‘Death Spiral’

‘Humanity Has Opened the Gates of Hell’

I have been increasingly using the phrase, “Death Spiral,” to describe society’s state of health these days.  Even so—or especially so—I acknowledge that it is “human nature” to be in denial, all the more if we feel helpless about the situation.  When it seems there is nothing we can do to change our predicament, the immediate urge is just to get on with our lives as best we can.

The flip side of a self-fulfilling prophecy, however, is that change depends on us.  The avoidance of an immensely frightening and numbingly depressing reality is understandable.  Yet this avoidance is what some groups and institutions exploit as an opportunity to create ever more dangerous situations.  This phenomenon, of course, is very familiar to the psychiatric and psychological literature, for it is the very dynamic of psychopathology.

It is therefore the responsibility of psychological and psychiatric professionals, more now than ever it seems to me, to try to explain and to educate, as well as at times to advocate for societal wellbeing.  There is much suffering and hardship we can circumvent through implementation of what we know through scholarship.  Indeed, prevention by definition is possible because of scientific study, since it involves interventions against calamities that have not yet occurred.  So that is what I am going to do very briefly in summary today.

Rather extreme phrases are being spoken of our situation today: “Humanity has opened the gates of hell”; and “Nuclear sabers are again being rattled.  This is madness.”

These are not the words of an alarmist or an Armageddon fanatic but the actual words in recent days of the United Nations (UN) Secretary-General, António Guterres.  He spoke the “hell” phrase when he opened a special Climate Ambition Summit on September 20, 2023, and then a few days later the “madness” warning at the High-level Meeting Commemorating the International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons, on September 26, 2023, with both events as part of the Seventy-Eighth Session of the UN General Assembly.

When it comes to “gates of hell,” Guterres was specifically referring to what humanity has done to itself in just a few hundred years since the Industrial Revolution, now causing fast-escalating climate destruction, resulting from heating the planet to dangerous levels with vast amounts of pollution.  The result is already a wave of unprecedented catastrophic climate disasters worldwide, accompanied by increasing human famine and violence, desperate refugee flows, and escalating “canary in the coal mine” species extinctions, all of which are now forecast to accelerate and to get much worse in the immediate years ahead.  Indeed, just a week after Guterres spoke about the “gates of hell” being opened, came the latest startling evidence from Switzerland, where in just the last two years glaciers have melted a shockingly unprecedented 10 percent!

And when it comes to the “This is madness,” talk of World War III, which has also become shockingly commonplace and almost casual in recent years, has accompanied vast efforts that are actually underway, rapidly accelerating preparations for global thermonuclear war. 

Additionally, other means of mass, even civilizational, destruction are also racing forward.  Years ago, scientific discoveries in physics led to atomic and nuclear weapons, accompanied by speedy and unstoppable delivery systems for these weapons.  Now, other major scientific advances in biological and chemical weapons, along with cyber and artificial intelligence technologies, are all being used to create a “brave new world” of multiple kinds of horrendous weapons of mass destruction.

Guterres stated: “Nuclear arsenals are being modernized to make these weapons faster, more accurate, and stealthier.  Nuclear sabers are again being rattled.  This is madness.  We must reverse course.”

Indeed, just a few days later Russia announced its first ever nationwide nuclear war simulation and preparation day, to be held on October 3, 2023.  Simultaneously, North Korea amended its constitution to reinforce the idea that the nation is a “forever nuclear power,” abandoning any idea of denuclearizing or giving up its weapons.

My own references to “Death Spiral” have focused on bringing attention to the multi-dimensional national and international developments that are now taking place at a pace difficult to keep up with, and yet are extremely dangerous.  In this context, I have criticized the official keepers of the Doomsday Clock, who are attenuating the existing science and hence failing to do their job.  Twice this year, I have advocated moving the hands far closer to Midnight.  And it seems that the UN Secretary-General has also decided that his responsibility is to warn more often, more forcefully, and in starker terms about what is happening.

At some point, humanity will face this predicament.  Denial may bring immediate comfort, but it worsens the actual problem.  Facing it now opens far greater potentialities for reversal and humanity’s preservation.

Albert Einstein, H.H. Arnold, J.R. Oppenheimer, and others came together 77 years ago to publish the bestseller, One World or None—a famous book that sought to advance our collective survival in the Atomic Age.  It gave rise to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which sets the Doomsday Clock every year.  The World Mental Health Coalition formed in 2017 after I and other mental health experts came together to publish the bestseller, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump—a book that sought to advance our collective survival in what we came to call, “the Psychological Age”—when a correct understanding of our own psychology and mind would become critical to determining whether humanity will perish or choose to persist.