But there are many more reasons not to despair: despair is self-fulfilling; despair is disempowering; despair is what the bastards want you to feel. Like the climate, like every ecosystem, society is a complex system. Its properties and adaptive responses cannot be predicted by studying its components in isolation, regardless of the brilliance of social scientists and futurologists. Travel and mass media allowed Irish people to see what social and sexual liberation looked like in other countries. The greatest question we confront, possibly the greatest question humanity has ever confronted, is whether we can hit the social tipping points before we hit the environmental tipping points.