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Quote of the Day: Doomerism Nonsense
I’m so weary of black pilled doomerism:
“Everything sucks. This is the worst it has ever been. Nothing matters. Nothing you do matters. Defeat is inevitable. Failure is inevitable. Everything used to be better. Nothing ever improves. Things only get worse. We can only lose. Winning is impossible.”
Is life hard? Yeah. It’s [CoC] hard.
But you ain’t milking cows, so it could be worse.
You are the master of your own happiness. Me telling you that life doesn’t have to suck and you can improve your situation isn’t some Pollyanna nonsense. . . .
Sometimes life kicks you in the balls. Sometimes you get hit by a truck or get terminal brain cancer. Most of you won’t.
Until then, do the best you can and look for opportunities to do better. Some stuff you can improve. Good. Improve it. Some stuff you can’t. That sucks. Some stuff is beyond your power to do anything about. Deal with it as best you can.
— Larry Correia
Yes, it is a rant. I have excerpted a part of it, in part because Correia isn’t CoC compliant. Read the whole thing here. You owe it to yourself. For that matter, go and read Kurt Schlichter’s variation on the same theme, Stop Dooming.
It’s easy to give way to despair. That is why (as the late Jerry Pournelle kept pointing out) despair is a sin. Because if you give way to despair, doom is inevitable. I believe there are worse things than going down swinging, and as long as you are in the fight, there is a chance you will win.
Ultimately, the challenge is important, win or lose. I’ve experienced both triumph and disaster, and Kipling is right; both are imposters. At the end of a job well done, there better be another job worth doing or life is going to be pretty empty. Two personal examples:
- My late wife and I raised three sons. They are all men now, standing on their own feet, with good careers and families of their own. Mission accomplished. Triumph. Guess what? They don’t need me anymore.
- Not really a problem because the mission shifts to making my wife happy. Life is good. Except she gets cancer. It should be treatable, but despite my best efforts, everything goes wrong. We fight the good fight, but at the end she dies. Mission complete. Disaster. While I was fighting alongside her, life had meaning. Afterward, I mourned the dead and licked my wounds.
You do get over it. Then what? Right now, I am living in an Earthly paradise. I have no debt. I am in good health. I have the best jobs of my life and money is gushing in. My house is paid for and I can buy anything I want and go anywhere I want (my wants are limited enough that it holds true for me). Life is good. And boring. I have no mission, no ultimate goal.
Sure, emergencies come up, and dad rides in to the rescue. But because I raised my sons right, after a week? Problem solved and dad rides off into the sunset. They don’t need me. As it should be. They are grown men and grown men don’t need daddy holding their hands.
Amidst plenty and a loving family, I feel empty because I have no purpose.
What’s the solution? One solution is to give way to doomerism. “Everything sucks. This is the worst it has ever been. Nothing matters. Nothing you do matters.” I really believe part of doomerism springs from that. Things are going good, but you have no purpose.
Really and truly around the world, things are going good. Poverty is lower than it has been. People enjoy better health, have more choices. There are storm clouds on the horizon, but there have always been storm clouds on the horizon and these aren’t as bad as many in the past. Yet without a purpose, a challenge, it is all ashes.
So people adopt various forms of doomerism to provide that purpose: climate change and systemic racism, among others. You can come up with examples across the political spectrum. Or they simply yield to despair.
There is another alternative. Find something around you that needs fixing. Something you would like to see fixed. Then fix it. Pick something close at hand, something you can do. Make that your challenge. Pick something that is quantifiably soluble and objectively difficult. Bite off a little more than you can chew because otherwise, it will be boring and empty.
Do I believe victory is inevitable? Not really. Do I believe defeat is likely? More often than not, I do. That does not stop me from joining in a just fight. I would rather go down fighting than preemptively surrender. I may lose, but I’ll let my opponent know they were in a fight. And sometimes you win. The fight is what life is about.
Let me close with a poem by Robert Service:
The Quitter
When you’re lost in the Wild, and you’re scared as a child,
And Death looks you bang in the eye,
And you’re sore as a boil, it’s according to Hoyle
To cock your revolver and . . . die.
But the Code of a Man says: “Fight all you can,”
And self-dissolution is barred.
In hunger and woe, oh, it’s easy to blow . . .
It’s the hell-served-for-breakfast that’s hard.
“You’re sick of the game!” Well, now, that’s a shame.
You’re young and you’re brave and you’re bright.
“You’ve had a raw deal!” I know — but don’t squeal,
Buck up, do your damnedest, and fight.
It’s the plugging away that will win you the day,
So don’t be a piker, old pard!
Just draw on your grit; it’s so easy to quit:
It’s the keeping-your-chin-up that’s hard.
It’s easy to cry that you’re beaten — and die;
It’s easy to crawfish and crawl;
But to fight and to fight when hope’s out of sight —
Why, that’s the best game of them all!
And though you come out of each gruelling bout,
All broken and beaten and scarred,
Just have one more try — it’s dead easy to die,
It’s the keeping-on-living that’s hard.
beautiful.
This is not normal.
