Abandoned By Its Angels

How LA's Culture of Extreme Optimism Created A Tinder Box of Devastating Vulnerability

My earliest memories are haunted by the catastrophic visions of 1970s disaster movies. The Towering Inferno, The Poseidon Adventure, and the China Crisis jolted me with stories and images about humanity's inability to control nature’s awesome forces. My parents would comfort me, explaining that these were just fictional stories, a product of Hollywood's wild imagination. How could I have known that by the time I reached middle age, my adopted city would begin to resemble the terrible scenes in those era-defining blockbusters?

As Los Angeles’ devastating wildfires continue to extract a heavy economic and social price, a harsh truth emerges from the ashes: the City of Angels has been abandoned by its own mythology. Those disaster films of my childhood now play out in real time on our screens and in our feeds—except this time, there's no fade to black, no inspirational torchsong, no comforting resolution and no assurance that it's all just make-believe.

LA’s legendary optimism—once its rocket fuel to the stars—has become a deadly liability, creating a cultural tinderbox as dangerous as the dried chaparral that rings its hills. Last week’s fires, which devoured whole communities from Pacific Palisades to Altadena and much of eastern Malibu, aren't just another natural disaster in a city prone to them. They’re the inevitable result of a bankrupt cultural paradigm that has left Los Angeles perilously unprepared for the harsh realities of the 21st century.

The city's extreme optimism, birthed in Hollywood's golden age and nourished by decades of seemingly boundless growth, has metastasized into a dangerous form of cultural denial. This mindset, marked by blind faith in individual triumph, technological advancements, and the myth of endless expansion, has left Los Angeles singularly ill-prepared to confront escalating systemic challenges.

Last week’s wildfires brutally exposed this cultural bankruptcy in stark numerical terms: $150 billion in economic losses, 12,000 structures reduced to ash, 130,000 people evacuated, and 24 lives lost (with more to come)—many in neighborhoods where median home values exceeded $2 million, yet basic fire preparedness remained an afterthought. The psychological toll compounds the physical devastation, with survivors facing chronic anxiety, depression, and PTSD that will likely persist for years. Communities of color, already 50% more vulnerable to wildfires, bear a disproportionate burden of this impact.

Meanwhile, the insurance industry's retreat from high-risk areas has left many homeowners unprotected, with insured losses alone estimated between $10-20 billion. These aren’t merely numerical figures; they represent the consequences of favoring mystical reasoning over communal readiness, a burden that disproportionately affects the city's most susceptible citizens.

The time has come to confront an uncomfortable truth: the very optimism that built this city may now destroy it, unless we can forge a new cultural framework, something I’m calling "resilient optimism"—a clear-eyed marriage of hope and pragmatism, individual achievement and collective responsibility, technological innovation and ecological wisdom.

The Bankruptcy of Extreme Optimism

Los Angeles' traditional optimism is more than just a sunny disposition and a can-do attitude; it’s a deeply embedded cultural operating system that has catastrophically failed. This dysfunctional mindset manifests itself in three devastating ways.

First, there’s what I call the "infinite horizon fallacy," which is the city’s pathological denial of it’s natural limits. Water scarcity, landslides, wildfire risk, and earthquake vulnerability have long been viewed by the city as mere roadblocks to unrestricted growth. This delusion has resulted in unsustainable urban sprawl, deteriorating infrastructure, and a Russian Roulette approach to environmental hazards.

Second, the city's toxic individualism. While fueling remarkable creativity and entrepreneurship, this individual exceptionalism has corroded our collective resilience. The fetishization of individual success over community well-being has produced a fragmented, every-person-for-themselves response to shared threats, leaving vulnerable populations—particularly communities of color and low-income residents—disproportionately exposed to disaster.

Third, the entertainment industry has perpetuated what I call the "Hollywood ending fallacy," which is the dangerous belief that every crisis can be resolved through individual heroics, magical thinking or a last-minute technological salvation. This fantasy has repeatedly undermined serious preparation for real-world catastrophes.

This month's wildfires brutally exposed this cultural bankruptcy. Despite repeated warnings from climate scientists and urban planners, wealthy enclaves and disadvantaged communities alike remained fatally underprepared for the fires' scale and ferocity. The city's fragmented, chaotic response—marked by chaotic evacuations, hydrant water shortages, communication failures, and shocking disparities in emergency services—revealed the lethal cost of prioritizing individual ambition over collective preparedness.

Resilient Optimism: Reimagining LA's Frontier Spirit

The alternative to Los Angeles' self-destructive strain of extreme optimism isn’t despair but a more sophisticated type of hope that I’m calling resilient optimism. This new cultural framework draws inspiration from an unlikely source: the pioneering spirit that built California in the first place. But, rather than the rugged individualism of the past, I believe we need a more "modern frontiersmanship"—a collaborative approach to exploring unknown territory and confronting unprecedented challenges.

This isn't about conquering nature or denying its limits, as our predecessors often did. Instead, modern frontiering means being bold enough to reimagine our relationship with the environment, economic and social constraints, and our future. It means pioneering new forms of collective resilience, innovative institutions, and social cooperation. Like the original pioneers who won the West, we also face uncertainty and risk. Unlike them, we must do so with a clear understanding of our interdependence with both natural systems and each other.

