PREPARING FOR COLLAPSE (10)
Final Episode
I could continue in this series, but other topics beckon, so this is my last one dealing with Collapse. I believe that, in the main, nobody is ever ready for Collapse, because our brains are wired to ignore such events as Climate Change and Collapse. Just try to bring the subject up at a social gathering; chances are that you’re met with either silence, downright denial or confusion.
I read a new word last week: HOPIUM. Where Karl Marx is supposed to have said: “Religion is the OPIUM of the people” for many liberal thinkers HOPIUM is the poison that distorts reality. In spite of all the evidence to the contrary they hope that somehow science, or the government, or the United Nations, or nature itself, will cause the problem of Collapse to disappear.
I was at a meeting last week where an author, a woman with extensive scientific background, kept on saying that ‘we will overcome’ the problems facing us. She demonstrated her knowledge of natural sciences repeatedly and, to general applause, expressed her ‘belief’ that dangers such as Climate Change and disappearance of wild species will be solved, without saying how.
HOPIUM is the new religion.
I am of Dutch birth, born in the most Northerly part of the Netherlands, where ‘nuchterheid’ ‘down-to-earth common sense is said to originate. HOPIUM is the false religion which soothes us to sleep, induces us to inaction and leads us to the way to Hell. C. S. Lewis once wrote something like this: The way to hell is smooth, no sudden turns, slightly sloping, easy to traverse. That’s the way we like it. But that’s not what life is all about. When we look at what’s going on out there, then optimism is not warranted. Instead we purposely close our eyes to reality, which earns us the label of being a cynic which is defined as someone who knowingly acts against what he or she knows to be true.
Why doesn’t positive thinking work the way you might assume? Dreaming about a future that poses no dangers calms us down and robs us of the incentive to take action to pursue our goals. Positive thinking fools our minds into perceiving that we need not act at all, and so stops our willingness to do anything at all. It’s the easy way out and also literally the way to hell on earth.
Do I sound negative? Yes. I know I cannot convince you. Still I want to draw your attention to a host of happenings which indicate COLLAPSE. The list is by no means exhaustive.
- Colony Collapse Disorder: bees are dying off in droves, imperiling thirty percent of our food supply.
- Wild Animal Collapse Disorder: more than half of the wild animals out there have disappeared due to us depriving them of their habitat.
- Ocean Fish Collapse Disorder: the oceans once full of life are increasingly depleted of fish and filled with plastic and other filth, while acidifying rapidly, spelling the end of all life.
- Stable Weather Collapse Disorder: ask insurance companies where the major source of insurance claims comes from, and they answer: volatile and dangerous weather.
- Middle Class Collapse Disorder: with the advance of robots and computer software inventions, society is rapidly dividing into a tiny upper class and a huge underclass, eliminating the most significant section: the Middle Class, the mainstay of society.
- The Truth of the Matter Collapse Disorder: the media are a reflection of our own reluctance to face the truth, and so reinforce our weakness to shy away from the cruel reality that is about to overwhelm us.
- The Stock Market Collapse Disorder: where before we bought when we had saved the money, we now live on debt, feeding the rise of stock market with borrowed funds, until debt does us in.
- The Fighting Ebola Collapse Disorder: we have closed our eyes to the imminent danger of infectious diseases, of which Ebola is the current danger.
- The Ecclesiastical Enterprise Collapse Disorder. In the coming columns I will elaborate on this phenomenon in detail, and will try to offer a possible remedy.
It’s not that I am obsessed by bad news. What I am fighting is that, by and large, people don’t really believe that evil is the prevailing reality in our life. In general, even the church people, the ministers and the rapidly diminishing flock of the faithful believe that evil can be overcome.
OK, I am an old fashioned believer. The Bible repeatedly states that we are born and conceived in sin and therefore are inclined to all evil, and shun the good. Those who govern us at the present time reject this central insight of Western religion, which is found also in Greek tragic drama and the work of the Roman historians. Destructive human conflict is rooted in flaws within us, the human beings. The study of human actions reveals that humans always are inclined to destructive and self-destructive behavior. The bitter truth is that we must be constantly aware that, in whatever we do, evil always pops up.
We are bombarded with news that spells progress. No view of things could be more alien at the present time. Every politician – especially now with the USA November midterm elections just ahead – whatever their political spectrum, all of those who govern us hold to some version of beneficial liberalism – the HOPIUM, that false religion – which teaches that human civilization is advancing, albeit in fits and starts, to a point at which the worst forms of human destructiveness can be left behind. According to this view, evil, if any such thing exists, is not an inbuilt human flaw, but a product of defective social institutions, which can over time be permanently improved. “All we need is love,” however that is defined. Politicians as a block reject the insight that destructive human conflict is rooted in flaws within us humans. They also, fanatically, advocate that continuous growth is possible in a finite world.
I have a book by the American writer and journalist William Shirer who lived in Germany during the rise of the Hitler regime in the 1930s. He writes something that applies to us as well:
“Most Germans, so far as I could see, did not seem to mind that their personal freedom had been taken away, that so much of their splendid culture was being destroyed and replaced with a mindless barbarism, or that their life and work were being regimented to a degree never before experienced even by a people accustomed for generations to a great deal of regimentation … On the whole, people did not seem to feel that they were being cowed and held down by an unscrupulous tyranny. On the contrary, they appeared to support it with genuine enthusiasm.”
