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Dystopian Idiots and Doomsday Dopes

By Rob Schultheis

Found in: | Inside | Politics |

A recent issue of The New Yorker features an article, "The Dystopians," about the current crop of American environmentalist doomsayers-cum-survivalists, and a depressing piece it is. The characters interviewed, who include a Boston software engineer and an upstate New York urban studies expert, are united in their scorn for the current industrial age, their contempt for those who are striving to fix it, and a toxic brand of selfishness that excludes everyone but themselves and a few family members and friends from their schemes to survive the coming Apocalypse and build a new, "green" society out of the ashes.

With that in mind, these guys are retrofitting sailboats as live-in coastal trading vessels, caching tools and food, buying tracts of forest to provide firewood, and so on.

Scratch a Dystopian, it seems, and you find a closet eugenicist. There's no racial or cultural diversity in their visions of the future: their imaginary Armageddon always seems to kill off blue collar workers, Hispanics, African-Americans and other inconvenient members of the population, leaving nothing but wickiup-weaving beardies and bong-huffing hipnoids. And just to make sure it stays that way, the Dystopians in the article boast of how they are arming themselves with everything from assault rifles to handguns, to mow down any less-worthy survivors who threaten their vision of the future as a gigantic gated community full of people exactly like themselves. All I could think of, after reading about these, are "here we go again," "when will they ever learn?" and "God help us all."

It's not that the current system is working; it definitely isn't. We're living on a planet that's drastically overpopulated with human beings, people who in turn are trapped in an economic system based on the over-consumption of ever-dwindling natural resources, with no obvious solutions in sight. But surely it is better to try and muddle through, mend our ways, and heal both ourselves and the rest of life on this planet than it is to fantasize about living on a planet "cleansed," "purified" by the violent extinction of the great majority of our species, our brothers and sisters.

When you really think about it, what separates the Dystopians' ethics from those of the Nazis? The latter attempted to exterminate enough of their "inferiors" to create "Lebensraum" for the chosen few; the former want Nature to do their dirty work for them, with the same unholy goal. One is pretty much as ugly as the other.

This current Dystopian movement is nothing new or unique, of course. Remember the Y2K craze a few years ago? I happened to be up in Boulder at the height of it, and got to see both the stupidity and the amorality of the true Y2K believers. One flakey Boulder woman I know told me that she and a man with the not-exactly-confidence-inspiring name of "Panther Wilde" were in charge of safeguarding Boulder's water supply. She and her cohorts talked about how they were going to have to arm themselves to ward off the hordes of Hispanics from Denver who were going to head up to Boulder to loot and rob in the chaos following Y2K.

When I pointed out to them that, unlike them, almost all of the Mexican-Americans I knew either owned small businesses or held down at least one full-time job, they were not amused.

There is nothing new about any of this: Norman Cohn's book In Pursuit of the Millennium describes the countless Doomsday movements that sprang up during the Middle Ages in Europe. Groups like the Shepherds' Crusaders, the Free Sorits and the Anabaptists preached that the old world order was going to perish, and salvation lay in joining other cult members in returning to a simpler, more egalitarian life. These groups either petered out when their predictions of Judgment Day didn't pan out, turned to violence and were exterminated, or, when mini-Armageddons like wars and plagues occurred, perished with everyone else. On this continent, the Ghost Dance religion swept Indian reservations throughout the West in the late 19th century, promising that if one prayed, danced and sang hard enough, the White Man and his cities, railroads and factories would be swept away by a giant whirlwind and the buffalo and the other wild animals would magically re-appear.

Maybe it should have happened, in a just universe, but it didn't.

Wishing won't rid the world of evil and ugliness, and sticking one's head in the sand and fantasizing is a good way to get buggered by Reality . . . and any Utopia that leaves out 99 percent of humanity is a nightmare, not a dream.