Note to readers: I confess that my previous blog, offering a whiff of hope, was designed to soften the blow of today’s.
In disaster movies, when the world faces an existential threat – such as an asteroid strike or zombie pandemic – it is America that steps up to lead the world. Our scientists come up with a solution, the U.S. Federal government rallies the world to implement it, and we are saved.
Today, the existential threat is real and there is not just one, but three of them on the horizon. The usual savior, however, is out of action, having lost the ability to govern itself, let alone to lead others.
What are the three calamities looming on the horizon?
Collapse of the Post-War International Order. A hundred years ago, in 1920, the global population was approximately 1.9 billion. By the end of the century, over 12% of that number were killed in wars, genocide, government-induced mass starvation, deaths in labor/internment camps and other politically caused mass mortality. When I was born in 1956 (with the invention and spread of nuclear weapons having raised the stakes to annihilation of civilization itself), there was a strong consensus in the world that we as humans had no greater priority than assuring that this catastrophe would not be repeated. The system that staved off this disaster for 75 years has been carelessly discarded by the nation that created it. At the same time, the aggressive nationalist behaviors that caused the catastrophes of the first half of the 20th century have reemerged, not only abroad, but here at home.
Artificial Intelligence. Until this year, AI was a promising technology posing potential issues, such as job loss, that seemed abstract, distant, and manageable. And then, seemingly overnight, we have AI escaping its “sandboxes” and deceiving its creators, causing serious experts – not conspiracy crackpots – to outline a range of possible disaster scenarios in the 2027–2030 timeframe. Whether or not these risks are overstated, the US should be organizing a global initiative that limits the pace of development, mandates and monitors safety requirements, and envisions a safe path to unlocking all that AI can do for humanity. But the Federal government is missing from the field of action, unable to deal with any real policy issue (i.e., that cannot be addressed with slogans or simply denied away as “hoax”). And those in a position to regulate have been bought off by tech bros whose unprecedented accumulations of wealth, together with grievous errors by the Supreme Cout, make any effective check on their power unlikely.
Climate Change. We’ve had a global scientific consensus for 45 years that carbon emissions, if not curbed, would push global temperatures to unprecedented levels, with drastic consequences for human life and the global economy. For much of that time the level of international cooperation was high, sensible targets were set, and powerful technologies deployed to limit our dependence on fossil fuels. As time moved on, the pace of warming increased, but political will to make sacrifices wavered, and ultimately stalled as a minority political movement in a single country assumed power, not only condemning the obvious problem as a “hoax,” but spending billions disabling green energy and renewing our addiction to fossil fuels. If humanity survives, historians will struggle over how 49.5 million people identifying as MAGA Republicans could have prevented their 8.3 billion human neighbors from saving the planet they share. In the meantime, hotter temperatures, melting glaciers, catastrophic floods, and stronger storms are in the headlines every day and are guaranteed to get much worse, even if serious remedial action were to commence today. But most alarmingly, we face possible “tipping points” (e.g. sudden collapse of the Greenland or West Antarctic ice sheets, or of certain global ocean currents) that could bring apocalyptic conditions within years, not decades.
The vast majority of Americans ignore these threats, assuming with a complete lack of historical perspective that the status quo is more or less permanent. Those of us in New York on 9-11 learned an invaluable lesson – the status quo can change in an instant. The narrator of my book Christian Nation, struggling to understand how the country could have collapsed so suddenly into an authoritarian theocracy, writes the following:
“I believed that the stage on which my life would play out – this country and its institutions – would be essentially static and unchanging. I see now that this was a spectacular failure of perspective. I should have known from history that the ground on which we take the walk of our lives is shifting and unstable, and that change is unpredictable and spasmodic. Nothing seems to us – in human time – to be more solid than the ground. And yet in reality the earth’s crust jerks across the globe in devastating spasms. Centuries or millennia of rock-solid calm, punctuated by a few minutes of heaving and rolling readjustment. This is the perspective of geological time.”
I write this because I believe many of us are suffering from a severe case of dissociation, overwhelmed by the stress and trauma of three concurrent existential threats, the emotional strain of 24-hour exposure to Trumpian deceit, ignorance, grift, and nastiness, and the devastating realization that the only institution in a position to save us, the U.S. Federal government, this time will be recorded by history as a cause of the threats and not the driver of the solutions.
Dissociation is a defense mechanism where we retreat from a troubling reality and tell ourselves the comforting fairy tale that all will have a happy ending. It is manifest in the deafening silence of candidates in the mid-term elections, who talk about the price of gas when the voters face these three existential threats together with the risk that our democracy might be lost in a matter of weeks. Every Democrat candidate should be simply pointing out that, whatever our politics, we all share the need for a functioning democratic government that works with the rest of the world to ensure that another generation is not lost to global war, to ensure that AI becomes a force for good, and to plan for our safety and prosperity in the face of challenging changes in the climate.
If we allow this dissociation to persist – ignoring the existential challenges and focusing on our marginal economic interests or cultural affinities – we will lose what might be our last chance at salvation, the mid-term election. If it goes the wrong way, November 3, 2026 could be the country’s last free and fair election, marking the end of democracy as we have known it, and in turn rendering probable a global war and/or AI going rogue and/or a climate tipping point being triggered. Please recall what you learned in statistics class: even if each of global war, AI going rogue, and a climate tipping point has only a 25% chance of occurring, the chance that one or more of them will occur is 57.8%.
It may be irredeemably in the character of homo sapiens to focus on quotidian concerns even when their lives and freedom are at risk. All I can ask is that you vote like your life and freedom depend on the outcome, which they probably do.
