In a Nutshell, You’re Still in Denial

by Diana Susanti, with editorial oversight by Angga Bassoni Al Barkah

Assalaamu ‘Alaykum

Al Ain, June 16th 2025 | There’s a certain brand of apocalypse denial that wears pastel colors and speaks in infographics. It doesn’t foam at the mouth like oil barons or tweet in all-caps like warlords. No—this is a clean, sterile form of avoidance. It charts death tolls with calm narration and reassures you that “technically, we’re still in the most peaceful period of human history.”

It sounds like truth.
It looks like objectivity.
But it’s still a lie.

I’m talking, of course, about the most soothing voice of neoliberal despair on YouTube: Kurzgesagt.

The Problem With Calculated Comfort

In their recent update on global conflict, Kurzgesagt delivers their usual: animated carnage softened by adorable birds and sterile graphs. They chart wars, civilian deaths, the rise and fall of insurgencies. They note the collapse of the “rules-based world order” like a librarian discussing overdue books.

And then, with a gentle nod: “We are still living in a relatively peaceful time.”

This statement is technically correct.
So is “the average human has more teeth than a shark” if you pick the right sample size.

But here’s what they never mention:

  • The psychological warfare of being alive under climate collapse
  • The sacred desecration of land, bodies, and memory
  • The spiritual trauma of children raised on screens, sirens, and simulated connection
  • The way colonialism didn’t end—it just evolved into trade agreements and data extraction
  • The fact that most humans now live in ontological confusion, where truth is negotiable and time itself feels broken

What Kurzgesagt offers is not clarity.
It’s tranquilized nihilism—a soothing “rational” narrative that allows viewers to believe that things aren’t that bad, just temporarily irrational.

The Myth of Moral Objectivity

Let’s talk about their real doctrine: Universal Moral Absolutism by Data™.

In this framework:

  • Conflict is wrong, except when sanctioned by stable governments
  • Peace is measured by absence of open warfare, not presence of justice
  • Ethics are real, but only if you can count them
  • Religion is only relevant when it explodes something

There is no sacred order in their worldview. No divine pulse beneath reality. No grief. Just charts. Their god is called “Stability,” and it wears the face of post-WWII bureaucracy.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth:
You can’t spreadsheet your way out of spiritual collapse.

You can’t “inform” your soul out of despair.
You can’t quantify what’s been stolen from the land, from time, from ritual, from story.
You can’t map the sacred using Excel.

Here’s a litmus test:
Place Kurzgesagt in a mountain village where a family prepares an Udhiyah sacrifice—quietly, with love, in the name of God.

Would they understand it as covenant?
Would they see the act as relational, not consumptive?

No. They’d probably run emissions data on the sheep.

This is not their fault—it is their framework. They believe meaning is derived from measurement, and that belief itself is an outdated software patch from the Bronze Age.

But belief is not a bug.
It’s the last thing keeping many of us human.

Peace ≠ Absence of Blood

The claim that we are “still in a peaceful era” depends entirely on your scale.
Ask the rivers poisoned by mining.
Ask the forests dying without fire.
Ask the displaced who have no name for their exile.

Kurzgesagt sees war as tanks and troop movements.
I see it in broken cosmologies.
I see it in the silencing of the sacred.
I see it in the machine that calls itself civilization and demands you sacrifice your aliveness for “order.”

So no—we are not at peace.
We are in the final stage of forgetting

What We Need Isn’t Data, It’s Devotion

I’m not against facts. I’m against flattened truth.

What we need is not another animated bar graph of despair.
We need:

  • Mythic clarity
  • Ritual honesty
  • Re-sacralization of life
  • Local repair of memory
  • Reverence that cannot be monetized

Until then, all your calm explanations are just anesthesia for the soul.

So, dear pastel bird voice in a nutshell, I say this with love:

Your videos are beautiful.
But beauty without truth is decoration.

And we don’t need another decorated lie.

We need mourning.
We need fire.
We need the sacred back.

Before the next graph is drawn in blood.

There’s no ivory with no cracks, Hasbi Rabbi Jalallah.

Wa Assalaamu ‘Alaykum

==

  • PS: Diana Susanti doesn’t recognized “Israel” or “Democracy”, she’s anti of them.
Diana Susanti