‘History fan’ and master of long-form podcasts Dan Carlin circulated an email yesterday which describes several things which I have also been powerfully feeling:
But, we ARE living through absolutely momentous times (and dangerous ones). Don’t allow yourself to be gaslit about that. Any fan of History can see it. And as someone who fretted for years (and bored the people around me to tears) about the trends we are now seeing play out, it’s personally a bit of a crisis for me. I spent my life since I was a teen paying attention to ideas, and approaches and arguments to keep from reaching the point we’ve reached. I wrapped my whole career around it. I am less well equipped (and of course totally inexperienced) with dealing with things now that we have arrived here. I feel I have less useful commentary to offer. I don’t know how to get us out of the mess we’re in. At that point what’s there to say that’s helpful? I am sure there’s something. But I haven’t figured out yet what it is.
But it’s haunting me. And it is thwarting me. It is sapping my energy and I feel angry and I feel stuck. Normally when I have things to say I will talk your ear off. I am silent these days. I’ve turned inward and want to read and study, rather than communicate. Even around the house. My wife is driving me nuts saying “are you ok?” all the time. But I am worried about the future. I think all intelligent Americans are. And like a computer that gets co-opted trying to figure out the value of pi to the last digit, my mind goes over our circumstances, endlessly and without answers or resolution.
…
I still go in the studio every morning. It just is slow going and frustrating, and the days when the energy and Muse/inspiration come together as they need to for a successful end result are fewer per week than they used to be. And maybe this is just age, maybe it’s that the traditional vast amounts of coffee seem almost powerless over me now, or maybe its the weight of the times in which we live. It would be nice to not be thinking about politics or the latest dangerous, divisive nightmare every day from the moment we wake up. But that’s not the reality in which we currently live.
I share that sense of having prepared all my life for this moment, and yet often feeling uncertain and disempowered now that it is here.
Smart commentary from Bret Devereaux on the ongoing Israel-Iran-US war
There is a cruel illusion in academic and activist circles that intellectual preparedness equals practical empowerment. We are taught that if we just understand the history, if we just read the right books, grasp the geopolitical nuances, and map the climate models, we will know what to do when the crisis arrives. But as you are experiencing, understanding the physics of a tidal wave does not give you the power to stop the water. You have the vocabulary, the historical context, and the analytical framework to perfectly diagnose the polycrisis, but because you lack the institutional levers to force the machine to change course, that knowledge just becomes a heavy, suffocating weight.