Carolyn Baker: The End of the World as we Know it – Hope vs. Mindset

A friend for whom I have a great deal of respect and admiration recently challenged me on my incessant hope-bashing stance and gave me some food for thought which has caused me to reframe the concept of “hope” in my own mind in a way that I can live with. What I cannot live with is a definition of “hope” that externalizes it-that fosters denial and a false and naive anticipation that government, religion, or to quote Lincoln, “the better angels of our nature” will somehow save humanity from slamming with lethal velocity into the brick walls of our own making-climate chaos, global energy catastrophe, planetary economic meltdown, population overshoot, species extinction and die-off–or nuclear holocaust.

The iconoclastic and cynical James Howard Kunstler is fond of mocking people who ask for “hope” and insists that any hope we have in the face of the end of the world as we know it (EOTWAWKI) must come from within. I’m not sure what that means to Kunstler, but I’m getting clearer about what it means to me.


Naive hope takes myriad forms and from my perspective one example is the hope that impeachment of Cheney and Bush is even possible. And I must add that Bush has not lost his “brain” with the departure of Rove. Who needs a brain when Darth Vader is the real man behind the curtain and has more political and economic power in the United States government than the average American can even imagine? Another example of false hope is faith in the U.S. political system and the possibility that clean elections exist, not to mention the hope that one will even happen in 2008. Other “hopes” include: the hope that the Democrats will finally find their spine, that the economy will improve without the working and middle classes being eviscerated by a financial meltdown as catastrophic or worse than the Great Depression, that technology will solve the energy dilemma, that moving to another country guarantees personal safety and human liberty, that the human race can exist for another century without a nuclear exchange, that a global spiritual awakening will occur in time to transform the human race and avert catastrophe.

As long as we are hoping for any of these, we are assuming a passively reactive position. Conversely, a pro-active mindset is willing to own that the paradigm upon which the empire is based is not only shallow, wanton, mindless, and infantilizing, but ultimately toxic-mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and physically. A truly pro-active mindset comes down to the question that film maker Tim Bennett leaves us with at the end of “What A Way To Go: Life At The End Of Empire” which is: “WHO do I want to be as the world as I know it comes to an end?” Do I want to find myself literally or metaphorically like a 2005 New Orleans resident crouched on one tiny dry corner of my rooftop waiting for a government helicopter to rescue me from an inundated house, or do I want to see the hurricane coming and take myself to another location, that is, another mindset? Do I want to assume that somehow citizens of empire can keep a show on the road that should be canceled and run out of town? Do I want to abdicate personal responsibility because I’ve been taught from childhood to be a good citizen and vote in elections because two different political parties exist, and I live in one of the few countries on earth where I have a “real” choice between them? Do I want to kick and scream against the death of the world as I know it, or embrace that death so that something else has a chance to be born-even if I’m not alive to witness the birth?

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