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I am anti-defeatist (and post-doom).
I've said this a couple times recently but I wanted to make it impossible to miss by making a post with ANTI-DEFEATIST in the title. That way if anyone accuses me of being defeatist I can just link to this essay and go back to whatever fun thing I was doing.
What is a defeatist?
By defeatist I'm referring to the position that things are so bad, we are so doomed, that there's no point in trying to do anything about it.
This position is two things. It is:
A fact claim that looks like it is either correct or incorrect. "We're hosed. The world cannot be saved." Putting aside for the moment the reality that basically no one bothers defining who We are, what The World is, and what precisely they mean by Saved, this statement boils down to "we are in checkmate." Either we are or we are not in checkmate.
An opinion about how we should respond to the fact claim. The defeatist opinion is that "there's no point in fighting". IF we are doomed, THEN there is no point in fighting.
Ugh It’s Just So much poppycock
It is far from clear that We, the World, or Us, are in fact Doomed and Beyond Saving, for any variety of definitions of the words World, Us, Doomed, or Saving. My response to the claim that we are in checkmate is "first, define your terms otherwise we can't even have a sensible conversation, and either way eh, maybe."
To be honest there is no circumstance under which I think "there is no point in fighting" is an acceptable position. I am categorically, emotionally, logically, ecumenically and spiritually 100% against rolling over, no matter what, purely as a matter of style. I'm the guy who will keep moving my King around the board until my opponent actually boxes me in, or gets up and leaves in exasperation.
Even if it is true that we are in checkmate, I'd rather spend the rest of my life fighting and moving, because to me that is simply an expression of the conditions under which all humans have operated for all time.
We're all doomed, all the time, but we live and fight and dance anyway. This is what it means to be human.
I understand despair. I understand the blackness. Our fierce little hearts were not designed to grasp the enormity of the metacrisis/Predicament. And sometimes all we can see is the end. I can hold space for that. I refuse to sugar coat things or to shame anyone who can't see any reason for hope. Everyone's gotta go through their own Kubler-Ross.
When I say things like 'the ship is going down', I mean I think that the current arrangement is doomed and we ought to, like, make something less shit. I do NOT mean that we should shrug, light a bowl, and just wait for the end.
I mean that we ought to apply our cleverness, wisdom, passion, interest, curiosity, sense of play, and sense of love for each other and ourselves, to engage fully in the experience of being alive now.
Defeatism is A Failure of Imagination
There’s been a big emergent propaganda project to make people think that the options are either
the current arrangement, or
everything gets scooped into a black hole and god turns off the lights.
So when people say things like “gee it looks like we’re in overshoot and collapse might be inevitable”, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to say and have a discussion about, people lose their minds and think we’re talking about rolling over and letting every good thing in the world evaporate.
This is nothing more than a simplistic failure of imagination. And it is understandable. We’ve spent a lot of time and energy talking about what’s wrong with the current arrangement, but we’ve spent less energy imagining what the other options are.
There is a whole universe of futures and to me that is exciting and interesting, but you can’t get to excited and interested if you can’t imagine anything other than Star Trek or zombies.
To me, a defeatist is someone who sees that the Star Trek future we were promised is probably not in the cards, but the only other alternative they can come up with is zombies. And not the fun kind of zombies, but zombies if Cormac McCarthy wrote them. Nobody wants that and that isn’t the only option. Our future is much richer than most people give it credit for.
This might be the most succinct way to describe my anti-defeatism: I believe in a rich landscape of possible futures. Not an infinite landscape, but a rich landscape. There are a lot of ways the future can go. And I plan on dancing through it until I can’t dance anymore.