Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
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alamity responses come in two broad types. Most ordinary people unthinkingly jump right in and help, with neighbors and strangers, strenuously, heroically sacrificing without thought for the costs to themselves. (And afterwards many of them experience the also disastrously under-popularized concept of “post traumatic growth,” whereby many people experience positive changes as a result of facing adversity, like no longer sweating the small stuff). Meanwhile, elites tend to panic, individualistically protecting their property and their privileges (often triggering what Naomi Klein calls “disaster capitalism,” whereby the rich use a crisis as an opportunity to find new ways to get even richer
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our shaky expectations of what happens in disasters are shaped by TV and Hollywood. These fictional portrayals are in turn shaped by artistic norms in which heroic, individuals tend to be contrasted against the stupid, hysterical masses. Meanwhile, during real crises, the masses tend to calmly help each other. For instance, when exiting the Twin Towers on 9/11, many people let those carrying the injured and disabled pass rather than stampeding down the stairs. Mass decency. Not elite panic.
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pretending that their unbridled greed is just simple human nature. Rather than pitch in to adapt to long-known eco-constraints (like maybe not building a $500 million super-yacht that needs a heli-padded support yacht), or helping those suffering now from climate change or those who will be most heavily impacted in the near future, the rich and their media allies are generally working hard to convince you that protecting your capitalist-god-given consumer liberties is paramount. Meanwhile there’s a “moral crime [in] how much you and I… consume, given how little is available to… so many other people on the planet
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in this view, “heedless consumption” is unavoidable—the entire human race t having been indicted as irredeemably greedy and addicted to comfort and “disposable crap,” , incapable of any altruistic behavior or even just “sacrifices” to protect their own kids or their beloved way of life —we simply have “no choice” but to get serious about geo-engineering. These purported tech-savior solutions come in two broad buckets: sun-blocking and carbon-sucking.
✏️ Continued propaganda to drive certain “truths” as… truth.
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“Humanity” didn’t cause climate change: capitalism did.
✏️ Triple bold please. The core of it all. The seed as it were.
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This purported “optimism” also hides a dark despair and contempt for humanity. In Klein’s interview of Kolbert, he suggested that the entire human race could be indicted for the climate fiasco. But the vast bulk of human beings (alive today or historically) really carry very little of the blame. For example, 1 billion people in 48 African nations have only caused 0.55 percent of total atmospheric CO2. And the bottom half of the global population caused a mere 6 percent of growth in total emissions from 1990 to 2015 (i.e. the unpoor caused 94 percent of emissions growth). In the meantime, Oxfam reports that “Nearly half [of global economic] growth has merely allowed the already wealthy top 10 percent to augment their consumption and enlarge their carbon footprints.” Indeed, calling this era “the Anthropocene”—the term used to describe the extent of human influence over the climate and environment in our time—is arguably a miscarriage of justice. It’s an utterly unearned collective punishment. It’d be truer to call this the Technocene, or Capitalocene, or Greedocene.
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geoengineering solutions are not offered as a stopgap solution while we get our carbon house in order, but to ensure that life—specifically greedy, consumptive W.E.I.R.D. (western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic) life—remains “awesome.”
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it’s not “human nature” that prevents us from making “sacrifices” or lifestyle changes—it’s capitalist nature, the worldview that treats greed as good or neutral, sees limitless growth as the goal, and believes altruism is impossible since humans are (and should be) selfish only able to solve a problem if the solution is presented as being in their own economic self-interest
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“greedocracy”—the all-trumping faith that greedy self-interest is and should be our ruling passion. This “In Greed We Trust” doctrine is foundational to capitalism (sometimes euphemized as “self-interest” or “utility”), and baked into many of the institutions that run our world. And it’s perhaps more powerful than any religious doctrine in history, since it shapes the lives of even those who don’t believe in it.
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Abstractions like GDP and economic growth conflate survival basics with “nice-to-haves” with looney-tunes luxuries because market value is seen as the only important measure of social value. This causes categorical errors: these are not at all the same kinds of things, and do not carry the same kind of social value. This is the central moral error of greedocrats and the markets-uber-alles crowd.
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as Ursula Le Guin reminds us, capitalism’s “power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings…Resistance and change often begin in … the art of words.”
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Degrowth doesn’t mean a drab world, or even an end to ludicrous luxuries.
✏️ Feels like a good prompt or challenge for hopepunk-style stories. Showing positive examples of degrowth.