I'm referring to the trope/meme of Mankind's Last Hope; the outlaws have killed the sheriff and started collecting tithes, the skies darken with alien landing craft, Earth's natural resources careen toward total depletion, and rumors abound that Blockbuster is about to re-open. These must surely be the end times, and the only question is whether civilization bleeds slowly out through thousands of tiny needle-wounds, sliding ever so slowly down into mud-soaked, unremembered oblivion or implodes catastrophically in a spectacular vortex of blazing fire and blood-soaked violence. Things are, it could be said, Very Very Bad.
But wait! What's this? A hero appears before us, his gaze piercing and his jawline unmistakably sculpturesque even through his just-rugged-enough stubble. He is one, only one, armed only with his personalized pearl-inlaid revolvers (which can also take the form of swords, magic rings, a set of launch codes, and the common cold) and a steely-eyed will to survive. There is an opportunity, a single shot-in-the-dark chance, and using his skill, resourcefulness, and sheer aftershave-scented animal magnetism, this single point of light will optionally assemble a team of qualified experts to stand against the encroaching darkness.
Their window of opportunity is tiny, and the odds are astronomically against them. Their mission is arguably impossible and certainly suicidal, and there is only one mission; all others have been attempted. And failed. And everyone involved was killed. Especially the characters you liked. It all comes down to this one-in-a-million, trial run-less, desperate trump card play. Succeed, and we might make it. Fail, and we won't be around to worry about it.
Examples of this trope abound, so I'll just list a few that come to mind. The Mass Effect saga focuses on Commander Shepard's suicide mission to defeat the Reapers (sentient machines who destroy all organic life every so often to start over from scratch. Yes, really.). The film Sunshine is about Earth's last-ditch attempt to give a dying Sun a jump-start with a colossal bomb of sorts. Even The Lord of the Rings exhibits this pattern to a certain degree, with the Fellowship's desperately-outnumbered race against time to deliver the One Ring to Orodruin before Sauron can gather enough power to fully freak out and destroy the Free Peoples entirely. More recently, films like Interstellar and a very similar movie whose name escapes me follow a few desperate adventurers on a journey to find humanity a new home (since Earth is so unbelievably, unsalvageably borked).*
These sorts of stories, when well-written, fire my imagination a great deal, and they're undoubtedly gripping to watch. Logic dictates that the heroes lose, but emotional investment (which you have, if the story is well-presented) insists that they absolutely must win, and the conflict between the two halves of your mind only serves to make the conflict on the page or screen all the more sensational.
I always wonder, however, about a single nagging and extremely annoying question: how in God's name did we end up in such a fix? I know the world outside can seem grim at times, but one minute we forget to tip the waiters and the next minute we're serving them up as the entrée?
It's the cultural manifestation of an increasingly common thought pattern, I think, and it's one that worries me a great deal. These sorts of stories, as a generality, represent the logical extreme of an assumption that people are not necessarily actively evil, but naturally passive. There's a good deal of evidence in support of this theory, actually, and a great deal of psychology focuses on something called the bystander effect. Especially in crowds, people very frequently become paralyzed by the assumption that Somebody will surely do something soon. Any given individual isn't important enough, or strong enough, or well-groomed enough to actually act, but we're always sure the proper authority or plainclothes hero will be along shortly enough. And so we stand, and Kitty Genovese gets stabbed in front of 38 witnesses.
A related but separate idea is the basis for the Milgram experiment. In general terms, participants were ordered to perform a task that conflicted with their conscience and caused pain to another person (delivering electrical shocks by way of a button, for example). This experiment found that people have a surprisingly high threshold for the unethical, as long as an authority figure told them to do it. Put another way, people are perfectly willing to do bad things as long as there's some ethereal Them for us to put the blame on. "Nah, I was just following orders!"
Both of these effects, and an increasing public awareness of them (along with a host of other things that piss me off extremely, likely to be discussed in the future), contribute to what I've decided is called socially-mediated disassociation of ethical agency. Now, in actual, non-pretentious English, I'd call it the Ethical Shrug Effect, a slightly-less-debased form of nihilism. People (particularly young people, from what I've detected) arrive at some sort of ethical fork in the allegorical road. The young mind in question can't see all the way down both forks, and insists they need more information or input to make an informed, sound, and generally "good" choice.
The next realization is that we can't have ALL the necessary information about the variables involved in making a decision, because (as I wrote a while back, actually) life is almost infinite in its complexity. Since we can't have all the information required, we therefore can't make a good choice. Therefore, we don't make a choice at all, because we have an annoying tendency to be looking for better options at all times (another topic). Because we made no decision, we become the bystanders in our own lives, standing and spectating as we drift indifferently through life. We never vocalize our opinion about dinner with friends, so we end up getting generic Mexican food every single time. Aware of our meekness, we then go and talk about the bystander effect with our other friends, or on Reddit, or, say, on a blog.
We never go up to that pretty girl or the handsome guy in class, because we're afraid of that unknown potential for rejection that we've all been told is waiting. He or she's way out of our "league," and so on. We walk timidly by the house echoing with sounds of domestic abuse because it's not our problem, and therefore not our place to do anything. Someone will help, we figure, so we squash the instinctive impulse to do it ourselves. On some grander scale, maybe we as a species do run our planet out of every natural resource because we're too short-sighted to see the danger and too meek to object to those in power if we do.
I, however, have news for you, people of the world. These are all possibilities, it's true, possible outcomes in the grand tarot of life. Unpleasant possibilities, nothing we would wish for, but it's essentially down to chance, right?
Wrong. Life is so infinitely complicated as to be random to our perception in some ways, and the sheer unpredictable chaos of it all can be overwhelming. In the voluminous morass of seemingly random red smudges, however, there are clearly-defined line segments, collimated bars of order so hot they're blue, continuously advancing rays of choice and will. One of those bright blue stars burning through the chaos, dear reader, is you.
Before this goes any longer, I'm going to truncate for the sake of brevity, and boil it all down to a single word of advice. From all my life experiences (and they are many and varied), all the peaks and troughs, there's one single word of advice I wish to hell someone had given me. So if you're reading this, and no one has told you this yet, or you're just in need of a reminder:
Choose. Make a choice, any choice. Hell, it can be the wrong choice, and some of them will be. It is infinitely better to explain what went wrong while you tried to do right than explain why you did nothing in the face of wrongness.
TL;DR Bad things happen, but you can choose good. The only way to become a virtuoso is the brave humility to mess up the scales.
