On Doomerism
The world isn’t in the best of places, and that can feel terrible, but we cannot give in to despair.
Hello, friends,
Last week, we talked about the New York Health Act, which is a single-payer program proposed in my home state of New York. It’s something we’ve been fighting for since, apparently, 1992. That’s before I was even old enough to be in the fight! And it’s something that, in spite of certain promises, we just haven’t gotten.
Why do we keep fighting?
Well, you know you’re at the start of an article so you’d probably guess I’m asking this question rhetorically, but in a shocking twist I’m really kind of not. See, starting some time around Saturday and only ending today (Thursday - I’m trying to get work done ahead of time), I hit a depressive episode. This kind of thing happens to me, it’s just my brain chemistry at work, but I was pretty down. The main driver of it all was the ongoing heat waves that are the worst in recorded history, and probably pretty far back into Human prehistory as well.
A talk with my therapist and some good happenings later and I feel better, thank you for asking! But the question I asked earlier - why do we keep fighting? - is still a valid one. We know there are powerful interests arrayed against us on many Progressive-facing issues (Single-Payer healthcare, climate change, banking reforms, and the list goes on), so what is it that keeps us fighting to make progress even in the face of daunting opposition?
Why shouldn’t we just engage in “doomerism,” loosely defined as a downward spiral of surrendering to the gaping maw that says “we are doomed no matter what we do?”
I’m glad that it’s easy enough for me to see the answer, today: Because we aren’t doomed.
So let’s talk about it.
How Doomerism Drains Our Strength
Basically put, it’s a pre-emptive surrender to opposing, likely-regressive forces that seem so overwhelming that there’s no hope.
Let’s consider the one that got me down: Climate change is an exceptionally difficult problem to solve because it depends both on technological innovations, like the LFTR, that we aren’t 100% sure will work; and because it requires collective action on a global scale that I am honestly even less sure will work. Some countries, like Russia, think they might benefit from climate change, making them hyper-unlikely to refuse to help. China essentially wants to ‘do its own thing’ with climate change, refusing to join any sort of global effort, or at least a U.S./Western-led one. And let’s not forget that the U.S. doesn’t have a great track record on climate change, ourselves - or, at least, we’re historically just one more ‘bad’ election away from refusing to work on it again.
Meanwhile, as I’ve mentioned previously, global temperatures are at all-time highs. I’ve talked previously about the Canadian wildfires that are less problematic now, but are still an ongoing issue where you never quite know what’s up. California has a wildfire season, too. These are entire ecosystems burning out of existence, right here on Planet Earth. What’s worse is that as temperatures continue to rise, there will be more wildfires - maybe even until there are no more forests left to burn down.
If it’s clear that global diplomacy can’t tackle the problem, at least we have technology to fall back on, right? I mean, if climate change is caused by an excess of carbon dioxide (and other gasses/factors) in the atmosphere causing a greenhouse effect that insulates the planet and heats us up, well, what if we can find a way to subtract back the carbon that we’d previously added?
If I haven’t already introduced you to this lovely gem that’s probably worthy of its own article, allow me to do so now: Hello, Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS). Basically, CCS is a way to pull CO2 out of the air and store it underground where it can’t hurt the environment. This technology, however, is far from mature. In theory, we can build massive solar/wind/nuclear-powered plants that pull CO2 straight out of the atmosphere, returning us to a ‘better time’ for the climate.
But this technology might or might not be feasible on the grand scale. We just don’t know. Doomerism as a pseudo-philosophy tells us to expect that until and unless it exists, it probably won’t, and therefore we shouldn’t put much focus on it because it might be a dead end. “After all,” Doomerism will tell you, “if we waste resources pursuing a dead end, we’re just gonna be worse off, right? Better just spend that money on ‘adapting’ to climate change, rather than trying something so bold.”
“After all,” Doomerism will tell you, “if the next election goes bad, Congress and/or the Presidency will just cut off funding anyway, so why even bother getting your hopes up when it’ll just end badly?”
