Did you know that the biggest destructors call themselves creators? If you make something, you have to destroy something else. This is the foundation of our metaphysical existence. I just made a cheese toastie; I destroyed the bread and I destroyed the cheese but I created a delicious meal. And then I destroyed that too. And now it’s turned into energy. Which I will also destroy.
But how do we destroy the whole world? What do we create as a result? It’s actually quite simple: don’t worry about it. The destruction of the world means the creation of the absence of everything, including your fears and anxieties. Just live your life (or don’t). Either way, the apocalypse is coming/it’s here/has already happened. Because if it’s about destroying everything then who’s to say what the apocalypse even is. What about peasants? The feudal system? Cholera? Didn’t we destroy all of those things in the UK and replace them with something unrecognisable? A service-based economy, Twitch streamers, something called the keto diet. Isn’t that what the apocalypse is? A slow death of everything you know, so slow that it spans generations so it doesn’t really matter. We’re waiting for the four horsemen but they’re already here and they all represent something very tangible: death, war, famine, and conquest (which is just more war, and ‘that’s just more war’ is a sentence a lot of us say a lot of the time isn’t it?). But really there are five horsemen, where the fifth represents uncertainty. You need uncertainty to balance out the rest of them. War is always happening, that’s certain. Famine: yes. And Death is the most certain one of all: we’re all going to die, whether from the natural decay of ageing or from a sudden nationwide explosion. Death is coming.
Or is it? Here’s Uncertainty, the fifth horseman, not even bothering to ride the horse, or even turn up actually. He sent his intern on the bus. Uncertainty says: maybe we can live forever. MAYBE. That is true apocalyptic thinking; leaving everyone guessing, worrying, pleading for clarity. In the old times death was certain; now we’re not so sure. Destroying humanity by literally killing everyone seems so brutish and unoriginal. Why not destroy humanity by keeping everyone alive FOREVER? The curse of eternal life!
Why stop there? Uncertainty says that maybe we can BEAT ENTROPY. Do you see? Uncertainty is the disease that kills you before you even get the diagnosis. The wealthy elite wield uncertainty in a way that destroys economies and destabilises democracies. Normal people who work for a living respond to it by taking to the streets; but they don’t protest the usual things (War, Famine) — no. They protest the future; they protest made up scenarios; they protest they outcomes of sci-fi movies (what if The Matrix happened in real life??). Uncertainty is the worst thing that ever happened because you really don’t know what it is and also it may have happened already/will happen very shortly.