The Age of Apocalypse and Indifference
We Should Probably Care More About the End of Human Civilization. So Why Don’t We?
umair haque
Dec 13 · 8 min read

If there’s one thing that strikes me regularly these days, it’s this observation. Never before has humanity been confronted by such a choice of catastrophes. An age of apocalypse doesn’t just loom — it’s already here. Enjoying another Covid winter? I didn’t think so. And yet…the apathy. Can you feel it?

The reigning sentiment of our age, this age of apocalypse, isn’t anger, disappointment, a fierce determination to fix all the wrongs confronting us, or even a simmering sense of discontent. It’s not even an entirely appropriate sense of despair. Above all, it’s apathy.

That’s bad. Weird. Odd. Because it’s wrong. Standing here on the cusp of civilisational collapse, watching the future implode by the day, the last thing we should feel, as societies, as nations, is apathy. The response does not match the predicament. The mismatch is head-spinning. It doesn’t make sense. Or does it?

How did we get here? To the age of apathy and apocalypse?

Think for a second of Squid Game. Remember how the players had been reduced, degraded, to a state of indifference, even to their own lives? It might just be the best window into the civilisation collapse that we have. I’ll come back to that.

My friends from around the world often ask me a question, baffled and bewildered. “Why don’t Americans care about anything?” They mean: why don’t Americans care about anything real. Anything but themselves. Americans care about things, sure — they’re obsessed with money and sex and power and things. But something real? Something really meaningful? Like, say, the plight of the human race, whether or not there’s a future, decency, truth, beauty, goodness, democracy? By and large, Americans couldn’t care less.

Americans will walk over a dying person in the street. They’ll deny each other healthcare and smile. They’re more interested in influencers and interest rates than the past, present, or future of human civilization. They don’t read books, because they’re not interested in anything real. Give them a Marvel movie, and they’ll cheer — but ask them a basic fact about climate change, and they’ll look at you like a deer in the headlights.

Apathy — it’s a form of stupidity.

You can take any number of examples of real things Americans don’t care about. Vaccinating the world so there aren’t more variants. Having a fair and equal society, not to mention world.

Now, I bring that up because that sense of apathy, that kind of strange stupidity, that weird indifference, is what’s spreading around the globe. The world is turning American in its attitudes, slowly but surely. Witness the creep of the far-right in Europe. See how gentle Canada is being corroded by American values. You don’t look to very hard to see that weird American thing, look, way, attitude — a total and shattering indifference to anything real, but please give me an influencer, a Marvel movie, fascism, Facebook conspiracy theories, some dumb escape to numb the pain with — seeping from corner to corner of the world.

The question is then this. Why are Americans like this? Why don’t they care about anything vaguely real?

The answer to that is grim, because it tells us: apathy amidst apocalypse is only to get worse, not better. The mismatch is here to stay — and intensify.

Americans don’t care about anything real because they can’t. The world thinks of them as selfish and ignorant, but that’s only partly true, in the sense that it’s an effect.

Americans only care about themselves. Because that is what they have been reduced to.

American life is a bitter battle for everyday survival. You have to get up every day, and fight off everyone else for a morsel of money, food, shelter, medicine. The stakes really are life and death. Lose that job? There goes your “heatlhcare.” There goes your credit, mortgage, life. Can’t pay the bill for that operation? Sorry, you die. Can’t afford insulin? Too bad, I guess you’re not going to live very long.

That is what makes America vastly different from Europe and Canada, as we often discuss. An almost complete lack of any kind of functional social systems, investments, or institutions.

Now, it’s correct to say that life in much of the world a battle for survival. But even so, not often like America. Because even poor countries have community. There may not be formal social systems and investments, but there are informal ones. The community pulls together to take care of the vulnerable, the elderly, the ill. Nobody much is often lend to simply fend for themselves.

If you think I’m kidding, a scene I often talk about — Americans walking over sick or ill or starving people — doesn’t happen even in poor countries. If someone falls on the street, or is sitting there literally starving to death, the community will immediately help them, to what extent it can. Only in America will people simply stroll by and frown in cruelty.

In that way, American life really is different, in a weird and unique way. Americans only care about themselves. No, not “all Americans.” But enough of them to have made America legendary for being such a cruel and mean place.

