Bulltard

The Devil’s Advocate™ →Go uptown In which the curmudgeonly old sod puts the world to rights. Index — Click ᐅ to expand: The Devil’s Advocate Tell me more Sign up for our newsletter — or just get in touch: for ½ a weekly 🍺 you get to consult JC. Ask about it here.

We humans tend to name our epochs in hindsight, by reference to the catastrophe that ended them: “antediluvian”; “pre-pubescent”; “pre-historic”; “pre-crisis”.

A wishfully revisionist habit, since the one thing that cannot define a given period is the crisis that will eventually do for it. Especially if the people of that period have no reasonable inkling of what is coming.

But these hysterical times may be the exception that proves that rule. This time, we do know it is coming. It does fashion our behaviour: no-one with a functioning cerebellum has any doubt we are in the end of days, and is therefore making what hay can be made before the remaining sunlight blooms into supernova.

There is nothing to be done: our faith in experts is gone. Our trust in institutions is gone. Our belief in principles is gone. Our hope for the future is gone. No-one understands, or believes, anything any more.

All that remains is our unshakeable collective conviction in a total lack of conviction. This is what now to spurs us all on: the magnetic horror of being pulled by 9our fascination towards a certain, yet unknown black doom behind a door that is yet slightly ajar. We are like freshly-infected plague victims, just awaiting the onset of symptoms, and acting out a danse macabre while there is still time: a desperate, decadent, demented tarantella, because we are so fucked we might as well roll the wheel of fortune with whatever is left in our pocket — because — why not?

Why not just enjoy the obliterated husk of what’s left of our post-historical project? Why not enjoy the fireworks when it goes up in smoke? Since, like unharnessed skydivers, we are falling to our certain death, why not just unclothe and, for the fleeting minutes we still have that are free of the Earth’s surly bonds, just deliriously tumble, free and unchained, optimising our exhilarating final ride?

What the hell: buy Shiba-inu, mint some dopey tweet on the blockchain and sell it for monopoly money, buy Tesla — who cares? We’re off the cliff and there are only moments left, so what else is there to do?

This is the bulltard era.

See also

• End of days
• Cryptobabble
• Bitcoin
• Global financial crisis