We are consumed by a mania for hope, which our corporate masters lavishly provide, at the expense of truth.

Friedrich Nietzsche in “Beyond Good and Evil” holds that only a few people have the fortitude to look in times of distress into what he calls the molten pit of human reality. Most studiously ignore the pit. Artists and philosophers, for Nietzsche, are consumed, however, by an insatiable curiosity, a quest for truth and desire for meaning. They venture down into the bowels of the molten pit. They get as close as they can before the flames and heat drive them back. This intellectual and moral honesty, Nietzsche wrote, comes with a cost. Those singed by the fire of reality become “burnt children,” he wrote, eternal orphans in empires of illusion.

Decayed civilizations always make war on independent intellectual inquiry, art and culture for this reason. They do not want the masses to look into the pit. They condemn and vilify the “burnt people”—Noam Chomsky, Ralph Nader, Cornel West. They feed the human addiction for illusion, happiness and hope. They peddle the fantasy of eternal material progress. They urge us to build images of ourselves to worship. They insist—and this is the argument of globalization ¬¬—that our voyage is, after all, decreed by natural law. We have surrendered our lives to corporate forces that ultimately serve systems of death. We ignore and belittle the cries of the burnt people. And, if we do not swiftly and radically reconfigure our relationship to each other and the ecosystem, microbes look set to inherit the earth.

Clive Hamilton in his “Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change” describes a dark relief that comes from accepting that “catastrophic climate change is virtually certain.” This obliteration of “false hopes,” he says, requires an intellectual knowledge and an emotional knowledge. The first is attainable. The second, because it means that those we love, including our children, are almost certainly doomed to insecurity, misery and suffering within a few decades, if not a few years, is much harder to acquire. To emotionally accept impending disaster, to attain the gut-level understanding that the power elite will not respond rationally to the devastation of the ecosystem, is as difficult to accept as our own mortality. The most daunting existential struggle of our time is to ingest this awful truth—intellectually and emotionally—and rise up to resist the forces that are destroying us.
The human species, led by white Europeans and Euro-Americans, has been on a 500-year-long planetwide rampage of conquering, plundering, looting, exploiting and polluting the earth—as well as killing the indigenous communities that stood in the way. But the game is up. The technical and scientific forces that created a life of unparalleled luxury—as well as unrivaled military and economic power for a small, global elite—are the forces that now doom us. The mania for ceaseless economic expansion and exploitation has become a curse, a death sentence. But even as our economic and environmental systems unravel, after the hottest year [2012] in the contiguous 48 states since record keeping began 107 years ago, we lack the emotional and intellectual creativity to shut down the engine of global capitalism. We have bound ourselves to a doomsday machine that grinds forward.

Complex civilizations have a bad habit of ultimately destroying themselves. Anthropologists including Joseph Tainter in “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” Charles L. Redman in “Human Impact on Ancient Environments” and Ronald Wright in “A Short History of Progress” have laid out the familiar patterns that lead to systems breakdown. The difference this time is that when we go down the whole planet will go with us. There will, with this final collapse, be no new lands left to exploit, no new civilizations to conquer, no new peoples to subjugate. The long struggle between the human species and the earth will conclude with the remnants of the human species learning a painful lesson about unrestrained greed, hubris and idolatry.
Collapse comes throughout human history to complex societies not long after they reach their period of greatest magnificence and prosperity.

“One of the most pathetic aspects of human history is that every civilization expresses itself most pretentiously, compounds its partial and universal values most convincingly, and claims immortality for its finite existence at the very moment when the decay which leads to death has already begun,” Reinhold Niebuhr wrote.

    Living is no laughing matter:
          you must live with great seriousness
                like a squirrel, for example—
      I mean without looking for something beyond and above living,
              I mean living must be your whole occupation.
    Living is no laughing matter:
          you must take it seriously,
          so much so and to such a degree
      that, for example, your hands tied behind your back,
                          your back to the wall,
      or else in a laboratory
          in your white coat and safety glasses,
          you can die for people—
      even for people whose faces you’ve never seen,
      even though you know living
          is the most real, the most beautiful thing.
    I mean, you must take living so seriously
      that even at seventy, for example, you’ll plant olive trees—
      and not for your children, either,
      but because although you fear death you don’t believe it,
      because living, I mean, weighs heavier.

    II
    Let’s say we’re seriously ill, need surgery—
    which is to say we might not get up
                    from the white table.
    Even though it’s impossible not to feel sad
                      about going a little too soon,
    we’ll still laugh at the jokes being told,
    we’ll look out the window to see if it’s raining,
    or still wait anxiously
                for the latest newscast . . .
    Let’s say we’re at the front—
          for something worth fighting for, say.
    There, in the first offensive, on that very day,
          we might fall on our face, dead.
    We’ll know this with a curious anger,
          but we’ll still worry ourselves to death
          about the outcome of the war, which could last years.
    Let’s say we’re in prison
    and close to fifty,
    and we have eighteen more years, say,
                      before the iron doors will open.
    We’ll still live with the outside,
    with its people and animals, struggle and wind—
                            I mean with the outside beyond the walls.
    I mean, however and wherever we are,
          we must live as if we will never die.

    III
    This earth will grow cold,
    a star among stars
              and one of the smallest,
    a gilded mote on blue velvet—
            I mean this, our great earth.
    This earth will grow cold one day,
    not like a block of ice
    or a dead cloud even
    but like an empty walnut it will roll along
            in pitch-black space . . .
    You must grieve for this right now
    —you have to feel this sorrow now—
    for the world must be loved this much
                          if you’re going to say “I lived”. . .

The section on Nietzsche is correct, but it's been used as a "tag-on" to help bolster his argument. Nietzsche did indeed peer into the meaningless of the world; he did see that deep down there is no meaning whatsoever other than the meaning we humans attach to things. He then states that only a select few could honestly look at the meaningless and come out optimists. There are many who peer into the meaningless and cannot stand it; those who long for meaning but realise there is none. The author appears to have pierced the veil of Maya but come out a pessimist.