You and I – and everyone we know, everyone and everything on the planet – are living in the Fafocene. A full explanation can be found here, but the short version is this: we are near the beginning of the Age of Consequences, where our failure to heed the warnings of scientists and public intellectuals in the 1940s (here) and especially the late 1960s and early 1970s (for example – Ritchie Calder “Hell Upon Earth, “November 23 1968) that we will would push beyond the Limits to Growth (see podcast here) starts to look like a stupid decision or set of stupid decisions.
“We” were warned. We didn’t take action. More specifically, we didn’t sustain organisations and institutions of dissent that could cope with inertia, despair and the counter-actions of corporations trade associations, states, bureaucracies, political parties, junktanks etc. So the assholes of senseless extraction got to kick into open goals, while kicking those who put their bodies on the gear in the head and laughing all the way to the bank.
And now, the things that we were warned about are coming to pass. Oops, it seems like “we” are planet trashing surrender monkeys (1).
In this post, I want to talk about what it feels like to be living in the Fafoscene. I know lots of other people feel the same way and have articulated it better than I will. If you are aware of really good summations of this feeling, please let me know, and I’ll add them to the reading list at the bottom.
I could fill paragraphs with synonyms for rage, anger, fear, self-disgust, self recrimination, recrimination at being so narcissistic as the world boils, fear, listlessness, bedrotting, anomie, hopelessness, etc, but these words don’t really work – they describe, but they do not capture the overwhelming sense of futility and listlessness (2) as the insects vanish, with the birds following and the humans not so far down the great chain of Un-being (3).
Btw, affect is distinct from emotion, but for that you need to go to footnote (4).
Part of this is that we have access to so much information now – we are all at risk of becoming part of the scrolletariat. It’s often been commented that the assault on the people of Gaza is the first genocide to be live-streamed. Perhaps in a similar way that the attack on Vietnam in the 1960s was the first one to end up on Americans television screens, until the war machine “lost Cronkite.”
But the thing is, it’s not just these individual acts of extreme, “kinetic” fast violence. It’s the slow violence. It’s the everyday operating of the system. As per this Onion article, “Millions of Barrels of Oil safely reach port in major environmental disaster as oil tanker”.
And as I used to say to an academic friend, you can walk into any decent bookshop (this is 25 years ago), and within half an hour, come out with a stack of books that tell you pretty well how the world works, naming some of the names and many of the mechanisms.
This isn’t like the Soviet Union, where you had to use allusions, metaphors, silences, etc (5) . The information is there hiding in plain sight, kinda like Poe’s purloined letter.
In the words of Leonard Cohen, who we’ll come back to, “everybody knows”.
Leonard Cohen – Everybody Knows (Audio)
And this is where two related terms, one I’ve known for a while, and one only just discovered, come into play. And these are kayfabe and hypernormalisation.
Kayfabe is the agreed fantasy script around professional wrestling where the personas and the personal lives of the wrestlers kind of mingle and overlap, all palimpsestian. It’s pretend, But very rarely does the fourth wall get broken, because everyone is invested in keeping the show on the road.
Hyper normalisation is a term I only just learned. And well, here’s the Wikipedia grab, which, as far as I know, is accurate. (I should hopefully read the book at some point.)
The word hypernormalisation was coined by Alexei Yurchak, a professor of anthropology who was born in Leningrad and later went to teach at the University of California, Berkeley. He introduced the word in his book Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (2006), which describes paradoxes of Soviet life during the 1970s and 1980s.[3][4] He says everyone in the Soviet Union knew the system was failing, but no one could imagine any alternative to the status quo, and politicians and citizens alike were resigned to maintaining the pretense of a functioning society.[5] Over time, the mass delusion became a self-fulfilling prophecy, with everyone accepting it as the new norm rather than pretend, an effect Yurchak termed hypernormalisation
So where have I gone with all this? Well, notice, nowhere. So far, “everybody knows the deal is rotten, Old Black Joe’s still picking cotton for your ribbons and bows.”
So a chunk of the strain of living in the Fafocene, for anyone who is even a little bit awake (or, dare I say, ‘woke’) is the cost of knowing that and having to confront (or choosing NOT to confront) the illusions. Knowing and not acting costs you. “Acting” is never enough and that costs you. Knowing and trying not to know – or act like you don’t know – that costs you too. Bateson’s double-bind, kinda sorta(6).
Which illusions? Not just the obvious ones, about democracy reduced to occasional elections, but the deeper myths. The deepest, I think is “the truth will set you free” one, as per John 8:32 “Educated” – which seems for the most part to mean indoctrinated – people in the West have this in spades. It’s that touching – but not so much anymore – unspoken but fiercely defended faith in democracy and transparency.
One of the shocks for them, especially since about 2016 with the first Trump administration, is that truth, decency, (as they see it), transparency, honesty, fact-checking and all the paraphernalia don’t actually count for that much, even in the “civilised” West.
We’re back to straight power concepts, and that offends people’s self image. It offends their sense-making, it offends their sense of power. It’s not that the world is not intelligible. It’s just that if you put your intelligence to the test, you can make it intelligible, but the lessons you learn about power, about violence in all its forms – slow, fast, psychic, physical, intellectual, cognitive, affective, whatever – are not stories we want to hear, stories we like to believe about ourselves.
And that, I suspect, is what leaves people disconsolate or despairing or worse.
What do you think? Am I onto anything? Let me know.
Reading suggestions
Pankaj Mishra’s The World After Gaza (though the publisher’s didn’t provide an index – but I did)
As Gaza’s children are bombed and starved, we watch – powerless. What is it doing to us as a society? | Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett | The Guardian
Update May 25 2025 – have just been alerted to this fantastic article, which went up on Thursday 22nd…
Footnotes
- This has already been the age of consequences for many, many other species. And of course, Western progress has had some pretty dramatic consequences for inhabitants of the New World and everywhere else.
- “We have been here before, I know – blah blah Robert Musil, Georg Simmel blah blah
- Quite proud of that one!
- So see this – “Affect is your basic sense of feeling, ranging from unpleasant to pleasant (called valence), and from idle to activated (called arousal). Emotion is a much more complex mental construction.
“Many scientists use the word “affect” when really they mean emotion. They’re trying to talk about emotion cautiously, in a non-partisan way, without taking sides in any debate. As a result, in the science of emotion, the word “affect” can sometimes mean anything emotional. This is unfortunate, because affect is not specific to emotion; it is a feature of consciousness. Affect occurs in every moment (whether you’re aware of it or not) because interoception occurs in every moment.
“Conversely, sometimes scientists use the word “emotion” when really they mean affect. For example, scientists who study how people remember pleasant and unpleasant events sometimes describe what they study as “emotional memory,” but “pleasant” vs. “unpleasant” is a distinction of affect; the findings really reveal how people remember instances of intense valence and arousal (i.e., affect)….”.
- I remember talking in 1992 to an Ostie who was trying to explain this to me, and I just kind of couldn’t “get it.”
- Gregory Bateson – under-rated thinker. See also stuff by Erving Goffman, about stigma maintenance. Those who Know are stigmatised, and have to manage their identities…
