Bøker av Jay Turney

Armageddon is just another meme. The end of the world sells gold-clad coins, nutritional panaceas, web site traffic, and probably shampoo and body spray. But in our consumer bubbles, we may no longer have the capacity for distinguishing between fake and real dangers. It is the premise of this book that very real threats to a decent way of life even for the entitled first world, and the survival of everyone else, including a vast amount of animals and plants, exist, and are being minimized and trivialized by a system that has been exploiting us for centuries. Those socioeconomic and political depredations, whatever new sexy forms they take, are helping to destroy us just as much as are the environmental disasters they seek to exploit and cover up.But this is one area where personal involvement can make a difference, if only psychologically. In old-style terms, maybe you can even save your soul, in a world that tells you you have no soul, all the better to wipe out that which might give us our souls: the natural world, the only source for whatever gods may be.

As much as we suffer from collective amnesia, believing the present moment is the worst of times or the best of times, the intense anxiety many people are feeling has been around for quite a while. This anxiety was perhaps sharper among some than others, but now seems ubiquitous, reflected in areas as diverse as economic fears, nuclear proliferation, presidential tweets, even mistaken Oscar announcements.This is not just about politics or even economics, but the culture and mass psychology of an entire people. That is why solutions, if they come at all, are not going to be easy. This author does not believe in offering platitudes or fairy stories, but in looking honestly at what confronts us, as responsible adults and not just consumers of junk optimism.