Dorian Lynskey On Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About The End Of The World
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Thanks, Jack. Hello, everyone. Lovely to see you. So the subtitle, which Jack didn't mention, which is fine, is the stories we tell about the end of the world. And the reason I chose that is because I wanted to reflect the fact that I'm talking about fiction, novels and films and TV shows and video games and comic books and so on and all the different things.

ways that we imagine the world will end. But then there's also the stories that we tell, the politicians tell, activists, scientists, even the ones that we tell ourselves. And a lot of the time, the reason why activists are telling them is because they want to get across a message and they want to galvanize people.

And so I just wanted to talk about a couple of different sort of sections of the book where it's really two halves of the same story, which is how useful is fear? Because people sometimes ask, well,

Well, why? What is the point of these stories of the end? And obviously, entertainment is one of them. But I wonder, are they actually useful? That if you make people think about the worst thing that can possibly happen, does that encourage them to avoid it? The idea is yes. But is it necessarily true?

So I'm going to start with Oppenheimer. Christopher Nolan very kindly decided to make a film about one of the main characters in my book. So many people know this already that the members of the Manhattan Project were generally less shocked by what their invention had done in Hiroshima and Nagasaki than by what it might do in the future to America, to the rest of the world. They were imagining what happens when everybody has nuclear weapons.

And Edward R. Murrow, the famous CBS anchorman, said, seldom if ever has a war ended leaving the victors with such a sense of uncertainty and fear, with such a realization that the future is obscure and that survival is not assured. So some of the scientists set up the Federation of Atomic Scientists magazine, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which is where we get the image of the doomsday clock, which is updated every year to see how things are going.

Anyway, at the same time, some of these scientists were trying to get international agreement. There was a plan that Oppenheimer co-authored that was taken to the UN. And the idea was that you could somehow get the US and the USSR to agree to control nuclear weapons, to basically avoid the arms race. And one of the mechanisms that the scientists used was fear. One of them, one of the physicists was called Harold Urey. He wrote in a magazine that

that without arms control we will eat fear, sleep fear, live in fear and die in fear. And he was saying, I'm frightened, everyone I know is frightened, you should all be frightened. So there was a real sense that time was running out and that if we did not get this arms agreement then we were all doomed. Anyway, we didn't. It was the beginning of the Cold War, there was mutual distrust, the agreement fell apart.

And then, of course, what happens when the deadline has passed? Does that mean we're all doomed? And one of the people involved in this plan, David Lilienthal, who was chair of the Atomic Energy Commission, said, it might seem like a good idea to scare the world into being good, but fear is brother to panic. Fear is an unreliable ally. It can never be depended upon to produce good. Nonetheless, many writers, many filmmakers were absolutely terrified throughout the 50s.

the invention of the hydrogen bomb korean war all kinds of reasons to think that actually um they weren't going to make it to the end of the decade so you get these remarkable works like the movie on the beach and the novel it was based on uh stanley kubrick's movie dr strange love roald dahl's first novel sometime never which uh not many people have read because he arranged for it never to be reprinted so it's an absolutely terrifying vision of uh

the entire world wiped out by nuclear war and taken over by gremlins. So it's a strange book and less popular than his later work. So the real test of what happens to the human brain when you think it's actually going to be the end was the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, a standoff over Soviet missiles that were stationed in Cuba. And for 13 days,

Kennedy, the John F. Kennedy administration and Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow were going back and forth, communicating, trying to avert an actual nuclear war. And Khrushchev said, I'm glad I was frightened as I was. I was absolutely terrified. And that helped avert war. And maybe we should all be will be frightened. But as soon as it was over.

public concern about nuclear war and opinion polls just plummeted. So the fact that it almost happened was eclipsed by the fact that it hadn't happened. And basically people wanted to forget about it and thought, well, if this is as bad as it gets, and we step back from the brink, then sort of let's not think about this again. A psychiatrist called Robert J. Lifton dedicated himself to studying the psychology of the bomb over the next few decades. He's still alive now. He's 97.

And he wrote a great book where he went to Hiroshima and interviewed survivors there about the experience of an atomic bomb. And then in a later book called Indefensible Weapons, he wrote about the psychology of living with the bomb. And he said the problem was that the fear was so vast and constant.

that it produced either resignation, cynicism or yearning. And the problem was that if you're very, very scared, you want to do something about it. You want to act. But in that case, trying to sort of abolish nuclear weapons, there was a feeling that action would be both difficult and possibly fruitless. Like what can I do to change geopolitics? And so what the brain sort of does is resolves that

By going either it's not going to happen or it is going to happen and there's nothing you can do about it or weirdest of all, sort of bring it on. Like, let's let's not hang around waiting. That's the hard bit. So that's what he meant by yearning.

And somebody else around the same time called Roger Molander, who worked on disarmament for President Jimmy Carter, he put it slightly differently, making a similar point. And he identified like three reasons for apathy, three groups of people. He said there are those who think it might happen, but it's no big deal that we could survive it without a great deal of damage. Those who think nuclear war is unthinkable, so devastating that it would never be permitted to happen. And those who think it's a real possibility, but there's nothing they can do about it.

