Healing After Nature Healing After Nature Response to Slavoj Žižek
crisis...dystopia crisis...dystopia
Crisis is the system through which we cope against the idea of Cosmic Pessimism. The struggle for us to find meaning in a Dystopian universe which is “absolutely unhuman, and indifferent to the hopes, desires, and struggles of human individuals and groups.” We are in a constant struggle between our instinct to find meaning and the universe’s complete indifference to us. Zizek asserts that “Capitalism is always in crisis.” This leads to the assertion that Nature, too, is always on the brink of disaster. He argues that it’s incorrect to think of “Mother Nature” before the Industrial Revolution as being a harmonious and steady state. This is false logic, and therefore the idea that Capitalism is the antithesis of that steady-state nature is also false. So assuming that Crisis is the status quo, what does that mean? In short, the idea that the world as a whole is always imbalanced is freeing. The only way to survive is to react; the crisis forces us to implement tactics rather than imagine strategies. There isn’t enough time, data, expertise, etc. to understand and then strategize a way to “bring balance to the world.” Instead, we should be happy to fight and survive one Crisis after the next. This heralds back to the idea of embracing the ugly problems in the world. There will always be huge problems that need to be solved, and the worst response we can have is to try and ignore them by relaxing in our manufactured “natural” environments.
“Nobody exists on purpose, nobody belongs anywhere,
everybody’s going to die.”