This is one of the things Ballard got right. We are all aware our feet have never touched the ground. We are desperate for disaster. We are hungry for The Real. We are not content with global warming, we have to accelerate it. There is no way out of this logiv. We all know our secret desires. We want to turn the world upside down. The protagonist in any Ballard novel only comes alive once the worst has happened. We want it. We need it. The vultures waiting on the street lights and telephone wires.
To return to the OP I think this also misses out some critical elements:
1. There is still a staggeringly immense amount of heads in the sand going on. Willing on the catastrophe at least recognises that it is happening. So I am not sure who is the "we" here.
2. People don't watch horror films because they truly desire to personally experience horror. They watch them because they want the drama and adrenaline in a safe environment.
3. That said, a lot of what vim and Luka have mentioned on this thread is true. There is nihilism, there is a drive towards destruction, there is desire to alleviate the boredom and frustration via an imagined (horror film) crisis.
4. And to that I would add that there is also the ideological justification angle - greens want to be proved right, evangelicals want the rapture, nerds want to be the heroic Mad Max figure in a post apocalyptic landscape. Anarcho-communist want the crisis that leads to the revolution that leads to utopia.
But all of these are just ingredients in the stew - there are other factors too and I think the reaction on here is down to the polemical way that the issue has been framed by the OP.
Clearly not
everyone is
solely focussed on burning the world down. (But yes I would love to turn the world upside down).
The problem is precisely that we
don't "all know our secret desires".