Resilient optimism consists of four essential elements:

1. Pragmatic Hope: Unlike Angeleno’s traditional magical thinking, pragmatic hope confronts challenges directly while maintaining faith in our human capacity to address them. It’s the difference between "Everything will work out" and "We can solve this together—but only if we act now."

2. Collective Agency: Resilient optimism recognizes that today's existential challenges—from climate change to social inequality—require coordinated action at unprecedented scales. It shifts focus from the myth of the individual hero to the reality of community networks and institutional responses.

3. Adaptive Learning: This mindset treats failure as essential wisdom and views setbacks as opportunities for systemic improvement rather than temporary obstacles to be ignored or minimized.

4. Long-Term Thinking: Resilient optimism extends the decision-making horizon beyond the next quarter or election cycle, considering impacts across generations and ecosystems.

The Cost of Inaction: A City at the Breaking Point

The stakes couldn't be higher. Los Angeles confronts a multitude of challenges that its current cultural operating system is woefully unprepared to tackle:

Climate Reality

The recent fires are just a preview of the climate chaos to come. Los Angeles faces escalating threats from megafires, extended droughts, seasonal mudslides and killer heat waves. The city's culture of extreme optimism has encouraged development in high-risk areas while undermining much-needed investment in critical resilience infrastructure, disaster preparedness and long-term solutions.

Social Fractures

The city's reflexive optimism has long masked deep inequalities that make natural disasters exponentially more devastating for marginalized communities. During this week's wildfires, wealthy neighborhoods received disproportionate emergency resources while middle- to lower-income areas of the city struggled with tardy evacuations and inadequate follow-up support.

Global Interdependence

In an interconnected world, Los Angeles's challenges are inextricably linked to global systems—from climate change to economic volatility to pandemic risks. The city's individualistic culture leaves it dangerously isolated from the collaborative networks needed to address these systemic threats.

Challenges and Resistance

This cultural transformation to a more sustainable form of optimism will face significant obstacles, from:

- Entrenched interests that benefit from the status quo

- The allure of quick fixes and unproven technological solutions

- The difficulty of maintaining collective focus in a crisis-driven world

- The challenge of building trust across diverse communities

However, these obstacles are not insurmountable. Other cultures have successfully navigated similar transformations, often in response to existential challenges. Japan's post-war adaptation of traditional values to modern challenges, Scandinavian countries' development of sustainable social democracy, and Indigenous peoples' maintenance of collective wisdom in the face of colonization all offer lessons for Los Angeles.

A Call to Action: The Time for Half-Measures is Over

The cultural transformation from extreme to resilient optimism will require thoughtful and decisive action from multiple stakeholders:

1. Policy Makers

- Replace growth-at-any-cost policies with frameworks that prioritize long-term resilience

- Create mechanisms for meaningful community participation in decision-making

- Invest in infrastructure that protects vulnerable populations first

2. Business Leaders

- Abandon the myth of unlimited growth for business models that balance profit with community benefit

- Shift from quarterly thinking to generational thinking

- Support workforce development that builds community capacity

3. Community Leaders

- Build networks of mutual support and collective action

- Document and share successful examples of community resilience

- Bridge the divides between different communities and interest groups

4. Cultural Producers

- Challenge the toxic narratives of extreme individualism

- Tell stories that celebrate collective resilience

- Document both failures and successes in the transformation process

Conclusion: Pioneers of a New Frontier

This week’s devastating wildfires have exposed Los Angeles's culture of extreme optimism as a dangerous anachronism in an age of cascading systemic threats. Yet within this crisis lies an opportunity to reinvent the pioneering spirit that built California. Not through the rugged individualism of the past, but through what I call "modern frontiersmanship"—a collective approach to exploring the uncharted territory of urban resilience in an age of climate chaos.

This transformation won't be comfortable or quick, but neither was the original California dream. Los Angeles can no longer afford to be a city of angels, floating above earthly concerns in a haze of delusional optimism. Instead, it must become a city of pragmatic pioneers, clear-eyed about challenges yet bold enough to imagine and build new forms of collective resilience. The frontier we face isn't geographic—it's climatic, social, and technological. And this time, we must explore it together.

As Los Angeles rebuilds from these fires, we have an opportunity to do more than just restore what was lost. We can pioneer a new cultural model that better serves all our residents while offering crucial lessons for cities around the world. The question isn't whether change will come—it's whether we can guide that change toward a more resilient and equitable future before an even bigger disaster strikes.

January’s wildfires have exposed the cultural bankruptcy of LA’s brand of extreme optimism, but they've also illuminated a potential path forward. By embracing a more resilient optimism, Angeleno’s can transform this crisis into opportunity and create a new cultural framework suited to the challenges of our time. This isn't just about surviving the next disaster—it's about ensuring that prosperity and security are shared by all residents, not just those who can afford to rebuild.

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This essay is intended to spark an urgent debate among policymakers, investors, community leaders, researchers, and thought leaders worldwide aimed at transforming LA’s collective culture for the challenges the city will face in the 21st century—before it's too late.