An Apocalyptic Appetite

As the Wuhan Virus, aka. Corona Virus, aka. Covid-19, is shutting down production lines, putting billions of people into self-isolation, and thousands into body-bags, the second-worst part of the disease is people’s hysteria about it. Granted; the contagion can be dangerous to a slim minority of the world’s population (a minority that still equates to some millions of people mind you!), but by and large it’s not a Spanish Flu or a Bubonic Plague. Not yet, at least. But that hasn’t stopped people from treating it like the end of days, stockpiling toilet paper and flour and other amenities as if this spring will be last they’ll see of modern comforts.

So, if the virus isn’t all that dangerous, and people’s hysteria is causing more havoc than the actual disease, why do people insist on acting like it’s doomsday-o’clock? Would it surprise you terribly to learn that a sizeable chunk of the world’s population actually want to the world to end?

Sound controversial? It ain’t. Not really. For about a decade, apocalypse media has been some of the most popular art that’s around. With zombie invasions and nuclear holocausts to vampire parasites and desert road trip rock concerts crowding our sensoriums, it really shouldn’t be controversial to say that people love a good World’s End.

You might think this is a modern predilection. That dissatisfaction with the state of the world, with market economics run rampant, with haves and have-nots escalating have somehow manufactured a desire for things to end. But you’d be wrong. Because if you’d have thought as much, you mustn’t have taken into the account the religious aspect. Because as it turns out, a majority of people on this earth pay homage to the Doomsday cults of Christianity and Islam. The Book of Revelations is basically the origins of modern apocalypse myth, and the Muslim tenets of Yawm al-Qiyamah is just more of the same. Hellfire and brimstone for the unfaithful; the Rapture and eternal salvation for the gullible.

And yet we let Christians and Muslims have a say in matters of sustainability. Funny, innit?

It’s not that “some people just want to see the world burn”. It’s that a whole fucking lot of people want to see the world burn.

Oh, you think I’m making mountains out of mole hills? You think people are just hunkering down to weather a storm? Then why, for fuck’s heavenly sake, are people stockpiling guns and ammo along with toilet paper and hand sanitizer? Because you sure as shining shit can’t shoot a viral infection away with magazine of .45 ACP!

We can see it in almost every facet of human society. In our continued reliance on fossil fuels, even though we’ve known for decades that its usage is a death sentence to our world. In our media and fantasy habits, glorifying and romanticising the end of order and the rise of cannibalism and moral ambiguity. In our religions, with seemingly harmonious and saintly folk openly praying for a cessation of God’s little experiment. Just look at how we’ve developed our world. How we have sickened it. How we continuously ignore pleads for sustainability. We, collectively, as a species, want the world to end. Preferably with a bang.

But I don’t judge. Well, I don’t judge a lot. I get it, I do. Every tale needs an end, and ours is desperately overdue one. I just wish people were more honest about it. I wish our fantasies weren’t so cruel. And more than anything, I wish people could imagine an end that was also a beginning of something else, rather than the hard stop, the short drop, and the long silence that most seem to gun for.

/Sebastian Lindberg 30/3-2020

The Wuhan Effect

When a cataclysmic eco-disaster looms, threatening the long-term survival of every living thing on the planet, world leaders and industry titans don’t give too much of a shit. But when a virus comes a-knocking, threatening the elderly and the infirm, the world turns on a dime.

As the world is hunkering down to weather the onslaught of the Wuhan Virus, aka. Covid-19, aka. Corona Virus, the social distancing and quarantine programs have produced not-totally unexpected fruits. Clear skies over industrial China. Starlit nights in urban areas. And pristine water in the channels of Venice (even if the claims of returning dolphins were an untrue exaggeration).

Turns out that a near-complete shutdown of the global economy is good for the environment. Whodathunk.

Well, everyone with a sliver of sense in their thick heads could have said so. And have said so. Repeatedly. From experts in pretty much every scientific field, to environmentalists and displeased children, plenty of voices have sounded and pleaded with the world industry to slow the fuck down before we crash into a wall. But any such pleads have fallen on disinterested ears, proving that the future of our children is an acceptable sacrifice for a black bottom line. Even when the next generation shames us in tears at a world summit, nothing changes. But the second that those fossilized fucks at the top of the economic food chain get assaulted by a virus that’s really only dangerous to them and not the wide majority of the population, they sing a different tune.

The politicians and the moguls always told us that a reset was impossible. That making the kind of zero-emission u-turn that the climate activists called necessary was in fact impossible. Unfeasible. Disastrously irresponsible. A fairytale fiction. That no matter what global crisis threatened the very existence of the human race, the factories wouldn’t, couldn’t, shut down. They told us this, laughed at us for our naiveté, and went on with their wanton profiteering.