From Mark Steyn:
I personally may be OK. My kids sure are not. The shut downs hurt them. The modern culture is hurting them in ways I cannot stop. It is not unreasonable to say that things are really, really bad.
I read Schlichter’s post and found it to be nonsense. He is acting like this is normal, that this is all reasonable and the wheel will turn in due time. It won’t. They have too much power and too much control no matter how inept they are.
We can all fight, and I plan too, be we are going to lose. This is the 300. This is the Alamo. That is where we are.
Seawriter:
So despair is a sin. According to Jerry Pournelle, a relatively minor SciFi author. If you’re going to discuss sin, it might help to cite the Bible or some other credible source.
Despair is not traditionally listed as a sin, although hope is one of the theological virtues.
The idea that avoiding doom is up to us doesn’t seem theologically sound, to me. I do agree that we should do our best, and not give in to despair. But theologically, the fate of the world is in God’s hands, not ours.
Doomerism is not altogether nonsense. The fertility rate is down in our country, and almost all wealthy countries. This bodes poorly for the future. The marriage rate is down. LGBT perversion is way, way up, especially among the youngest adults.
There is a lot of false doomerism, in my view, on issues like climate change. Interestingly, at present, I’ve seen quite a bit of doomerism from the Right about the supposedly terrible state of the economy, which is quite strong at the moment.
As a practical matter, though, I think that demographics are destiny, and the future for our country looks pretty bleak demographically.
Interesting analogies, Bryan.
The “good guys” at Thermopylae and the Alamo lost the battle, but their side won the war.
I would have despaired unless I had believed that I would see the goodness of the Lord In the land of the living. — Psalm 27:13
Be strong and take heart, all you who hope in the Lord. — Psalm 31:24
Even youths shall faint and be weary, and young men shall fall exhausted; but they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint. — Isaiah 40:30-31
We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. — 2 Corinthians 4:8-9
Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. — James 4:7
Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord and in the power of His might. Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places. Therefore take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand. Stand therefore, having girded your waist with truth, having put on the breastplate of righteousness, and having shod your feet with the preparation of the gospel of peace; above all, taking the shield of faith with which you will be able to quench all the fiery darts of the wicked one. And take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God; — Ephesians 6:10-17
I have said these things to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation. But take heart; I have overcome the world. — John 16:33
Oh, and Jerry Pournelle was probably a more significant author than you are a significant lawyer. But that’s just my opinion.
Great post.
Correia is incorrect. Forty-eight to sixty percent of happiness is heritable according to Arthur C. Brooks. We are at least half-enslaved to our DNA. We should genetically reengineer people who suffer from severe depression.
I understand why people want to focus on their freedom and their ability to change. But that simply isn’t the case. We should compassionately treat those who are made to be unhappy.
According to The Golden Bough, people have though that the world was ending and things were as bad as they could be hundreds of years before Yeshua of Nazareth walked the Earth. This is why I am skeptical of doomerism.
Would your wife and your pastor say that you have been pessimistic ever since they have known you? Since you politically came of age, have you had the opinion that the world was ending?
I mean we might be heading into a Civil War in America but I am worried that just as some people as genetically designed to be unhappy you might have been genetically designed to be a doomer.
I have not read The Golden Bough, but I have read articles about attitudes of people throughout history and pessimism is a constant. You can find writings of people from 50, 100, 300, 800, 1500 years ago and you will see certain themes again and again. Things were pretty darn good before I was born and were still pretty good when I was a child, then everything went to hell when I became an adult. Thousands of years ago people complained that they were pious, hard-working, and serious when they were kids but the darn kids nowadays are lazy, disrespectful to their elders, and only want to have fun with their friends.
Excellent post, Seawriter. Thank you!
Thanks for the rant and the Robert Service poem. Love his work!
If I am ever feeling down, listening to this song always helps:
https://youtu.be/mQPjKSVe1tQ?si=kqCcGTvRq0GRJ9AR
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I didn’t say any of that.
A few notes: Some of us- many, I hope- do not regard Jerry as having been “relatively minor” , especially in light of his sales figures in the 70s and 80s, his work on SDI, his hard science writing, and his enduring influence. Also, he was Catholic. As I understand it, through my own reading in Catholic sources and conversations with Catholic friends, despair is in fact a sin. In particualr, the sin of Judas. It’s giving up on God’s mercy and embracing damnation.
Being one of the two authors on The Mote in God’s Eye which is the first contact book, I would not call him “relatively minor” either.
Yeah, I mostly knew him through his collaborations with Niven and the quite enjoyable Janissaries series. Then I looked into this other work.
Your response is some of the finest rapier wit I have seen in some time, right up there with Mark Steyn, and I can’t think of a higher accolade than that, and as to your last line I have only this to say, and only because of the limitation on words I can use: Bravo x a thousand!
This is a superb, beautiful, much-needed post, especially coming as it does on the day after one of the saddest, most tragic days in our country’s calendar. Thank you very much for this post.
I would appreciate your considering giving me permission to put this on my blog as a guest author post with, obviously, full attribution to you and Ricochet. I have an infinitesimal following, mostly friends and family, but would like for all of them to have the benfit of your inspiring piece.
Thanks again, Jim.