We Are All Willing On The Catastrophe

The mass shooters in the US often seem to be seeking catastrophe, both for themselves and others.

I'm alternately swayed by arguments on both sides here - the Ballard view, the Seneca view - but i suppose the extreme popularity of CGI-action spectaculars involving the destruction of the Earth, natural disasters, suggests some kind of appetite for destruction in the hearts of the masses

similar to the Sublime effect of e.g. footage of mushroom clouds.... or Stockhausen on 9/11 as Aesthetic Triumph (it weren't at all fun upclose i can tell you - we lived about 1 and half miles from ground zero)

Then there's the "tabula rasa" fantasy (John Carey discusses it The Intellectuals and the Masses), a response to a verminously overcrowded world, the dream of starting again, a more heroic - dangerous, but satisfying - life. Mad Max, even.

As a kid i was a big fan of this series The Survivors, a very-near future England where an escaped biological warfare germ had wiped out 99 % of the population. Used to daydream similar sort of "empty England" fantasies myself - the more exciting world that would open up.

See also: punk as a reaction to boredom - "no future" not as a dire warning but as kind of promise. Punk's been so rationalised and validated by historians etc, there's a sort of social worker version of punk (youth energy, DIY, anger at the Shitstem), but a lot of it was just pure nastiness, completely indefensible. i remember me and my brothers thrilling to tales of the Pistols puking at airports, Vicious slashing his chest onstage, the cynicism of the Swindle narrative, the nihilism, the sick joke of "Belsen Was A Gas" or turning Ronnie Biggs into a pop star.

Ballard is key but before Ballard was Freud, right - Civilisation and Its Discontents - the death instinct. Not that I've read it...

Apropros of almost nothing, I've been watching - in small increments, cos it's so bad - the 90s ramraider-sploitation movie Shopping. That is some pulp Ballard kitsch.

Also on a 90s tip, tried to watch Tank Girl - another 'after the collapse' fantasy.

One thing that's come to mind when looking at stuff like Brexit is that a lot of people get excited about catastrophe because they don't see themselves as being the ones who won't make it. They identify with the survivors and not the dead because it's impossible to identify with actually being dead, it's something that only happens to other people right up until it actually happens to you. Everyone sees themselves as the hero who fights their way out in the film, not the extra in the background getting squashed or blown to bits.

Yeah, Freud is the obvious touchstone, and Ballard was a huge fan of his - the death drive, but that is very much an internal, unconscious wish for personal annihilation. Its an enormous stretch to extrapolate that out to encompass an entire species with so much diversity in thought and culture.

WRT disaster movies, that's the vicarious urge in action. We love disaster films because they allow us to process tragedies from a distance and on a grandiose level that keeps them just out of the realm of realism. This fascination with destruction is not the same as desire. People don't watch horror films or go on rollercoasters because they want to be murdered or flung into oblivion, they do those things for precisely the opposite reason, so they can experience the peril without the consequences.

There's a perverse thrill to narrowly avoiding death and destruction. I was in a car crash as a teenager and my first response once it was over and I'd gotten out of the car was an intense wave of euphoria accompanied by hysterical laughter.

Repetition compulsion, too. Societal disaster is metaphorical for a lot of people, in addition to the literal near-disasters. Returning to the scene of trauma in some way, hoping it might turn out better this time.

This whole thread mirrors that, as we're retreading old ground in the interactions.

"Ballard" keeps revisiting the scene of his accident in Crash and it's as though every crash is only ever the one crash repeating itself.

but by imagining catastrophes we make them more likely to occur

"it's easier to imagine the and of the world than the end of capitalism" and more entertaining

actually i find it easier to imagine the end of capitalism as well as a non-apocalyptic non-capitalist future now than a few years back.

What bothers me about the thread other than the unnecessary personal aspect is that this is essentially doomerism. A variant on the 'just lie down and die' kind of comments you see under every story and tweet about climate. I must've seen it tens of thousands of times by now. Humanity is a virus, undeserving of existence, there is no hope, our end is fated, and not only that, we are unconsciously willing it on.

Well bollocks to that. There are billions of people, trillions upon trillions of organisms on this planet who do not deserve or desire this fate, and doomerism is just another form of denial that makes it more likely to happen.

@version ok, not familiar with it, but makes sense. Another theory is that it's not about rectifying what went wrong, but about the simple visceral act of witnessing it again, maybe bearing witness for eternity. Feels like there must be a greek myth that's relevant here. Louise Bogan wrote a beautiful poem called Medusa on the subject, so that fits.

baboon2004 said:

Ah ok, not familiar with it, but makes sense. Another theory is that it's not about rectifying what went wrong, but about the simple visceral act of witnessing it again, maybe bearing witness for eternity. Feels like there must be a greek myth that's relevant here. Louise Bogan wrote a beautiful poem called Medusa on the subject, so that fits.

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Yeah, I don't get the impression that in the story he wants it turn out better. He just wants to relive the crash over and over.

New world is def possible, but it involves people going beyond the current model and uniting psychology and politics/the external. The trauma of indivls is worked out on millions of victims, and it has to stop for anything to change

sufi said:

but by imagining catastrophes we make them more likely to occur

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But also more likely that they can be prevented. We imagine an asteroid impact so we monitor the skies to try and mitigate. We imagine the pandemic and create vaccines and medicines. We imagine the flood and build arks and sea walls. We imagine the inferno so we install smoke alarms and do fire drills.

You cannot avoid a catastrophe if you cannot conceive of it.

droid said:

What bothers me about the thread other than the unnecessary personal aspect is that this is essentially doomerism. A variant on the 'just lie down and die' kind of comments you see under every story and tweet about climate. I must've seen it tens of thousands of times by now. Humanity is a virus, undeserving of existence, there is no hope, our end is fated, and not only that, we are unconsciously willing it on.

Well bollocks to that. There are billions of people, trillions upon trillions of organisms on this planet who do not deserve or desire this fate, and doomerism is just another form of denial that makes it more likely to happen.

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I see threads like this as something of a relief valve rather than an indicator of an ever-present and all-encompassing fatalism. I don't think the majority of people are fixed into a permanent state of hope or despair, it goes up and down and it helps to discuss both.

In climate circles doomersim is a real problem and is actually a vector of predatory delay by fossil interests. Why bother acting if there is no hope? Its the endgame of climate denial and a brutally cynical attempt to stave off meaningful change in the short time we have left.

That's a fair point. I think you can still do something whilst feeling hopeless but perhaps that's a misunderstanding of hopelessness on my part.

Im not saying that the vast majority of people who express these sentiments arent being genuine, its also a function of exposure to the reality of what we face. You cant get around the dark mountain, you have to scale it and come down the other side. Doomers are lost in the foothills.

I think the scale of the problem makes people apprehensive and that responsible governments would do something like implement local programs on top of things like reducing plastic usage on a national-scale. It needs to be broken up into manageable chunks, imo; things like people working together to clear rivers and pick up litter within their local area. If you had every local authority running things like that and making people focus on things they can see their impact on firsthand then you'd get a cumulative effect and see a more positive outlook and people feeling more empowered and capable in the face of the problem.

Its coming.

With stuff like the reporting on the Amazon it's obviously appalling but I get the feeling that it's counter-productive in the sense that people in places like the UK see that and go "This is terrible but what can I do about a forest on the other side of the world?" then go about their day when there are probably a few things they could be doing in their immediate environment that would have a tiny but positive impact and several billion people doing things like that certainly wouldn't have a tiny impact.