The Ministry for the Future

61

Negative reactions to news of biosphere collapse are not uncommon. Grief, sorrow, anger, panic, shame, guilt, dissociation, and depression are frequently seen responses to news of global climate catastrophe. These negative reactions can sometimes become extreme enough to be labelled pathological.

One pathological reaction, a form of avoidance, has been called The Masque of the Red Death Syndrome, after the story by Edgar Allan Poe. In the story, a group of privileged aristocrats, isolated in a castle on a peak above a countryside devastated by a plague, stage a masquerade to distract themselves, or to display indifference or defiance to their eventual fate. They arrange the rooms of the castle such that each room is illuminated by light stained a different color, and then, having dressed themselves in costumes including masks and dominoes, they parade through the castle dancing to music, eating extravagant meals, and so forth. A silent masked stranger then appears and stalks through the party, and few readers are surprised when this stranger turns out to be death itself.

The syndrome is thus an assertion that the end being imminent and inevitable, there is nothing left to do except party while you can. The late middle ages’ dance of death, danse macabre in French, Totentanz in German, is an earlier example of this response, in this case associated with the Black Death; it is likely to have been one of Poe’s inspirations.

Even more extreme pathological responses to biosphere collapse are possible, and have been observed. Some who feel the end is near work to hasten it, or worsen it. Their position seems to be that if they’re going to die then the world must die with them. This is clearly a manifestation of narcissism, and has been named the Götterdämmerung Syndrome. Hitler in the last days of World War Two has become the canonical example of this response. Hatred of the other is also quite obviously manifested in such a reaction.

The name for this response comes from Wagner’s opera Götterdämmerung, which ends with the old gods of the pre-Christian Norse mythology destroying the world as they die, in a final murderous and suicidal auto-da-fé. A folk translation of this word into English has it as “the God-damning of the world,” although this makes use of a false cognate and the German actually means “the twilight of the gods,” and is Wagner’s German neologism for the Norse word Ragnarok.

The Götterdämmerung Syndrome, as with most violent pathologies, is more often seen in men than women. It is often interpreted as an example of narcissistic rage. Those who feel it are usually privileged and entitled, and they become extremely angry when their privileges and sense of entitlement are being taken away. If then their choice gets reduced to admitting they are in error or destroying the world, a reduction they often feel to be the case, the obvious choice for them is to destroy the world; for they cannot admit they have ever erred.

Narcissism is generally regarded as the result of a stunted imagination, and a form of fear. For the narcissist, the other is too fearful to register, and thus the individual death of the narcissist represents the end of everything real; as a result, death for the narcissist becomes even more fearful and disastrous than it is for people who accept the reality of the other and the continuance of the world beyond their individual end.

Even the night sky frightens the narcissist, as presenting impossible-to-deny evidence of a world exterior to the self. Narcissists therefore tend to stay indoors, live in ideas, and demand compliance and assent from everyone they come in contact with, who are all regarded as servants, or ghosts. And as death approaches, they do their best to destroy as much of the world as they can.

The phrase Götterdämmerung capitalism has been seen. This marks a shift, possibly inappropriate, from psychology to sociology, and is therefore outside the purview of this article; and is in any case self-explanatory.