Doubt is a Cloaking Device Hiding the Future
There’s a crisis ahead. Avert your gaze, if you dare.
“The crisis takes a much longer time coming than you think, and then it happens much faster than you would have thought.”
This well-known quote by a respected economist, which I encountered only recently, forced me to stop and think about the implications. (I was gobsmacked, actually.)
Dornbusch was referring to some abstruse aspect of market capitalism. But it resonates on a deeper, humanistic level. It’s visceral, even.
A central tension in all our lives is our ability to discern trouble, or problems, headed our way coupled with our inability, or unwillingness, to fully prepare the way to avert said trouble.
For example, we worry that we’re not saving enough money for retirement, yet we don’t take concrete steps to address the projected shortfall until, say, we’re in our 60s or 70s and that far-off day is now a reality.
Or: We live in designated flood plains that are increasingly vulnerable to devastating floods. But instead of moving to higher ground or adding defensive infrastructure to the property, we carry on one day at a time. Then the “big one” arrives, and the house is destroyed.
There’s nothing stopping us from peering into our futures and making darn good guesses about what’s barreling toward us. The claxon has sounded; the raging fire approaches.
Yet we’re paralyzed. Or, perhaps, not paralyzed, but willingly succumb to a logic that tells us there’s nothing to be done right now, this instant. We’re aware that a “situation” is brewing, but we aren’t moved to set a plan in motion that would ensure our safety, or at least, our escape. Maybe later.
Even when it means going against our own best interest, we frequently lean into the opposite of a willing suspension of disbelief. Instead, we lean into a willing suspension of belief.
It’s so much easier to be fatalistic than prevention-oriented.
Why are we built this way? Didn’t our cave-dwelling ancestors need to anticipate a crisis lurking around every bush as a matter of self-preservation?
Or were they so focused on the urgent, short-term need to find food and shelter that thinking about the future was a luxury their brains could not afford?
Why do we, today, engage in so much magical thinking about how our lives ought to run, instead of how they actually run?
There is always a crisis on the horizon—personal, communal, and yes, political.
We are constantly finding ways to avoid acknowledging the crisis, or crises. Or maybe we do acknowledge it—yet still decline to act. Until we’re forced to do so.
If we accept a reality that poses a threat but don’t act upon it, then all we’re doing is philosophizing.
Doubt is a shadowy companion through all of this. Doubt is a kind of cloaking device that helps us cope comfortably today in order to postpone tomorrow.
I doubt it will come to that… we say, as a way of mitigating a painful, perhaps unthinkable, future.
In this context, doubt is a survival mechanism. For if we truly could see the coming crisis and felt compelled to take frantic, frequent actions to head it off early, we’d all be psychological wrecks.
Doubt offers the luxury of questioning the future—thereby envisioning alternative outcomes and endings.
The fire is raging…the land is flooding… the fascists are rising…but I doubt that I’ll be directly affected.
But this is a terrible double-edged sword. For the more we blunt our senses to the coming crisis—whatever it may be—the more danger we are in.
I’m trying to look the future in the eye. It’s terrifying. It’s also a choice—and one that we all might want to make, sooner rather than later, for our own sakes as well as our species.
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My husband likes to say, "bad karma!" when I bring up potential crisis topics such as the idea of being prepared if one (or both) of us need a decade of chronic care in the future. Who wants to think about that?! No one, including me. So, my default is "If X ever happened, what would your preferences be?" And then, importantly, "Why?" because sometimes solutions are more nuanced and greyer than we can anticipate. This is a bit gloomy, isn't it? Or is it life - lol! Thought-provoking post.
Ouch! That hit close to home. A thought-provoking post as always.