KW-24 What is a Happy Doomer anyway?

My first real attempt at committing an explanation to the world.

Happy Doomerism is the joy of being alive in a world which used to be easier. It is Zen thinking, not as consolation or from gratitude, but because the universe is infinite and I am not. It is gardening as if the world was about to end.

In over 200 chapters of the Book of the Barracks, and 50 or so longer essays on the website, I have never really had a decent crack at what it means, or where it came from. For many reasons, I’ve been thinking about it a lot this week, and it’s time to give it a first pass.

I did a social thing this week. I went on a walk with the villagers!

Oftentimes, when someone is trying to explain something, badly, they say maybe it’s easier if I start at the beginning.

The problem is deciding what to call the beginning. It is the question that journalists, commentators and biographers always want an answer to, and that should be proof enough that it is a lazy question. There is not a thing has a single exclusive beginning which lead inextricably to that thing. Monocausophilia creates false narratives, false certainties and false gods.

So when we tell our histories, we get to chose where to begin. We look for a positive truth that fits the narrative and decide to call that one genesis. Let us go back around 20 years when I was semi-professionally debating climate change in London.

The potager is frustratingly behind schedule. It does keep raining. Perhaps that has something to do with it?

The first incarnation of my philosophy which lead to Happy Doomerism started as a typically over the top response to whataboutism. Long, productive debates that frequently ended with “yeah, but you drive a car” or “how can you say that when you shop at supermarkets the same as the rest of us?” Logical fallacies, technically ad homimem attacks, but in reality honest frustrations the public has with itself. Remove those, and everyone has the chance of thinking more clearly. The barracks is the manifestation of a defence against it. Put me on a dias in public panel discussion on climate change, and you can easily find people more knowledgable, more experienced, more able to quote the literature, but it would be hard to find anyone more thoroughly armoured against the whataboutism that can destroy the perception of an argument.

Go down this path of removing the morally dubious actions of good people in society and all consumption, all of capitalism, all exchanges of time for reward become questionable. Taken to extremes, there is nothing that can be bought with a clear conscience. We have our celebrity villains to lob sideline scorn at from time to time - Monsanto, Amazon, Nestle, ExxonMobil, Facebook - while Bayer, Koch Industries, Chevron and BlackRock enjoy the relative anonymity of a public with a short memory, no attention span, and a complicit lack of interest in the cheerleaders of their auto-asphyxiation.

Defence against the whataboutist arts took shape at the barracks and became the attempt at a physical existence beyond capitalist morality. Boycott Everything You Didn’t Make Yourself would make a great tee shirt if the irony wouldn’t kill me (it wouldn’t), and the idea found a name - Radical Authenticity. The hope was that anyone spending time here would be able to think clearer, more searching thoughts while taking a break from the contradictions of a fully lived life outside. Cognitive refuge for moral repair.

We get 90% of our visitors in the months of July to September. Which means that only very few people have seen the vanilla-scented flowers of the broom hedges, which delight us from the start of May to the middle of June

But the original contradiction remains. Human existence at the end of capitalism, butting up to the punk rock introduction of Anthropocene Part 2 is just too funny for fate not to have thrown them together. What is humour if not the subversion of expectations?

I have a list of over 100 existential threats, any one of which has the potential to alter the conditions of our decedents so radically that we can call it existential. The reality is though, that no matter what trigger you can imagine that shatters society into individual pieces - war, terror, disease, banks or billionaires - Climate Change makes everything worse. It really is the non plus ultra, the threat ex machina.

And it was forever thus. We will always be able to argue, pointlessly, if the inevitability of our climate doom started in prehistory at the point where man sowed his dinner instead of gathered it, from when he first domesticated a goose or a pig, dug up and burned the black, sooty rock from an exposed seam in the ground. Or was it when Jeb Bush handed the 2000 US election to cousin George when Al Gore got bored of hanging chads?

When you give up the search for how and why we took the path that we did, when you have studied the data and convinced yourself of the truth, when you can see clearly that we have truly sealed our fate, then you get to make a choice.

Are you going to take up position on the shoreline and bark and holler at the incoming tide to reconsider? Are you inclined to fall to your knees, repent your humanity and beg forgiveness from the thunderstorm? Or are you going to live the best life that you can?

Happy Doomerism is not a contradiction. It is not an enforced jollity - goodness knows, I can be a grumpy old man - neither is it an obsession with downfall. We were always finite, there were always going to be struggles. None of this has ever been an excuse to be miserable, and it’s not now.

I say, if the end is coming, bake a cake. You can stand at the window watching the weather, I’m going to lay the table.

And you’re all invited.

with love and happiness your loving

Pirate Ben xoxoo

This pig is not asleep. This pig has her left eye open just the tiniest crack and is watching everything you are doing.

---

If that seemed to end a little abruptly, it’s because I have been in a staring competition with the hare that I share the barracks with for the last 5 minutes. I will outlive this hare. He doesn’t seem in the slightest bothered by that truth.