Time and again we see that, if it comes to choose between a job and preserving the climate or democracy, the job always wins. Hitler created jobs. That, in a nutshell, illustrates the truth of the end of the world. Jared Diamond, in his book COLLAPSE, also gives a good example, citing the demise of the Eastern Island’s existence. He writes ”What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last palm tree say? Like modern loggers, did he shout “Jobs, not trees!”? Or: “Technology will solve our problems, never fear, we’ll find a substitute for wood”?
Jesus asks us to be (and here I use the Greek words, as the New Testament has been preserved in that language) ‘anthropoi teleioi’. This means that we have to be anthropoi ‘people’ who are ‘teleioi’ keeping the ‘telos, the end’ in mind. The translators in their idea of the meaning of the word ‘teleios’ have seen fit to render it as ‘perfect’: so the text in the Sermon in the Mount comes to us as “Be ye perfect as my Father in Heaven is perfect.” But we know only too well that we can’t be perfect. But we can fulfill the meaning of teleios by always in our actions trying to gauge what the end of our doings entail. We know that the ‘telos’ of driving an automobile is GHG – Green House Gases – which, in the end causes Climate Change and all its after effects such as warmer weather, greater storms, rising seas, disappearing glaciers, harsher drought. Even if I cannot do without a car, living far from stores, church and relatives, I do what Luther recommended, “sin bravely”, while praying for forgiveness. That this earth, as we now know it, will end, and be replaced with a renewed, cleansed, pristine world, is a biblical given. So, in a sense, all my 10 instalments of PREPARING FOR COLLAPSE are Eschatologies, stories that deal with – another Greek word – the eschaton – meaning the last stage of all things.
Collapse.
The apostle Paul elaborated on this when he wrote, “For the creation was subject to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it” (Rom. 8:20). Once sin affected just one portion of that beautifully holistic order, it infected its totality, ruining the entire realm because Satanic forces threw themselves onto nature, onto us humans, onto the entire radiant creation. The result has been that our universe no longer is one of only beauty and harmony, but, especially in our days, one where unpredictable powers are threatening us with annihilation from all directions. Now the world in which we live is dominated by demons. Every hour we experience the terrible influence of this satanic situation.
Yes, something went wrong.
Here’s how a poet who remains anonymous, phrased it.
The future broke. Collapse.
The Collapse is the future slowing, stopping, winding down. Fracturing; splitting apart; coming undone. It is the future ending, rupturing, breaking.
Once, we subscribed to a naive view of historical progress. That humanity marched forwards into a place we called the “future”.
The future stopped happening. For most of us. We got left behind by it.
The future isn’t one of unalloyed, golden progress anymore. Tomorrow is a tale of decline, degeneration, decay. Collapse.
The future isn’t flying cars and food pills and a smart-home and a stable career and comfortable prosperity for every family anymore. Collapse.
The future looks more like this. A story of a burning planet, of imploding middle classes, of lost generations, of empty decades, of mass unemployment, of the rule of law breaking, of democracy cracking, of nations splintering, of tribes warring, of broken dreams, of Greater Depressions, of unending Stagnations, of human possibility itself shattering into a million million pieces. Collapse.
The future isn’t the steady, forward march of human advancement anymore. What is “declining”? Constitutional democracy, opportunity, mobility, material prosperity, law, equity, fairness, a sense of meaning in life…hope for the future. Collapse.
The stories we used to tell ourselves can no longer be told. History is not a march to progress. Progress can shatter; crack. Collapse.
The future, too, can end up broken.
Collapse.
This is how the future ends. Not with a click, but with a Bang.
The Collapse is a story about how the world—the world as we once knew it—will end. Not end as in “be blown to bits by a meteor”. But end in the sense that it will never come to be. It is a story about the end of the future.
We are not living in the future. We are living in the Great Collapse. The space in between the future that never was, and the past that will not end. The break; the chasm; the gap.
We’re trapped here, in this ongoing Collapse. In a purgatory from which there’s no escape.
This Collapse is killing the future. Not the past, not the present, the future and filling it with a void, a null, an empty space, full of stagnation, of nothing, of nihilism. We can’t fix it by fixing it. We can only fix it by fixing us.
There is a fundament to the thinking of all civilized people. It is this. That each and every person deserves the chance to live fully. No matter how weak, poor, frail, or destitute. Why? Because to each life, that is all that there has ever been. Life. The struggle. The glimpse. The triumph. The fall.
If we are to become ourselves again, then we must fight to reclaim what we truly know. We are made to LIVE. That fighting against life is the truest misfortune of all. For it is the end of Faith, love, meaning, purpose, grace, wonder, suffering, passion.
And it is all those that we must rediscover if we are to escape the Collapse.
And the greatest of these is LOVE. Love for God’s creation. Love for all of life.
I have translated a book by Johan Herman Bavinck, of which the subtitle is A Radical Kingdom Vision. That radical Kingdom vision is the Renewed Creation where the sheep and the lion, the wolf and the little child, live together in peace, where harmony reigns forever, never to be broken again. It will restore what happened in the Garden of Eden, when Collapse began, when the human pair there wanted to be like God and so God let them be: God hid his face “to see what their end would be.” (Deut. 32:20). We are now discovering what it means when God disappears from the earth.
Fortunately it is only temporary. The true vision of the future is captured in Revelation 21: 2: I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband.
The new earth is the bride. We, the new human race, with Christ as the head, is the groom. The last Holy Marriage.
Next week I will start a long series on the possible place and task of the church in these Last Days. The possible new title CHURCH—ILL?