In A World Of Chaos, Pessimism Is Enemy No. 1

-OpEd-

BOGOTÁ — I read a news story last month that seemed like fiction, given all its bitter irony. In fact, it seems like a fable or an allegory, as if someone had invented it so children would understand where the path of pessimism, fatalism or even tragic thinking, leads. When one focuses on the chain of possible horrors, hellish visions become a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

In a nutshell, the story is as follows: a farmer from San Luis, in Colombia’s northwest Antioquia department, named Arturo Aguirre, is convinced for obscure reasons that the end of the world is approaching. Despite seeming contradictions, he believes he can avoid that fate by building a shelter where he can hide. He informs his family he is going to build a bunker.

As they already know his eccentricities, the family is not alarmed by the fact that Aguirre disappears for several hours each day, and certainly, the man was digging an underground cave in a remote and isolated spot outside the town. Someone passing by, perchance, sees him at a distance with his tools (pick, shovel, hoe, bucket), hitting away at the world.

One night, Aguirre doesn’t return home. The family is alarmed; the town mobilizes. The fire brigade find the place where Aguirre was building his bunker, and start digging in turn, only to find Aguirre’s body three meters underground. The earth from his shelter had collapsed on top of him, burying him alive. 

An allegory

For someone who suffers from dreams, nightmares and apocalyptic thoughts, like the person writing this, the real-life allegory I’ve just described seems perfectly tailored to prevent us indulging in this kind of obsession. Our phobias may be borne out by the facts out there, but are nonetheless very damaging. The moral of this true fable is easily written: you will sink alone in your own pit of despair if you focus only on the horrors nature, wars or human wickedness may bring, like a wall collapsing about us.

Day after day, I read the news of the world’s tragedies. A couple of centuries ago, one knew quickly, if at all, what was happening in one’s own village. The horrors of Korea, Ukraine, Palestine or the Sudan would arrive — if they did at all — on sailing ships or on muleback, years later, like the light from distant stars.

News of a massacre in Armenia or Egypt, or of a battle at Waterloo, were almost chapters in a historical novel that took place in another century. Months later, and with difficulty, people knew what had happened at the battles of Junín or Ayacucho. The Vargas Swamp affair (in nearby Boyacá) was known in Antioquia a week later, not earlier.

Something irreplaceable

Now, avalanches of blood and mud fall upon us, day after day, and we see children dying of hunger in Gaza, from missiles in Kyiv, or massacred in Alaska or Amalfi. All of this, alongside speeches about the end of the world the president delivers live for hours, falls on our heads like buckets of terror.

Perhaps we still have something irreplaceable: living the moment in which we are still alive.

It really does make you want to build an underground shelter, fill it with canned goods and long-lasting grains to endure 10 years of nuclear winter, after an attack and its mistaken response in line with the doctrine of mutually assured destruction. Who would urge their children to have children with this state of affairs? The bunker resembles, at least, the mythical hole the ostrich digs into the sand to avoid seeing the sling and the stone of the hunter who will kill it.

As artificial intelligence replaces us in every profession existing now and in the future (even in this one of writing articles), perhaps we still have something irreplaceable: living the moment in which we are still alive, skin to skin, eyes looking into eyes, the children on our laps, and telling each other stories. Like the fable of the man from San Luis who wanted to save himself from the end of the world by digging a bunker that turned out to be his own grave.