Nate Bear Substack
I rarely leave it this long between writing, but I’ve been somewhat overwhelmed by the sheer volume of fuckery we face.
That fuckery should, I know, be grist to my mill, but rather than motivating me, it has left me feeling angry, dispirited, and, perversely, lacking motivation.
I’m well aware of the dangers of what some refer to as “doomscrolling” and I usually manage to find the balance between ingesting the doom, processing it, and then trying to make sense of it in my writing. But over the last two weeks, for whatever reason, that ability has broken down. I’m working on a couple of longer-form research pieces, and they will be published soon, but I thought I’d get back on the horse and over the mental block by, well, doing this. By writing what I’ve been thinking without worrying too much about form or cohesiveness.
And what I’ve been mainly thinking is that the burden is both in the knowing, and the caring. Doomscrolling is a misnomer, a term used to rhetorically delegitimise those who keep up with the torrent of horrible news and the numerous, accelerating and overlapping crises we’re presented with. And not to sound snobbish, but the reality is that the majority of people who get their news from mainstream sources are shielded from knowing the worst of it. They are shielded from doom, because too much knowledge imperils the system. And if you don’t know, how can you care? But if you do know? Well, therein lies the danger.
As an example, three weeks ago BBC News in the UK did a piece on Israel opening a probe into the murder of Hind Rajab, the five year-old from Gaza riddled with bullets while on the phone to the Red Cross, having survived an attack on the car that killed her family. My good friend, an educated, intelligent, empathetic person, was watching the news and had never heard the story before. She was, naturally, outraged and upset. If the story of Hind was news to her more than two-and-a-half years later, you can imagine what else she doesn’t know about the genocide, about Israel, Palestine, Zionism and on and on. Essentially all the things that, if you subscribe to this newsletter, you do know, and have the burden of knowing.
My friend watches BBC news religiously, before work, and when she gets home from work. Because she, like many others, believes this is a good way to stay informed about the world. But how do we tell people that what the BBC and other mainstream news outlets report is carefully curated to support imperial narratives, without sounding like a conspiratorial loon? How do we tell people that mainstream news is full of deliberate omissions, avoidance of context, and occasionally, outright lies designed, especially when it comes to empire, to protect western interests. How to tell my friend that the only reason the BBC is reporting about Hind now is because they can use her murder to present Israel not as an outlaw state, but as a place where legal, judicial and political processes are working? How to tell her that a story about Israeli troops murdering a child is designed not to harm Israel’s reputation, but help rescue it? How to tell her that Israel is a key node in the rise of a far-right international enamoured with eugenics and working towards a pre-crime, technological surveillance-security state?
But all this, I suspect, would be easier than talking about Russia and Ukraine.
One of the longer pieces I’m working on is about the presentation of Ukraine and the Ukraine war in the mainstream media. How do we tell people that they have, essentially, been tricked into supporting the remilitarisation of Europe via a constant diet of pro-Ukraine, anti-Russia propaganda which bears little resemblance to objective reality? Explaining that the Ukraine war has absolutely nothing to do with defending democracy or upholding international law, and everything to do with the interests of imperialists and arms dealers, is a sure-fire way to be exiled from polite company. How to explain that Ukraine is not the second Spanish republic defending itself against fascism with the help of international brigades, but a training ground for western neo-Nazis to get hands-on military training as they prep for fascism and race wars?
Then there’s the heat, the floods, and the industrialised slaughter of landscapes and ecosystems.
How do you tell people your fears about the collapse of the ecological and biophysical conditions on Earth that enabled the rise of organised societies? How do you explain to people what the holocene is (was) and what the end of the holocene means for organised society? How do you tell people that the constant breaking of heat records signals a climatological phase-shift that imperils civilisation without sounding like a panicked tin-foiler? How do you explain that in ice cores, and soil samples, we see no echo of a past world that underwent a change as rapid as this? How do you explain that we live, essentially, in the ruins of a once-abundant planet, destroyed by capitalism, for capitalists, without sounding incredibly depressed. And how do you explain that the process is far from over, that it continues with gusto, and it will lead, without revolutionary change away from extractivist growth economics, to truly dystopian futures that make concerns about mortgages, careers and children, both quaint and tedious.
And how do you even talk about children in the context of these futures? With incredible difficulty is my experience.
How do you explain that there is no way out under systems of liberal democracy? That voting is a busted flush, a narcotic designed to make you feel good about yourself and your participation in the process, not to deliver material change? How do you explain that the democratic process is captured, and the only chance to save what you love is through revolutionary organising and revolutionary acts?
And all of this without touching on the implosion of public health, the frightening rise of cancers in young people, the growing environmental health stressors, and the virus which shall not be named among friends.
How do you do all this without sounding like a total fucking bore?
I’m not sure it’s even possible. But, somehow, we do have to do all this. We do have to make the case, present, refine and win the arguments. We do have to do the organising. We do have to have the awkward, uncomfortable conversations about the collapsing conditions, and about the dystopian futures.
And somehow we have to do this whilst retaining a belief in true human agency, and a belief in a better future, regardless of the forces weighed and allied against the good.
Because pessimism isn’t revolutionary.
And while yes, I am extremely pessimistic about the direction that current conditions are leading us, I’m not a fatalist.
I do believe in pro-social, revolutionary change, not least because revolutions have been a constant in human history.
My fear, though, is that we might have to touch the bottom in reactionary ways none of us can really ever be prepared for before the revolutionary fervour takes hold.
I desperately hope I’m wrong, and I know the only way to prove myself wrong is to do the hard, the right, and the revolutionary things.
Thanks for listening. I needed this. Back soon.