But the Wuhan Virus has proven that they lied. Undeniable proof that the factories can in fact be shut down. That the ships can be stranded. That the trucks can be stopped. It’s just a matter of the right incentive. And global ecological collapse, rising sea levels, hellraising storms, famine and drought, turned out to be the incorrect incentives for the avaricious and the corrupt. The right incentive wasn’t a mass extinction. It turned out to be a little cough. A little cough from mainland China that rocked the world into compliance.

Because the lives and futures of all those that come after us weren’t as important as the withering lives of those precious few that make all the decisions.

But no matter how hard the markets fall, no matter how many companies shutter their doors and lay off their employees, a pandemic passes. Eventually. No matter what measures we take, what failures we commit, eventually the plague passes. A day will come when the Wuhan Virus is about as irrelevant to global society as the common cold. The question isn’t how we get there, but rather what happens then?

Do we go back to an exponential growth economy that keeps hollowing out the planet we live on? Do we go back to stock markets, carbon and sulphur emissions? Back to commercialism, greed and want? Do we go back to spending the worlds renewable resources at double the rate they replenish at? Because that’s what all the economists, politicians and industry giants  contemplate. On how to go back to the twisted, distorted, dysfunctional way things were.

Or do we count ourselves lucky, and keep our production down enough to satisfy our needs without going back to inflating our wants?

It’d be nice, wouldn’t it? If people living in urban China could keep looking up and seeing the sky? Wouldn’t it be nice to see fabled wildlife return to our ports and channels? Wouldn’t it be nice to not have to wear an oxygen supply just to go get groceries? Wouldn’t it be nice if all those parasitic fucks at the top would die off from a little cough, and finally relinquish the reigns of the world to those that prefer to live on our planet rather than profiteer from of it?

/Sebastian Lindberg 23/3-2020

The Great Toilet Paper Crisis

All I have is a single roll of toilet paper and civilization is about to crumble.

And all because of a cough. Fair enough, the Wuhan Virus (an apt name if only it weren’t for the fact that the squabbling tips of society have gone done goofed and politicised it) has been running rampant across the world. A fresh new influenza virus that by and large, aside from the elderly and infirm, seems not much worse than a seasonal cold. Certainly not as deadly as SARS was. And yet, the infection has our leaders (who coincidentally are, by and large, elderly and infirm), and by extension their more reactionary and pliable subjects, in a fearful frenzy. Leading to people hoarding food and utilities in expectation of something of apocalyptic proportions.

But no matter how fast the Wuhan Virus spreads, a new Black Plague or Spanish Flu it is not.

And yet, here I am, but with a single roll of toilet paper to my name. At this rate, I’m more likely to perish from malnourishment as I get stuck in embarrassment on the loo after finding my roll empty upon having taken a particularly nasty shit then I am from respiratory failure.

Though, aside from pointing out the hysteria of the public in its bunkering of supplies we’ve grown to take for granted, there’s another good point to be made here. How fragile, oh so fragile, the supply-lines of our massive world economy can be. The West is sorely unused to supply shortages. And even though there are the precious few that may remember the last days of rationing, my Generation X and the ones that spiralled downward after me, can barely even fathom a world were we can’t get a hold on a roll of toilet paper if so our lives depended on it.

So I guess it’s actually not very difficult to imagine that this coddled generation of people can envision the End of Time in the grime of an unwiped turd cutter.

Every single civilization that has come before us has fallen. Due to ecological disaster. Due to disease. Due to economic collapse. Sometimes because of all of the above. And every single time, once we get back on our feet, we keep building the same fragile societal structures that are proven time and time again to be about as sustainable as a house of cards. To call human development stupid seems insufficient in such a light. Yet, we keep at it. Sourcing our food from across the globe. Sourcing our electronic pacifiers from sweat-shops in the Third World. Sourcing our fuel and energy from anywhere but where we live.

It is a humbling thing, to look at how the world twists itself into a living Prisoner’s Dilemma. How no matter how educated or knowledgable our populations have become, we keep reverting to the same basic nature over and over and over again. We learned nothing from the Bronze Age Collapse. We learned nothing from Rome. Nothing from the Aztecs or the Mayans. We learned nothing from the near miss Y2K, and we have learned absolutely fuck all from the Great Recession.

Humanity, so hungry for knowledge, never ever learns.

But you know what? I don’t mind the hysteria, the pandemic pandemonium. It’s fine. It’s overdue. I’m a chronicler. A writer. I look forward to the Great Slip; when our downfall turns from a slow slide into a headlong rush. I want to see it. I want to document it. Even if it’s heralded by just a mediocre couch. I’d be damned if I’d have to slog through the inane bullshit and incessant corruption that we today call society, without being afforded the privilege of watching it all turn to dust.

I just wish I had a clean butthole while I was watching it…

/Sebastian Lindberg 16/3-2020