That's Great It Starts With An Earthquake

Like most people, tonight I'm busy building a shrine to the Mayan god Q'uq'umatz.  So here's an end-of-the-world essay I published on Facebook three years ago:

I'm a pessimist, so I'm not really shocked by all the problems of the world. And yet there's something not-quite-right about what's going on now. I finally decided that it's not that the world's going down the toilet that's worrying me, it's just that I didn't think it would play out anything like this.

Swine Flu

Disease is really not how I pictured civilization ending. A disease generated amongst livestock as part of intensive farming techniques? That's just not homo sapiens style. Nuclear war, ill-advised genetic manipulation, maybe even pissing off a powerful alien species — that's the sort of thing I was expecting. Placing the products of wisdom in the hands of the foolish or emotional: that's the humanity I know. But dying of disease was more fitting for the Martians in War of the Worlds — not us. On the other hand, we're about to face millions of deaths and we're more concerned that calling it "swine flu" will hurt pig farmers; that is an appropriately silly touch.

But it still doesn't seem right. As a committed cynic, I always pictured that — however we manage to screw ourselves — I'd be able to bitterly turn to the person next to me and say, "told you so." As it stands, a Muslim or Jew will say that to me.

Pigs: okay, maybe they deserve it. Did you know that after primates, marine mammals, and elephants, pigs are the next most intelligent animals? So the fact that we eat them in such numbers violates even our usual flimsy division between pets and food. And sure, we forced them to live unnaturally in their own filth, then made them the paragon of uncleanliness because they live in their own filth, so there's plenty of poetic justice here. But I still would have bet on killer bees or tsetse flies.

The Environment

As a child looking into the future, it always seemed like the only way we'd avoid environmental disaster would be to gain a new awareness of our place in the world and our responsibility for the ecosystem and our effect on it. That awareness seems to be an all-or-nothing proposition: you either notice and do something, or ignore it and go on as you always have. So I figured we would either achieve a hippyish love of the earth, or run the planet into the ground. As it happens though, we've found ourselves in a kind of in-between-state of awareness of the problem and paralysis of action.

What kind of a state is that? We're a race that's usually caught in either desperate action or defiant ignorance. Easter Island is often held up as a microcosm of our environmental predicament: they died out after destroying all the forests on the island. They didn't just destroy some of the forest, stop and say, "oops," then fade away in a slow decay. No, they died like humans are supposed to — stubbornly cutting down every last tree. But look at what we're doing now: we kind of realize we have to change, but we're hemming and hawing trying to come up with a plan to change. It's so...Canadian!

2012

If you haven't yet heard, the story here is that the Mayans had a calendar that that ends in 2012, which has led everyone with a new-age bone in their body to be convinced that the world will end in 2012. Specifically, a few days before Christmas — man those Mayans were jerks; I'm glad they disappeared. That of course brings up the next obvious point: the Mayans don't generally have a good record when it comes to seeing disaster coming.

Is this the best we can do for an omen of doom? No explanation of why the world would end. No cryptic description of how it will happen, no signs we can argue over. Just a date. There's nothing to this end-of-the-world prediction except the end itself. It's the Final Destination of apocalypses.

Back in university, I tried to convince people that the world would end on September 29, 1997, but at least I had misinterpreted bible verses to back it up. Even Y2K had a story behind it, albeit a silly and poorly understood one. This is just the Mayan calendar stopping without explanation.

Now the fact is that I'm something of an expert on the Mayan Long Count Calendar. Of course, I'm using the modern definition of “expert,” meaning that I didn't only read the Wikipedia entry, I read a couple of other web pages too. It turns out that the Mayan calendar doesn't really end in 2012 — that's just the date when this creation exceeds the age of previous, imperfect creations. Even the Mayans themselves didn't believe that would mean the end of the world. That's a pretty flimsy justification even for a Hollywood blockbuster, never mind for people actually getting worried.

Truth and Reason

I don't want to get too wrapped up in the American health care debate. Let's just agree that there are a lot of good arguments for each side. But, well, that's kind of the problem: no one is actually using those arguments, they're just yelling at each other. As if that's not enough, most of what they're yelling isn't even true. Again, this isn't how I imagined it.

I guess 1984 and Brave New World ushered us towards a view of a future that was dystopian, but was at least an organized dystopia. The citizenry would be held in check by a system of lies, but at least they were well-written lies told by professionals. I never expected that disinformation would be coming in the form of a chain e-mail from Aunt Jean who hasn't read a newspaper in thirty years. At least it fits the human pattern: smart people develop something (here, the Internet) then it gets mishandled by everyone else.

Add to that another problem: for a while now, there's been an over-analysis of politicians' everyday decisions. Everything from the President's choice of beer to his jeans has been criticized. So it's now official, we're living in 1984 in reverse, with the Proles spying on and lying to Big Brother.

Finance

Whenever unusual things happen in the financial world, I like to try to understand it by going back to basic principles and looking at the big picture. Economics is really just a system for allocating resources. So I try putting aside the common terms and abstract ideas, and explaining it like I'm trying to explain it to someone from another planet. For instance, when the price of oil goes up, it's just the system telling us that more people are using a fixed resource, so we're going to have to try to be more frugal with it.

In the case of the housing collapse, it all comes down to the system mistakenly devoting far too much of our resources to building houses in the US. In a way, that's not surprising: as an apartment dweller, I've noticed that people always go a little crazy when they buy a house. Well apparently our whole society went a little bit crazy. The last thing I need is another reason to hate suburbia, but now I can see that it's not only destroyed our environment and our culture, but our economy too.

One of the strangest parts of the financial crisis is that it originated in the US, but they aren't even the hardest hit. Who has been hurt worse? Eastern Europe and India. It hardly seems fair that Americans go nuts trying to buy houses, and the people who suffer the most can't afford houses. I guess the British were hurt too, but if you've ever watched the British house-buying programs on HGTV, then you have to agree there's some kind of real estate karma there. But then there's Iceland; their economy was devastated and their currency devalued. They ended up so poor they couldn't even afford to keep their McDonald's outlets open. That's like being officially demoted out of the First World.

The one group that might benefit are the Chinese. Their economy hicupped when the Americans stopped buying, but now they're moving again, with the Americans recovered enough that they can afford the cheap crap the Chinese make, even if they're still too nervous to buy the expensive stuff Americans or the Japanese make. And now the Chinese — just when it seemed their world domination couldn't get any more inevitable — will end up as America's largest creditor.

And as an aside, let me say this: The Chinese make terrible global villains. No crazy ideology they insist on spreading, no vendetta against anyone, not even a wacky leader. Just people who want to be middle class, and a government that has no aspiration beyond staying in power. Again, so Canadian.

Perhaps more than anything, I hate how this financial crisis has turned everyone's ideologies around. Harper is running up a deficit, the Chinese government is actually acting socialist, the Americans are nationalizing companies. I don't even know who to root for anymore.