Nobody in a burning house needs to be made more aware of the fire.
Collapse stories are oddly comforting. The world ends, the cities empty, and the survivor walks through the ruins with a rifle and a backpack, making decisions that decide whether he lives. Venkatesh Rao, writing about his own posture toward climate change, names the preference underneath the genre:
We’d rather stride grim-faced with a gun across a devastated post-apocalyptic landscape, masters of our own fates, than feel helpless within a world that’s largely doing fine and even providing for us.
Why would anyone prefer the wasteland? Because in a collapsed world every action matters: finding water, defending shelter, choosing allies. The fantasy is about agency. In a functioning world, an individual’s actions are a drop in a roaring river of institutional forces that would run regardless. The fantasy of collapse is a fantasy of relevance. That raises the question this note is about: when people face a large problem they genuinely cannot fix, what do they do with the feeling, and why does what they do so often make things worse?
The house on fire
Picture a house on fire. Everyone agrees it is on fire, and nobody can put it out. What do people do? Some ban plastic straws. Some call their political representatives. Some vandalize paintings in museums. And then there is the all-time favorite: “Raising public awareness.”
Awareness is the clearest case because its returns have already run out. Everyone in the house can see the flames. We are well past useless diminishing returns on awareness, and possibly into negative returns. Yet people keep raising it, which suggests that the activity is serving some need other than the stated one.
The power process identifies that need. People function when they can set a goal, put in effort, and attain it; helplessness is the absence of that cycle, and it is miserable to live without. Surrogate activities restore the cycle’s form without its substance. Banning a straw has a goal, takes effort, and can be achieved, so it delivers the feeling of having done something, while the fire burns at exactly the same rate. The goal quietly shifts from solving the problem to feeling like the kind of person who would solve it.
If the copes merely failed to help, they would be a harmless waste of effort. They do more damage than that because people build identities on them. Someone who has become the kind of person who cares, who acts, who raises awareness, now needs the problem to keep that identity alive. Attachment to an imagined part in the solution converts genuine concern into performance, redirects energy from tractable problems to impressive-looking intractable ones, and creates a class of professional problem-havers whose identity depends on the problem never being solved.
Letting go of the solution
Rao’s advice is the reverse of what the copes offer:
If you suspect you’re part of the problem, the first thing to do might be to let go of being attached to your imagined part in the “solution.” It should feel a bit like leaving a religion, because that’s essentially what it is.
It should feel like leaving a religion because the role was doing a religion’s work, supplying meaning in the face of forces too large to control. Giving it up will feel like nihilism to the person doing it, and it will look like nihilism to the people still inside.
The obvious objection is that individual action matters at the margin, and every bit helps. Sometimes it does, and nothing here says to stop voting or stop building things. The objection misses where the harm comes from. The straw ban does little damage on its own; the damage comes from the person who needs the straw ban to feel all right and so cannot look at the size of the problem. That is why the most honest response to genuine helplessness is to feel helpless — and the inability to tolerate that feeling is what drives the copes that make things worse.
That person is the opposite of the survivor in Rao’s wasteland. The survivor gets to matter because the world has fallen apart. The person who has let go of the solution accepts that the world is largely doing fine, that the river will run without them, and that their part in it is small. Because they are no longer waiting for the world to collapse into something they can shoot at, they are the one most likely to notice the actual leverage point, if one exists.
References:
- Venkatesh Rao, My Climate Posture, Ribbonfarm