feel anything but a terrible hopelessness. And soon enough, all that becomes rage, hate, fury. “Those subhumans! They are to blame for our hardship! Finish them off, and we will be great again! Sound familiar? It should.

And yet the translation is this: when the quest for self-preservation is all there is, the following things cannot exist. Democracy. Civilization. Humanity. And all the things they are composed of can’t exist, either. Democracy: equality, freedom, justice. Civilization: decency, investment, shared values. Humanity: empathy, wisdom, courage, grace. All of these — every single one of them — becomes an unaffordable luxury.

And you don’t have to look very far to see all that happening already. America’s the world’s leading example, of course. But the same is increasingly true in China, India, even the Europe I’ve described in such admiring terms. Humanity is becoming a luxury, because the quest for self-preservation is all there is.

Maybe, already, the skeletal fingers of this great feeling sweeping the globe have already touched you. Maybe you’ve been losing your empathy these days. Maybe you feel it’s harder to feel much for people anymore.

I don’t blame you. There are days when I think, too: why should I bother caring about societies, like America and Britain, that can’t seem to care much about themselves? Why should I bother caring about a world that can’t seem to care about itself? Maybe I’m the one who’s wrong. Maybe foolish, weak, stupid things don’t deserve to be cared for. Maybe weak things just…die. Ah, my friends. How close to the line we come. Because if we cross that line, then we have become the very things we fear. Monsters, laughing as other monsters snatch kids at night, and put them in the camps.

People fighting desperately for survival are also usually people perfectly happy to see concentration camps, Gestapos, dictators, paramilitaries, violence, mock trials, gulags, dehumanization, public displays of hate and shame, ethnic cleasning, genocide. They are the ones who, as Ian Curtis once said, “march in line.” They’re the obedient ones. Why resist? What is there to resist with? And what is there left to fight for? The quest for self-preservation cleaves the world into the humans and the subhumans, and your job is to exterminate the subhumans, so that the humans, like you, can live. When you’re fighting for self-preservation, the only safety there is is in the tribe, the pack, and the more predatory, ruthless, and vicious — the better. And the best way to behave in that pack is to submit, and do whatever you’re asked to do.

Now imagine all that — but on a mega-scale, across the ashes of a dying planet. Stop and really think about it for a second. Do you like what you see?

All that — from the packs to the wolves to the predators to the violence — is going to be more and more of us, not less and less of us. And as we become those people, the question is whether we will stop being these people. Will we become people who’ve lost their empathy, defiance, grace, courage, truth, people to whom nothing matters…and can’t seem to find their way back to it…a little bit like modern day Americans? People who can’t care for one another anymore, who can’t care for any higher value, civilization, democracy, humanity, who shrug when their kids shoot each other at school and the sick have to crowdfund medicine — because all we have the meager, threadbare time, energy, and resources to care for is…ourselves?

Will the quest for self-preservation, as we all become people fighting desperately for survival on a dying planet, destroy us from within? You see, we don’t think about that question enough. But I think it might be the most urgent one of all. Why? Because if the quest for self-preservation does ruin us as human beings, the more that we become people fighting desperately for survival on a dying planet…then who will care for that very planet, for life on it, for democracy across it, for civilization upon it? And then won’t a vicious cycle erupt? Do you see the paradox yet?

Poverty dehumanizes us, my friends. We have now grown poor in the truest way. Decades of implosive capitalism, created an American way of life — that taught the world that brutal competition was the sole point of not just human existence, but of literally all life on the planet, which is the only life we know of anywhere in the universe. Hence, we tore through the planet’s resources. We destroyed our own middle classes. We ripped through our own democracies, societies, economies, and then even our kids’ bodies, minds, souls. What’s left? Not much. Poverty dehumanizes.

And we are being catastrophically dehumanized every day now by the kinds of hidden (and not-so-hidden) poverty implosive capitalism creates. From the death of the planet, to glibly smiling it away on Snapchat, to watching life die off and shrugging and swiping right for tonight’s date, from the algorithm to the cheap, trivial, escapism it offers. We are becoming so badly dehumanized we can’t even process reality much anymore to begin with. But do we know it? Do we understand the stakes? We are becoming people fighting desperately for survival on a dying planet. And as we become those people, will we stop being people capable of empathy, wisdom, grace, courage, humanity, too? But won’t those take civilization and democracy with them?

If history is any guide, my friends, then the answer is: yes, we will stop being these people. We will become something much more like little packs of desperate wolves, howling in the endless night, searching for something — anything — to consume, as the snow falls, as the wind shakes the fallen leaves. And the snarls and the silence are all that’s left of the people we once were.

Umair

October 2019