The Age of Self-Inflicted Catastrophe

There’s a strange, funny, and curious fact about the world today. We face a choice of catastrophes — but not just any old kind. What really makes them different isn’t that are grave and dire ones — but that they are ones of the self-inflicted sort. And yet, if anything, we seem to be weirdly not just paralyzed, as a world, as societies, as people, by those very self-inflicted catastrophes.

We live, weirdly, an age of self-made catastrophe. What do I mean? Probably you already know. Natural catastrophe. The planet is beginning to melt down. There’s a mass extinction happening — of insects, bees, animals, trees.

Economic, political, social catastrophe. There’s Britain, committing something like national suicide, by way of Brexit — willingly. It is literally stockpiling medicines, water and food — as if it is preparing for a war — and nobody much in any position of power appears to care. Then there’s America — the reigning heavyweight champion of self-made catastrophe — a society whose middle class has imploded, where people can’t afford insulin, yet points to the stock market and cheers at its “success.”

Read the Medium Eudaimonia story by Umair Haque - “The Age of Self-Inflicted Catastrophe.”