And these are all very distinct ways of thinking about nuclear weapons, but they all lead you to basically not doing anything, either because you feel you don't have to or you feel that it won't make any difference. Now, this was sort of the early 1980s. We're talking here. And there was another period, possibly actually more dangerous, more terrifying than the Cuban Missile Crisis. Around 1983, you had

President Ronald Reagan in Washington, you had an assortment of difficult men in Moscow. There were various misunderstandings that are absolutely blood curdling to learn about where there might have been a nuclear war by mistake. What happened then, though, was that for various reasons,

the Soviet Union decided to pull back. You had Mikhail Gorbachev who realized it was too expensive. It could no longer really survive as a nuclear state, as a kind of an equal and opposite force in the Cold War. Long story short,

The Cold War ends in 1991, which is when the Soviet Union disintegrates. The doomsday clock is at 17 minutes to midnight, which now just appears almost inconceivable, just an absolute magical time. But at the same time, we were seeing the rise of climate change as an issue leading up to the Rio summit in 1992. So it was like the fear moved. It was like, we don't have to worry about nuclear weapons, but here's this other thing that is terrifying.

Now, Robert J. Lifton, because he was so long lived at the age of 90 in 2017, published a book called The Climate Swerve, in which he called the bomb and the climate crisis apocalyptic twins. And he said there was a danger that they both produced what he called psychic numbing.

Now, there's lots of differences between nuclear weapons and the climate crisis. There's the timescale, which is why you don't get many movies about climate change, because everything happens too slowly. Except in the day after tomorrow, where they just threw science out the window and said, let's have it happen in a fortnight, which is good for movies, but not good science. And then there's also the question of culpability, that you cannot blame the warmongers, you cannot blame these people.

you know, sort of mad generals or politicians, there's a sort of general culpability which produces very strange emotions of sort of guilt and shame. And the solutions are less clear as well. Nonetheless, I think that that is the thing that most people are scared about now. And some activists want to use that fear in the same way that the scientists were trying to do in the late 1940s.

So you may know this famous speech by Greta Thunberg to world leaders in 2019. She said, I don't want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act.

So her assumption there is that fear makes people act, which, of course, it does on a personal level. You know, whether you're crossing the road or trying to avoid being killed by a bear, fear encourages you to take prophylactic action to avoid the danger. But on a larger scale, that's not really how it plays out psychologically.

So if we go back to Roger Mullender's three kinds of apathy, a similar thing is happening here. There's the people who think climate change won't be that bad, which is the outright climate deniers, but also the people that think, well, we've had all these deadlines and tipping points and we're still here and things don't seem so bad. And so they don't really believe the warnings anymore. Then there are the people that do believe the warnings and think, well, my God, this is going to be so bad that obviously

governments and just, you know, people in general are going to do something about it. And then you've got the people who think that it's so bad that nothing can be done about it, which produces a kind of weird sort of smug cynicism, sometimes verging on nihilism, the idea that realism and moral clarity is accepting that we're doomed. This word doomerism

is really apt here, a kind of wallowing in the idea that things can only get worse. Now, let's say that is not any more helpful than outright climate change denial. It's still a way to not do things.

Now, there are some people who are really galvanized by the fear. I met some activists from Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil. And so it's the nightmare scenario is what makes them kind of put their bodies on the line and risk prison and protest. But this isn't most people. Most people have that kind of the resignation, the cynicism, the yearning, a lot of

climate change writing in fiction, we have this sort of mixture of shame, fear and despair. And I think that the lesson that people can learn now from the Cold War is that fear is double edged, is that you can use it to shock people into paying attention. But once they're paying attention, you need to give them

The hope of a solution, which is why activists like to use phrases like radical hope, which is not the same as optimism, because optimism is thinking things will work out whatever I do. Whereas radical hope is like things could be better.

Yeah, we can avoid disaster, but we actually need to do something. And if you're interested in fiction like that, there's a writer, Kim Stanley Robinson, books like Ministry for the Future, where it's sort of between denial and despair. It's going here is a problem, but here are things that can be done about it. He's the sort of he's a disaster novelist who really believes in in conferences and meetings and plans, which is which is which is very unusual.

And I think that what this is, what this mindset is summed up by a climate scientist called Gavin Schmidt. And he says, it sounds cute to say, oh, we're fucked and there's nothing we can do. But it's a bit of a nihilistic attitude. We always have the choice. We can continue to make worse decisions or we can try to make ever better decisions.

And this plays into what Robert J. Lifton calls the anxiety of responsibility, which is essentially making fear useful. Because this is where we are now. We do have a massive problem, as we had a massive problem with nuclear weapons, particularly in the 50s and the early 80s.

And it's perfectly normal and understandable to be to be very scared. But you have to be more than scared. You have to harness fear rather than being paralyzed by it, drowning in it and in some weird way relishing it. Because saying things, saying things cannot be fixed ensures that they cannot be fixed. It is a sort of complicity in catastrophe.

So the challenge and what I hope is one of the themes that comes out of the book is how to process this very legitimate fear and sometimes use it to prod people awake without surrendering to that deadly trio, resignation, cynicism and yearning. And then we have the potential to actually do something useful.

And change the world for the better. So this is one of the ideas that comes out of the book. There's a lot of different things in there. But I think I did keep coming back to the idea of how can contemplating the worst help us avoid the worst? Thank you so much. I've really enjoyed talking to you.