America is in a tight spot, and it is terrifying to me. I've talked a couple of times about the ephemeral nature of human civilization, how close we always are to collapse, and how it is only through a combination of willpower and ignorance that we keep staggering onward.
I'm worried that we're approaching a tipping point. Or rather, a point of no return. Or rather, another point of no return. We've passed quite a few of them already, fortunately for things that we wouldn't want to return to.
And maybe I'm just being one of those worrywarts that laments the coming of new things as being inherently bad. I don't think I am, but it is always difficult to see from the inside. But let's try and take a step back and look at the larger picture.
We live in an era where our President is simultaneously pushing away allies that we have spent in some cases more than a century building relationships with while embracing some of the more despotic, insular, and aggressive nations on the planet. Meanwhile, roughly half of the country cheers while the other half has panic attacks.
I want to be clear on one thing. This isn't the end of the world. In fact, I'd bet that humanity itself is nearing the point of being damn near unkillable. We have been, as a species, on a steady upward trend throughout history. On average, each year is a better year for the average person living on Earth. This progress have given us access to technology that allows us to survive almost any circumstance. We could do some real damage to ourselves, sure. But we'd have to work real, real hard to wipe ourselves out.
I mean, we bounced back from around a hundred people. We could do it again. It might take 70, 000 years or so, but we could do it. So it isn't humanity I worry for.
Fuck, I'm being selfish. Really, it's me I'm scared for. It's funny how often these soul-searching rants about the big picture end up revealing that simple fact. I can talk about love for my country all that I want to, but at the end of the day I have to admit that I am a globalist, and a humanist, and that those two factors mean that as long as humans are doing better, I shouldn't fret about which groups of them are doing better or worse.
It's just that I am part of one of those groups, you see.
I just sighed. A pretty good sigh. Just so you know. Back to politics. I find the recent trends towards nationalism and isolationism troubling, because the international order that we have come to rely on for stability is in flux.
Perhaps a brief history lesson is in order. See, there were these two pretty big wars that happened. One was about a century ago, one a little more recently. And everyone was so appalled by the level of violence inflicted on the world that we all agreed that war was some bullshit and we shouldn't probably have them any more. We all sat down and made this thing called the UN, and really tried to get behind this thing called "international law."
In the grand scheme of things, international law is pretty new. Countries used to be pretty small, and the ones that got big could do pretty much whatever they wanted. Westphalia changed all of that, to a certain extent. But up until World War 2, nations for the most part only played lip service to ideas like "sovereignty."
World War 2 was a brutally effective demonstration of how fucking dangerous we are. Every single person on the planet was forced to reckon with how destructive war had become, and we came to a realization: we didn't want to risk it. The UN was born out of that fear.
But despite what Lord of the Rings would have you believe, it doesn't take thousands of years for folks to forget things. Hell, it doesn't take decades. It seems that the modern American has forgotten the horrors of war. We have forgotten just how dangerous we are.
And so, instead of continuing down the path of peace and global prosperity, we'e decided to try that good old trick, isolationism.
There is a problem with old tricks that we've abandoned. They don't work. That's why we stopped trying them. And I don't think that cozying up to countries we've traditionally identified as adversarial is the way to go, either. At this point I suppose I'm just rambling, but I'm just worried. Because there is going to be fallout from the decisions we've made over the past months, and it may not be apparent for awhile.