And here’s the trap that invades one’s mind:
“Here are all the reasons the next election is going to go badly, so you’d better just prepare for the worst. You can’t change it.”
Finally, it suggests one solution above all others:
“If you can’t change it, why do you even care?” I mean, there’s a reason that Pepe The Frog’s sad face became a meme amongst Fascists.
But the trick is: If you don’t care, there’s no reason not to fight onward.
To Combat Doomerism, Push Forward
It can be really easy to say “I don’t care” when confronted with the overwhelming weight of the world. It can be really easy to give up. To say, “Fuck it, I don’t care.” And I used climate change as an example, an issue where liberals and progressives tend to align with at least some good intentions (though I’d argue liberals and especially ‘centrists’ lack urgency…). What about an issue where we diverge? What about - sayyy - the Biden administration’s utter failures when dealing with people with disabilities such as ADHD?
It is exceptionally easy, as someone who spent a few years with under-treated chronic pain, to fall into the Doomerism trap on issues like these. Well, first, I get infuriated. That fury has no useful direction other than maybe complaining to social media about it (I mean, you can tag @POTUS, but that doesn’t mean he’s gonna ever see it), so it quickly turns towards depression. “Well,” the Doomerism brain-rot whispers, “if Biden doesn’t give a fuck about disabled people, why should you bother voting for him?”
But the alternatives are all worse.
Is Trump really gonna make it easier to access necessary medications, or is he just going to invoke draconian restrictions? Since it’s going to be the latter, he’s clearly of no help to us. The problem is that people who need certain restricted substances - be they opioids, stimulants, or otherwise - are a comparatively small minority that’s easy to demonize as “drug seekers” who “don’t really need their meds to function.”
But if we all unite and raise our voices together, well, things can change. It’s taken decades, but many states have legalized cannabis for use. We still have a very long way to go on this issue, but at least we’ve made progress. The Federal government, for the most - but not entire - part, stays out of the issue on the state level.
Under the right circumstances, an electoral victory - the very thing that Doomerism says we cannot achieve - can produce improvements to the quality of life that people have.
So when you feel angry or depressed, when you feel like you can’t possibly care or can’t possibly escape, that’s the time to fight harder.
That’s your healthy way out of Doomerism.
Because next week we’ll talk about Doomerism’s big brother, Accelerationism.
In Other News…
You all know how we feel about strikes and protests on this blog. Many of you probably know there’s a strong possibility of a UPS Drivers’ strike coming soon. Many of you might not have heard of a similar movement at Yellow Freight over the company’s - for lack of an appropriate word - “appropriation” of pension funds. This is a perfectly appropriate reaction to this situation, and it dovetails into today’s main article because this is an example of a man who is certainly not going to let Doomerism play into his decision making.
It would appear that the Biden administration’s border patrol is locking migrants in cages in Arizona during a searing heatwave. This is the sort of shit that people were really riled up about during the Trump administration, but have since fallen relatively silent about while Biden’s in office. It’s part of the reason why I wish that Biden faced a significant primary challenge. This is cruelty, and it needs to be spoken up about rather than surrendered to. “He’s a Democrat” is simply not an answer.
In news sure to threaten some Doomerism, Russia has begun regularly bombing the Ukranian city of Odesa, a port city that is one of the world’s largest grain-exporters. This means people will pay more for grain, and/or will starve to death because they cannot afford it. You know, Russia could end this war tomorrow: It could leave Ukraine to its 1991 internationally-recognized borders. That would solve a lot of problems, so the least we can do is keep supporting Ukraine in making Russia leave the hard, bloody, sacrificial way that they have been since February of 2022.
In a late-added thing that slipped my mind when I completed this article, apparently Florida has decided to “teach” students about the “benefits” that enslaved people got out of being enslaved. As a former History teacher, fuck them.
Thank you for reading The Progressive Cafe. If this article has helped you, please consider signing up for our mailing list. This article is by Jesse Pohlman, a sci-fi/fantasy author from Long Island, New York, whose website you can check out here.