Cassandra on Prozac

A lot of things happened, in 1942. But two things happened in the world of authors.

Algeria-born French author and philosopher Albert Camus wrote a small essay: The Myth of Sisyphus. It opened with:

There is only one truly serious philosophical problem: suicide. Weighing whether life is or isn't worth living, is answering philosophy's fundamental question.

Earlier that year, exiled Jewish Austrian writer Stefan Zweig and his wife, Lotte Altmann, consumed a lethal dose of barbiturates. Their lifeless bodies were eventually found at their home, north of Rio de Janeiro, lying on their bed, holding hands.

Camus' essay does not specifically refer to contemporary events, and instead considers the absurdity of the human condition as a whole. If anything, there is something slightly absurd about describing the mundane “tramway, factory, sleep” grind of daily life, when the whole continent is on the edge of annihilation.

Zweig's motivations are not as obvious as they seem either. His friends and contemporaries ascribed his action to the loss of hope. Many even resented him for giving up at the most crucial time. But his notes paint a different picture: his was not fear or despair at the future, but grief over the past. The Nazis had not just driven him out of his home and his country, they had robbed him of his culture, his language, his identity. They had forever tainted the German language as the language of barbaric hatred.

It's not that Zweig did not believe in the possibility of a brighter future, it's that he knew the World of his past was irremediably gone.

Camus' answer was not to sell hope in the future either.

His eponymous concluding chapter introduces Sisyphus as the archetype of the human race: hopelessly pushing that boulder up, never to reach its goal. Or rather: reaching it only long enough to see it roll back down, having to start all over again.

But it does not matter that there is no hope to ever accomplish the task, or that the task is patently absurd to begin with. What matters, Albert tells us, is that Sisyphus be having fun doing it:

The struggle towards the peaks is enough to fill the heart of a man. One must think Sisyphus happy.

Close to a century later, as that boulder starts hurling downhill again, as we sleepwalk our way toward another cycle of misery and suffering, as that cycle increasingly looks like a one-way line into the abyss… there is comfort in focussing on the present: how the self can bring joy, how the struggle can bring joy, how present happiness is not preconditioned on future outcomes.

And then there's Cassandra.

Cassandra does not fear a possible future, she knows the future.

The curse of being a powerless bystander — no one believes her visions — turns that knowledge into certainty.

Her future holds no room for doubt, and therefore no room for hope either. Cassandra's clairvoyance robs her of any possible existential relief: unlike Sisyphus, she knows exactly where that boulder ends up in the end.

The most depressing part of the unfolding polycrisis, might very well be its most abstract: even as it enters its acute runaway phase, the now irreversible destruction of our climate and ecosystems remains infinitely less tangible than the day-to-day march toward global technofascism, with its daily dose of barely-hidden genocide and petty oppression of minorities.

Of course, the two are linked.

A world where resources get scarcer, and liveable land melts away, is a world where cruel individualism,  ruthless tribal violence, and settler colonialism get rewarded. Initially.

But while there is always hope that the darkest of human instincts will eventually subside, Climate works on a different timescale. The world of our past is irremediably gone.

Sisyphus is too busy with his own struggle to notice. Cassandra has nothing to fall back on.

One must think Sisyphus happy. And Cassandra on prozac.