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Still from the Netflix series “Three Body Problem.” (courtesy of Netflix)

By Slavoj Žižek, Global Eminent Scholar at Kyung Hee University

The true problem of our era is that although we all know about the looming crises, we in the developed West still do not act accordingly. 

Our situation is the one described by Liu Cixin in his sci-fi masterpiece “The Three-Body Problem”: a scientist is drawn into a virtual-reality game “Three Body” in which players find themselves on an alien planet Trisolaris whose three suns rise and set at strange and unpredictable intervals — sometimes too far away and horribly cold, sometimes far too close and destructively hot, and sometimes not seen for long periods of time. The players can somehow dehydrate themselves and the rest of the population to weather the worst seasons, but life is a constant struggle against apparently unpredictable elements, so that although players try to find ways to build a civilization and attempt to predict the strange cycles of heat and cold, they are condemned to destruction.

Do the latest disturbances in our environment not demonstrate that our Earth itself is gradually turning into Trisolaris? Devastating hurricanes, droughts and floods, not to mention global warming, do they all not indicate that we are witnessing something the only appropriate name for which is “the end of Nature”? 

Now that God or tradition can no longer play the role of the highest Limit, Nature takes over this role. But what kind of nature will this be? Even when we imagine global warming, we are aware that we are approaching a new world in which “England” will designate a barren dry country, while “Death Valley” will designate a big lake in California. However, we still picture it as a new stability, with “regular and repeatable weather patterns.” 

However, recent researchers find it more probable that Earth’s climate leads to chaos —true, mathematical chaos. 

“In a chaotic system, there is no equilibrium and no repeatable patterns. A chaotic climate would have seasons that change wildly from decade to decade (or even year to year). Some years would experience sudden flashes of extreme weather, while others would be completely quiet,” writes Paul Sutter in Live Science. “Even the average Earth temperature may fluctuate wildly, swinging from cooler to hotter periods in relatively short periods of time. It would become utterly impossible to determine in what direction Earth's climate is headed.”

Such an outcome is not only catastrophic for our survival, it also runs against our (human) most basic notion of nature, that of a repeatable pattern of seasons. 

Although our planet has only one sun around which it circulates, our predicament could be called “a six-crises problem”:  ecological crisis, economic imbalances, wars, chaotic migrations, the threat of AI, and the disintegration of society. Although the underlying cause of these crises is the dynamic of global capitalism, the interaction of crises leads to chaos which is no less unpredictable than the situation on Trisolaris. Do these crises strengthen each other or does their interaction offer some hope — say, a hope that the ecological crisis will compel us to move beyond capitalism and war to a social order of global solidarity? 

Although Liu imagines wonderful and/or terrifying new scientific and technological inventions, he is fully aware that the basic dimension of our crises is social, the coexistence of different civilizations as well as the antagonisms within each civilization. So the solution will also have to be social (a new social organization of our societies), not just technological.

The first thing to do today is therefore to act accordingly to our predicament: to prepare for the forthcoming emergency state(s). The paradox is that acting as if they will happen in all their dimensions (from ecological catastrophes to wars and digital breakdowns) is the only way to have a chance to prevent them from really happening. 

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk recently said: “I know it sounds devastating, especially to people of the younger generation, but we have to mentally get used to the arrival of a new era. The prewar era.” He is right, although not unconditionally — the situation is still open, and what we should say is, to be more precise: “If a new world war will happen, it will be clear that it has begun back in 2022, and that its deployment was necessary.” Why this strange paradox of retroactivity?

Our predicament confronts us with the deadlock of the contemporary “society of choice.” We pride ourselves on living in a society in which we freely decide about things that matter. However, we find ourselves constantly in the position of having to decide about matters that will fundamentally affect our lives, but without a proper foundation in knowledge. Such a situation is properly frustrating: although we know that it all depends on us, we cannot ever predict the consequences of our acts — we are not impotent, but, quite on the contrary, omnipotent, without being able to determine the scope of our powers. 

While we cannot gain full mastery over our biosphere, it is unfortunately in our power to derail it, to disturb its balance so that it will run amok, swiping us away in the process.

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]