Chase on denial

Here's a nice quote from Phil Chase's blog — a president who blogs! How cool is that? — on the subject of denial:

But there are other kinds of denial that are worse yet. There's a response that says I'll never admit I'm wrong and if it comes to a choice between admitting I'm wrong or destroying the whole world, then bring it on. This is the Götterdämmerung, in which the doomed gods decide to tear down the world as they lose the big battle. The god-damning of the world. It's a term sometimes used to describe what Hitler did in the last months of World War Two, after it was clear Germany was going to lose the war.

Of course people are offended by any comparison to the actions of Adolf Hitler. But consider how many species have died already, and how many more might die if we keep doing what we're doing. It might not be genocide, but it is ugly. Speciescide. As if nothing else matters but us, and specifically the subset of us that agrees with everything we say. When you take a look at our own Rapture culture, these people pretending to expect the end of world any time now, you see that we have our own Götterdämmerung advocates, all very holy of course, as world destroyers always are. And it's an ugly thing. Countries can go crazy, we've seen it happen more than once. And empires always go crazy.

Robinson, K.S., (2007), Sixty Days and Counting, Harper Collins, p.162