One thing that jumps out at me about the current political scene is that people are killing and dying for things that do not matter. This would be a shame in any case, but we are kind of living with this ticking timebomb of climate change that affects all of humanity as a unit (albeit in differentiated and often unjust ways, etc., etc.). And instead of dealing with that problem, we are collectively choosing to indulge in pointless hierarchy-generating and in-group behaviors that seem to become more urgent and violent the more our irreducibly shared global human problem becomes more and more undeniable.

Putin, for instance, has mused that perhaps starting a nuclear war would be a good option if Russia’s existence is at stake. He would rather that the world end, for everyone, than that anyone should live in a world without Russia in it. He is also waging a brutal and hugely costly war because of his belief that Ukrainians are “really” Russian and have been tricked into thinking they have a different national identity. But here’s the thing: Russia is made up. No one is “really” Russian, and a world in which no one saw any reason to identify as Russian would be a different world — perhaps even a poorer world, if it meant losing some lifeways or artistic or intellectual traditions — but at the same time, no one in that world would have any reason to miss the existence of “Russia” or “Russianness.” In the last analysis, push come to shove, “Russia” does not matter — except to Russians, of course, whose leader has seen fit to declare on their behalf that the continued existence of Russians is worth absolutely everything.

Similarly, people are killing and dying to make sure that only the right people get to live and have voting rights in a particular territory that was arguably mentioned in the Bible. People are killing and dying to make sure that the wrong type of people don’t get to cross certain notional boundaries drawn on the ground, because that would give them access to resources that belong, by right, to people who were born with some ancestral connection to the land enclosed by those borders — basically none of which were drawn in their exact current places as recently as 100 years ago. For this, people are left to die in the desert and drown at sea.

And lo and behold, there aren’t enough people in those wonderful nations, with their wonderful blood and their wonderful lifeways and traditions! For whatever reason, their young people cannot see their way to pumping out enough children to keep the Ponzi scheme of the nation-state going — when they aren’t departing for greener pastures altogether. For this, we don’t need to kill quite as many people, but we definitely need to thwart as many lives as possible. Above all, we need to make sure that every woman who gets pregnant, stays pregnant. And if they die from it? Well, that’s the price we need to pay to make sure that nobody gets any big ideas about being able to control their own life outside the terms we have collectively hallucinated. We need that life, to create more of our precious life — our precious white American life, the most victimized life in the world, because everyone else refuses to recognize its right to everything and everyone.

In reality, a world in which no one thought they were “American” and no one — even people with the puzzlingly wide array of skin tones and hair colors we associate with the term “white,” which no one but the dead actually is — thought they were “white” would be a perfectly acceptable world for all those who remained. They would have no reason to miss the idea of being American or being white. Maybe they’d have some exciting new arbitrary identity! Maybe they would identify simply as human — but for real this time, not with a wink and a nod to all those other humans who are supposedly less than human. In any case, they would live and die and laugh and love and never know they were missing America or whiteness.

We don’t live in that world, though. We live in a world where the collective agencies we actually have — the market above all, but also the nation-states and the various organizations that institutionalize the conflict among them — have decided, on all of our behalf, that the prospects of human flourishing are to be permanently and irreversibly downgraded because that’s what it takes for America, or Russia, or Israel, or Hungary, or Christianity, or whiteness to flourish. Never mind whether those things could continue to exist, even in something close to their current form, in a world in which climate change had been successfully tackled. No, the very notion of an exogamous problem, a problem arising from outside the terms of “America” (or whatever) and demanding cooperation with something outside of “America” (or whatever), is unimaginable, offensive, incompatible with the survival of “America” (or whatever) as a sovereign entity. So the world will burn, and countless human beings will die, and all subsequent generations will have their life chances permanently and irreversibly downgraded, rather than cede even an inch to the existence of a world where “America” (or whatever) is not eternally binding.

And none of the rest of us are in a position to do anything about it, as far as I can tell. Just like the opposition within every one of these “countries” being inexorably taken over by demagogues claiming to vindicate the “nation” and/or “race,” we somehow can’t get our acts together, can’t find a way to offer something other than “not that.” A big part of that, as I’ve suggested before, is that the left does not want to envision creating, much less becoming, the kind of collective agency that could offer a genuine alternative to the reactionaries and their dangerous lies.

That failure, and the success of the most worthless human beings on earth at seizing every lever of institutional authority, has made me think dark thoughts about whether this addiction to hierarchy-seeking and in-group behavior is unfixable — at least in the time we have left. In principle, I could imagine solutions that play on those hierarchy-seeking and in-group behaviors to solve climate change, but they could not possibly function in a world in which all the institutions that instantiate the deeply ingrained pointless stupidity that comes from being the emergent property of a thousand thousand generations of evolutionary Rube Goldberg machines have decided that even attempting to solve the problem is an existential threat to everything we most value.