**6. Conclusion**

It is deeply disturbing parents can no longer say to their children that 'the best is yet to come.' In the grief this truth prescribes, slogans like Gramsci's 'pessimism of the spirit, optimism of the will', or Tolkien's advice to 'fight the long retreat', can be recited to fortify courage. As Wiseman (2021) says, there are many ways to nurture and support the group 'in the long emergency.'

This is important to know, *and* there is no point pretending. It does look dark, mindful there have been other times when humans have faced-up to fearful specters. Commenting on the rise of Nazism in 1930s Germany, Max Horkheimer wrote: 'Only one thing is certain … the irrationality of society has reached a point where only the gloomiest predictions have any plausibility' (as quoted in [21] p. 163). Let us tell it like it is.

Climate collapse is not the rise of Nazism, even if there may prove to be political parallels. What each of these phenomena do have in common is that in each instance the conscious and unconscious life of the individual is radically impacted. Mindful exceptions and counter-trends are bound to co-exist, inner life will tend to be roiled by climate collapse in part because the unanimous culprit for the disaster is 'anthropogenesis.' For this crime collective psychic punishment will be meted – think unconscious fantasies of unpredictable attack and wraith-riven whirlpools – though many are definitely innocent.

Future generations bear no responsibility for the disaster. Given this innocence, what will their disposition be? Malignant anger and poisonous grief: *how could they have done this to us!* More or less, this distemper is likely to cart-wheel in and through all those who arrive from now on.

Given this bad lot what is the best that can happen? It was noted earlier that a complex precondition must be realized if recognition is to be achieved: a tumult of primary emotions – grief; horror; anger; despair; disbelief – must be accessed and, to a significant degree, processed if deep recognition is to be achieved. However quixotic it may sound, in so much as this quality of recognition is achieved, a further possibility then presents: to come to terms with, rather than act out, the disaster that is climate collapse. That is, if private and public disturbance is to be minimized personal and collective rituals need to directly address loss and articulate gratitude as well as contrition. It is only in this scenario that it is possible to envisage forms of rational public and private thought that lead to planned civilly minded action. This hope is about 'smelling the spring on a smoggy wind' [22].

What of Eros in this most optimistic of all scenarios? Is there a prospect the skybound can continue to soar, that innocence, curiosity, the spontaneous and the fresh, will continue to spark the inner breath? This dream must continue to be imagined.
