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Mike Jump asked:
Are there any stories about the societal/evolutionary impacts involving a global disruption of the ability of humans to engage in goal-directed behavior. For example, what happens to humanity if a subtle environmental or alien influence causes humanity to lose the ability to “hope”?
the adult population of Earth destroying itself because the human purpose is complete, the addition of sentience to the Overmind.
While Clarke’s novel was intended to be hopeful insofar as humanity’s evolution was ultimately to benefit a higher intelligence, one cannot help but look at the suicides as simply passionless admission of the completion of one’s purpose.
What’s Expected Of Us by Ted Chiang features the effect of a device that erodes humanity’s confidence in free will, resulting in a loss of hope (and activity).
Similarly, Larry Niven’s All the Myriad Ways deals with an erosion of hope due to knowledge of how much of their fate is due to events out of their control.
Or just terminal depression at having all their children taken by alien invaders. After all, is a sow supposed to be grateful that her piglets will “benefit a higher intelligence” by being turned into sausages for human consumption?
Such stories fail to portray the vast, voracious, prolific, metamorphic, and even fractal nature of life. Conquering a single, noble hero such as Winston Smith is nothing. Conquering 99.9% of Humanity is not enough (Sapiens has teetered on the brink several times already). I’m not talking about brave resistance here, I’m talking about cockroach-level survivability. As the survivor says at the end of CASTAWAY (2000), “Because tomorrow the sun will rise; who knows what the tide will bring?”
And life itself is a million times tougher, as in Crichton’s “The Andromeda Strain”. Even if totally snuffed out, it can still restart (and did so billions of years ago).
There’s a bit of voiceover in the movie, Ready Player One, that – for me – encapsulates the loss of human hope.
“I was born in 2027. After corn syrup droughts. After the bandwidth riots. After people stopped trying to fix problems and just started trying to outlive them.”
This dialogue doesn’t appear in the book, but it does capture the spirit of a society that’s stopped hoping for a better future.