Americans, in other words, live lives of materialism and individualism. Because that is what they have been reduced to. They have neither functioning social systems nor investments. Nor do they have community. They are left to fend for themselves, each against the next, every person for themselves, the stakes life or death.

What kind of norms and values does such a social order produce? Well, it produces the ones Americans are legendary for. Greed. Selfishness. Narcissism. All of which add up to a total indifference to anything real.

Americans don’t often understand this point. So let me talk about greed for a second. America is a society completely obsessed with money. Turn on the TV, and there are like ten channels about…money…stock markets…and so on…a million ads for “personal capital” and “wealth management” and so on. It’s not like this anywhere else. No other society is so obsessed with money to the point that it’s one of the only topics of public discourse.

Because, of course, it matters a lot less to obsess about money if you have a functioning society. Canadians and Europeans don’t have to obsess over money the way Americans do because they have functioning social systems. Americans, on the other hand, have to obsess over every dollar because they are out there fending for themselves, each against everyone else, and if you’re poor, well, basically, you die.

So the norms of a society in which life has become an individualistic battle for survival — Squid Game style — corrode. Such a society cannot be a place of gentleness, warmth, friendship. It has to be a place of cruelty, greed, selfishness, and indifference.

And shallow, stupid escapes from reality. After your daily battle is done, and you’re weary — who wants to think about anything real? What emotional room is there? All you want is your influencer or Marvel movie or Fox News conspiracy theory to dull the pain of a pointless, unhappy life.

What’s the consequence of norms of selfishness and greed and individualism? Well, such a society cannot ever develop community or working social systems — the very things it needs most. It falls into a vicious circle. Atomized into little rivals and adversaries, competing viciously for self-preservation, collective action can never be taken to remedy the situation.

And if someone ever does bring any of that up — uh, oh reality — the backlash is vicious. Reality is too painful to confront. Nobody in such a society wants to face the bitter truth — you’re just a worthless commodity in a machine of exploitation, exploiting and being exploited all the way down — all they want, can handle, deal with, process, are left with, is an escape which tells them that greed and selfishness and indifference are OK, wonderful, normal, desirable. Hence, the influencers and comic book culture and Facebook and Fox News and so on.

Are you beginning to see my point? Let me crystallise it. Americans are greedy and selfish and indifferent because they have to be. Life is a brutal battle for self-preservation. Caring for anyone or anything else is a liability. Weakness. And weakness equals death. Americans only care about themselves because that is what they’ve been reduced to.

And only caring about themselves has put America on the path of sure collapse now — because of course such a society doesn’t stay a democracy or a functioning nation, but ends up a failed state, heading into fascist collapse.

Now. Think about the world. What is climate change going to do? What is ecological implosion going to do? Mass extinction?

Think of what Covid already did. Remember at the beginning of the pandemic — all those long months ago — we used to say, idealistically, “we’re in it together!” And then…nobody vaccinated the world…even though it’d cost a tenth of what one Bezos is worth…because nobody much cares…and here we are, in another Covid winter.

Apocalypse and apathy are tied together in a doom loop. The more apocalyptic things get, the more intense the pressure for self-preservation becomes. The more it’s every person for themselves. As social systems crumble, social supports crumble, and communities wither. Everyone is fending for themselves on a dying planet, against everyone else.

It’s like America, or Squid Game, which are the same thing — only writ large.

Apocalypse intensifies apathy — and apathy intensifies apocalypse. Americans only care about themselves. Now imagine a world fighting desperately over what’s left of air, water, food, medicine, money, shelter. Nobody is going to care much about stopping the apocalypse — they’ll be too busy fighting everyone else bitterly for survival.

America gives us a window into the future of civilizational collapse. It teaches us a crucial lesson. That lesson is the one of Squid Game, too. Apathy and apocalypse might seem like opposites. They are partners. Apocalypse makes even the warmest and kindest hearted into Americans — greedy, selfish, indifferent, cruel, apathetic to anything or anyone but themselves. But that way, the cycle of apocalypse only hardens and speeds up, because stopping it takes collective action.

Squid Game, it turns out, may have been even more prescient than it knew. The future of human civilisation is before us. This is the age where everything gets decided. And so far, the world’s choice is much like America’s: I only care about myself, and everyone and everything else can go straight to hell.

Any wonder, then, that it all is?

Umair
December 2021