It’s the End of the World

Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

It’s the end of the world. Again. And I still feel fine.

I grew up very at home with the idea that there would be an end of the world, because most of the people around me seemed to think the world would end in two thousand. Which begs the question of why they were working, saving, having children and planning for retirement, etc, less than 30 years away. Never mind. People are weird.

I used to worry about it but grandma told me a very old story of who knows what origin, that after the delluge, G-d had said “Till 2000 you’ll last, and from there you’ll not pass.” And then our lady took a handful of sand and tossed it into the Earth and said “I add these many more.” Theologically, this is not the Judeo Christian G-d, of course. The story had the feel of an old legend, but who knows from where and when. And definitely the year wouldn’t be 2000.

Having tried to count the grains of sand in one of MY — admittedly not adult — handful, I decided there were way more than a thousand grains, and it was my far distant descendants look out.

Having survived the apocalypse, thus, mentally, at 10, I went on to be just jaded.

Most of the stories I read at the time, the authors knew we’d all die in a nuclear exchange. (If you’re not aware of this, it’s time to inform you most of the nuclear panic was fueled by USSR propaganda. Being far behind us in arsenal — if you don’t know that, please do some research — they tried to use what they could do — propaganda — to get us to surrender.) I remember worrying about it for maybe a summer, but it just didn’t seem plausible. Oh, sure, maybe some cities would get hit. But most of the world would just have to do the best they could after. The overblown after effects always felt overblown. Not plausible.

Then at some point I read Paul Ehrlich — the world’s most accomplished false prophet — saying by 1980 we’d have no potable water, or the like. It didn’t hit as hard as it could. Look, by then it was 75? 78? I was worried for a while, and then Dad read it, laughed and pointed out this jerkoff had completely missed the water cycle.

Then there was overpopulation. My fear over that lasted until I was in my thirties, but by then it didn’t ring true. Where were these masses of humanity? Everywhere in the world, including places that claimed otherwise, people were having fewer kids. These endless kids seemed to only exist for the purpose of getting welfare, whether at a country or personal level. Which is one of those things that make you go “um”.

By the time the ice age panic hit, I was uber-jaded. Like, so jaded I realized that the prescription to save us from that was like the prescription to save you from everything else dire was “more socialism.”

(Hums “If the world is ending tomorrow, it’s a scam; If capitalism causes sorrow, it’s a scam; If there is no escape but socialism, it’s a scam; If you can die of individualism, it’s a scam.”)

I read the articles, and then all the anthologies from science fiction, all the stories talking about how we’d all freeze to death in like twenty years, and raised my eyebrow and thought “It’s a scam.”

Because, you see, I had some idea of geological time, and how fast things move in a system as large as Earth. Or how slow.

I mean, if we are to believe things, we got hit with such a large asteroid circa 1500 BC it destroyed civilization such as it was then, but–

But not humanity and not the Earth. And again, why was the solution always “socialism”?

And then suddenly we were all going to burn, unless we were going to freeze because it was so hot, and we had to go full on commies to survive.

There are still idiots, most of them in government and academia, running around with their head on fire about this.

That’s nice. I hope they enjoy their little freak out. And no, I’m not freaking out about nuclear war, either. I don’t believe any of our enemies has an arsenal maintained well enough to be worth the name. Heck, I’m not sure we do.

I’m not convinced that freezing to death while baking or whatever the heck it is today (by people who can’t even predict weather that ALREADY happened) , or even being nuked is worth all that panic. It certainly isn’t worth socialism/communism

Communism — which the Green Nude Heel is — well, that is for real and absolutely deadly. I enjoin you to reach The Black Book of Communism, if you don’t believe me.

To quote Shakespeare, we all owe G-d a death. But I’d like to leave the world in a shape that my grand kids (at this point all adopted) can write their own stories.

Warming/cooling/nuclear war, anything short of a crash big enough to wipe out the biosphere, and that’s not something we’d do, there’s a chance we’d survive all “ends of the world.”

I mean, the world ends a little with each generation. But a new one is born. Sometimes the birth pangs are more intense and a lot of people die, that’s all. (I’m looking at the Black Death here.)

But socialism/communism? Those kill. Fast or slow, they kill. And they destroy civilization from within.

Cataclysm move at such a pace all humans can survive and adapt.

Any “cataclysm” that can only be cured by more socialism and communism and government control?

It’s a scam.

And we’re not at home to scams.

We’ve survived enough ends of the world to laugh in the face of them.

Let free humans face whatever comes. If it needs socialism? It’s a scam. A stupid one.

 

Reprinted from According to Hoyt for May 1, 2023